From pistols to podcasts

Signs of human progress are everywhere

The challenge: demand satisfaction. If they apologize, no need for further action. So begins Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Ten Duel Commandments,” a prescription for resolving disputes with honor in the age of America’s founding generation. In the centuries between Alexander Hamilton’s death by duel and his rebirth in Miranda’s musical, people have argued and debated and disagreed as much as ever. To disagree is human nature. To resolve disagreements peacefully, on the other hand, is a sign of human progress.

A recent public dispute reminds us of the growth of which human society is capable. It also serves as a useful metric for forward progress at a time when many seem nostalgic for a supposedly harmonious past.

Last month, Sam Harris, host of the “Waking Up” podcast, and Vox’s Ezra Klein engaged in a public debate about race and IQ. Rather than relitigate the debate, consider the nature of the litigation itself. It took place in the public eye. It featured two prominent personalities whose livelihoods depend on public commentary and intellect. It centered on a topic much bigger than the two of them (in part because, as Klein put it, they’re “two white guys talking about how growing up nonwhite in America affects your life and cognitive development”). It became very personal very quickly, at least from Harris’s perspective. He charged Klein and Vox with attempting the “total destruction” of his reputation and repeatedly redirected their exchange to that topic.

Only a couple of centuries ago, such a public spat between prominent people with honor at stake might’ve been considered, as Ron Chernow describes it in his biography of Hamilton, an “affair of honor” — the type of disagreement best settled with a violent duel. At the time of the American revolution, Chernow writes, “no politician could afford to have his honor impugned. Though fought in secrecy and seclusion, duels always turned into highly public events that were covered afterward with rapt attention by the press. They were designed to sway public opinion and shape the images of the adversaries.” Swap “intellectual” for “politician,” and replace “fought” with “exchanged heated emails,” and you have a pretty accurate description of the Ezra Klein-Sam Harris dispute.

These semantic substitutions make all the difference. Not only did Klein and Harris not shoot at each other, but they ended their exchange simply by going their separate ways. They didn’t solve their disagreement but rather set it aside, with each participant’s honor intact. And they did so with dueling blog posts and podcasts, not pistols.

What’s remarkable about this outcome is that it’s not remarkable at all. That’s one of the takeaways of Steven Pinker’s recent antidote to cynicism, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. On topics from wealth and war to equal rights and the environment, Pinker makes a convincing, data-driven case that “the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being.” The catch, as Pinker writes, is that “almost no one knows about it.”

A decline in routine human violence is just one example. Take Pinker’s description of Europe during the Middle Ages, an era in which “lords massacred the serfs of their rivals, aristocrats and their retinues fought each other in duels… and ordinary people stabbed each other over insults at the dinner table.” This world was humanity’s status quo for generations. Yet over time society evolved, in part through institutions like politics, itself a means of peacefully resolving disagreements about the future.

While few people might describe American politics today as emblematic of human progress, it is. Even in our hyper-partisan, conflict-driven political environment, disagreements are settled almost exclusively with words. No one thought for a second that the presidential candidate who bragged that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” would actually shoot anyone on 5th Avenue. Yet just over 200 years ago — a blink of an eye in human history — a sitting vice president shot and killed a former treasury secretary over personal disagreements. Could anyone really picture a similar scuffle between Mike Pence and Jack Lew?

Today, as instability and uncertainty pervade our predictions of the future and toxic political climates put entire populations on edge, it’s worth taking a moment to note progress where it exists. “When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress,” Pinker writes, “we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs.” Seeking that idyllic impossibility and inevitably coming up short makes us vulnerable to fatalistic convictions that the end of days — or at least a dystopian future of some sort— is just a crisis or lost election away.

We can find a middle ground that reflects both our progress and our works in progress. We can acknowledge, as President Obama wrote in 2016, that “if you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one,” and you’d choose the United States—while also acknowledging that our progress has been unequal. We can recognize the demise of America’s greatest injustice while also recognizing that our work to right historical wrongs remains unfinished.

Neither personal disputes nor political differences are entirely without violence today. White aristocratic men have stopped challenging each other to duels, but the legacy of that violent culture still resonates. Abortion providers still receive constant death threats. Black men and women are still being killed by police for no reason. Immigrants are still at risk of violence and heartless deportation.

But it’s also true that most of the time, two people can disagree vehemently and peacefully. Despite the animosity between political parties, they can compete aggressively and transfer power back-and-forth without violence. These aren’t laurels to rest on, but they are laurels worth recognizing.

If peaceful disagreements can go from unprecedented to unremarkable in such a short time, what else is possible? What other seemingly insurmountable challenges today — the gun violence epidemic, the racial wealth gap, inaction on climate change, unequal access to education — will go the way of the duel?

As Pinker shows, we should take heart in the progress we’ve made. That sense of possibility and strength of conviction is what sustains us and drives us forward in uncertain times. And all times are uncertain until they’re written (or rapped) into history.

This column was originally published on Medium.

Life after President Trump

What happens next?

Imagine, for a moment, a future in which Donald Trump is no longer president. Whether he’s been voted out, kicked out, or termed out, the forty-fifth president has returned to Trump Tower, his legal prospects as uncertain as the country’s political and moral future. What happens next?

America is not prepared for life after Trump.

These days, considering a post-Trump world might seem premature and indulgent. Yet Trump’s eventual departure, whether six months or six years from now, is inevitable. Thinking only of his all-consuming presidency, and not what follows it, risks falling into the same short-term mindset — the “next election will solve our problems as long as we win” mentality — that helped make Trump’s fluke election possible.

Trump is just a symptom of a more foundational set of issues too easily postponed or papered over by the immediate threats and distractions of his White House and the unity of a common opponent. These persistent challenges run from rampant voter suppression and the undemocratic effects of gerrymandering and the electoral college, to a conflict-driven media environment, online tools vulnerable to fearmongering and foreign influence, and powerful cultural forces of racism, misogyny, and tribalism.

While Trumpism has fed and exacerbated these issues, the end of the Trump presidency is a means of fighting them, not the end in itself. Robert Mueller’s investigation won’t fix the structural flaws at the heart of Trump’s rise. The end of this presidency, however it comes about, won’t prevent a craftier and less impulsive demagogue from taking power in the future. While it’s of monumental importance, not even the election of a Democratic House majority in November will single-handedly preserve American democracy.

An effective, long-term treatment for our broken politics requires sustained bipartisan efforts to rebuild trust in institutions, write unwritten norms into law, inspire long-term political engagement, and begin to reconcile America with its founding sins. How do we get from Trump to there?

One way to think through the question of the United States after Trump is to consider how an exhausted and divided nation would react to his impeachment or resignation under a cloud of criminal accusations.

In this not-unlikely scenario, Trump’s successor would be under enormous pressure to leave his legal fate in the hands of the justice system. Despite the extent of wrongdoing already in the public eye, there’s a strong case to be made that the next president should resist that impulse in favor of, in the words of former President Gerald Ford’s September 1974 proclamation, a “full, free, and absolute pardon.”

There’s a key distinction here between the presidency, the president himself, and the hangers-on around him. A pardon wouldn’t spare Trump’s cronies or enablers from prosecution, either by the courts or by public opinion. The Paul Manaforts and Michael Flynns and Jared Kushners of the world are of little significance to America’s constitutional order, and the gears of justice should continue to turn for them.

More importantly, a legal reprieve for a former president is not the same thing as Donald Trump escaping justice. As the Supreme Court ruled in 1915 in Burdick v. United States, a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt,” and accepting it is akin to a confession (an argument in which Ford found solace). Any legal pardon would be conditional on the completion of congressional and special counsel investigations that provide an honest accounting of the legal and ethical failings of the Trump era.

A pardon, whether a literal one signed by his successor or a tacit agreement by the American people to move forward, wouldn’t erase the damage this administration has done, but it would make it easier to learn from it by etching into public record the corruption at its core. It would send a signal — perhaps a futile one, but a signal nonetheless — that opposition to Trump’s presidency was in good faith and not for partisan ends. It might even help to neutralize the perpetual sense of victimization that seems to drive some of the president’s most devout supporters.

Most importantly, it would shift the focus from the individual in the White House to the structural issues that helped tip the electoral college to the candidate patently unqualified for the job.

This argument isn’t for or against impeachment, or even for or against a pardon. At this point, both topics are proxies for the larger and longer-term challenges of life after Trump. How will we re-engage in a constructive way with weary allies and wary adversaries if we’re consumed with the years-long saga of Trump on trial? What about protecting future elections from foreign interference? Expanding access to the ballot box? Getting money out of politics? Institutionalizing frayed norms into law?

No matter how Trump leaves office, the task of rebuilding will be complicated by a powerful, righteous, and legitimate desire for justice. But thinking beyond his departure reminds us that what happens after Trump is just as important as getting him out of office in the first place. It encourages us to focus more on healing a divided nation and rebuilding damaged institutions, and less on seeking vengeance against someone who accidentally stumbled into the Oval Office. And for someone consumed by resentment and desperate for admiration and attention, the most effective punishment is surely to ignore him.

In announcing his decision to pardon his predecessor, Ford spoke to the nation of the damage Nixon and those around him had done. “Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part,” Ford said. “It could go on and on and on, or someone must write ‘The End’ to it.”

Donald Trump, of course, is incapable of seeing the distinction between an individual president and the institution of the presidency. But the rest of the country doesn’t face that limitation. The sooner we write “The End” to Trump’s presidency, the sooner we can learn its lessons and begin a longer, and more meaningful, chapter in the American story.

This column was originally published on Medium.

The most urgent criminal justice reform is forgiveness

Justice means offering — and seeking — redemption and reconciliation

The bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last month is smart, fiscally responsible, and compassionate. It would reduce federal mandatory minimums, create new programs to fight recidivism, and give judges additional discretion in sentencing. Passage would also send a powerful signal that racially-motivated “law and order” politics can be defeated.

But we should harbor no illusions about either the scale of America’s incarceration epidemic or the ease of fighting it. True reform of the criminal justice system in the United States takes far more than gradual public policy victories. It requires considering more than incarceration’s high fiscal and moral costs and its low impact on public safety. It requires building a broader coalition of support than the left-libertarian alliance that has rightly identified a systemic abuse of the government’s power to detain.

True reform requires a fundamental shift in how Americans view one another, from a perspective strictly of punishment and vengeance to one that also allows room for redemption.

Forgiveness is the most urgent, and the most difficult, criminal justice reform. It must be offered, in the form of rehabilitation, and sought, in the form of reconciliation.

I. Offering

Tackling mass incarceration requires embedding an inclination to forgive in our discourse and our laws. The long journey of the Senate reform bill shows why the challenge of confronting America’s incarceration epidemic is so daunting.

Despite the bill’s broad bipartisan support and its narrow scope, it still hasn’t received a vote by the full Senate. And even if it did, it would only transform a sliver of an over-incarcerated nation. The bill’s reforms are welcome and overdue, but they would almost entirely target low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. That’s not enough.

At its most elemental, the rationale for looking beyond this subset of convictions is one of math. State and federal prisons in the United States currently house more than two million inmates who represent 20 percent of the world’s prison population. That doesn’t include the 4.5 million Americans either on parole or probation. Nor does it include their families or their communities.

Human beings — let alone state and federal law enforcement — don’t have a surefire way of defining and differentiating violent and nonviolent offenders. But even if we did, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in The Atlantic in 2015, focusing only on those who society has deemed least offensive isn’t sufficient to bring U.S. incarceration rates in line with similarly developed countries.

As Coates put it, citing a 2012 analysis showing that more than half of state prison inmates have been convicted of violent crimes, “the popular notion that this can largely be accomplished by releasing nonviolent drug offenders is false.” Even if every state and federal drug offender were immediately released, as a 2015 review of prison data by FiveThirtyEight found, the United States would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

We can make significant reductions in that rate with some straightforward reforms: arresting and convicting fewer people, eliminating overly punitive sentencing laws, reducing the sentences of those already convicted, and making reoffending and recidivism as unlikely as possible by eliminating government-imposed barriers to rehabilitation.

That final step means automatically restoring fundamental rights — of voting, of serving on a jury, of accessing government services, of securing employment and housing — for those who have served their time and those who should never have served time at all. Any reform must be coupled with the evolution of a new social compact that establishes rights of education, job training, and community support.

But America cannot truly address mass incarceration without confronting head-on more difficult questions of punishment, justice, and redemption. True reform will have to permit reentry into society even some people whose past behavior may have been abhorrent and reprehensible. True reform will demand that we take to heart King’s reminder that “an element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy.”

True reform will ask us to see what Bryan Stevenson has seen. “I have discovered,” Stevenson writes in Just Mercy, “deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity — seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions.”

Any society based on the rule of law requires systems to judge behavior and restrain truly dangerous people. But meaningful reform is perfectly compatible with such a society if we take a more nuanced view of ourselves and each other — a view that recognizes that our knee-jerk impulse for punishment may be flawed, and that nearly everyone is capable of atonement and redemption.

If America had faith that its justice system could punish and rehabilitate effectively, would we still feel compelled to stamp ex-offenders with a label of criminality that follows them for the rest of their lives? How did America’s definition of justice become so warped that it leaves leaves no room for empathy or forgiveness?

II. Seeking

Human nature is incredibly complex, and our emotions and experiences are impossibly subjective. The things we do and the reasons we do them fall somewhere along an infinite spectrum of grays. Yet the system we use to judge and punish behavior leaves no room for gray. It has been designed, quite literally, in black and white.

The plague of incarceration is irreparably racialized because it was built that way. It’s no accident that more than five times as many African Americans are imprisoned as whites. Or that, despite similar levels of drug use, whites are multiple times less likely than blacks to be arrested on drug charges. Or that the so-called “War on Drugs” has coincided with enormous increases in incarceration rates, particularly of black and brown people.

Mass incarceration is indeed, as Michelle Alexander put it in The New Jim Crow, America’s “new racial caste system.” It is the latest iteration of a generations-long pattern of what Alexander calls simply the “criminalization and demonization of black men.” Public policy alone won’t address the sources of this epidemic of incarceration.

The righteous American obsession with punishment runs deep, stemming from the comforting idea that there is always a clear “right” and “wrong,” and that a small subset of the population should decide which is which. For centuries, appeals to primal, fearful instincts have proven to be good politics, while notions of forgiveness, reconciliation, and even compromise are considered either a betrayal or naive.

In many ways, the public policy debate around criminal justice reform mirrors American politics as a whole. Both are characterized by bad faith arguments. Both are defined by histories of structural inequity. Both are impeded by us-versus-them rhetoric, racially-motivated notions of justice, and visceral fears of having something taken “from me” that is “not deserved.” The missing ingredients in the U.S. justice system, as in American politics as a whole, are empathy and forgiveness.

But cultivating these ingredients will mean declaring a permanent ceasefire in the arms race of law-and-order rhetoric that has characterized our political discourse for decades. As long as the political right sees greater benefit in mobilizing white racial resentment, rehabilitation and reconciliation will remain impossible.

As long as mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on certain people is seen as either a desired outcome or, at best, an inevitable side effect of “tough on crime” policies, rehabilitation and reconciliation will remain impossible. As long as the American narrative — in law, politics, media, and culture — equates blackness and criminality, rehabilitation and reconciliation will remain impossible.

America’s legacy of racial oppression, and the struggle and perseverance of generations of African Americans to overcome that legacy, is a foundational part of its history. To seek forgiveness on a societal level is not to forget that. To seek forgiveness is not to bury the past, or to whitewash it further.

To seek forgiveness is to begin to take responsibility. It is to create space for healing and reparation, of which moving from a system of punishment to one of rehabilitation is only a small part.

To seek forgiveness is to acknowledge not just the brokenness of our criminal justice system but the brokenness in each of us, and to refuse to accept a broken system that punishes some far more than others.

To seek forgiveness is to appreciate that too many Americans, over too many generations, have given tacit acceptance to a system that has built white supremacy into its very fabric and institutionalized discrimination under the guise of justice.

​Seeking forgiveness for this legacy starts with a good faith effort to reform our criminal justice system. True reform may be difficult and uncomfortable. But it will be an indication that America is, at last, prepared to seek forgiveness for its own original sin.

This column was originally published on Medium.

There’s no finish line in democracy

Parties help sustain the endless give and take of politics

Democracy doesn’t have a finish line. Democracy doesn’t work if there’s a point where the fight ends, where a winner is declared, where a vision for the future becomes the vision. The only sustainable system is one characterized by a neverending back-and-forth, one that finds stability in the endless tension of competing beliefs, ideologies, and convictions. One that, in the United States, takes the shape of political parties.

Today’s partisan divisions are a direct descendant of the core disagreement — namely, the size and scope of the federal government — that divided Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson more than two centuries ago. American democracy is founded on this disagreement, which is why the modern political class is still having many of the same arguments the Founders had in the eighteenth century.

But the fact that the Hamilton-Jefferson dispute has never been resolved isn’t the cause of political gridlock or polarization — it’s a source of stability and continuity. As historian and author Joseph J. Ellis argues in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, what’s kept the United States united is precisely the fact that one side has never secured a permanent victory. Neither has vanquished its opponent by permanently imposing its own vision on the country. “In the battle… for the true meaning of the revolution,” Ellis writes, “neither side completely triumphed.” Democracy has found stability and staying power in the tension between these sides.

A similar tension has evolved within humans themselves, moderating not just political debate but also the emotions that determine how people relate to each other. In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, author Sebastian Junger posits that human beings evolved with two competing traits: a visceral aversion to “freeloading,” or taking what wasn’t earned, and an deep-seated desire to take care of others — what Junger calls a “culture of compassion.” These competing traits are both innate and irreconcilable. They are baked into the human psyche, and they “will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.”

These tensions are inherent in American history and inherited in the human condition. The sources — our democracy and our DNA — are distinct. But they’ve been channeled into the same place: political parties.

As Junger writes, the aversion to “takers” (as Mitt Romney famously put it) and the inclination to compassion “have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system.” Ellis makes a parallel argument, writing that political parties have “institutionalized and rendered safe” what he calls “the explosive energies of the debate.” An irresolvable disagreement between two men, Hamilton and Jefferson, reflects a core human contradiction. And in the form of political parties, that disagreement has become a stabilizing force for the world’s most successful democracy.

Today, political affiliation is charitably described as a signifier of shared beliefs and values, and more accurately defined as a tribal identifier that renders independent thought or analysis unnecessary. But in Vox shortly before the 2016 election, Julia Azari describes political parties as more complicated and significant than that. The “team-spiritedness” of partisanship, Azari argues, “needs to be balanced out by organizations that have an interest in the next fight: robust party organizations that want to win next time, and believe that they can.”

It’s the “next time” that’s particularly important here. Politicians come and go, but parties, like other democratic institutions, should not. Parties preserve the long-term mindset — the understanding that the game never ends — by holding together irreconcilable disagreements and contradictions. That’s why Jonathan Rauch, in a 2016 article in The Atlantic, calls the party structure “a second, unwritten constitution,” bringing order to the chaos of a country whose Constitution leaves much for interpretation and whose core disagreement would otherwise threaten its very stability. In other words, partisanship matters, but not for the reasons we hear on cable news.

The ongoing collapse of party influence doesn’t have a single cause, though Rauch makes a compelling argument that the individualization of politics has played a role. Pointing to the rise of party-less political actors like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (and even Ted Cruz who, while a Republican, has shunned most of the GOP’s traditional infrastructure), Rauch argues these candidates reflect a new normal: that “political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.” They’ve been replaced by “individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly.”

American democracy has long specialized in harnessing individual egos and channeling short-term, personal interests into a system designed to outlast them. The collective understanding that there’s always another election — that the losing side today could be the winning side in two years — has helped preserved this system for centuries. Americans have always debated, sometimes viciously, the appropriate role of the federal government, but with one (very notable) exception, the tension between factions has never become unbearable. (It’s worth emphasizing that this tension hasn’t ruptured in part because the United States has refused to confront its original sin of slavery and white supremacy, choosing instead to paper over its most contentious, and shameful, historical stain.)

Human beings have always feared being taken advantage of and desired to take care of each other, but for the most part these competing tendencies have managed to coexist. Democracy has taken hold in the tension between the two extremes, yielding a stability that forces some level of policy moderation and compromise from the party in power, which implicitly or explicitly accepts it won’t be there forever.

But the same tension that stabilizes the way humans govern themselves can easily be stretched beyond a breaking point, lurching the system to an extreme fringe. Democracy frays, snaps, and ceases to function when politicians find checks and balances an inconvenience rather than an institutional force. Or when established and accepted traditions and precedents, and even the very definitions of “truth” and “facts,” come under repeated assault.

Or when short-term political wins make long-term sacrifices irrelevant or not worth pursuing. Or when gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement make primary elections decisive and general elections undemocratic. Or when shame ceases to restrain behavior and discourse. Or when moral equivalency becomes an excuse for normalizing behavior that through a rational lens looks completely irrational, but through irrational glasses looks like “very fine people on both sides.”

Each of these hallmarks of twenty-first century American politics threatens the fundamental norms of its political process. The two-party system, while far from perfect and far from the sole source of democratic longevity, represents one of these undervalued norms.

Political parties have constrained the permanent tension between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian visions. They have balanced the competing human needs to protect one’s self and one’s community. They have built long-term incentives into a debate that too easily devolves into a short-term, zero-sum game. They have preserved the understanding that there’s no finish line in a democracy — just a constant pulling back-and-forth, forcefully enough to move the debate but not so aggressively as to rip it apart. They have built a system in which permanent victory is impossible, and trying to achieve it is self-defeating.

The argument in favor of political parties is not without flaws. It’s difficult to reconcile the fact that a system designed to prevent a permanent victor has entrenched generations of winners and losers. Since before independence was declared, white Americans, mostly men, have built and perpetuated a system that disproportionately benefits them, often explicitly and intentionally at the expense of women and people of color. One need look no further than rates of incarceration, income inequality, financial wealth, or educational opportunity — to name but a few — to see that some continue to benefit far more than others from the status quo. But the question is not whether political parties are perfect; it’s whether the alternative system — one characterized by short-term, zero-sum tribalism — is any better, or offers more hope for progress.

Political parties have helped preserve the core tensions of democracy. Today, we’re testing how much that system can withstand without them.

This column was originally published on Medium.

In Liberia, dignity in the struggle for progress

A win for democracy, and a reason for hope

Occasionally, from unimaginable horror emerges something else once unimaginable: hope. Liberia’s recent election represents one of those occasions.

Last month, Liberians saw their democratically elected president hand power to her democratically elected successor. It was the country’s first peaceful transfer of power in nearly 75 years, but even more momentous was that it came just a decade and a half after a brutal civil war, and only a few years after a deadly pandemic halted its economic recovery and threatened to undermine years of progress.

A feeling of instability and uncertainty pervades many western countries today. Nations whose democracies seemed unshakeable and whose security was long taken for granted are rethinking the stability of those foundations. Yet the challenges Liberia has overcome — an effort led largely by the country’s women — offers reason for optimism even when forecasts are ominous. Liberian democracy shows that progress is always possible. And it serves as a timely reminder of the human dignity inherent in the struggle for that progress.

The brutality of Liberia’s civil war was nearly incomprehensible. Over fourteen years of violence, some 70 percent of the country’s women were raped. Nearly 250,000 Liberians were killed. An estimated 90 percent of the country’s economy was destroyed. As author and journalist Helene Cooper describes vividly in Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian children were transformed into soldiers who, high on drugs and propaganda, rampaged their country and sometimes even their own homes. As Sirleaf told Foreign Policy last fall, “I don’t think people understand the awesomeness of the destruction of this county — its institutions, its infrastructure, its law, its morals.”

That Liberia held free and fair elections just two years after the end of the war is a testament to its citizens’ resilience and determination — especially that of its women.

It was Liberian women who strung together and sustained the few remaining threads of society through more than a decade of violence, and it was Liberian women whose peaceful protests helped end it. It was Liberian women who led the “Vote for Woman” campaign that helped elect, and reelect, Africa’s first female head-of-state. It was Liberian women who made that election possible by canvassing their country to register voters, ultimately signing up close to half the country’s population.

Raising awareness. Building faith in the electoral process. Canvassing homes and markets to register voters and get them to the polls. Against all odds, Liberians undertook the exhausting, unglamorous work of democracy, and it worked. It’s still working today.

The story of Liberia’s recovery is inseparable from the leadership of its two-term, Nobel Prize-winning president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Sirleaf’s accomplishments were both symbolic, as a woman who led a country destroyed by men, and tangible, as a technocrat whose international experience and savvy helped eliminate Liberia’s foreign debts. To put it more simply, as one Liberian woman told the BBC last fall, “The best thing she did is the peace she kept for us.” The legacy of Ma Ellen, as Sirleaf is known, was cemented last month with the peaceful transition to her successor, George Weah.

That legacy is not without blemishes. Throughout her twelve years in office, she was dogged by charges of nepotism for bringing her sons into her cabinet. In 2010, she walked back a pledge to serve only one term. Two years later, undercutting her own messages of equality and fairness, she defended an anti-LGBT law, telling the Guardian that “we like ourselves just the way we are.”

Liberia, like its outgoing president, remains imperfect. Corruption, poor infrastructure, and high rates of poverty persist. The new vice president is the ex-wife of the warlord who plunged Liberia into war in 1989. Fears remain, as Prue Clarke and Mae Azango described recently, that “the ghosts of Liberia’s past” will find a new foothold in the country.

But to be inspired by Sirleaf and her country’s accomplishments is not just to understand the immense challenges Liberians faced when fighting finally ended in 2003. It’s also to recognize that no leader is without shortcomings, no election without skeptics, and no democracy without flaws. Overcoming these obstacles peacefully isn’t a sign of democracy failing — it’s the whole point of democracy itself.

Sirleaf’s response to the 2014 Ebola crisis demonstrates democracy’s messy, roundabout nature. As the president worked on the international stage to secure aid to fight the rapidly spreading pandemic, she was falling short at home. She was criticized harshly for not recognizing the threat quickly and for quarantining an entire neighborhood of her country — a tactic that failed to contain the disease but succeeded in sparking panic and protest.

Yet in the face of this criticism, Sirleaf didn’t double down. She acknowledged her errors and changed course. As Cooper describes it, “The very freedom and democratic process that had flourished in Liberia under her presidency kicked her into action.” In September 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecast that 1.4 million people across Sierra Leone and Liberia could be infected within a few months; ultimately, fewer than 11,000 Liberians contracted the disease before the country was declared Ebola-free.

The leader erred. The community reacted. The system responded. That process, with all of its mistakes and flaws and inefficiencies, is the process of democracy. It’s a process that’s neither preordained nor perfect. It’s a process that never ends. But to say that any of these shortcomings make the ends not worth pursuing is to ignore the dignity intrinsic to the process itself. There is no finish line in a democracy.

Overlooking that reality makes it far too easy for scandals and shortcomings to blind us to the powerful movements that gather strength quietly and steadfastly in the background — like a massive voter registration drive that enables a nation devastated by violence, much of it directed at women, to elect a continent’s first female leader. The triumph in Liberia was not Sirleaf’s election alone, but rather the monumental citizen-led march forward that continues to this day.

That march, with all of its twists, turns, and steps backwards, also continues in United States. Last month, for example, Florida organizers succeeded in gathering nearly 800,000 signatures to put on the 2018 ballot a referendum to restore voting rights for 1.5 million Floridians whose felony convictions bar them from exercising one of their core rights. Gathering that many signatures anywhere is difficult; it’s all the more remarkable in a country with a centuries-long history of using the criminal justice system as a weapon against African Americans — a country that prides itself on punishing first and asking questions later.

As these Floridians showed, and as Liberians reminded the world last month, there is dignity and meaning not only in the desired outcome but also in the struggle for fundamental rights. That’s true whether the fight is to strengthen a democracy two centuries old or one less than two decades old.

Cooper closes her powerful biography of Sirleaf with a telling anecdote. In May 2015, as the danger of Ebola subsided, the president spoke to a group who had gathered to recognize the occasion. “Let us celebrate,” she told them. “But stay mindful and vigilant.” It is yet another lesson Liberia can teach the world.

This column was originally published on Medium.

Draining the swamp — of expertise

We demand qualified doctors, lawyers, and athletes. What about presidents?

The United States is a nation of credentials. We demand qualified doctors and lawyers. We define scientists and academics by where they studied and what they’ve published. The entire notion of sport celebrates the talent and training necessary to be the best. In nearly every professional industry (far too many, by some measures), we’ve crafted standards to measure and convey expertise and experience.

The reasons for doing so are often obvious. The accused deserve representation by a capable lawyer. The sick deserve treatment by a trained surgeon. The student deserves qualified teachers. But this nearly universal expectation has roots in something more fundamental. It reflects a culture of hard work and striving, contributing to an idea that expertise matters, and that it is derived from effort. It empowers people to specialize, raising the collective bar of what society can accomplish. It helps build a sense of trust among individuals and institutions, among communities and the larger systems that make up our world.

But there’s one glaring exception to this expectation. There’s one line of work in which expertise is not just ignored but shunned, where experience signifies not strength but rather weakness or even corruption, where credentials that in any other field would be met with demand by employers are instead met with disdain. That field is government, and the employer is the voter. The job, today, is the presidency.

Admittedly, “president of the United States” has a job description unlike any other. The presidency is a public trust with public obligations. The president, especially abroad, speaks for an entire nation. The presidency has unique responsibilities, such as unifying the country in times of crisis or tragedy, that distinguish it from most other jobs for which customers traditionally demand expertise and experience. It’s also different in that only those who’ve held the job can fully grasp its burden. As President Obama said in his 2016 DNC speech, “nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office.”

But one might think these distinctions would be cause to hold presidents to a higher standard of expertise and experience, particularly when it comes to temperament and character. One might expect the person commanding the most powerful military in the world to be held to higher standards of intellect and introspection. One might hope the person looked to for guidance and inspiration around the world would be held to higher standards of integrity and moral character. One might think we would select the person whose words move markets on something more profound than who we want to have a beer with.

Sometimes, thankfully, our confusing expectations give us the right person at the right time. Yet in politics, too often actual qualifications aren’t considered qualifications, while obvious disqualifications are rarely disqualifying.

The 2016 election put America’s double standards of expertise (not to mention race and gender) on full display. While the losing candidate had extensive policy proposals and decades of competent government experience, the winner actively disparaged the very notion of expertise and ran on a resume of reality television and race-baiting. The outcome was a timely reminder that plenty of Americans share the winning candidate’s assertion that “the experts are terrible.” But why?

The presidency is an impossibly complex role, in an impossibly complex nation. That we could be so quick to waive the most basic requirements for the most difficult job in the world speaks to our irrational view of what the president does and what the presidency says about us. This irrationality reflects part of what Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, calls the “death of expertise.” But it also highlights a contempt for government that goes far beyond the current occupant of the Oval Office.

This contempt has taken over one of the two major political parties. It has contributed to shrinking budgets that have forced many talented and experienced public servants to find work elsewhere. It has infected political discourse to the point that simply keeping the federal government open is seen as an accomplishment. It has burrowed so deeply into the American psyche that fewer than three in ten Americans view the federal government favorably — lower than 23 other professional sectors surveyed — even though most federal employees are career civil servants who work in critical but thankless jobs, often for lower pay than they’d earn elsewhere.

These trends have culminated in a government controlled by people committed to “deconstructing the administrative state” and demonizing the very concept of government itself.

The Trump administration has accelerated the destruction of expertise beyond anything in recent memory. It has eviscerated the State Department. It has actively suppressed scientific evidence that doesn’t match its political beliefs, while either defunding the agencies charged with studying it or filling them with people opposed to their very missions. It has staffed roles previously held by PhDs with entirely unqualified campaign aides — when it staffs them at all. It has devolved from attacking economic analyses it disagrees with to ignoring them altogether. It has nominated racist bloggers with no judicial experience to federal judgeships, dismissing the recommendations of the American Bar Association and Republican and Democratic senators alike.

Each of these steps is simply the logical conclusion of an anti-government strain of partisan thought that has grown louder and more powerful with each election cycle. For a generation of political operatives, including many who’ve worked in government for most of their careers, the death of expertise in public life and the dysfunction of government aren’t byproducts. They’re the end products.

Why does it matter? Sometimes, the consequences are immediate: inadequate responses to natural disasters. Poor management of taxpayer resources. Reckless economic policy. Self-inflicted national security crises. Less obvious, but just as damaging, is the broad erosion of faith in government perpetuated by obvious incompetence. It’s hard to escape a vicious cycle of distrust.

But perhaps the most significant consequence is the destruction of potential. The potential for the United States to inspire and play host to the next generation of researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The potential for the United States government to be powered by the most innovative and capable scientists, judges, economists, and diplomats, too many of whom are driven away from public service by our toxic and dysfunctional politics.

The potential for the United States to develop treatments that will stop the next pandemic, or build prosthetic limbs that work as well as the real ones, or craft algorithms that harness the power of artificial intelligence. The potential for the United States to inspire and grow from a culture of opportunity and ambition, of effort and hard work, of drive and determination.

Most importantly, draining the swamp of expertise and experience makes it far harder for America to realize its potential as a beacon of moral authority. “Political rhetoric and ideals,” Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote recently, “can raise the moral sights of a nation and point men and women to responsibilities beyond the narrow bounds of self and family.” But not when idealism is replaced by cynicism. Not when we scoff at that potential, instead of striving to realize it.

Eviscerating government and disparaging expertise perpetuate a race to the bottom in every aspect of society. Every time politicians demonize experience and demonstrate that knowledge and skill are not to be praised but instead buried or dismissed, they plant a seed of cynicism and distrust. These seeds are dangerous and contagious, sparking tribal flames that spread as populist fantasies and conspiracy theories.

The solution is not, of course, to trust blindly in experts or elites. Look no further than the financial crisis or the Iraq war for evidence that confirmation bias, conventional wisdom, ulterior motives, and moral equivalency plague all human beings, experts and elites very much included.

Or, consider that for most of this country’s history, actual experience and expertise have been seen as secondary qualifications to race, gender, religion, and sexuality — for the presidency and for too many other positions. Disrupting the straight, white, male, Ivy League-educated entry requirements for the White House, as for other positions throughout American society, is undoubtedly positive and long overdue.

The United States is the most dynamic and powerful nation in the world in part because it has welcomed new people, cultures, and ideas that have challenged and shaken up the status quo. Fighting America’s disdain for expertise doesn’t mean discarding that innovative spirit. It simply requires rebalancing of the way we view government so expertise is valued as it is in nearly every other field: as something to be prized, sought, respected, and challenged.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

The special relationship will be just fine

Principles, not politicians, unite Britain and America

As an American in the U.K., it’s been puzzling to observe Theresa May’s single-minded determination to win the favor of Donald Trump. Is she genuinely pursuing a bilateral trade deal to lessen the sting of Brexit, or simply making a desperate political calculation to show voters she remains in America’s good graces?

Regardless of motive or outcome, the “special and enduring relationship” between the United States and Britain will outlast these two leaders. That’s why May’s pursuit of Trump’s approval is likely to prove futile and short-sighted, damaging her own credibility and the values the special relationship rests on.

The first year of the Trump administration has confirmed what many knew all along: One cannot negotiate, compliment, or ingratiate one’s way into Trump’s favor for any longer than a segment on Fox & Friends (his favorite T.V. show) can change his mind. This is someone who demands loyalty but does not practice it. Someone who complains incessantly about unfairness but doesn’t understand the concept. Someone who ran for president as a dealmaker but can’t even negotiate with his own party in good faith. Someone who calls himself “the least racist person,” yet whose belief in white supremacy is one of the few commitments he’s maintained for decades.

What about Trump’s record suggests the prime minister can build a relationship that will outlast, say, Trump’s next outburst at May or missive against Sadiq Khan? Given Trump’s protectionist, zero-sum outlook on the world and penchant for promising one thing and doing the opposite, sacrificing principles in pursuit of a trade deal with him would be, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told the BBC in December, a “waste of time” — not to mention damaging to the very relationship May is determined to protect.

The only principles Trump values are those that serve his own self-regard. He has suggested to author Michael Wolff that he would “only honor the special relationship if he ‘gets what he wants.’” Earlier this month, a source told the The Times that Trump “felt he had not been shown enough love by the British government.” By Friday, Trump had proclaimed himself “somebody that loves Britain.” If the president indeed visits the U.K. later this year, who knows which Trump will show up?

For a stark lesson in the futility of accommodating the president, May should look to his Republican supporters in the U.S. Congress. As Brian Beutler wrote earlier this month for Crooked.com, Trump’s enablers “have all committed reputational suicide-by-Trump, in exchange for practically nothing.” An enormous tax cut for the wealthy represents their singular accomplishment.

Britons seem to have reached a similar conclusion. A year after Trump’s election, one poll found that nearly 80 percent believe he has hurt America’s standing in the world. Another survey suggests that just three in 10 would welcome an official visit to the U.K. A third predicts 2 million Britons would protest such a visit. These aren’t numbers that suggest trading core values for short-term political victories has a high R.O.I. Promises accountable only to the president’s whims require far more collateral than either America under Trump or Britain amidst Brexit can provide.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, May rejected a petition signed by nearly 2 million Britons opposing a state visit for Trump. As Matthew D’Ancona recounted in The New York Times, May’s government told MPs “that Britain’s diplomatic, strategic and commercial interests must override distaste for the American president’s racism, misogyny and offhand bigotry.” But is it true that accommodating the latter really serves the former?

Theresa May, of course, bears no responsibility for enabling Donald Trump’s presidency. No one is asking May to raise her fist and join the resistance. Rejecting engagement and diplomacy entirely would be both unrealistic and self-defeating, achieving little while leaving Britain further isolated. But her government is responsible for interacting with Trump and his administration without illusions.

Moreover, with her premiership faltering yet again, May has an opportunity to defend her country’s values, distinguish herself on the world stage, and draw a clear, and likely popular, distinction between herself and Jeremy Corbyn. May can refuse to indulge Trump’s vanity. She can take forceful, principled stands against Trump’s rhetoric. And she can do so while working closely with his administration on the matters on which the countries depend on each other, from trade and economic cooperation to intelligence, cybersecurity, and defense.

In fact, by engaging with the White House from a position of clear-eyed confidence and conviction, rather than illusion or desperation, May can actually strengthen the special relationship. By making clear that what unite Britain and America are principles, not trade deals or politicians, she can extend a democratic olive branch to allies and adversaries around the world who have good reason to question whether the Transatlantic relationship is anything more than transactional.

After a rough start in the late 1700s and early 1800s, through presidents and prime ministers of different parties and times of peace and war, the British-American relationship has remained anchored to its core values. Neither country has always lived those values. America, for instance, still hasn’t achieved the promises of freedom and equality laid out in the very document with which it declared its independence.

But as populism surges and democracy teeters around the world, turning away from those values because they fail to serve short-term political interests does threaten the special relationship. Being insufficiently accommodating of Donald Trump does not.

After meeting with Trump in Davos on Friday, May told reporters the two countries would “continue to have that really special relationship, standing shoulder to shoulder.” That is true, and May is right to fight for it. She would be wrong, though, to assume that its success depends on Trump.

“The United States,” Winston Churchill famously said, “invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.” The quotation may be apocryphal, but the message endures.

Crossing the president may put May on the wrong side of Trump’s ire today. But it will put her, and the relationship she values so deeply, on the right side of history.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

Oprah, the permanent campaign, and the myth of the all-powerful president

The Oprah 2020 frenzy reflects two dangerous trends at the heart of American politics today

Oprah Winfrey’s powerful speech at the Golden Globes earlier this month sparked days of unrestrained analysis (“Oprah 2020 gets low ratings from voters,” said Politico), trending hashtags, trivial polls, and nonstop cable chatter. Too little discussion centered on what Oprah actually said, while too much of it consisted of breathless, and ultimately meaningless, speculation of whether she’ll run for president.

Can a successful person not just give an important, inspiring speech without being immediately shortlisted for the presidency?

Oprah, to be clear, is more than qualified to run. As her remarks demonstrated, she has lived the American story and understands far better than the sitting president what the United States can be. But regardless of what she decides, the 2020 frenzy reflects and reinforces two disruptive trends at the heart of American politics today. The first is the speculative groupthink of the endless race for the presidency, in which the national political discourse revolves almost entirely around the next presidential election. (Donald Trump filed for reelection on the day of his inauguration, for example.) The second is the mirage of the all-powerful president. These forces alone didn’t elect Trump, but they did help make his candidacy possible, and they do threaten to make future elections even more destabilizing.

Let’s start with the permanent presidential campaign, characterized — and monetized — by feverish speculation that treats politics as a sport and substance as a secondary concern.

Before Oprah had finished accepting the Cecil B. DeMille award, many of the institutional forces that perpetuate the perma-campaign immediately revved into gear behind a potential Winfrey candidacy. It would’ve taken little time or reflection to realize that the speculation was just that, but when there’s only enough time for reflection or speculation, one speculates — or risks losing a news cycle. If the Golden Globes had been held in Iowa or New Hampshire, Politico’s web servers would have melted.

In some ways, the permanent campaign depends on the same seductive Ponzi scheme of attention as the National Football League. The NFL generated $14 billion in revenue in 2017, mostly from TV deals. The broadcasts that comprise those deals last, on average, a little more than three hours. Yet only 11 minutes of each broadcast feature actual, live football. The league’s business model depends on convincing millions of viewers that what comes next — not what already happened or even what’s happening now — is going to change everything. (Consider the volume of TV ads for next week’s games that air during the current week’s games.)

Much of the American political conversation now rests on the same empty foundation. Hype and speculation about the next election capture a lot of attention and make a lot of money, further incentivizing the hype and speculation. That cycle is only reinforced by the celebritization of the presidency.

In Vox, Constance Grady describes celebrities as “avatars of America’s subconscious” because “they are the people onto whom we project all our deepest fears and fantasies.” One of those fantasies is, of course, that simply electing the right person will solve our country’s — and, by implication, our own — problems. It’s the democratic equivalent of taking a multivitamin instead of eating better and exercising. The relentless nature of the perma-campaign exhausts us, tempts us, and hammers home the belief that the multivitamin will solve it. That doesn’t just make it easier to elect an unqualified and easily distracted reality TV star. It also, much more dangerously, makes it more tempting to elect an aspiring strongman who promises that “I alone can fix it.”

That brings us to the second threat to democracy showcased by the 2020 frenzy: the conviction of the electorate that the person who wins the office can, through sheer force of will and political mastery, “fix it.” No matter what happened last time, this time will be different. Piling a nation’s worth of expectations onto the shoulders of individual presidents, rather than the institution of the presidency, is a recipe for disappointment at best, demagoguery at worst.

Take the fact that we tend to rate the success of our presidents on the strength of the economy. Presidents do have a role to play in managing the federal bureaucracy, advocating for an economic agenda, and making influential appointments. Presidents’ words can and do move markets. But as Neil Irwin wrote last year in The New York Times, the available evidence suggests that presidents have mostly a marginal effect on the economy. The people we put in the Oval Office “have far less control over the economy than you might imagine,” Irwin writes. How we judge their performance is “highly dependent on the dumb luck of where the nation is in the economic cycle.”

Why do we ascribe these vast powers and responsibilities to the person whose office was designed specifically to prevent a single individual from becoming too powerful?

Many of America’s early chapters were shaped by what Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, calls “the obsessive American suspicion of monarchy.” For the Founders, Ellis writes, that obsession “haunted all conversations about the powers of the presidency.” Yet today, for a country sustained by — and rightfully proud of — democratic institutions built on that very suspicion, Americans seem quite determined to project wide-ranging powers on individual presidents.

As historian Ray Raphael told the Washington Post in an interview last February, “if you just took the Founders at the convention, and how they envisioned the presidency, compared to the presidency today, they would be absolutely aghast.” The causes of the executive evolution transcend parties, stretching from congressional dysfunction to wartime demands for presidential authority.

But an increasingly powerful presidency wouldn’t be sustained over time without the ongoing endorsement of the electorate. Through successive Republican and Democratic administrations, Americans have made it clear that we’re comfortable with this transformation of the presidency. Our expectations for what an individual president can and should accomplish have grown in tandem.

Who knows whether a President Winfrey — or any future president — can meet these expectations. But for now, the Oprah 2020 craze has little to do with an actual candidacy and a lot to do with the same flaws in our democratic process that were exploited by the person in the White House today: the permanent presidential campaign, and the fetishization of an omnipotent president. Neither served our democracy well in 2016. Nor will they in 2020.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

Prepare for the lionization of Paul Ryan

How will history remember those who enabled Donald Trump?

Master legislator. Wonky intellectual. All-American conservative. Congressional institutionalist, stuck between some rocks (his policy beliefs, his patriotism) and a couple of hard places (his president and his party). Yet through sheer force of will and wonkery — a “minor miracle,” the local paper called it — he navigated competing and unpredictable forces to pass America’s first major tax overhaul since 1986.

That’s what history is likely to say about House speaker Paul Ryan. That the legacy achievement of the “famously wonky” “solution-oriented fiscal conservative” is neither conservative nor fiscally responsible probably won’t matter.

That the debt-and-deficit-obsessed numbers guy only values the pretense of fiscal responsibility on the stump and only worries about debt and deficits under Democratic presidents probably won’t matter. (One Fox News contributor called Ryan’s 2012 convention speech “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”)

That the then-vice presidential candidate who proclaimed that “economic policy [is] my value-add” to the Mitt Romney campaign also said more recently, in a moment of honesty, that “nobody knows” whether his long-heralded tax cut will pay for itself — that small postscript probably won’t matter, either.

None of these inconsistencies will matter to Ryan’s legacy because, as The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis wrote in a profile of Ryan in 2012, “once you earn a reputation as a Serious Man in Washington, it’s almost impossible to lose it.”

For those appalled by Ryan’s duplicity and shamelessness, the persistence of his reputation as “a pillar of GOP competence and seriousness” is difficult enough to stomach. Ryan spent most of 2017 dissolving any last shreds of credibility as a “regular order” institutionalist by forcing through the House a desperate repeal of the Affordable Care Act and trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. Both efforts came mostly free of the burdens of committee hearings, floor debate, or the possibility of amendments.

But it’s on the question of moral courage that Ryan’s behavior falls so grievously short of what his legacy will likely reflect. That shortfall raises a more profound question for American democracy: Will it matter that one of the few Republicans who truly had the chance to hold Donald Trump accountable not only declined to do so but chose, instead, to enable Trump’s rise to power?

The question of Paul Ryan’s legacy — and what it says about American political culture in the Trump era — arose following a December Politico story that reported the speaker planned to retire at the end of the 115th Congress. The article cited more than 30 interviews of people close to Ryan, among whom “not a single person believed Ryan [would] stay in Congress past 2018.”

Who knows what the speaker will actually do; any assessment of how history remembers him may be premature. But assuming Ryan leaves and Trump’s presidency eventually ends — ideally with a peaceful transfer of power to a democratically elected successor — one can only hope that America’s institutional memory will remember Ryan’s role in it.

When it comes to asking how and why someone as patently unfit for office became the president of the United States, reflecting on Ryan’s support for Trump is a good place to start. Throughout the 2016 general election, the speaker not only explicitly endorsed Trump but also allowed his own institutionalist stamp of approval to give not-quite-Never Trumpers permission to do the same under the obviously false pretext that “serious people” like Ryan would keep Trump in check. Wishful thinking, to put it charitably.

Since Trump’s election, everything Ryan has said and done seems to have been put through a carefully calibrated filter of whether it would bring him closer to passing an enormous, unpaid-for tax cut for rich Americans — what Politico described as “the things he had only fantasized about” before President Trump became a reality. It seems to have paid off: Ryan got his tax cut in exchange for, according to a “senior Trump aide” quoted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, post-election support for the president that entailed “rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness.” Perhaps that’s why Ryan himself says he was “made for this moment.”

If history stamps that legacy with a grade exceeding clever opportunist who made America’s misfortune work for him, history will be giving Ryan too much credit. Millions of people have borne witness to Donald Trump’s unfitness for office, including some of his Republican colleagues in Congress. Yet only a select few have truly been in a position to act unilaterally to constrain it. In addition to its high profile, the speakership of the House of Representatives today comes with incredible power, from controlling the bills that come to the floor to determining committee assignments. Endowed with the privilege of that position, Paul Ryan, conservative institutionalist, has failed spectacularly to use any of the legislative branch’s powerful tools to check or balance the out-of-control executive.

Thus the more significant, and as-yet-unresolved question: Will the collective “we” hold accountable the Paul Ryans of the world who enabled Donald Trump? Will the legacies of those who could have stopped Trump’s rise to the White House reflect their willful failure to do so?

Many observers have said frequently, and somewhat wistfully, that history would judge those who put Trump in office. How Paul Ryan is remembered will give us a good idea whether that comforting thought is actually true, or just something we tell ourselves in fits of indignation and despair. History has a short memory, particularly in Congress. Consider that one of the Senate office buildings still bears the name of Georgia Democratic Senator Richard Russell, the staunch segregationist and relentless opponent of civil rights.

Paul Ryan may not have a building named after him, but it seems plausible that the odes to the speaker upon his retirement will read something like the recent editorial in Ryan’s hometown newspaper, which predicted that he would be heralded as an athlete at the top of his game, a man of “humanity and decency” who deserves praise for not “getting into a tweet war with Trump,” even though working with the president “must be exhausting.”

The United States is obsessed with punishment and finger-pointing. Maybe the healthiest step for reconciling and repairing our post-Trump democracy will be just to move forward in rebuilding institutions and restoring trust. But simply ignoring how and why Trump happened comes at a high cost, too.

The next time an aspiring demagogue — perhaps a more capable one — sets his sights on the White House and those standing in the way are presented with the same faustian bargain Ryan gleefully accepted, will Ryan’s tarnished reputation serve as a warning? Or will his legacy somehow skip the Trump chapter, suggesting that another generation of Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells can get away with trading values for political victories?

Ultimately, those questions will be answered by voters. In the meantime, whether it’s seven months or seven years from now, when Trump leaves office our collective responsibility will be to remember who made possible this crisis of American government. If a faithful record of history is to be written before the conventional wisdom takes hold, the first question to any sitting Republican member of Congress, starting with Paul Ryan, must be: Where were you? What did you do to constrain this man and those around him?

It’s never too early to lay the groundwork for an honest accounting of this chapter in American history. Those for whom moral leadership still means something should be prepared to challenge the inevitable lionization of Paul Ryan and combat the willful forgetfulness that will follow the Trump era.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

Democrats, try campaigning like human beings

Democratic congressional candidates should run on what they actually believe in. Is that too much to ask?

After the 2016 election left Democrats without control of the House, Senate, or White House for the first time in a decade, most campaign postmortems offered one of two predictable (and contradictory) arguments: to win in 2018 and 2020, Democrats should move left or center — toward either the “Bernie wing” or the “Hillary wing.”

But those analyses miss an even greater obstacle to electoral success. No matter the effectiveness of its message, the strength of its ground game, the direction Democrats move along the political spectrum, or the weakness of the Trump-led GOP, the party’s problem is more fundamental: too many Democratic candidates seem incapable of speaking like human beings with core convictions.

Democrats won’t retake the House or Senate solely by opposing Donald Trump or by telling voters what they should care about. They’ll win by campaigning sincerely and confidently on what they actually believe in. Yet even with Donald Trump in the White House, with less than a year until the 2018 midterms it’s unclear whether Democratic candidates will cast aside a pathological determination to please everyone and, instead, focus on connecting with voters on an honest and human level.

The challenge facing Democrats reflects one of the great ironies of modern-day American politics: the party whose empathy is genuine and whose convictions are real has gained a reputation as inauthentic and out-of-touch. Meanwhile, the party whose only true convictions are shrinking government, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and preserving tribal loyalty manages to claim the mantle of authenticity and a reputation for fighting for working people.

That’s not just Democrats’ fault. The media, with its tendency to falsely equate good- and bad-faith arguments from opposing sides, is also among those responsible. But when it comes to campaigning, too many Democratic candidates — and the insular circles of consultants and operatives whose condescension for the electorate knows few bounds — have decided they’re left with a binary choice of losing elections with integrity intact, or standing a chance of winning only by running away from their core beliefs.

There is, of course, an obvious third path for Democrats: speak with the courage of your convictions, and make an honest, sincere case to your prospective constituents.

Whether a candidate is to the left of Bernie Sanders or to the right of Joe Manchin, every Democrat who picks 2018 to run on a platform of lukewarm and uninspired-but-poll-tested promises threatens to tank the Trump-era Democratic resurgence even before the first anniversary of the Women’s March.

The party’s chances of taking back the House and Senate depend on a wave of enormous proportions. The unpopularity of Donald Trump and the GOP agenda alone cannot overcome the extent to which gerrymandered House seats and the Senate electoral map favor Republicans. That means a Democratic platform that consists only of not offending anyone won’t be enough.

The 2014 election cycle holds important lessons for Democrats. Take the Colorado Senate race that pitted incumbent Sen. Mark Udall against Republican Rep. Cory Gardner. Despite his liberal voting record, Udall had a compelling personal story as a mountaineer and was broadly well-liked by Coloradans heading into the 2014 campaign.

But instead of telling voters who he was or how he was fighting for his state in the Senate, Udall’s campaign so single-mindedly talked about reproductive rights that he became known as “Mark Uterus.” Moreover, rather than defending or even attempting to make a case for his liberal voting record — like his support for the Affordable Care Act — Udall tried to distance himself from it, even refusing to attend a fundraiser President Obama hosted for him in Denver, as if that patently political gesture would sway a single Republican voter.

Udall was on the record defending Democratic policies. He voted in support of President Obama’s agenda. His beliefs (and party registration) were clear. So why, then, when an election approached, did his campaign see the path to victory running through a blatant disavowal of most of his voting record and worldview? Udall lost to Gardner by 2.5 points.

The American political landscape looked vastly different in 2014 than it will in 2018, and every election is uniquely complicated and rarely determined by a single action or event. But the argument against Democratic please-everyone politics isn’t about a particular campaign or candidate. It’s not about whether the Democratic party needs to become more or less progressive. It’s not a screed for liberal purity or against compromise, or a “No Labels” meets “The Innovation Party” self-congratulatory call for a Mark Zuckerberg-John Kasich ticket in 2020. It’s not false equivalence disguised as post-partisan intellectualism.

This is simply a plea for Democratic candidates to start acting more like human beings who truly believe that government can improve the lives of the governed, and less like professional political operators with such disdain for voters that candidates don’t even try to make a compelling argument for what they actually believe in.

A key takeaway from the recent victories of Doug Jones in Alabama and Danica Roem in Virginia is that Democratic candidates can win competitive races because of — not in spite of — their core convictions. Across the country, there are plenty of examples of Democrats who’ve cracked the code of humanity in politics. Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana aren’t conservative by any measure, but they’ve repeatedly won in states that voted for John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump in the last three presidential cycles. Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth is among the recent arrivals to the Senate who’ve built a reputation for speaking sincerely and passionately.

In the House, Reps. Maxine Waters and Keith Ellison are long-serving members of Congress who don’t try to please everyone and haven’t forgotten how to connect on a human level, while relative newcomers like Reps. Eric Swallwell, Cheri Bustos, Hakeem Jeffries, and Beto O’Rourke have risen quickly in prominence without forgoing the frankness and directness with which they first came to Washington. These members are just a few of the sitting elected officials whose elections and reelections demonstrate that humanity and honesty aren’t incompatible with electoral success. They, along with other recent candidates like Jason Kander — who in 2016 came within three points of unseating an incumbent Republican senator in a state Trump won by nearly 20 points — represent a Democratic party that can compete anywhere in the country.

Voters have a pretty good idea of who’s speaking to them directly. They recognize a candidate who tries to answer a different question than the one they asked. They see through a refusal to acknowledge disagreements or, when challenged, a reluctance to defend a position. They aren’t impressed by politicians who answer a yes-or-no question with winding paragraphs replete with hemming and hawing but devoid of conviction.

Bringing some sincerity and humanity to Democratic politics doesn’t just show a respect for the electorate; it also comes with the added benefit of localizing and personalizing a campaign. It’s hard to paint a candidate as a liberal stooge of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer if that same candidate is at your front door or a town hall answering your questions honestly and interacting with you like a human being.

The endemic Democratic insistence on running away from one’s convictions in hopes of pleasing everyone — the naive belief that voters will eventually realize the candidate knows what’s best — leaves supporters disillusioned and the rest of the electorate shaking its head at the audacity of attempted political expediency.

Democrats talk a lot about human dignity, and rightly so. They stand for the dignity that comes from holding a good-paying job, being able to send a child to college, and having reliable access to health care. For Democratic candidates, though, shouldn’t the same dignity they talk about on the stump also apply to their day-to-day interactions with other human beings whose votes they seek?

As the 2018 midterms approach, there’s an enormous opportunity for Democrats who don’t just offer steadfast opposition to the president but who actually possess the same qualities he falsely claims to have — candidness, directness, authenticity. Whether an aspiring Blue Dog or a socialist-turned-Democrat, candidates shouldn’t fear being honest with voters. Holding Donald Trump accountable is a constitutional and moral imperative, but no person’s worldview consists entirely of opposing Donald Trump. Why should a candidate’s campaign?

Even as Trump and his party no longer attempt to hide their appeals to white resentment and their allegiance to big business and the far-right, Democrats still risk allowing Republicans to set the parameters of what defines conviction and authenticity. In the era of Donald Trump, that’s a particularly ignominious and disheartening accomplishment. Not only does it push more of the Democratic base to the far left — a risk in itself — but candidates who try to win just by not losing leave far too many voters wondering what, exactly, they stand for. That’s an opportunity lost, and not a problem that slogans, messaging, or pivots can fix.

Donald Trump is the president of the United States. The risk averse playbook that has guided Democratic candidates— and created a generation of political operatives and consultants whose greatest fear is their candidate’s humanity — is no longer good enough.

Elections are complicated, and a little more honesty and authenticity isn’t going to paint the electoral map blue. But it might just be a step towards winning a few seats and restoring some sincerity to the Democratic party and the democratic process.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

When faith in government evaporates

American democracy has long depended on a basic level of trust. The Trump administration has squandered it

American democracy is built on a precarious paradox. Its founders, deeply fearful of tyranny, crafted a system that would constrain the impulses of power grabs and partisanship. Yet the same system would also depend on a certain amount of blind faith, on a reservoir of trust in government that would rise and fall over time but never sink too low.

Until now. The sun hadn’t set on Donald Trump’s first day in office before his administration began rapidly draining any semblance of credibility infused into it by the peaceful transfer of power that had just taken place. When Sean Spicer spoke from the White House podium that evening and proclaimed the inaugural crowd to have been “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” he was simply cueing up the pattern of lies, distortions, and shameless half-truths that have defined his administration.

Individually, many of these moments seem harmless, but together they’ve had a destabilizing effect on the very idea of government. As the trail of falsehoods grows longer, each day Trump and his team retreat further into a defensive crouch in which no stance or statement is too outlandish to defend. The extent of the lying poisons the integrity of the whole institution, to the point where it’s now necessary to wonder whether anything the Trump administration does is genuinely in good faith.

This level of distrust doesn’t stem from public policy disagreements. Of the many traits that distinguish this White House from its predecessors, a major one remains the absence of a serious interest in policymaking, or even serious goals for the direction of the country beyond making it whiter, more isolated, and more fearful.

What we’re experiencing today is an era of distrust, not just disagreement. Disagreement is essential for a healthy democracy; distrust extinguishes it. And today, the reservoir of trust has been thoroughly emptied, drained drop-by-drop by what Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson aptly described as the Trump administration’s “spectacular accumulation of lies.”

That matters as much for the routine, everyday business of government as it does for the major crises. Consider the administration’s opposition to the proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner. The Department of Justice, The Economist wrote recently, “worries that the combined firm could exploit [its customer base] unfairly to win new distribution customers [and] jack up the fees it charges other video distributors.” The administration is probably right to argue that “the merger would harm competition, resulting in higher bills and less innovation for millions of American consumers.” Sounds like an appropriate place for government to intervene.

But the administration’s claims, as Julia Ioffe pointed out, contradict its decidedly anti-consumer stance on most other issues, like eliminating the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules. That inconsistency is made even more questionable by Trump’s childish beef with CNN. But what makes it impossible to take the administration at its word is that it has lied so relentlessly and so shamelessly so many times about issues both petty and profound that we have absolutely no idea when it’s making an honest, good-faith case.

Americans rely on the federal government, but many people don’t understand how it works or appreciate just how significantly it impacts their lives. For the most part, they don’t need to. Implicit in that lack of awareness is a basic level of trust that government will continue, quietly and competently, to perform its many functions, from compiling monthly unemployment statistics and producing weather forecasts to making scientific investments, managing retirement programs, and organizing the Census.

At a conceptual level, we may debate the role of government in American life, but few people take the time to quibble with every single thing it does. A 2015 Pew poll found, for example, that even while the country is distrustful of and frustrated with government as a whole, “in 10 of the 13 areas tested in the survey, half or more say the federal government is doing a very good or somewhat good job.”

But a growing distrust that threatens to poison even things as routine as weather forecasts and unemployment data — the business of government supposedly driven by facts, not politics — can quickly spiral into a post-truth perspective that would be right at home in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When there’s no agreed-upon reality, the state has as much authority as the conspiracy theorist. If the choice is between RT and InfoWars, how much does the choice even matter?

A distrusted and dysfunctional government serves only those in power and those who don’t believe in the institution of government itself. That may be the goal of Trump and his party, but this isn’t just a Donald Trump problem.

It’s an H.R. McMaster problem when McMaster, the national security advisor who literally wrote a book on speaking truth to power, denies that Trump revealed classified information to the then-Russian ambassador in the Oval Office during a meeting documented only by Russian government photographers.

It’s a John Kelly problem when the White House chief of staff smears Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson from the White House podium, calling her an “empty barrel,” and refuses to walk back his statements even in the face of video evidence that he lied, saying he’ll “never” apologize.

It’s a Sarah Huckabee Sanders problem when the White House press secretary claims, in response to criticism of Trump’s decision to retweet a series of bigoted, Islamophobic video clips, that even if the videos aren’t real, “you’re focusing on the wrong thing [because] the threat is real.”

It’s a Steve Mnuchin problem when the Treasury secretary repeatedly asserts that his department is working on a secret, data-driven analysis showing the Republican tax bill will increase growth and reduce the federal debt even though, as Jordan Weissmann noted recently, no such analysis exists.

Every Democratic and Republican administration has had moments when someone has gotten the facts wrong, or sometimes worse. But no White House has been as blatantly, toxically, cynically untruthful to the people it purports to serve as Donald Trump’s. That’s particularly dangerous, given that Trump took office with public trust in government already at a record low.

In the event the administration successfully sues to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger, we want to believe it did so to protect consumers. But is there any reason to think that this administration’s only action that doesn’t make big business even bigger is anything other than a fulfillment of Trump’s personal vendetta against CNN?

In the event the president chooses to re-impose sanctions on Iran in violation of the 2015 nuclear agreement, we want to think it’s because the international community has clear evidence that Iran violated the accord. But have we seen any indication that Trump would overrule his national security team for any reason other than his single-minded determination to undermine Barack Obama’s legacy?

In the event of a terrorist attack, we want to believe that the federal government is pursuing all leads to find out what happened and keep the country safe. But have we been given any reason to think this administration wouldn’t spin an attack to its liking and use it to pursue its anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant agenda?

Thousands of decisions are made by the executive branch every day. Most aren’t this significant, but as a whole they’re profoundly consequential. And this administration has lied so defensively, so shamelessly, and with such self-interest and head-spinning frequency, that it’s become impossible not to question the motives behind every decision.

That doubt and distrust seeps into everything the White House does, even if the questioning is nothing more than a subtle, lurking suspicion about whether a small power company from the Interior secretary’s hometown is really the best choice to turn Puerto Rico’s power back on, or whether the State Department is really facing legitimate challenges in imposing congressionally-mandated sanctions for Russian election interference.

When the reservoir of trust has been drained, the little questions we used to shake off instead fester and grow, upsetting the shared foundation upon which our democracy rests. It makes cynics and conspiracy theorists of us all.

Blind faith, of course, is not the answer. Like a free press, public skepticism of authority and overreach keeps government in check and has long been one of this country’s most energizing and inspiring traits. And all administrations have the right to make their case and defend their decisions.

But with its refusal to concede any argument, compromise on any issue, or even consider the possibility that its performance might be anything short of exemplary and wholeheartedly patriotic, the Trump White House has corroded faith in government to a shocking degree.

It’s easy to forget that we used to be able to give public servants, even our political opponents, the benefit of the doubt.

It’s easy to forget that only the most extreme partisans used to ascribe sinister motives to everyone who questioned or critiqued them.

It’s easy to forget that a proven lie used to be met with a correction or an apology, not self-righteous defensiveness.

It’s easy to forget that faith in government didn’t used to be a luxury.

To a degree greater than many of us like to accept, the maintenance of a democratic society depends on preserving that faith. It depends on giving government the benefit of the doubt, even if we disagree with a particular policy or its implementation. Governing is far too complicated, and democracy far too precarious, for the majority of the governed to doubt every single decision.

It’s a paradoxical premise, the idea that a system built on a foundation of distrust also requires trust to function. Democracy is a delicate balance.

But in our politics today, shame is nonexistent. Common truths no longer seem to matter. Defensiveness and whataboutism have replaced honesty and accountability. And trust has been bargained away for short-term political gain. In its place, we’re left with a world in which compromise and the common good have nowhere to take root, but where conspiracy theories and corruption thrive.

In Missouri last month, Trump asserted that “there has never been a 10-month president that has accomplished what we have accomplished.” He’s right: it’s hard to imagine another president squandering so much faith so quickly.

The swamp is teeming. But America’s reservoir of trust has been drained.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

Democracy can check our worst instincts — if we let it

A relentless craving for relative superiority still threatens the American experiment.

Donald Trump’s rise to power has coincided with another rise: that of popular interest in the collapse of the Roman Empire. But the potential of populist demagoguery to precipitate a breakdown of democratic order isn’t the only striking echo of Roman history in the United States today. Both Roman and American societies were built on foundations of slavery and the maintenance of a permanent underclass — a precarious and cruel stability that depended on the majority’s sense of relative superiority to the minority, and a fear of that superiority being taken away.

In America, this human foundation created and perpetuated what Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, calls the “narrative of racial difference” that persists to this day. The fear of that difference dissipating, and the resentment such fear provokes, paved the way for a President Trump.

Trump, after all, rose to political relevance with the racist birther movement. His race-baiting campaign was premised on restoring white Americans — the “forgotten men and women,” the “silent majority” — to their rightful place in a zero-sum world that pitted different tribes against each other in a struggle for relative superiority. In Trump’s victory it was, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man — no matter how fallen — can be president.’” Promise of superiority restored. America made great again.

The Trump campaign didn’t invent this zero-sum worldview. As historian Tom Holland observes in Rubicon, for centuries the Roman republic existed on the backs of slaves, who not only sustained its economy but also fulfilled “a subtler, more baneful need.” In the republic, Holland writes, “all status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free?” In other words, “even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave.”

Among the many consequences of the human tendency to see the world in zero-sum terms is a constant, relentless measuring of ourselves relative to others around us. People are loss averse, meaning we’d rather not lose something (like status) than gain something. We’re also last-place averse, so we’re generous until we’re not, until we find ourselves in second-to-last place, fearful of tumbling further. We’re determined to maintain our relative status.

That status, while entirely fictional and self-imposed, is deeply entrenched. As Yuval Noah Harari observes in Sapiens, “it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.” For any number of reasons, he writes, “complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.” In earlier chapters of human evolution, these instincts and tendencies may have served us well. (One of Harari’s main arguments in Sapiens is, in fact, that humankind’s ability to organize itself around an imagined order is what enabled it to build complex civilizations.)

In America, however, these traits have been exploited for generations by an established class that is largely white, male, and wealthy to preserve its status, primarily by appealing to working-class whites’ sense of relative superiority. As a result, as Carol Anderson writes in White Rage, throughout every chapter of this country’s history, “black achievement, black aspirations, and black success [have been] construed as direct threats.” The presidency of Barack Obama was only the latest example.

Our tendency, as individuals and groups, to seek relative superiority is both a design flaw and a shortcoming for which we bear deep responsibility. Nowhere are its consequences more glaring than in an America that remains unwilling to confront its legacy of racial injustice. It’s not just Donald Trump. Mass incarceration and our lust for punishment — and our societal aversion to rehabilitation — are similar manifestations of that desire for a feeling of relative superiority.

Yet the same founders of American democracy who built a nation that entrenched white supremacy, many of whom themselves owned slaves, also built a system of representative government capable of tempering the “fickleness and passion” of the electorate and checking and balancing its worst instincts.

In a democracy, we can choose to elect leaders and empower institutions as a form of self-arrest. Institutions are led by human beings with human failings, but with the consent and participation of the governed, they can help us fight our worst instincts. That fight can take many forms, some more realistic than others: Fighting voter disenfranchisement and increasing access to the polls. Building organizations that register and turn out voters. Attacking gerrymandering in the courts and state legislatures. Supporting good journalism. Making government more efficient. Reforming the electoral college. Dismantling structural barriers to equal opportunity.

It’s on us to transform a democratic infrastructure that rewards fearmongering and perpetuates injustice into one that encourages moderation and makes it more likely that our better angels will prevail.

In Rubicon, Holland quotes the Roman philosopher and former slave Publilius Syrus, who advised that “gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.” That remains the governing philosophy and worldview of Donald Trump. If, as expected, his administration continues its flirtation with zero-sum authoritarianism, we’ll continue to see the fate of the Roman republic as a cautionary tale. But perhaps rather than looking for parallels in what brought Roman society down, we should look for lessons in what was tolerated to prop it up.

This column was originally published on Medium.

The 77,000 votes test: One year later, what not to learn from the 2016 election

It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions from the small fraction of votes that put Donald Trump in the White House

Zero-point-zero-six percent. Of all the votes cast for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, 0.06 percent of them tipped the electoral college in favor of the Republican nominee. Putting aside the fact that Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than her opponent, and that the electoral college has kept the winner of the popular vote from the White House in two of the last five presidential elections, that number should serve as a warning to progressives across the country: be wary of rewriting an entire political strategy based on what most would consider rounding error.

To be clear, that 0.06 percent wasn’t an actual rounding error; it was a hugely consequential difference in votes that changed the course of history. But it’s such a small fraction of the total votes cast that it’s a highly narrow and unsubstantiated foundation on which to base an argument that the Democratic party needs to upend its entire message, platform, and outlook if it wants to win another national election.

That’s not to say progressives don’t have a lot of hard lessons to learn from the last election cycle. They certainly do, starting, perhaps, with the importance of campaigning in the communities where they want people to vote for them. But it’s also far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions from 77,000 votes in three swing states that could easily have gone the other way.

Predictably, Clinton has been pilloried for noting some of the reasons why she lost (besides the candidate and the campaign’s shortcomings, which she’s acknowledged at length). Like many analysts, Clinton has pointed to a number of outside factors that influenced the outcome, from Russian interference in the election, to the media’s obsession with her emails (how’s that one holding up?), to former FBI director James Comey’s October 28th letter.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has argued, the Comey letter alone probably did shift enough votes to swing the election to Trump. But the point in sharing this list isn’t to relitigate exactly how or why Clinton lost the election; it’s to say that any one of these events could have tipped enough votes either way. In other words, we should be cautious of over-interpreting the significance of her loss.

Since Trump announced his candidacy for president, a common thought exercise has been to take something that Trump, his campaign, or his administration has said or done and consider how the country would have responded had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton said or done the same. Although this exercise doesn’t necessarily accomplish much, it’s a deeply revealing look at the American psyche for its stark, excruciating exposure of the enormous double standard to which this country holds African Americans, women, and most people other than straight white men.

But an equally telling thought exercise is to ask the question, “What would have happened if 77,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had gone the other way?” Would we still be having the same conversation and drawing the same conclusions about the Clinton campaign, the Democratic party, or the American electorate if the crucial 0.06 percent of the votes had gone for Clinton? If a post-election conclusion doesn’t hold up against this line of questioning, then it’s a political opinion in search of electoral evidence — a bias in search of a confirmation — rather than a lesson to be taken to heart.

A common post-election argument that clearly fails the “77,000 votes going the other way” test might sound something like this: “Hillary Clinton ran a disastrous campaign that was doomed from the start!” Yes, Clinton has her flaws, and her campaign made many mistakes, but no undertaking whose outcome hinges on a margin smaller than most rounding errors was doomed from the start.

Another post-2016 bias in search of confirmation, especially among the political establishment, has been that progressives need to redirect their entire platform toward the so-called “white working class.” That’s a profound conclusion to draw from a profoundly inconclusive number of votes, particularly when exit polls suggest that Clinton won among voters making less than $50,000 a year but lost among white college-educated men and barely won majority support from white college-educated women.

As Nate Silver pointed out in May of 2016, at that point in the Republican primary Trump voters’ median income was more than $70,000, exceeding the national median income ($56,000), as well as the median incomes of Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters ($61,000). The point, of course, is not that Democrats shouldn’t focus on the working class; it’s that they should focus on all working class Americans, not just the white ones. Nearly one year since November 8, 2016, that’s a conclusion that passes the 77,000 vote test.

Here’s another one that passes the test: voter suppression works. Wisconsin is a case in point, though far from the only case. As Ari Berman wrote recently in a must-read Mother Jones cover story, voter turnout plummeted in Wisconsin from 2012 to 2016 following the implementation of a highly restrictive voter ID law. As Berman noted, “more than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77–18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012.”

In a state decided by fewer than 23,000 votes, that decline is catastrophic for Democratic candidates — and for the legitimacy of a democratic election. Yet instead of covering these anti-democratic efforts with the seriousness and thoroughness they deserve, Berman writes, in post-election media coverage, “voter suppression efforts were practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.” Democrats shouldn’t make the same mistake as the media.

Here’s a final conclusion that passes the 77,000 vote test: white resentment remains as significant a driving force in American politics as ever. Even if those 77,000 votes had gone the other way — even if Trump hadn’t ended up in the White House — the fact that he’d come so close with majority support from nearly every white voting demographic would have been more than enough to conclude that no, the United States still isn’t a post-racial society, and no, the consequences of centuries of dehumanization and discrimination still have not been remedied. That conclusion has been true throughout American history, and it would be true whether or not Trump was spending 2017 on The Apprentice or in the White House.

Each of these takeaways stands the test of the 77,000 votes and, in the United States, the test of time. Instead of focusing the Washington consensus of criticizing Hillary Clinton while chasing after the mythical “white working class” at the expense of the “entire working class,” Democrats should double down on what they stand for and what works. That means telling voters proudly and confidently why they fight for social, racial, and economic justice — a platform that encompasses most wings of the party — and then setting about winning that fight. They can start by focusing relentlessly on dismantling the obstacles that prevent far too many Americans from being able to exercise their right to vote.

Does Clinton deserve responsibility for her loss? Of course, starting with the fact that she and her team allowed the race to get close enough that 77,000 votes could change the outcome. Are there lessons progressives should learn from her campaign? Absolutely.

But those lessons are far more difficult than simply blaming Hillary Clinton or focusing more on white voters — two deeply American traditions that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

The incuriousness of Donald Trump

Why it matters that the president of the United States has no interest in learning anything about the world around him.

Of the many habits and characteristics that make Donald Trump unfit to be president, one trait in particular is more often mocked than considered in light of its real consequences: his fundamental incuriousness. It’s not just that Trump is indifferent to new information that doesn’t fit his existing worldview, or that he’s unwilling to seek out or confront intellectual challenges — it’s also that he appears to have no desire whatsoever to learn or absorb anything about the world around him.

One Saturday morning tweet last month encapsulates just how uninterested Trump is in acquiring new information:

@realDonaldTrump: Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have! (10:59 PM · Sep 23, 2017)

As was widely reported (and easily confirmed), Trump’s tweet was completely false — no such test occurred — and based on old footage of an unsuccessful Iranian missile test from January.

As far as we know, this tweet was mostly inconsequential. No lives were lost, no wars were started, and no international incidents were provoked. But to accept that standard as an appropriate one for measuring a presidency is sad and dangerous — and misses the point.

No single individual in the United States has access to a greater volume and caliber of information to probe a passing hunch than the president of the United States. The office of the presidency offers its occupant on-demand access to America’s deepest and most classified secrets, as well as hundreds of qualified experts who will drop everything they’re doing to respond to the president’s questions. In the likes of Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, Trump has surrounded himself with three of the people most likely to ace a pop quiz from the president about Iranian missile launches — but only if they were quizzed before the president tweeted.

Trump’s predecessors didn’t suffer from the same incuriousness. While reading isn’t the only measure of intellectual curiosity, it’s often a telling one. Previous presidents of both parties have made time to read, arguing that it’s one of the few ways to stay in touch with the world outside the bubble of the office. Barack Obama read extensively throughout his presidency, believing reading to be an invaluable source of empathy, historical perspective, and understanding of the human condition. George W. Bush was also an avid reader, even averaging about two books a week throughout 2006.

Obama and Bush, like many presidents who came before them, shared a deep curiosity of history and of the world around them. Their successor doesn’t share that belief.

As Washington Post reporters Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish describe in Trump Revealed, Trump doesn’t read because he believes he doesn’t have time. In March, Trump was asked by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, “What do you do at the end of the day? What do you read, what do you watch?” Trump responded, in Palin-esque form, “Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book — I’m trying to get started. Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there’s some emergency, this or that.” He ultimately suggested he was reading a book on Andrew Jackson.

It’s true that the presidency is an all-consuming job, but by all accounts, Trump’s problem isn’t time, it’s prioritization — and his priority is television. More specifically, his priority — his obsession — is cable news coverage of himself and his administration. According to the Washington Post, “Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence.” He told TIME that TiVo “is one of the great inventions of all time.” One estimate suggests that Trump watches five hours of television a day.

By a number of measures, Trump’s self-imposed intellectual boundaries have served him well. The arrogance, self-righteousness, and boundless self-confidence of someone who says he doesn’t need to read “because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability” helped give him a life of wealth and celebrity — and get him elected president.

But the same incurious traits that made him a business mogul, reality star, and successful candidate also make him an ineffective and dangerous president. The same impulsiveness, pettiness, and indifference to human emotions that captivated millions of viewers of The Apprentice have undermined the world’s faith in the United States by alienating American allies, provoking adversaries, and bringing the the country dangerously close to a nuclear confrontation.

The same obsession with his portrayal in New York City tabloids has become an obsession with how cable news covers his administration, feeding his sense of victimhood, closing him off to competing sources of information, and prompting impulsive Twitter rants directed at perceived opponents and those who have failed to appreciate his accomplishments and sacrifice.

The same deep insecurities and thin skin that motivated Trump to aspire to build an empire also left him defensive, sensitive to slights, and demanding of pitiful obsequiousness from those who find it an opportunity and blessing to serve his agenda.

The same unpredictability, logical incoherence, “who me?” folksiness, and willingness to lie and contradict himself shamelessly that charmed investors, reporters, and business partners throughout his career offered plausible deniability to those who wished to disregard his long track record of stoking racial fear and resentment, one of the few activities to which he’s remained committed throughout his life.

The same obsession with revenge and score-settling that helped him rise in the cutthroat world of real estate has morphed into such a profound resentment of his predecessor that Trump’s infatuation with unraveling Obama’s legacy seems to guide nearly all of his decision making.

It’s difficult to accept the degree to which one person’s impulsiveness and intellectual indifference is guiding the direction of the most powerful nation on earth.

Because Trump is fundamentally incurious about something until it affects him directly, has his name in it, or is put directly in front of him, he seemed to see all Syrians as threats to American safety — until he saw pictures of victims of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons attacks. He seemed to think fixing the American health care system was easy, until he tried it himself and realized that “it’s an unbelievably complex subject” that no one knew could be so complicated. He seemed to believe no one knew the chair of the Federal Reserve was important — until he was tasked with picking the next one, when he learned that “It’s actually a very important decision [and] most people have no idea how important that position is.”

The fundamental disinterest in learning or experiencing anything other than what’s directly in front of him makes it almost impossible to do the thing that presidents are elected to do: make the most difficult decisions in government — the decisions that no one but the president can make. As Obama told writer Michael Lewis in a 2012 Vanity Fair profile, “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it.”

It doesn’t matter how Trump gets his intelligence briefings, but it matters whether he gets them at all — and who he shares them with. It doesn’t matter whether he watches television, but it matters when it’s five hours a day and is seemingly his only source of information. It doesn’t matter that he likes to feel appreciated, but it matters when his insatiable desire for praise and flattery makes him immune to disagreement and different opinions.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t exercise because he believes that “the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted,” but it matters when the person who holds those beliefs also controls the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t recognize an old Iranian missile launch on TV, but it matters that his response is impulsive tweeting, not information seeking.

The consequences of Trump’s incuriousness are real: he doesn’t know what bills he’s supporting, what policy commitments he’s making, or what implications his words and deeds have. He’s deeply susceptible to superficial appearances and prone to making decisions based not on the most compelling argument, but who happened to be the last person he spoke to, or who the president thinks “gets great ratings” on Morning Joe. (Daniel Drezner has compiled an impressive list of the hundred-plus times Trump aides have treated their boss like “like a toddler” in order to get him to do what they want.)

The world is a complicated place, and few jobs are as complicated as the presidency. But by every indication, Donald Trump sees none of that complexity. Even more unsettling, he appears to have no interest in trying to see the world as anything other than a reflection of himself.

When the ostensible leader of the free world is that incurious about the world he’s charged with leading — when he sets the bar for our collective expectations and aspirations that low — he doesn’t just risk conflict or catastrophe, but also the poisoning of a generation with apathy, cynicism, and resentment.

Trump’s flailing first ten months in office suggest that at least some intellectual curiosity is a prerequisite for a successful presidency. That alone should give us reason to aim higher next time.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’

A telling test of character in American politics

Tim Murphy’s downfall is a consequence of his own moral failings. But it also begs the question: do we value character in politics?

In her speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama offered a telling insight into the presidency: “Being president doesn’t change who you are,” she warned. “It reveals who you are.”

More than four years later, the disturbing allegations that forced the resignation of Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Murphy are a reminder that Obama’s prescient warning of the revealing power of elected office applies to more than just the nation’s highest office. It’s just as true for any person who suddenly finds himself or herself in a position of power and influence.

Such is the case for many members of Congress, whose swearing in endows them with not just the power to write laws for the most powerful nation on earth, but also extraordinary perks that can rapidly inflate the ego past the point of recognition: Visits to the White House. Police escorts. Taxpayer-funded flights to and from Washington every week, and to foreign capitals every recess. The authority to question witnesses and compel information. A fully-funded, full-time staff of dozens. Distinguished titles like “The Honorable” and “Congressman.” Multimillion-dollar operations, in the form of political parties, that exist solely to help them keep their jobs.

Serving as a member of Congress isn’t an easy job, and many of trappings of the office exist for good reason. But is it any wonder that, taken together, the cumulative effect of such a radically privileged lifestyle can be toxic?

***

Tim Murphy’s saga is only the most recent reminder of what happens when power-encrusted political identity decays past the point of recognition.

Murphy, an eight-term family values Republican from Pennsylvania who prides himself on his anti-abortion record in Congress, wasn’t just caught pressuring a woman with whom he was having an affair to have an abortion. He was also accused in a leaked memo as demonstrating “hostile, erratic, unstable, angry, aggressive and abusive behavior” toward staff, creating a brutal work environment that led to “near 100 percent turnover” in the past year.

In describing the memo, reportedly authored by his chief of staff, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cites an instance in which Murphy berates and abuses his legislative director in ways that show a complete disregard for the basic humanity of his staff. Murphy, according to the memo, “verbally abused him, harassed him, chastised him and criticized all his work products.” The Congressman “pushed other documents off the table onto the floor” and then “got angry and demanded we find the documents that [he] had just thrown on the ground.”

As Politico and HuffPost have reported, this behavior wasn’t limited to Murphy, but appears also to reflect the demeanor of his chief of staff, who reportedly “regularly engaged in brutal verbal abuse of lower-ranking aides, from calling aides ‘worthless’ and their work ‘garbage,’” and going as far as to keep “white noise machines throughout Murphy’s congressional office so constituents waiting in the front room couldn’t hear her screaming.”

The Murphy memo follows an August memo from the office of Indiana Congressman Todd Rokita, which spends eight pages outlining in painfully micromanaged detail how to chauffeur Rokita around his district. While the Rokita memo is more embarrassing than incriminating, it nonetheless exhibits the same symptoms of an elected official who sees his staff as a perk of the office rather than an ally in serving a public agenda.

The toxic effects of power don’t observe partisan constraints. Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, for example, reportedly churned through through 11 chiefs of staff in 11 years and was named by Washingtonian Magazine the “meanest” Democrat in the House in 2014. Now-disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner had a notorious reputation for being harsh to his staff.

There’s no doubt that serving in Congress is a relentlessly demanding, and often thankless, job. At the end of the day, it’s the elected official — not his or her staff — who face public scrutiny and take the fall for mistakes. Those realities, along with their accomplishments in public life, are why we forgive some of history’s most iconic public servants who were demanding, impulsive, and even cruel to their staff.

But that doesn’t address the issue of what we, as participants in a democracy who are represented in government by fellow human beings, should make of stories like Murphy’s.

It’s far too easy to hear these anecdotes and simply condemn his behavior as just another example of an entire system that’s corrupt, out-of-touch, and broken beyond repair. Only the most naive observers of the political process take our elected leaders entirely at face value, but that doesn’t make hopeless cynics of those of us who acknowledge the behavioral race to the bottom that our politics seems to encourage.

This truth applies at a larger level. You can believe government can act as a force for the public good while criticizing the many ways in which it falls short. You can trust the democratic process without trusting everyone who participates in it. You can call public service an honorable line of work while still recognizing that some participants in it hold definitions of public service that are a lot closer to “House of Cards” than “The West Wing.” For a complex democracy to function, we have to be able to acknowledge the reality and aspire to a better future at the same time.

That politics is beyond saving is also a futile response to stories like Murphy’s in large part because there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Most members of Congress don’t lose their head or their humanity upon finding themselves in elected office. I had the privilege of working my entire political career for members who fit the category of kind, decent, humanistic people who care deeply about public service and value highly the people who work for them.

***

You can tell a lot about a person in power by how they treat their staff. That’s especially true for elected officials, who rarely have much to gain by being kind to people who work quietly behind the scenes for them. That’s why it’s such a revealing measure of character.

But you can also tell a lot about a democracy, and its electorate, by the character and value of those chosen to lead it. The behavior of people like Tim Murphy, who served more than 15 years in Congress, begs the question: Why are kindness, decency, and humility so rarely rewarded in public life?

Another way to ask that question is by turning the mirror on ourselves. Can we, as voters, as an electorate, demonstrate that the character of our elected officials matters? Does it matter? Has it ever?

It’s not clear that Murphy’s poor treatment of his staff would’ve forced him from office if the memo describing that behavior weren’t accompanied by made-for-cable-news headlines of hypocrisy following the abortion revelations. Earlier this month, Politico reported that “fears among senior Republicans about a potential wave of negative stories on how Murphy ran his congressional office were what ultimately pushed him out the door,” but it’s worth nothing that it was the negative stories — not the behavior itself — that made them nervous. And it’s unclear whether those stories even would’ve mattered to anyone other than his political opponents. (It didn’t seem to matter to his colleagues, who surely had at least some idea of Murphy’s behavior before the story broke.)

It was similarly well-reported that Anthony Weiner treated his staff poorly, but it wasn’t until the first iteration of his sexting scandal that he was forced to resign from Congress.

One could, of course, spend a lifetime listing the shortcomings of elected officials throughout U.S. history. Yet the question of whether private character matters in public life seems particularly relevant today, given the acrimony and animosity that define modern American discourse.

In The Road to Character, David Brooks writes of a pattern he observed in a series of historical figures who, in his opinion, came to epitomize the highest ideals of moral character. As Brooks notes, what unites this diverse cast is that, at some point, they all “had to go down to go up. They had to descend into the valley of humility to climb to the heights of character.”

We should hope that Tim Murphy follows a path from his present valley towards his own moral redemption, but whether he does so is less relevant than what his story — and the base state of our politics today — says about us.

Few could plausibly claim that our political debate, as a whole, is today characterized by either humility or character. It does seem possible that we’re in what Brooks called the valley of humility, the low point before we begin to redeem ourselves. But it’s unclear whether we’re humbled by the consequences of what our democracy has become and determined to rebuild it, or simply resigned to its brokenness.

To paraphrase Michelle Obama’s 2012 warning, elections don’t change who we are; they reveal who we are. Time will tell what, if any, lessons we take from this one.

This column was originally published on Medium.

What exactly is Mitch McConnell’s vision of public service?

More than any other individual today, the Senate majority leader has undermined the norms and traditions on which American democracy depends. What does he hope to achieve?

In January of 2015, Mitch McConnell’s 30-year career in American politics brought him to the peak of power as Senate majority leader.

As author and historian Robert Caro captures in The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of his epic chronicle of Lyndon B. Johnson’s life and career, the majority leader role comes with so much power and influence that Johnson sought to keep the job even after he was sworn in as vice president.

But unlike most of his predecessors in the role, including Johnson, McConnell has distinguished himself in only one significant way: as the single most destructive individual force in American democracy in the past decade.

Recall how McConnell, then Senate minority leader, greeted the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency: with an assertion to National Journal that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Maintaining that uncooperative and undemocratic pledge, McConnell utilized the filibuster against Obama’s nominees with unprecedented frequency. (Failing to move judicial nominations didn’t just hold up the sitting president’s agenda; it also left federal judgeships vacant and courts across the country struggling to keep up with a high volume of cases, undermining the ability of the judicial branch to fulfill its constitutional role.)

McConnell’s obstructive efforts drove down public approval of the Democratic-led Senate, helping deliver him control of the chamber in 2015. But instead of moderating his tone or approach with his party in power, McConnell doubled down. In his first year as majority leader, the McConnell-led Senate confirmed the fewest number of judges since 1960.

This blanket opposition to President Obama’s nominees culminated, of course, with McConnell’s still-shocking refusal to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Even measured against the record of opposition McConnell had built up since 2009, this breach of precedent and protocol was stunning. Not only was McConnell saying that he would rather risk having Donald Trump make the next lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, but McConnell was willing to undermine the very ability of the Court to function just to achieve a political victory.

That level of disrespect — both to the president of the United States and to centuries of Senate precedent — completely undercut any claim McConnell made that his efforts were in service to “regular order.”

McConnell’s greatest hits continued in the summer of 2016 when, as the New York Times reported, he was among the congressional leaders presented by the C.I.A. with “intelligence not only that the Russians were trying to get Mr. Trump elected but that they had gained computer access to multiple state and local election boards in the United States since 2014.” As the Times reports, rather than issuing a strong, bipartisan statement in response to this obvious threat, McConnell questioned the veracity of the C.I.A. evidence, singlehandedly threatening to politicize the intelligence community’s warnings and leaving millions of voters unaware that an American adversary was seeking to interfere in the most fundamental of democratic processes.

Meanwhile, as his actions were undermining the integrity of our electoral process, McConnell was simultaneously enabling a demagogue to capitalize on the chaos encompassing it. McConnell didn’t just decline to criticize Donald Trump throughout the campaign; he also gave other Republicans cover to weaken their own disavowals of Trump, providing Trump a stamp of establishment approval and, in turn, offering voters a get-out-of-self-doubt-free card for supporting him. The Atlantic quotes one GOP staff member in the House who described McConnell’s “political genius” as, in part, “remaining silent in times of controversy.” A true profile in courage.

Throughout 2017, McConnell has maintained his willingness to cast aside democratic traditions as he deems convenient. Earlier this year, he changed the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster and confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. More recently, McConnell dispatched with any final pretense of respect for “regular order” by repeatedly trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no semblance of open debate, committee hearings, opportunities for amendments, or any other input senators, including many of his own party. (This from the man who’d pledged two years earlier that “We need to get committees working again. … We need to open up … the legislative process in a way that allows more amendments from both sides.”)

Individually, each one of these acts over the past decade reflects a disdain for basic truth and fairness, an indifference to accusations of blatant hypocrisy, and a subservience of public service to political convenience. During Obama’s presidency, they showcase an obsession with undermining a president who, for any number of reasons, McConnell seemed to find illegitimate.

Taken together, the toll of McConnell’s record is damning. His anti-democratic resume reflects a willingness to cast aside the value of norms, procedures, and precedents that have sustained American democracy . These steps have poisoned the Senate to the point where even some Republicans have lost faith in McConnell’s ability to respect the rules of the chamber or his willingness to speak honestly to them.

In doing so, McConnell has — subtly at first, and under glaring scrutiny more recently — undermined the strength of a constitutional order that depends on the trust and faith of the electorate to function.

This ignominious record begs the question: Why? What exactly does Mitch McConnell hope to achieve? Today, he seems to have few public policy goals, other than his party’s standard repertoire of cutting taxes, repealing Obamacare, and appointing conservative judges. His real interest appears primarily to be impeding Democratic success, even if he does so in a way that hurts his party’s agenda in the future.

One possible goal, of course, is power for power’s sake. The post of majority leader doesn’t just come with the ability to dictate the legislative calendar in the Senate and thus play an outsized role in shaping American governance; it also comes with all the trappings of a powerful office, from a full-time security detail to a beautiful office in the U.S. Capitol.

It doesn’t seem to be money that interests McConnell, who long ago could have left the Senate and earned many multiples of what he makes in government. A comfortable lobbying gig would conveniently spare him the relentless public attacks by a president of his own party and, more recently, the string of political defeats that he brought upon himself by accommodating Trump’s rise to the presidency and forcing votes on unpopular, undemocratic legislation.

What exactly is Mitch McConnell’s vision of public service? What purpose do his profound cynicism and deep hypocrisy serve, other than to further diminish our democratic institutions and destroy public confidence in the ability of government to function? Is it possible that what truly drives the Senate majority leader — one of the most powerful posts in the world — is a series of petty grievances against Democrats?

It’s worth clarifying that the argument in this piece is not that Mitch McConnell is the only source of dysfunction in an otherwise well-intentioned political process. Nor is his party solely responsible for the status quo today — it was, after all, Democrats who eliminated of the Senate filibuster for lower court nominees in 2013 under then-majority leader Harry Reid.

Moreover, despite the bad faith with which most evidence suggests McConnell has long operated, Democrats should still seek work with him wherever possible to protect the Senate — the place of the “eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note” described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831 — and restore at least a little functionality to our democratic process. (As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently, fixing our politics will require “mutual forgiveness” because “no tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity.”)

The argument against McConnell isn’t a partisan one, but rather an individual one. Among the many guilty parties responsible for the race to the bottom that characterizes our politics today, Mitch McConnell as an individual has played a remarkably outsized role. On top of that, he’s managed to do so while, until recently, maintaining a public facade of a Senate institutionalist and, as Adam Jentleson has written, the false reputation of a “political super-genius.” (It’s all part of what Jentleson calls the “Myth of McConnell.”)

It is, of course, impossible to know what drives Mitch McConnell. For someone who professes to cherish the traditions of the Senate and the concept of “regular order” as much as he does, the Senate majority leader has a deeply cynical way of showing it.

But regardless of his intentions, his actions have had real and profound effects. Last November, Americans learned that our country was far more vulnerable to a demagogic president than we’d thought or hoped. Yet as McConnell’s career shows, despite strong traditions and institutions that have helped sustain American democracy — and that, somehow, seem to be holding today — we were vulnerable to undemocratic threats long before Donald Trump descended into the presidential campaign.

It’s remarkable what one individual, operating quietly at the right place within the system at the right point in time, can accomplish. Today, that subtle threat may be just as dangerous as the more obvious one in the White House.

This column was originally published on Medium.

The constitutional crisis no one is talking about — except Hillary Clinton

The former presidential candidate and Secretary of State needs a job. Here’s one.

Pundits, reporters, and analysts professional and armchair alike have had a lot to say about “What Happened,” Hillary Clinton’s post-election deconstruction. The book and accompanying media tour have led many — especially those on the left — to question why Clinton doesn’t just call it a career and retire to the woods.

Putting aside why Bernie Sanders rarely gets the same question (Vermont’s well known for its woods, after all), we should be thankful Clinton is staying involved in public life. Democrats, and the country at large, need a post-2016 Hillary Clinton because she’s the only major American public figure warning of one of the most formidable threats to our democracy: a constitutional convention.

Organizing a convention to rewrite the Constitution — known as an Article V Convention, after its legal basis — is no easy task. It requires 34 state legislatures to approve an effort to call for a convention, and then three-quarters of all 50 states to ratify the final product before it takes effect.

To date, 27 states have approved some sort of request for a convention. All are led by Republicans, reflecting the partisan leanings of the national organizations behind the effort. (Some on the left have pushed far less successfully for a similar gathering with the goal of repealing the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.)

What would a constitutional convention mean? Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, puts it succinctly: “At stake, potentially, are the freedoms we take for granted under the Bill of Rights; the powers of the president, Congress and the courts; and the policies the government can or cannot pursue.” In other words, he writes, “conventioneers could alter absolutely anything about the way the United States is governed.”

That means all of the constitutional protections Americans rely on today would be on the bargaining table — with no guarantee they’ll be at the table to bargain. A free-for-all on the floor of some convention center controlled by well-organized fringe groups with the financial backing of the Koch brothers, among others, at a particularly fragile and acrimonious moment in American politics. What could go wrong?

Yet despite being just seven states short of calling for a convention, this issue doesn’t appear to be on the radar of most Americans. (The extent of voters’ awareness is difficult to discern, given the lack of available polling data.) That’s likely because a constitutional convention is a long-term effort that only slowly coalesces into a major threat — exactly the kind of serious but not yet in-your-face challenge, like climate change, that American politics is particularly ill-suited to confront today.

Progressives — and supporters of our existing constitutional order — have to find a way to come together against a constitutional convention. Yes, winning control of more state legislatures in 2018 would be the most effective and immediate check on this threat, but how do we get voters enthusiastic about showing up for state and local elections?

We need someone with the stature to raise wide public awareness of the dangerous implications of this effort. Someone with the experience and connections necessary to build a coalition in opposition to it. Someone with financial resources and free time. Someone with deep understanding of politics, government, and law, and who can explain their intersection in words human beings understand. And, perhaps most importantly, someone who’s fired up to fight.

Hillary Clinton’s available now, and unlike most public figures — elected or non — she’s already speaking publicly about what a constitutional convention is and why it’s so dangerous. As she warned in a recent interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, “There’s a big move for change coming from the right that I think would be disastrous for our country. They want radical, pull-em-up-by-the-roots change, they want to have a constitutional convention to rewrite our Constitution to make it friendlier to business, to inject religious and ideological elements.”

To some it might sound conspiratorial, but why shouldn’t we trust Clinton on this? Think of some of the major stories in American politics of late. Clinton was right to raise the alarm about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, even when few were taking her campaign’s allegations seriously. She was right to call out Donald Trump’s white supremacist leanings in a speech in August of 2016, almost a year to the day before a group of white supremacists, many adorned in MAGA hats, gathered in Charlottesville, Va., emboldened Trump’s election and continued antagonism toward racial justice. Clinton, from day one, tried to explain that the private email server “scandal” was nothing more than a media pile-on to a shred of a story.

Hillary Clinton warned us about each, and she was right about each. Perhaps we should take her seriously when she warns of the consequences of rewriting the rules of our democracy.

Hillary Clinton is the right person to lead Democratic opposition to a constitutional convention. Rather going quietly back to Chappaqua, we should hope she takes the reins in loud and public opposition to hitting reset on one of the most remarkable founding documents in human history.

This column was originally published on Medium.

In politics, a little integrity goes a long way

No politician will do the right thing every time. We should give them credit when they do.

“I was wrong, and now I want to be right.”

So said Illinois Republican Congressman Henry Hyde in 1981, following a subcommittee hearing on voting rights that took place in Montgomery, Alabama. As Ari Berman recounts in his important book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, Hyde, then the senior Republican on the subcommittee, was opposed to a key provision of the Voting Right Act (VRA), believing it no longer necessary.

But while Hyde traveled to Montgomery already holding a strong opinion, he also traveled with an open mind. He came home convinced he’d been wrong. As Berman writes, “the conversion of Hyde, one of the most conservative members of the House, marked a critical turning point in the VRA reauthorization debate.”

Today, Hyde is most remembered for the amendment that bears his name, which prohibits federal funding for abortion. But this column isn’t about that legacy, or about any other part of his career. It’s about how one moment of open-mindedness, of integrity, of fundamental decency, can have an impact on millions of people — and maybe even inspire a little hope in the democratic process itself.

It’s the type of moment of which American politics is almost entirely devoid today.

In recent months, Republicans in Congress have been rightly mocked for expressing “disappointment” or “deep concern” about things Donald Trump says or does, all while continuing to support his agenda and oppose efforts to constrain him. Even Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, or Ben Sasse, who refused to endorse Trump during the campaign, often seem to go out of their way to praise the president when they can, as if to offset any halfway-critical comments.

Politicians whose actions don’t back up their words deserve castigation. But occasionally Republican tweets of disappointment and concern have precipitated moments of genuine integrity — moments that deserve real praise.

Take the drama that unfolded on the Senate floor in the early hours of July 28th. The vote on the Obamacare repeal bill was a culmination of the years-long capitulation of Republican leaders to the same forces that enabled Trump’s rise.

The Senate vote — on a bill that had been released just hours earlier, that had been written without hearings or markups or public scrutiny, that was so unpopular that a sizable share of Republicans would only vote for it on the condition that it not become law — was the product of a deeply broken political and legislative process.

For nearly a decade, that process — led by Mitch McConnell but sustained by countless others in his party — has been defined principally by impulsive, visceral resentment of anything affiliated with Barack Obama. That process enabled the election of a president whose White House is willing to discard even the pretense of acting based on facts or evidence. It manifested itself in stunning, shameless hypocrisy at the highest levels of legislative leadership, from spineless capitulation to Donald Trump in hopes of finding his signature on long-sought-after tax cuts, to the craven denial of a hearing or a vote on President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Late last month, all of these toxic factors brought us to a rare moment on the Senate floor in which the outcome of a vote wasn’t already known. It was a dramatic, unscripted moment that cried out for a few senators willing to put any core value — institutionalism, integrity, or simply basic decency — before their party.

And for those of us still looking for a reason to believe that those core values matter in American politics, we found that reason in the “no” votes of Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain.

That these three senators voted against an abysmally unpopular bill that even many of their colleagues (secretly) opposed shouldn’t be remarkable, but it was. It shouldn’t take courage to vote against a bill that would force millions of Americans to lose their health insurance, but it did. It shouldn’t surprise us that a bill written in secret by Mitch McConnell and his staff didn’t have unanimous, instinctive, no-questions-asked party-line support, but that’s where we are.

More than 30 years earlier, after that 1981 field hearing, Hyde returned to Washington and helped guide a strong reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act through Congress. Explaining his new perspective, Hyde said simply, “You’re being dishonest if you don’t change your mind after hearing the facts.”

Honoring Henry Hyde for his fact-based change-of-heart on voting rights doesn’t mean we support his career-long anti-abortion crusade. Nor does thanking John McCain for voting against the Obamacare repeal bill mean we forgive his selection of a running mate in 2008. It simply means recognizing them for doing the right thing when they did.

In evaluating our political leaders, we should strive to find people who meet standards as lofty as we can imagine them, and we should hold them accountable for what they promise, say, and do.

But no politician will do the right thing every time. That’s an admirable standard, but an unrealistic one. To hold our political opponents — or our allies, for that matter — to an impossible standard is to be disappointed every time. That’s a recipe for the same toxic, hopeless cynicism that gave us Donald Trump in the first place.

Instinctive condemnation won’t fix our politics, but making common ground safe again might at least be a step in the right direction. We have to celebrate those who do the right thing, even once, because it gives us a reason to believe in the process. Only by nurturing those moments of hope, integrity, and courage will we restore our political standards to their rightful place.

In the 1:00 am hour on July 28th, as McConnell and Mike Pence worked the Senate floor, trying to flip the votes of McCain or Murkowski, we were desperate for a flicker of political courage, for a sign of integrity. In their “no” votes, we’ve found a reason to be hopeful about the messy process of democracy.

That little moment of integrity can go a long way — but only if we let it.

This column was originally published on Medium.