James Fallows | The Atlantic

An Unlucky President, and a Lucky Man

2023-02-21T18:16:08-05:00

Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.

Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and cruelties of fate as did Kennedy and his family. But I think Carter’s long years in the public eye highlighted a theme of most lives, public and private: the tension between what we plan and what happens. Between the luck that people can make for themselves and the blind chance they cannot foresee or control.

In the decades of weekly Bible classes he led in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter must have covered Proverbs 19:21. One contemporary translation of that verse renders it as: “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Not everything in his life happened the way Jimmy Carter proposed or preferred. But he made the very most of the years that God and the Fates granted him.

Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

Jimmy Carter made his luck, and benefited from luck, when he ran for president. He couldn’t have done it without his own discipline and commitment, and his strategy. He seemed to shake every hand in Iowa—but his team was also the first to recognize that the new Iowa caucus system opened the chance for an outsider to leap into the presidency. At a time when his national name recognition was 1 percent, he spent all day walking up to strangers and saying, “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” Stop and imagine doing that yourself, even once. Carter was easier to admire—when delivering his stump speech to a rapt crowd, when introducing himself at a PTA meeting or in a diner—than he was to work for. But that is probably true of most public figures with such a drive to succeed.

Because he was so engaging in person, and made such a connection in countless small-group meetings across Iowa, he won the caucuses and went on to win the nomination and the presidency. No other candidate has gone from near-invisibility to the White House in so short a time. (Barack Obama became a Democratic Party star with his famous convention speech in 2004, four years before he won the presidency. Donald Trump had been a celebrity for decades.)

This is how Carter and his team helped themselves. Other developments they hadn’t planned affected the race—mainly to their benefit.

By early 1976, Carter had become the new thing. He embraced rock music and quoted Bob Dylan. He was as powerful and exciting a fusion of cultures as any candidate who came after him. He was a Naval Academy graduate and an Allman Brothers fan. He was deeply of the South and of the Church. He also spoke about Vietnam as a racist war. He quoted poems by Dylan Thomas. He was, yes, cool. He appeared at a Law Day meeting at the University of Georgia’s law school and upbraided the audience about the injustice of America’s legal system. Here’s just one sample of the speech, which would now be considered part of the Sanders-Warren platform:

I grew up as a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record … ”Maggie’s Farm.”

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

But what if Hunter S. Thompson had not noticed this speech and announced that he “liked Jimmy Carter” in an influential article in Rolling Stone? What if Time and Newsweek, also very influential then, had not certified him as a serious potential leader with their coverage? What if the civil-rights figures Martin Luther King Sr. and Andrew Young had not endorsed Carter to Black audiences around the country, and reassured white liberals that he was the southern voice an inclusive America needed? (As governor of Georgia, Carter had placed a portrait of MLK Jr. in the state capitol.) What if Jerry Brown had not waited so long to enter the primaries? What if Teddy Kennedy had dared to run? What if Mo Udall had figured out the Iowa-caucus angle before Carter did? What if Scoop Jackson had not been so dull? Or George Wallace so extreme?

And for the general election, what if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon, turning Watergate into Ford’s own problem? (The Carter team knew that this was a campaign plus. But in the first sentence of his inaugural address, Carter thanked Ford for all he had done “to heal our land.”) What if Saturday Night Live, then in its first season and itself hugely influential, had not made Ford the butt of ongoing jokes? What if Ford had not blundered in a crucial presidential debate? What if Carter’s trademark lines on the stump—I’ll never lie to you and We need a government as good as its people—had not been so tuned to the battered spirit of that moment, and had been received with sneers rather than support?

What if, what if. There are a thousand more possibilities. In the end the race was very close. Luck ran his way.

Then he was in office. Intelligent, disciplined, self-contained, spiritual. President Carter made some of his own luck, good and bad—as I described in this magazine 44 years ago. There is little I would change in that assessment, highly controversial at the time, except to say that in 1979 Carter still had nearly half of his time in office ahead of him, and most of his adult life. I argued then that his was a “passionless” presidency. He revealed his passions—his ideals, his commitments—in the long years to come.

In office he also had the challenge of trying to govern a nearly ungovernable America: less than two years after its humiliating withdrawal from Saigon, in its first years of energy crisis and energy shortage, on the cusp of the “stagflation” that has made his era a symbol of economic dysfunction. It seems hard to believe now, but it’s true: The prime interest rate in 1980, the year Carter ran for reelection, exceeded 20 percent. You never hear, “Let’s go back to the late ’70s.”

Probably only a country as near-impossible to lead as the United States of that time could have given someone like Jimmy Carter a chance to lead it.

Despite it all, Carter had broader support during his first year in office than almost any of his successors, except briefly the two Bushes in wartime emergencies. Despite it all, most reckonings have suggested that Carter might well have beaten Ronald Reagan, and held on for a second term, if one more helicopter had been sent on the “Desert One” rescue mission in Iran, or if fewer of the helicopters that were sent had failed. Or if, before that, Teddy Kennedy had not challenged Carter in the Democratic primary. Or if John Anderson had not run as an independent in the general election. What if the ayatollah’s Iranian government had not stonewalled on negotiations to free its U.S. hostages until after Carter had been defeated? What if, what if.

Carter claimed for years that he came within one broken helicopter of reelection. It’s plausible. We’ll never know.

Because we do know, in retrospect, that Reagan had two landslide victories, over Carter and then Walter Mondale, and that the 1980 election broke heavily in Reagan’s favor in its final weeks, it’s natural to believe that Carter never had a chance. But it looked so different at the time. History changed, through effort and luck, when Carter arrived on the national stage in 1976. And it changed, through effort and luck, when he departed four years later.

Effort and luck combined for Jimmy Carter’s first two acts: becoming president, and serving in office.

Luck played a profoundly important role in his third act, allowing him to live mostly vigorously until age 98, and to celebrate his 76th wedding anniversary with his beloved wife, Rosalynn. He had 42 full years in the postpresidential role—10 times longer than his term in office, by far the most of any former president.

This extended span mattered for reasons within Carter’s control, and beyond it. Good fortune, medical science, and a lifetime history as a trim, fit athlete (he was a good tennis player, a runner, and a skillful softball pitcher), helped Carter survive several bouts of cancer and other tolls of aging. But his faith, will, idealism, and purpose allowed him to invent and exemplify a new role for former presidents, and to see his own years in office reconsidered.

Suppose that, like Lyndon B. Johnson, he had died of a literal and figurative broken heart at age 64. His record and achievements would have concluded with Ronald Reagan still in office, and his story would have been summarized as ending on a loss. Carter could never have received the Nobel Peace Prize, which he won while nearing age 80, in 2002. (Nobel Prizes cannot be given posthumously.)

With health like Lyndon Johnson’s, Jimmy Carter would not have had a chance to establish his new identity—and to see prevailing assessments of his role as president change as profoundly as those of Harry Truman did. As with Truman, the passing years have made it easier to see what Carter achieved, and to recognize what he was trying to do even when unsuccessful. But Truman was no longer alive to see that happen. For Carter I think the process of reassessment will go on.

It is hard for most Americans to imagine the Jimmy Carter of those days. It is hard even for me to recognize how different the country is as a whole.

Just to talk about politics: The South was then the Democrats’ base, and the West Coast was hostile territory. Jimmy Carter swept all states of the old Confederacy except Virginia, and lost every state west of the Rockies except Hawaii. In Electoral College calculations, the GOP started by counting on California.

The Democrats held enormous majorities in both the Senate and the House. Carter griped about dealing with Congress, as all presidents do. But under Majority Leader Robert Byrd, the Democrats held 61 seats in the Senate through Carter’s time. In the House, under Speaker Tip O’Neill, they had a margin of nearly 150 seats (not a typo). The serious legislative dealmaking was among the Democrats.

In culture and economics—well, you just need to watch some movies from the 1970s, Rocky, Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon (or, if you prefer, Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars). The United States was a country fraying on all its edges, just beginning to absorb the shock of the Vietnam years, in its first wave of grappling with globalization and environmental constraints.

Prevailing memories reached back far beyond Vietnam to the Korean War, World War II, and the Great Depression. In campaign speeches, Carter talked about the difference it made to him, as a boy, when Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration brought electric power to small communities like his. We on the speechwriting staff could rely on the story for applause. Enough people remembered.

There were no cellphones then, nor even bulky “portable” phones. Computers meant behemoths at major data centers.

And in civic life, Richard Nixon’s downfall seemed to have reinforced the idea that there was such a thing as public shame. It was construed as embarrassing for Jimmy Carter that his hard-luck brother, Billy, was in a penny-ante way cashing on the family fame by promoting six packs of his own “Billy Beer.” Carter, from a small-town business-owning background, felt that he had to sell the family peanut mill to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. After Nixon’s scandals and Spiro Agnew’s resignation, “doing the right thing” mattered, and Carter did so.

Jimmy Carter took office in the “before” times. We live in an unrecognizable “after.” He did his best, in office and out, to promote the values he cared about through it all.

What did he do in office? He did a lot. He was visionary about climate and the environment. He changed the composition of the federal courts. For better and worse he deregulated countless industries, from craft brewing to the airlines. I direct you to Stuart Eizenstat’s detailed and authoritative President Carter: The White House Years for specifics. I’ll just add:

Jimmy Carter did more than anyone else, before or since, to bring peace to the Middle East, with his Camp David accords. The agreement between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat could not possibly have been reached without Carter’s all-in, round-the-clock involvement. I was there and saw it. Any other witness would agree. (This was also the theme of Lawrence Wright’s excellent Thirteen Days in September.)

Jimmy Carter saved the United States decades of woe with his Panama Canal Treaty.

Jimmy Carter bought the United States several generations’ worth of respect with his human-rights policy. Can such an approach be no-exceptions or absolute? Of course not. Carter recognized as clearly as anyone the tension between ideals and reality. But does even imperfect idealism make a difference? That is the case Carter made in a speech at Notre Dame in 1977. I think it stands up well. Its essence:

We have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy …

This does not mean that we can conduct our foreign policy by rigid moral maxims. We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect—a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.

I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.”

In the life of the human spirit, words are action.

Jimmy Carter spoke to the “values” and “engagement” crises decades before demagogues like Trump or healers like Obama. In the summer of 1979, he gave an unusually sober and sermonlike address on the national “crisis of confidence.” This is generally known as the “malaise” speech, and is widely considered a downbeat marker of a down era. But as Kevin Mattson points out in his entertaining What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?, the speech was well received at the time. Carter’s popularity rating went up nearly 10 points in its wake. (Also, the speech didn’t include the word malaise.) Things again started going wrong for Carter soon after that—he made mistakes, and was unlucky—but the speech deserves respect. It was a leader’s attempt to express the fears and hard truths many people felt, and to find a way forward.

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Biden’s State of the Union Did Something New

2022-03-03T14:57:55-05:00

Listening to Joe Biden give his first official State of the Union address on Tuesday night, I thought: This is strong. It is clear; it’s the right message in the right language. It reflects the speaker in an honest way. And it also brings something new to this tired form.

But each of those judgments rests on assumptions about speeches in general and State of the Union addresses in particular. So let me lay out my reasoning and then get to the details of the speech.

What makes a speech “good”? Or “effective”? Or viewed as “eloquent”? Or perhaps eventually as “memorable” or “historic”?

These are trickier assessments than they might seem, and can take time to settle in. The value and effect of a speech depend on some circumstances that a speaker can control, or at least be aware of: the message, the audience, the expected length of the speech, the expected tone, from jokey to statesmanlike. But they also depend on aspects of timing and fortune beyond anyone’s control. Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” pledge to Parliament in 1940 is remembered in a particular way because of how the next five years of combat turned out. As are Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “date which will live in infamy,” John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

By contrast, George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration one month into the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is remembered in a different way, because of what happened afterward.

(I know how it feels to be involved in a statement that history has made look foolish. While working for Jimmy Carter in the White House, I was the writer on the trip where he gave a New Year’s Eve toast, in Tehran, to the shah of Iran as an “island of stability” in the turbulent sea of the Middle East. That was the official U.S. outlook at the time, which I did my best to express. Within little more than a year, the shah was out, and the Iranian revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini was under way.)

Why many different kinds of speeches can be “good,” and what makes them that way

Some speeches are meant to excite or inspire. Political-rally speeches are in this category, the more so the closer they come to Election Day. Speeches to inspire the whole nation should obviously not be partisan. For instance, JFK in 1962: “We choose to go to the moon … not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skill.” Speeches to energize the base can be partisan as hell, because voters are about to choose one side or the other. For instance, FDR just before Election Day in 1936: “[My opponents] are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

[Read: What Biden’s State of the Union speech was for]

Some speeches are meant to console or commemorate. Robert F . Kennedy’s most moving speech may have been his unscripted statement of grief and resolve, at a street corner rally before a largely Black crowd in Indianapolis, when sharing the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated, in April 1968. This was two months before Kennedy himself was shot dead. Ronald Reagan gave his State of the Union address in 1986 a few days after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and he began with a tribute to the seven dead astronauts. I believe that Barack Obama’s most powerful address was his eulogy in 2015 for the slain parishioners at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Some speeches are meant to explain. The example all aspire to is FDR’s first Fireside Chat in 1933, on the reasons behind the banking crisis. (He began, “My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.”)

Some speeches are meant to motivate, organize, and instruct in the short run. After the “Bloody Sunday” marches in Selma, Alabama, Lyndon B. Johnson gave his most powerful speech, in urging Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”

Some speeches are meant for reflection and guidance in the long term. Lincoln’s second inaugural in 1865. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. George Washington’s farewell address in 1796, and Dwight Eisenhower’s in 1961. The commencement address by George Marshall at Harvard in 1947, the Nobel Prize lecture by William Faulkner in 1950, the “Moral Equivalent of War” speech by William James at Stanford in 1906. Having told my embarrassing “island of stability” story, I’ll add that I think a different speech I was involved in, Jimmy Carter’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977, on the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy, stands up well: “I understand fully the limits of moral suasion … But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody … In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted.”

Some speeches are meant to get the speaker out of an immediate bind. Bill Clinton’s career is packed with examples, from the town meetings in New Hampshire that made him the “comeback kid” in 1992; to his State of the Union address in 1995 after his party had lost 54 House seats in the midterms, delivered with Newt Gingrich seated behind him as speaker; to his State of the Union in 1999, while being impeached. This last speech was about economics and domestic-reform measures and it did not mention his legal problems. After introductory formalities it began, “Tonight, I stand before you to report that America has created the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history”, and it never looked back.

Some speeches are meant to be enjoyed purely in the moment, like a play or concert. Some are meant to be reread or studied on the page. Some are dignified by quotations and fancy language. Some are best when plainspoken and spare. Some fall into categories even beyond the ones I’ve named.

Here is the point of this long setup. It is as hard to define a “good” or “bad” speech as a good or bad song. It all depends—on who the speaker is, what the circumstances are, and what is the register in which the speaker sounds most convincing and authentic. Let’s apply those standards to this speech.

What Biden was trying to do, and how he did it

The questions about a speech like this are: Does it sound natural to the speaker? (A speechwriter’s skill is not so much the ability to “write” as the ear for the way the speaker would like to put things.) Does it make use of the times and circumstances? And does it tell us anything new?

By those standards I thought Biden’s speech was a real success, and one that might have been underappreciated because of the plainness that was in fact its main virtue.

The language. Some speakers sound natural when uttering phrases that seem headed straight for the Famous Quote books. Churchill. FDR. John Kennedy. A handful of others.

But most people seem puffed-up and strained when reaching for a fancy phrase. They can sound like high-school actors, overemoting, “To be, or not to be.” Nearly all of us are better in the mode Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower brought to the presidency, at their best: eloquence through plainness.

Early in his career, Biden favored fancy speechmaking. In his maturity he has embraced, as he should, his simpler and authentic-sounding “listen, folks” style.

In this speech, as I’ll note below, Biden sounded like himself, rather than like a person intent on Speaking for the Ages. Even his cadence showed it. He gave the whole speech at a rapid clip, even when this meant talking over applause lines. Perhaps in part this was to deal with the lifelong stuttering challenge that John Hendrickson has so powerfully and beautifully described. But to me it came across as a person intent on delivering a message, rather than hoping to be admired while delivering it.

Even the fit-and-finish details of the speech suggested a man on a mission. State of the Union addresses are notorious for their unsubtle, groaning-hinges transitions. “Turning now to affairs overseas,” or “We cannot be strong abroad unless we are strong at home.” The transitions in this speech are notable for not existing. Biden just made a point, then made the next one.

The substance. Joe Biden sat through dozens of State of the Union addresses as a senator, and sat on-camera through eight of them as vice president. Everything about this ritual is familiar to him.

So were the three main topics of his discourse: dealing with the Ukraine emergency, dealing with the economy, and dealing with the pandemic. Coordinating with other countries was part of his experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president, and comes naturally to his dealmaking nature. Ordinary-American economic issues were part of his identity as Scranton Joe. And the pandemic was the emergency he inherited on arrival. His treatment of them sounded like a briefing from a person in the middle of running multiple response teams, conveying which emergencies they were dealing with on which fronts. I’m always thinking of aviation-world analogies, and this reminded me of an experienced controller giving a rundown on where a skyful of airplanes were headed, and what his team needed to focus on next.

The backstage view. Being president is impossible. John Dickerson made the case in this cover story four years ago. I have written about it as well. To “succeed” in the job, a person needs a broader range of skills than any real human being has ever possessed. Public eloquence. Private persuasive power. IQ. EQ. Stamina. Luck. A generous imagination, but also cold-bloodedness. A thousand traits more. The question is not whether any president will “fail.” It is in which particular way, and how the world will judge the over/under.

Joe Biden was not explicitly making the case for himself, in handling the complexities of his role. (Although of course every speech, by every president, is implicitly an advertisement for the incumbent’s fitness.) But having heard nearly as many of these State of the Union speeches as Biden himself has, I thought this one amounted to a look at what a president’s job is. State of the Union speeches have rightly been mocked, including by me, as to-do lists. To me, this speech came across as a realistic view into the to-do urgency that makes up a president’s day.

What follows is an abbreviated version of an approach I’ve tried before, of annotating the SOTU transcript. You can read the whole official speech from the White House if you prefer. I’ve used the version that was on Biden’s TelePrompter, and I’m leaving out more than half of it, indicated by an ellipsis (…) in interests of space. Comments are in bold, with the words or lines they’re referring to in italics. Here we go.

Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President, our First Lady and Second Gentleman. Members of Congress and the Cabinet. Justices of the Supreme Court. My fellow Americans. Of course, this is the first time that a president has begun with this salutation. As was true throughout the speech, Biden under- rather than oversold the moment.

… Six days ago, Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to shake the foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways. But he badly miscalculated.

[Read: Vladimir Putin united America]

He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead he met a wall of strength he never imagined. An attempted “line,” which Biden sensibly moved right past rather than waiting for a response.

He met the Ukrainian people. What I am referring to as plain-style eloquence.

From President Zelenskyy to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, inspires the world.

Groups of citizens blocking tanks with their bodies. Everyone from students to retirees, teachers turned soldiers, defending their homeland. This will not be studied for rhyme, or emphasis in delivery. But it is very powerful.

In this struggle, as President Zelenskyy said in his speech to the European Parliament, “Light will win over darkness.” The Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States is here tonight.

Let each of us here tonight in this Chamber send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world.

Please rise if you are able and show that, Yes, we the United States of America stand with the Ukrainian people. One of the performance-art aspects of SOTUs is which part of the chamber will cheer which lines. This was a graceful and appropriate way for Biden to induce a standing ovation from all.

Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos. As a matter of sentence rhythm, this is not the way Churchill, Kennedy, et al. would have phrased it. But, once more, powerful in its intent. They keep moving.

… American diplomacy matters. American resolve matters. This could not be plainer. Nor truer, at the moment.

… [Putin] thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready. Here is what we did. See above.

We prepared extensively and carefully… I spent countless hours unifying our European allies. We shared with the world in advance what we knew Putin was planning and precisely how he would try to falsely justify his aggression. “I am going to tell you about the actual work of being president.”

We countered Russia’s lies with truth.

And now that he has acted, the free world is holding him accountable.

Along with twenty-seven members of the European Union including France, Germany, Italy, as well as countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and many others, even Switzerland. Even Switzerland!!!!

We are inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine. Putin is now isolated from the world more than ever. I do not think we have heard these words before in a SOTU …

Tonight I say to the Russian oligarchs and corrupt leaders who have bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: No more. Nor this word.

The U.S. Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs. I believe the camera panned to Merrick Garland at this point. Many people thinking, with me, Get busy with these task forces!

We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets. We are coming for your ill-begotten gains. Nor these words. Nice emphasis on your.
…
And tonight I am announcing that we will join our allies in closing off American air space to all Russian flights—further isolating Russia—and adding an additional squeeze on their economy.

The Ruble has lost 30% of its value. The Russian stock market has lost 40% of its value and trading remains suspended. Russia’s economy is reeling and Putin alone is to blame. Powerful to keep calling him just “Putin.” And around this time Biden ad libs, “He has no idea what is coming,” emphasized that way.

… And we remain clear-eyed. The Ukrainians are fighting back with pure courage. But the next few days weeks, months, will be hard on them. Preparing for grim news in these coming days …

I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming.

But I want you to know that we are going to be okay. Not fancy, but an important part of the duties of the job. A president’s mission, in a time of crisis, always boils down to recognizing the fear, hardship, and sorrow of today; expressing confidence about tomorrow; and offering a plan to get from now to then. Biden’s whole speech is a demonstration of that formula. This line is the summary version of Step 2.

When the history of this era is written Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger. First part undeniably true. Let’s hope the second part is also …

… In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security. Notable because so many have assumed the opposite.

This is a real test. It’s going to take time. So let us continue to draw inspiration from the iron will of the Ukrainian people. One more time, then I’ll give this theme a rest: This may not count as a Ringing Phrase, but it’s an important concept, and plainly true.

… He will never extinguish their love of freedom. He will never weaken the resolve of the free world.

We meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced. This would have been the start of the speech, if not for the news from Ukraine. Again, note that he’s not even pretending to make a transition.

The pandemic has been punishing.

And so many families are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food, gas, housing, and so much more.

I understand. The essence of Biden’s pitch, in times of economic distress. Skipping past the next few paragraphs, which are the pitch for his economic plan …

… And as my Dad used to say, it [economic legislation] gave people a little breathing room.

And unlike the $2 Trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people—and left no one behind. The “partisan” part of Biden’s argument is: We are trying to help you. The other side wants to enrich them.

And it worked. It created jobs. Lots of jobs.

In fact—our economy created over 6.5 Million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America. The New York Times did a pettifogging “fact check” for this claim, saying it was “partially true” because employment figures go back only to 1939. Oh, come on.

Our economy grew at a rate of 5.7% last year, the strongest growth in nearly 40 years, the first step in bringing fundamental change to an economy that hasn’t worked for the working people of this nation for too long. A “phrase,” but Biden rolls right through it.The effect, again, is that he is concentrating on the contents, not the packaging.

For the past 40 years we were told that if we gave tax breaks to those at the very top, the benefits would trickle down to everyone else.

But that trickle-down theory led to weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits, and the widest gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century. Over the past generation, the Republicans have been careful to use phrases like “death tax” (for “estate tax”) in all of their statements. “Trickle-down” is the one phrase on which Democrats have shown similar consistency and “message discipline.”

Vice President Harris and I ran for office with a new economic vision for America.

Invest in America. Educate Americans. Grow the workforce. Build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down. We will keep hearing this, too.

Because we know that when the middle class grows, the poor have a ladder up and the wealthy do very well … I’m condensing the infrastructure section that follows …

This was a bipartisan effort, and I want to thank the members of both parties who worked to make it happen.

We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks.

We’re going to have an infrastructure decade. Write your own caption. Condensing the next part about competing with China …

And we’ll do it all to withstand the devastating effects of the climate crisis and promote environmental justice.

We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, begin to replace poisonous lead pipes—so every child—and every American—has clean water to drink at home and at school, provide affordable high-speed internet for every American—urban, suburban, rural, and tribal communities. Internet access is a huge problem in much of America. Meta-point: Bill Clinton’s 1995 SOTU address, after the Democrats had been nearly wiped out in the midterms, was enormously long, and mostly made of nitty-gritty specifics like this. Pundits made fun of it for its length and boringness. Polls later suggested that the national audience paid attention and cared about these details. I went into this in my book Breaking the News and in this magazine.

4,000 projects have already been announced. And tonight, I’m announcing that this year we will start fixing over 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.

When we use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America—we are going to Buy American: buy American products to support American jobs Condensing the “Buy American” and Intel-investment parts …

— And Intel is not alone. A “transition”!

There’s something happening in America.

Just look around and you’ll see an amazing story.

The rebirth of the pride that comes from stamping products “Made In America.” The revitalization of American manufacturing. I agree. For more, see this.

[David Frum: This is no time for protectionism]

Companies are choosing to build new factories here, when just a few years ago, they would have built them overseas.

That’s what is happening. Ford is investing $11 billion to build electric vehicles, creating 11,000 jobs across the country. GM is making the largest investment in its history—$7 billion to build electric vehicles, creating 4,000 jobs in Michigan.

All told, we created 369,000 new manufacturing jobs in America just last year. My proposal: Every story about “our inflation-racked economy” needs to have a counterpart story on “our record-fast job growth.” They’re both part of the same reality. More here.

Powered by people I’ve met like JoJo Burgess, from generations of union steelworkers from Pittsburgh, who’s here with us tonight. Ever since Ronald Reagan kicked off this tradition, “guests in the first family’s box” has become the great cliché of SOTU addresses. Biden went lighter on it than usual.

As Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown says, “It’s time to bury the label “Rust Belt.”

It’s time. Yes. And the line we are waiting for here is “This revived part of America is the Chrome Belt.” Or “It’s America’s Newest Frontier.” “It’s the Freshwater Belt.” “It’s the Real America and the Next America.” Or something to complete the thought. Counterargument: proposing any specific name might start a little argument on whether the new name is silly—see: “Washington Commanders”—and Biden is better off just moving straight ahead.

But with all the bright spots in our economy, record job growth and higher wages, too many families are struggling to keep up with the bills. Transition!

Inflation is robbing them of the gains they might otherwise feel.

I get it. That’s why my top priority is getting prices under control. Going to condense this next part …

One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer.

I have a better plan to fight inflation.

Lower your costs, not your wages … Instead of relying on foreign supply chains, let’s make it in America …

Economists call it “increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”

I call it building a better America. Replacing the “Build Back Better” of his currently stalled legislation.

My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit. One person’s opinion (mine): It is politically necessary for him to mention the deficit, but Biden kept the discussion relatively under control. More on this theme below.

— First—cut the cost of prescription drugs. Just look at insulin. One in ten Americans has diabetes. In Virginia, I met a 13-year-old boy named Joshua Davis. This young man is the instant national favorite as guest-in-the-first-family’s-box …

Imagine what it’s like to look at your child who needs insulin and have no idea how you’re going to pay for it.

What it does to your dignity, your ability to look your child in the eye, to be the parent you expect to be. This is the kind of line that would sound fake from many politicians but that Biden has made authentic to him.

Joshua is here with us tonight. Yesterday was his birthday. Happy birthday, buddy …Similar point about this different phrase. The one in the previous paragraph sounds Biden-esque because we all know the stories about his father being laid off. This one has an average-person approachability that would seem faux-chummy from, say, Ted Cruz, but fits the impression we already have of Biden..

Drug companies will still do very well. And while we’re at it, let Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, like the VA already does. Editorial note: Amen! …

Second—cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combatting climate change.

Let’s provide investments and tax credits to weatherize your homes and businesses to be energy efficient and you get a tax credit; double America’s clean energy production in solar, wind, and so much more; lower the price of electric vehicles, saving you another $80 a month because you’ll never have to pay at the gas pump again. The kind of detail, again, that could be called “boring” on pundit panels but that Bill Clinton built his reelection campaign on. Same for the following few paragraphs.

Third—cut the cost of child care. Many families pay up to $14,000 a year for child care per child …
My plan doesn’t stop there. It also includes home and long-term care. More affordable housing. And Pre-K for every 3- and 4-year-old …

So that’s my plan. It will grow the economy and lower costs for families.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get this done. And while you’re at it, confirm my nominees to the Federal Reserve, which plays a critical role in fighting inflation.

My plan will not only lower costs to give families a fair shot, it will lower the deficit.

The previous Administration not only ballooned the deficit with tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations, it undermined the watchdogs whose job was to keep pandemic relief funds from being wasted. See previous remarks on mentioning-but-not-belaboring the deficit.

But in my administration, the watchdogs have been welcomed back.

We’re going after the criminals who stole billions in relief money meant for small businesses and millions of Americans. See FDR on blunt language against well-heeled crooks.

And tonight, I’m announcing that the Justice Department will name a chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud.

By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office.

The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year. For decades, Democrats have pointed out that deficit trends have been much lower under their administrations than under the GOP. But they have been abashed about making that argument. Maybe Biden, who has seen it all, is going to try.

Lowering your costs also means demanding more competition. Shorthand introduction follows to “modern anti-trust theory.” In my view this is really important; glad it is getting some airtime in the speech. For more, see Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Wu, Lina Khan, and others.

I’m a capitalist, but capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism.

It’s exploitation—and it drives up prices.

[David A. Graham: Biden seizes the center]

When corporations don’t have to compete, their profits go up, your prices go up, and small businesses and family farmers and ranchers go under …

And as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. The kind of specific that Bill Clinton used to effect.

That ends on my watch.

Medicare is going to set higher standards for nursing homes and make sure your loved ones get the care they deserve and expect.

We’ll also cut costs and keep the economy going strong by giving workers a fair shot, provide more training and apprenticeships, hire them based on their skills not degrees. Shorthand reference to another very important reform and concept.

Let’s pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and paid leave.

Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend the Child Tax Credit, so no one has to raise a family in poverty.

Let’s increase Pell Grants and increase our historic support of HBCUs, and invest in what Jill—our First Lady, who teaches full-time—calls America’s best-kept secret: community colleges. Amen to all of this. See more here.

And let’s pass the PRO Act when a majority of workers want to form a union—they shouldn’t be stopped.

When we invest in our workers, when we build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out together, we can do something we haven’t done in a long time: build a better America.

For more than two years, COVID-19 has impacted every decision in our lives and the life of the nation. This is what I mean about not even pretending to have a transition. And that’s fine—the organizing theme of this speech is Let’s keep moving.

And I know you’re tired, frustrated, and exhausted.

But I also know this.

Because of the progress we’ve made, because of your resilience and the tools we have, tonight, I can say we are moving forward safely, back to more normal routines. Condensing what follows. We’re all tired, frustrated, and exhausted …

Here are four common sense steps as we move forward safely. Condensing this, too, but it has the virtue of specificity. …

And we’re launching the “Test to Treat” initiative so people can get tested at a pharmacy, and if they’re positive, receive antiviral pills on the spot at no cost. Leaving this in, because it is specific and will be new to most people …

Even if you already ordered free tests tonight, I am announcing that you can order more from covidtests.gov starting next week. Personal note: We ordered, received, and have used these tests.

… We have lost so much to COVID-19. Time with one another. And worst of all, so much loss of life.

Let’s use this moment to reset. Let’s stop looking at COVID-19 as a partisan dividing line and see it for what it is: A God-awful disease. Doing his best to deflect the culture war on vaccines, masks, disease itself. There’s no point in trying to rebut the opposing views; the best strategy, on the politics and the substance, is to move on like this.

Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.

We can’t change how divided we’ve been. But we can change how we move forward—on COVID-19 and other issues we must face together. Another “transition.”

I recently visited the New York City Police Department days after the funerals of Officer Wilbert Mora and his partner, Officer Jason Rivera…. Condensing “fund the police” argument to skip to its conclusion …

We should all agree: The answer is not to Defund the police. The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.

I ask Democrats and Republicans alike: Pass my budget and keep our neighborhoods safe. Condensing gun-violence section that follows …

Repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued.

These laws don’t infringe on the Second Amendment. They save lives.

The most fundamental right in America is the right to vote—and to have it counted. And it’s under assault. “Transition.” The sentence that follows is of great democratic importance, and in a way is what Biden is talking about rather than talking about the January 6 attacks. (To which he devoted a whole, powerful speech on January 6 of this year.)

In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert entire elections.

We cannot let this happen.

Tonight, I call on the Senate to: Pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And while you’re at it, pass the Disclose Act so Americans can know who is funding our elections.

Tonight, I’d like to honor someone who has dedicated his life to serve this country: Justice Stephen Breyer—an Army veteran, Constitutional scholar, and retiring Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Breyer, thank you for your service. Anyone who saw the speech saw Breyer’s gracious response here. SCOTUS justices are supposed to sit stone-faced during the speech, the one notorious exception being Samuel Alito shaking his head No, no when Barack Obama criticized the Citizens United ruling. Breyer set a more becoming example.

One of the most serious constitutional responsibilities a President has is nominating someone to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

And I did that 4 days ago, when I nominated Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. One of our nation’s top legal minds, who will continue Justice Breyer’s legacy of excellence.

A former top litigator in private practice. A former federal public defender. And from a family of public school educators and police officers. A consensus builder. Since she’s been nominated, she’s received a broad range of support—from the Fraternal Order of Police to former judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans.

And if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the Border and fix the immigration system. Transition? We don’t need no stinking transitions! Condensing what follows, so I don’t need to mention the attempted chant by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert of “Build the wall” …

That’s why immigration reform is supported by everyone from labor unions to religious leaders to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Let’s get it done once and for all.

Advancing liberty and justice also requires protecting the rights of women. Saving time by skipping transitions. And, of course, a powerful statement in the line that follows. The TV we were watching panned to Amy Coney Barrett on the “under attack” line.

The constitutional right affirmed in Roe v. Wade—standing precedent for half a century—is under attack as never before. Condensing what follows …

While it often appears that we never agree, that isn’t true. I signed 80 bipartisan bills into law last year. From preventing government shutdowns to protecting Asian Americans from still-too-common hate crimes to reforming military justice. Biden’s election-year argument on issues from the economy (jobs versus inflation), controlling the pandemic, managing the alliance (unified against Putin), to managing domestic politics will necessarily be: Actually, we’re doing a good job. This section is part of his presenting that argument.

And soon, we’ll strengthen the Violence Against Women Act that I first wrote three decades ago. It is important for us to show the nation that we can come together and do big things.

So tonight I’m offering a Unity Agenda for the Nation. Four big things we can do together. They are: opioids, mental-health programs—including attention to social media—care for veterans, and a new campaign to “end cancer as we know it.” The detailed description was full of the kinds of specifics that historically voters have cared about. Condensing …

As Frances Haugen, who is here with us tonight, has shown, we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit. A Facebook whistleblower. This is a big callout by Biden.

… Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan faced many dangers. Won’t mention the odious Boebert outburst around this part.

I know.

One of those soldiers was my son Major Beau Biden. The decent members in the chamber were respectful through this part.

We don’t know for sure if a burn pit was the cause of his brain cancer, or the diseases of so many of our troops. Skipping to anti-cancer program.

… To get there, I call on Congress to fund ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

It’s based on DARPA—the Defense Department project that led to the Internet, GPS, and so much more.

ARPA-H will have a singular purpose—to drive breakthroughs in cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and more. So far, none of these diseases is politicized, the way COVID has become. And virtually every family in America is affected by one or more of them. This is the kind of big-tent appeal Biden would like to make. Or, as he put it in the following line:

A unity agenda for the nation.

We can do this.

My fellow Americans—tonight , we have gathered in a sacred space—the citadel of our democracy. Biden briefly paused before starting this paragraph, one of the few such punctuation-points in his delivery. This is clearly the “and now we come to the end of the speech” transition.

In this Capitol, generation after generation, Americans have debated great questions amid great strife, and have done great things. Everyone in the chamber knows what else has happened in the Capitol, 14 months ago, and Biden’s pitch is stronger with this audience for not needing to spell that out.

For the record, I’m leaving in the whole rest of the “in conclusion” section:

We have fought for freedom, expanded liberty, defeated totalitarianism and terror.

And built the strongest, freest, and most prosperous nation the world has ever known.

Now is the hour.

Our moment of responsibility.

Our test of resolve and conscience, of history itself.

It is in this moment that our character is formed. Our purpose is found. Our future is forged.

Well, I know this nation.

We will meet the test.

To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity.

We will save democracy.

As hard as these times have been, I am more optimistic about America today than I have been my whole life.

Because I see the future that is within our grasp.

Because I know there is simply nothing beyond our capacity.

We are the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we have faced into an opportunity.

The only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities.

So on this night, in our 245th year as a nation, I have come to report on the State of the Union.

And my report is this: The State of the Union is strong—because you, the American people, are strong. There it is! Back in Japan I loved the phrase matte mashita from the audience at kabuki performances. It means “We’ve been waiting for it!” and it greets the appearance of familiar characters or scenes. A State of the Union address traditionally requires a sentence saying “The State of the Union is …” Matte mashita! Biden is one of the few to save the big reveal for the very end of the speech. I think this is a nice touch.

We are stronger today than we were a year ago.

And we will be stronger a year from now than we are today.

Now is our moment to meet and overcome the challenges of our time.

And we will, as one people.

One America.

The United States of America.

May God bless you all. May God protect our troops.

This is Biden’s trademark ending for all of his speeches, and it is gracious and heartfelt.

In this speech he told us what his work involves, in his own words. Some people will agree, many others will disagree, and most Americans won’t have registered the speech at all. But I think he used the opportunity as well as he could have.

Will the U.S. Pass a Point of No Return?

2021-08-13T18:27:35-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

This is the latest installment in a series that began back in 2019, with an article I did for the print magazine on Americans’ long-standing obsession with the decline-and-fall narrative of Rome.

Many people wrote in to agree, disagree, or otherwise react. The online discussion begins here. But the most sustained line of response has been from my friend Eric Schnurer, a writer and long-time advisor to state and local governments.

In his first installment, in the fall of 2019, Schnurer emphasized the parts of the America-and-Rome comparison he thought were most significant—and worrisome. Then last summer, during the election campaign and the pandemic lockdown, he extended the comparison in an even-less-cheering way. In a third and more cautionary extension of his argument this summer, he concentrated on the U.S. Senate.

Now, chapter four: crossing the Rubicon. Schnurer argues that this is more than just a familiar phrase. And he says that a U.S. Rubicon moment is in view—which would be triggered by a possible indictment of Donald Trump. Over to Eric Schnurer:

Crossing the Rubicon:
If the United States, in recent years, has been tracking the decline and fall of Republican Rome, when do we pass the point of no return?

By Eric B. Schnurer

As James Fallows has observed, Americans long have been fascinated by the fall of the Roman Empire and frequently fret whether a similar fate awaits our own. But the more pressing comparison is the collapse of the Roman Republic: How did a wealthy, powerful, and successfully self-governing people—proud of their frontier origins, piety and traditional values, and above all their origin story in throwing off monarchical rule—essentially commit democratic suicide and settle, more-or-less willingly, for a half-millennium of dictatorship?

Over the last two years I’ve been charting how our politics today increasingly resemble those of ancient Rome. From rising economic inequality, political violence, and governmental dysfunction on through the generally lackadaisical reaction of the Senate to a losing chief-executive candidate’s conspiracy to murder many of them, overthrow the government, and thereby block certifying his defeat, events in ancient Rome have remarkably paralleled some you might recognize more recently.

History isn’t destiny, of course; the demise of the Roman Republic is a point of comparison—not prediction. But the accelerating comparisons nonetheless beg the question: If one were to make a prediction, what comes next? What might signal the end of democracy as we know it? There is, it turns out, an easy answer at hand.

While there is no precise end date to the Republic, there was a bright-line occurrence generally recognized as the irreversible beginning of the end for participatory government. In fact, it is such a bright line that the event itself has become universally synonymous with “point-of-no-return”: Julius Caesar’s crossing of the river Rubicon.

And there is indeed an event looming—probably before the end of this year— that poses almost precisely the same situation as what provoked Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon: the possible indictment of former president Donald J. Trump.

Not long after empanelment of the special grand jury investigating the former president and the Trump Organization, Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for the past half-dozen years for The New York Times, tweeted that he is obsessed with the idea that he will soon be returned to office by the various, multiplying efforts to recount and overturn state-level results from the 2020 election. As Haberman reported, the impetus behind Trump’s restoration fever-dream is the realization that he needs the immunity afforded by the presidency to avoid prosecution for the career that got him there. Just last month, Michael Wolff recounted his conversations with Trump for his new book in a Times opinion essay and concluded that Trump believes that “[r]unning for president is the best way to directly challenge the prosecutors.”

Now the month prophesied in Trumpian circles for his restoration to the White House has arrived—and with it, the intelligence services are reporting increased online traffic on the subject, including calls for violence, not unlike the uptick in advance of January 6th. It is no coincidence that insurrectionists that day carried banners urging Trump to “Cross the Rubicon” and declaring “The Die Is Cast”— Caesar’s words upon alighting on the Italian side of the river—or that they will be with him to storm the forces of the Republic and ignite a civil war over Trump’s potential indictment: Avoiding criminal prosecution is precisely why Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army and ignited a civil war 21 centuries ago.

The ancient Roman Republic diverged from our notions of republican government in several respects. Although the word “republic” itself derives from a Latin phrase meaning “a thing of the people,” it was more like a closely-held corporation than anything we think of today as a public enterprise—more-or-less “owned” by those who operated it. Elected officials were expected to spend their own money on state functions like erecting public structures or organizing public events (such as the famous gladiatorial games), and in return they could expect to reap sizeable “profits” when they attained higher office. Today, we would think of basic Roman government as institutionalized graft.

Yet even the Romans had their limits. Officials who pushed the envelope too far could be criminally prosecuted. But the Romans also had a concept very similar to ours, and crucial to what motivated Caesar’s actions and is now animating Trump’s: As long as an official held “imperium”—essentially, the authority of the state itself— he was shielded from prosecution. As soon as he left office, however—boom!, he could be subjected to criminal charges.

Caesar, like most politicians, had committed his share of excesses and gained his share of enemies in his rise to the highest office in Rome, the consulship. After his consular year, he had secured the governorship of one of the more lucrative provinces—Transalpine Gaul—and, partially for self-advancement and partially to postpone prosecution, got his governorship extended to an unprecedented five years. Officials historically had been limited to serving only a single one-year term in most offices, in order to keep one man from accruing too much power, but constitutional norms had begun to fray under ambitious men like Caesar, who had his eyes on a second, and then hopefully permanent, consulship.

But he faced three obstacles. First, his governorship was scheduled to end six months before the beginning of the next consular term, so he would have to keep his army in the field until then to maintain his imperium and immunity to prosecution. Second, his political enemies had enacted a requirement that candidates had to campaign for consul in-person in Rome—which, thirdly, since it was illegal for a general to lead armed men into Italy or Rome itself, meant that Caesar had to choose: return to the city to campaign without legal immunity, almost certainly to face prosecution; forego the consulship, and thus forfeit any further hope of future immunity; or cross the Rubicon that formally separated Italy proper from the provinces at the head of his army—by definition an act of insurrection not only stripping his immunity but criminal in itself.

Caesar’s ultimate rise had begun with the Cataline conspiracy a decade or so earlier, which, as noted, bears a familial resemblance to Trump’s attempts to overturn the recent election and, both literally and figuratively, decapitate the government. Caesar emerged as Catiline’s most prominent defender against Cicero’s attempt to bring him to justice, while most of the Senate vacillated: Senate conservatives, known as the optimates (i.e., “the Best People”), chose largely to shrug off both the immediate assault on the state and the long-term threat Caesar in particular posed to republicanism. They soon lived to regret it.

For over a century Roman politics had been split between two parties, the optimates and the populares, who pushed for redistributionist policies to benefit the working class. The most famous of the latter were the Gracchi brothers, who both were assassinated for their liberal views (and thus often compared to the Kennedys). The patricians who ruled Rome, however, had long resisted fundamental economic reforms to benefit the great mass of the population, making only such concessions as necessary when times grew tense. This simply increased the internal tensions within society as the economy globalized, making those with the means richer and richer, hollowing out the middle class, and leaving more and more Romans at the edge of desperation.

By Caesar’s time, however, the populares were no longer so much true “Tribunes of the People” like the Gracchi, as ambitious patricians with an authoritarian bent who recognized anti-elite appeals to the disaffected mob as their pathway to power. Soon, three of these—Caesar, of course, plus Marcus Licinius Crassus, known as “the richest man in Rome,” and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), the undisputedly dominant figure of the era—formed a Triumvirate and became, between them, the sole possessors of real power. The only real question was which one would prevail as the sole autocrat, and once Crassus was killed in a foreign war the inevitable final contest between Caesar and Pompey erupted in earnest.

The remaining defenders of the decaying old order allied by necessity with Pompey, the lesser evil. Caesar thus hoped to temporize, reach some sort of cohabitation arrangement with Pompey, and eventually prevail in the long term. But his enemies forced his hand with the threat of imminent criminal prosecution.

Caesar paused with his army on the Gaul side of the Rubicon. He knew he would be taking a dramatic risk by leading his army across the river—but his back was against the wall on the Rubicon’s far shore. His only path was forward. As he crossed, he uttered the famous phrase, “Alea iacta est”: “The die is cast.” The phrase has taken on the meaning of an inevitability, but Caesar meant quite the opposite: that, while he was committed and could not turn back, the outcome was far from inevitable but, rather, a tremendous gamble. At least for him.

The outcome for the Republic itself, however, was indeed at that point already cast as if in iron rather than in tumbling dice. Whatever the outcome of the ensuing war, whether Caesar or Pompey prevailed as dictator, the Republic—a system of self-government in which disputes were settled by politics rather than force, where power was dispersed rather than concentrated—was dead.

The defenders of the Republic folded more quickly than the French Army in World War II and left Rome open to Caesar. Pompey was driven out of Italy and eventually defeated and killed. But, as we know, opposition remained and Caesar was eventually assassinated, leading to another series of wars between the Caesarite party and a pseudo-republican party that more resembled a vigilante movement. The Caeserites prevailed in the form of Caesar’s trusted lieutenant, Marc Antony, and Caesar’s great-nephew, adopted son and designated heir, Octavian—known to history as Caesar Augustus. Antony and Octavian initially divided the empire between them, but inexorably came the war to settle sole rule over the Roman world. Octavian prevailed. Rome was now—and ever would remain—a dictatorship.

When Trump’s supporters urge him to cross the Rubicon and cast the die—events that become highly likely if he, like Caesar, faces indictment—that is what they contemplate.

What did all this mean for Rome? And what might it mean for us?

Augustus essentially achieved the settlement of unreconcilable political, social, and economic strains within Republican Rome that even his uncle Julius could not attain. The Augustinian settlement was essentially to substitute peace and prosperity for politics, and to impose the veneer of traditional piety and moral values over the reality of an increasingly heterodox and heterogenous society.

The Augustinian Settlement had something for everyone. Augustus, ultimately the canniest politician, was himself outwardly pious, dutiful, traditional, and respectful of republican forms—thus appealing to conservatives—while he presided over a cultural efflorescence fueled by a liberality in everything except political expression. The concentration of power in the Emperor allowed Rome to mobilize its economic and military resources in a way that the Republic had not, leading to five centuries of expanding geopolitical power and economic opulence the likes of which the world had never seen before. As Augustus boasted, he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Politics essentially ended for half a millennium—all government was the will of one man—and so did freedom of political speech and thought. But Romans, at least if they were lucky, were free, safe and wealthy beyond imagination in every other way. It was a trade-off they were more than happy to accept.

Will the Trumpist party similarly ultimately prevail once they cross the Rubicon? I have been predicting for years that something resembling a civil war will arise and something like Trumpists likely will carry the day in the short-term. But a reactionary philosophy that rejects fact in favor of fantasy, is economically retrograde and socially repugnant to the majority of Americans, can impose its rule for only so long.

Some politician someday—one we don’t yet know, whose thinking isn’t locked in to the current paradigm—will devise our own equivalent of the Augustinain settlement, a new consensus that both sides, today’s red and blue Americas, can grudgingly accept because it purports to give them both what they want. We can suppose that, like Augustus, this new leader will need to satisfy conservatives by paying obeisance to traditionalist values and forms. But he or she will recognize the new economic realities shaping the future of wealth and power: Thus, perhaps, underneath the public façade of conservative rectitude will flourish with tacit official approval a liberal urban society of tremendous innovation and wealth—in science, technology, culture, art, thought and belief generally.

In governance, however, any new regime will need to recognize the technological realities of which I have written frequently, in which people will be able to choose the social and political systems they prefer to express themselves individually and create “public goods” collectively. Governments as we know them today will be left to fill the role solely of the traditionalist “night watchman state”—maintaining physical order and extracting a “protection” fee in return—much like the ancient Roman state. The demise of liberal democracy, the end of virtually all politics, and perhaps a little performative traditionalism and a destructive civil war, may all be coming, anyway. But, in return, Blue America, like Rome, will be able to carry on pretty much as it wishes, rising to new heights of wealth and global power.

Will highly-educated Americans really be willing to settle for physical security and financial success beyond anything now imaginable, in return for abandoning the American Republic for an enlightened dictatorship? The Roman experience isn’t very encouraging on that score—but neither are contemporary Democrats.

When the crisis came, it was the optimates (i.e., “the Best People”) who were the last defenders of the Republic.

Why? Because the status quo worked for them, whereas the plebeians had long-since lost faith in “the system.” The supporters of the Republic were the cream of Roman society, those who, as the saying went, “had Greek” (world-class educations), married amongst themselves, and passed these advantages on to their children. The republican structures they defended—elections, limited and dispersed powers, rule of law—in turn supported the rest of their existing order: an increasingly globalized economy exacerbating distributional divides but benefiting their own class.

The optimates were tone deaf to the needs of those struggling to make a living, while the insurrectionists played to the working class in order to destroy what passed for democracy and impose their personal rule. Rich, out-of-touch, socially liberal democrats versus rich, demagogic authoritarians masquerading as the party of the working class—not far off from today. The difference is that progressives don’t recognize that they’re the new optimates.

As in Rome, life is good for those who live on the hills and could save the Republic. But the communities of the hinterlands, stretching off to the seemingly-faraway Rubicon, are increasingly devastated. Virtually all economic growth in the past decade has occurred in three coastal metros. Inequality has intensified. The opioid crisis has decimated countless communities of the interior. Increasingly-illiberal “progressives” are slowly losing not just the white working class but also Black and Latino workers, those for whom they think they speak.

Meanwhile, time grows short. As aggrieved souls are forced from their dying communities and traditional social structures, into a metropolitan economy that has no place for them, the army on the Rubicon draws closer every day to the city’s walls.

Our Towns: State Programs Are Laboratories for the Nation

2021-06-05T11:03:07-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

My wife, Deb, has written about the concept of “Big Little Ideas.” These are modest-seeming, simple-and-practical steps that can have surprisingly large consequences.

I am drawn to the parallel concept of “New Old Ideas.” These are themes from the American past that have new relevance for the United States of this moment and the years to come.

Every nation has its leitmotifs: its tendencies and excesses and achievements, which run through its history. Probably because I know more—or at least have read more—about the history of the U.S. than of anyplace else, I’m more alert to these recurring themes than for other countries. (Of the many books in this vein, two that stick in my mind are Thinking in Time, by the late professors Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, and Special Providence, by Walter Russell Mead.)

As the United States of the early 2020s considers its possibilities in the aftermath of the public health, economic, and civic tragedies of recent years, I think that the record of its most successful past renewal efforts deserves close attention.

Because Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs went on for so long, and came in response to such a sustained and dire economic crisis, they are naturally and obviously a main source of parallel guidance. And the parallels are profound: What the Rural Electrification Administration meant to Americans of the 1930s, in bringing millions to the possibilities of electric lighting for the homes and electric refrigeration for their food, a nationwide effort to improve rural broadband access could mean today. What the Federal Writers’ Project did to shape Americans’ view of the contradictions and extent of their country, a new writers’ project—like the one that Rep. Ted Lieu, of California, has proposed—might help achieve now. The architectural and infrastructure legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project is still a major part of America’s cityscape—in auditoriums and amphitheaters, libraries and post offices, archways and murals—more than 80 years later. During our travels, Deb wrote about the lasting imprint of New Deal programs, including the National Youth Administration, in a little town in coastal Maine. The creations and constructions of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the most celebrated of the New Deal programs, are also still part of the visible public landscape, and the invisible public infrastructure.

As described at length here and here and elsewhere, these New Deal programs, and the breakthroughs of other reform-and-renewal eras in American history, were notable for their rapid-cycle, trial-and-error experimentation. Those experimental projects on the national level were, in their turn, often based on local or state-level innovations through the preceding years.

That is why I think programs like California Volunteers deserve attention. (As described early in the pandemic lockdown, and again last fall.) Because of California’s quasi-national scale—with an economy larger than the U.K.’s or India’s, and as home to one eighth of all U.S. residents—projects there have unusual heft, whether they intend to or not. The people in charge of the Cal Volunteers project, and especially its new “Climate Action Corps” project, are in this case quite intentional about the example they hope their programs will set.

“From the start, this [Climate Corps] effort was very much with the idea of being a real-time laboratory, for ideas that could be a model for the nation,” Josh Fryday told me this spring. Fryday, a former mayor of the small town of Novato, California, is the state’s “Chief Service Officer,” which has been made a cabinet-level position under governor Gavin Newsom.

When I spoke with Fryday recently, he gave me many details of how the Climate Action Corps was launching sustainability and climate-mitigation efforts across the state. (For instance, this venture in my own home town of Redlands, in San Bernardino County, which is shown in the main photo above.) You can get many updated details, plus photos and sign-up information, at at their site. For the moment my attention is on the way Fryday described the rationale behind the program, and the longer-term, larger-scale effects he hoped it might have.

He said there were three big-picture ways in which he thought the California experimentation might be a guide for the nation. To oversimplify then, and add my own commentary, they were:

Service, along with “policy”: “We’re applying the idea of service, and civic engagement, to tackle climate change,” Fryday told me. “Most people have focused on policy to leverage climate change. We are talking about people power–people power at scale. We’re trying to foster a culture of climate action here. That is an important change for how climate is approached at a policy level.”

Obviously policies matter. In California’s case, the most famous example is the state’s insistence, from the 1960s onward, on fuel-efficiency and pollution-control standards for cars that were more rigorous than in the rest of the country. But Fryday is arguing that “muscle memory,” and civic habits and incentives, can be marshaled in the same direction.
Local flexibility and innovation: “First and foremost we are supporting local goals,” Fryday said. Although he didn’t put it this way, the idea paralleled the famous maxim, “Think globally, act locally.” In California’s case, this meant recognizing the ultimate goals—reducing emissions, improving resilience, increasing awareness—but adapting the tactics place-by-place and opportunity-by-opportunity.

“Climate means different things in different communities,” he said. “We have built this program to be adaptive to rural communities, suburban communities, every community that wants to be part of it, and will be part of it. We’re bringing state resources, convening the resources of universities and businesses and civic society, to support and meet locally defined goals and opportunities.” All of this is fully in the “New Old Ideas” spirit of combining national/global support with the lessons of local adaptability.
Tools for connection, not division: “It is really important to us to create an opportunity where the power of service can unite people, to bring them together rather than divide them,” Fryday told me. This is of course a deliberate invocation of the CCC model, plus subsequent iterations, of the idea that service projects can bring people of different backgrounds together in unexpected ways.

This unifying spect of service in America has a very long pedigree. It was part of William James’s renowned assessment of the aftereffects of the Civil War, the influence of broad military service in World War II and thereafter, and the Peace Corps and Americorps and Habitat for Humanity and many other illustrations. “We have a real chance to use this as an opportunity to bring people together across different backgrounds,” Fryday said. “But if we’re going to do that, we can’t just focus the program on a few people.” Toward that end the Climate Action Corps program has an elaborate tiered structure of service opportunities, which I won’t detail at the moment but may prove useful guidelines for other communities.

(In summary: On the most-involved tier, people in California would sign up for a period of dedicated service, on the model of the old CCC, and in exchange for educational and other benefits. On the other end of the spectrum, they could learn from a list of “Ten Things You Can Do At Home” for climate improvement, from planting a tree to reducing food waste. More details later, as results of these real-time local-laboratory experiments come in.) “We want to have a pyramid of service,” Fryday said. “Whether you have an hour to give, or a year, we’d like to create an opportunity for you to be involved in climate action.”

Picking up trees from “Treestock” this month at the University of Redlands (Carlos Puma)

The core of the “New Old Idea” here is that local or state-wide innovation can be a model for projects elsewhere. Are there signs of national-level movement in similar directions? Here are a few:

In March in The New Yorker, Jim Lardner had a story titled “The Civilian Climate Corps is a Big Government Idea That All Americans Can Embrace.”
For NPR in May, Scott Detrow and Nathan Rott had a report on the Biden administration’s climate-corps plans.
For MSNBC also in May, Talia Levin wrote about the potential for revived versions of the Federal Writers’ Project and similar arts efforts.
A group of young state-and-local elected officials have informally organized in a group called NewDEAL, with the goal (among other things) of adapting past successful models to current challenges.

There will be more, which deserve attention and support.

Does the U.S. Senate Resemble Ancient Rome?

2021-06-02T12:31:05-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Over the weekend, this space held the third installment in the “Lessons of Rome” chronicles by my friend Eric Schnurer. This one went into the comparison between the Roman Senate, in the era of Cicero and the Catiline conspiracy, and the current one in Washington.

If you haven’t read it yet, please give it a try—among other reasons, for the speechwriter’s view of classic Latin rhetoric. This third piece also updated the “doomsday sundial”—a Roman Empire twist on the famous “doomsday clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—and set its time to “a year before midnight.”

Now, some reader reactions. First, from a reader with extensive experience in national government:

Thank you for conveying the very thoughtful observations of Eric Schnurer comparing our situation to that of late republican Rome.

One striking element is the complacency highlighted by Schnurer at the time of Cicero, and so evident now in the mistaken belief that “it” can’t happen here because we’re “exceptional.”

As political scientist David Faris observed in a recent interview on “Vox,” we could not be more wrong. Republicans are working to deprive the majority of its ability to control the agenda or to change the leadership. If they succeed, the result will be undramatic but definitive: “People are going to wake up the next day and go to work, and take care of their kids, and live their lives, and democracy will be gone.”

For all their failures (which have become ever more obvious), the Founders did not have this outlook. They had a lively fear that “it” could indeed happen here, and they constructed the government they made to preclude that outcome.

Our misfortune is that, partly because of the deficiencies of that design (owing largely to several forced compromises) and partly because of later developments (such as the emergence of parties and of the filibuster), we face the reverse of one of their fears: a dictatorship not of the mob but of an entrenched minority. And we don't seem to be coping with that danger any better than did Ciceronian Rome. So we come to where Faris placed himself in his interview: “My current level of concern is exploring countries to move to after 2024.”

He did not quite despair, nor evidently does Schnurer. But the hour is indeed late, and time by our “atomic clock” is swiftly passing.

“Race against time,” from another reader:

Reading your précis of Schnurer’s articles (thanks for bringing this to a wider audience), and the lead in of O Tempora! O Mores! my mind did a sort of leap to the smart Alec translation as Oh Times, Oh Daily Mirror ! [JF note: this was from the fabulous mid-20^th century British comedy duo Flanders and Swann, whose records I loved listening to as a boy.]...

Schnurer is bang on, about the corruption (I think it’s way beyond cynicism) at the heart of the not-so-grand old party.

I sometimes find it ironic that ‘conservatives,’ who should be conserving our institutions, so often slide into radicals’ intent on destroying those institutions. Their focus on ends by any means would make Machiavelli blush. [JF note: compare the different approaches to considering a Supreme Court nominee in an election year applied by Mitch McConnell in 2016, when the nominee was Merrick Garland, and 2020, when it was Amy Coney Barrett.]

It is a race against time in my view. Will they succeed in subverting American democracy before people wake up to the con trick. I suspect they will.

“Storm Before the Storm”—a reading tip:

I read with interest the excellent article comparing Rome with today’s political situation. It immediately brought to mind a book called The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan, written in 2017 about Rome between 146-78 BC, starting with the Gracchi brothers. He reached a similar conclusion to Eric Schnurer at the end of the book. You might know Duncan from his history podcast “The History of Rome,” the granddaddy of history podcasts on the net.

In the book he wrote about,“rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct” as well as “a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it.” The parallel between that and what you wrote caught my attention.

Looking Across the Atlantic (Ocean), from a reader in Texas:

This article is very well-taken. Reading Gibbon even 20 years ago felt like reading the news … now we can even go back to ancient Greek experience of demagogues.

I wonder if you would ask conservative Republicans you know, not whether they agree with those of us who fear a reprise of 1933 Germany, but if they could say at what point in German political history it would NOT have been wildly premature and hyperbolically alarmist to raise a cry that would bring developments to a halt. (Were that possible.)

Ecocide—the most sobering of the responses:

In these last four years of our own personal Catiline, I did read up on ancient Rome, and read Gibbon. I also wondered about the validity of democracy in this country, and now, with this article, the validity of democracy in Rome before Caesar.

It would seem to me that if there is a decline and fall of an American Empire, I agree that it would happen more quickly than the centuries it took Rome to splinter and disappear.

But I think the outside forces that will eliminate us will be natural in origin, and not a sleepy Chuck Grassley, Visigoths or Sandinistas pouring across the border at Brownsville. Argument by analogy may be the only tool historians have to predict the future, but it is still invalid.

It isn’t hard to see that our highly interconnected world is dependent on resources that are nearly magically acquired and brought to life, and that have a limited abundance and existence. Yet our lives are
increasingly dependent on them. So, just soothsayer-wise, I would
predict that industry will be chewing holes in the Congo in search of the latest element needed for the most advanced iPhone in 2050, when the world population will hit 10 billion and the oil will run out.

That while Bangladesh is awash with the Bengal Sea, the Musk Ox, Polar Bear and Caribou go extinct, Mar-al-Lago builds a wall around itself and starts pumping, and LA burns back into the desert it once was.

Those natural phenomena are actually predictable and I think, regardless of what surprises democracy has in store for us, will be the end of us.

Because we still solve problems like the Romans did, after all is said and done. By killing them. Yet we are far more destructive, given our machines, than they ever were. Rome never had the ability to kill the biosphere. Everyone in America, and indeed, on planet Earth, is participating in that execution right now.

What Ancient Rome Tells Us About Today’s Senate

2021-05-29T12:09:18-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

The U.S. Senate’s abdication of duty at the start of this Memorial Day weekend, when 11 senators (nine of them Republican) did not even show up to vote on authorizing an investigation of the January 6 insurrection, makes the item below particularly timely.

Fifty-four senators (including six Republicans) voted to approve the investigative commission. Only 35 opposed it.

But in the institutionalized rule-of-the-minority that is the contemporary Senate, the measure “failed.” The 54 who supported the measure represented states totaling more than 190 million people. The 35 who opposed represented fewer than 105 million. (How do I know this? You take the list of states by population; you match them to senators; you split the apportioned population when a state’s two senators voted in opposite ways; and you don’t count population for the 11 senators who didn’t show up.)

The Senate was, of course, not designed to operate on a pure head-count basis. But this is a contemporary, permanent imbalance beyond what the practical-minded drafters of the Constitution would have countenanced.

Why “contemporary”? Because the filibuster was not part of the constitutional balance-of-power scheme. As Adam Jentleson explains in his authoritative book Kill Switch, “real” filibusters, with senators orating for hours on end, rose to prominence as tools of 20th-century segregationists. Their 21st-century rebirth in the form of phony filibusters (where senators don’t even have to make a pretense of holding the floor) has been at the hands of Mitch McConnell, who made them routine as soon as the Republicans lost control of the Senate in 2006.

The essay below, by a long-time analyst and practitioner of governance named Eric Schnurer, was written before the Senate’s failure on May 28, 2021. But it could have been presented as a breaking-news analysis of the event.

Several days ago I wrote a setup for Schnurer’s essay, which I include in abbreviated form below. Then we come to his argument.

Back in 2019, I did an article for the print magazine on Americans’ long-standing obsession with the decline-and-fall narrative of Rome. Like many good headlines, the one for this story intentionally overstated its argument. The headline was, “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad.” Of course it was bad! But the piece reviewed scholarship about what happened in the former Roman provinces “after the fall,” and how it prepared the way for European progress long after the last rulers of the Western Empire had disappeared.

Many people wrote in to agree and, naturally, to disagree. The online discussion begins here. One long response I quoted was from my friend Eric Schnurer. I had met him in the late 1970s when he was a college intern in the Carter-era White House speechwriting office, where I worked. Since then he has written extensively (including for The Atlantic) and consulted on governmental and political affairs.

Now he is back, with a third and more cautionary extension of his argument. I think it’s very much worth reading, for its discourses on speechwriting in Latin, among other aspects. I’ve slightly condensed his message and used bold highlighting as a guide to his argument. But I turn the floor over to him. He starts with a precis of his case of two years ago:

I contrasted Donald Trump’s America then—mid-2019—with the Rome of the Gracchus brothers, a pair of liberal social reformers who were both assassinated. Of course, the successive murders of two progressive brothers at the top rung of national power would seem to suggest the Kennedys more than, say, Bernie Sanders and Elisabeth Warren, to whom I compared them. But that’s to say that no historic parallels are perfect: One could just as fruitfully (or not) compare the present moment to America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period we managed to make it through without ultimately descending into civil war.

Yet, historical events can be instructive, predictive—even prescriptive—when not fully de-scriptive of current times and customs.

What concerned me about the Roman comparison was, I noted at the time, “the increasing economic inequality, the increasing political polarization, the total eclipse of ‘the greater good’ by what we’d call ‘special interests,’ the turn toward political violence, all of which led eventually to the spiral of destructive civil war, the collapse of democracy (such as it was), and the wholesale replacement of the system with the imperial dictatorship: Looks a lot like the present moment to me.”

In the 1960s, such developments were in the future, although perhaps apparent then to the prescient …

The question that raised was the extent to which the tick-tock of republican decline in Rome could provide a chronometer something like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ famous “doomsday clock”:

If we could peg late summer 2019 to the Gracchi era—roughly up to 120 B.C.—with the fall of the Republic equated to Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon and subsequent assumption of the dictatorship (roughly speaking, 50 B.C.), we could set our republican sundial at, more-or-less, “seventy years to midnight.” But time under our atomic-era clocks moves more quickly than in ancient Roman sundials, so how could we equate a seventy-year margin on a sundial to our own distance from a possible republican midnight? We’d need another contemporary comparison to understand not just where we stood, but also how fast we were moving.

A year later I wrote about the developments of 2020 that seemed to move us closer to midnight. I compared last year’s Trump to Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix: Despite common descriptions of Trump as a would-be Caesar, Sulla is, in terms of temperament and background, a closer match to The Donald: “Sulla, a patrician who indulged a fairly libertine, sometimes vulgar, lifestyle even throughout his several marriages, was nonetheless the champion of the economic, social and political conservatives.”

Of perhaps greater similarity—and great concern, in my view—was the increasing hollowing out of the Roman state from a “common good” into simply another form of private corporation benefiting the already-wealthy and powerful who could grab hold of its levers and hive off its components … After a tumultuous reign, Sulla retreated to his villa at Mar-a-Lago, er, Puteoli, and Rome fell into a period of relative quiescence.

That took us from the 120’s B.C. in July 2019 to roughly 80 B.C. by August 2020: By that measure, our republican doomsday clock had lurched forward about 40 Roman years—a little more than halfway to midnight—in roughly a year …

But as U.S. politics fell into a period of relative quiescence lately, with Trump ensconced quietly at Puteoli—er, Mar-a-Lago—and a relatively calming, moderate and institutionalist Everyman (if no Cicero …) installed in the White House, I didn’t think much further about the Roman comparison.

That is, until last week, when I made an off-hand comment about a young family member’s misbehavior, jokingly complaining, “O tempora, O mores!”: “O the times, O the customs”—the most famous line from the most famous speech by Rome’s greatest lawyer, politician and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the circumstances of Cicero’s famed oration and those we face now in the wake—and denial—of the assault on the Capitol of January 6.

I have a personal fondness for what have become known as Cicero’s “Catilinarian Orations”—a series of speeches he delivered at the height of a failed conspiracy to assault the citadels of republican governance and seize power. I read them in the original in my high school Latin class, at a time when my major focus was on school politics and, as the immediate past student body president, I was leading a similar (in my mind) effort to beat back a coup attempt by the would-be conspirator who had been defeated electorally by my chosen successor.

As a result, I found reading Cicero’s words uncovering, indicting, and overcoming Lucius Sergius Catilina (known to us as Catiline) and his co-conspirators, and thereby preserving democracy, rather thrilling. These orations—especially the first—have become famous as among the greatest speeches in history, not least because of the self-promoting Cicero’s promoting them as such. But to read them in the original is to recognize them as deservedly so.

Latin is an extremely complicated but flexible language. Its elaborate system of agreements between nouns, adjectives and verbs allows for words to be ordered in sometimes almost-random-seeming patterns requiring extensive detective skills to puzzle out the actual meaning of a sentence. At the peak of my Latin studies, for example, I could probably translate an average sentence in the great Latin epic, The Aeneid, at the rate of about one per hour. Reading Cicero in Latin, however, is like spreading warm butter over a piping-hot piece of bread: It simply flows.

Cicero could reach unequaled heights of high dudgeon with the simplest of sentences. He reached for his greatest in the opening lines of his first Catalinarian Oration to the Roman Senate. The immediacy of the language fairly leaps off the dead pages as if alive itself, overpowering the reader with the desperation of Cicero’s fight for democracy, his courage in the face of danger, his importuning his at-first-impassive audience seated in their clean white togas amidst the marble walls and red-cushioned banquettes, slowly distancing themselves from the censored Catiline as Cicero’s oratory builds in mighty waves.

Catiline was yet another aristocratic yet amoral politician who had aimed at absolute power by appealing cynically to the reactionary foot soldiers of Sulla’s former army and their “blue-collar” supporters. But he nonetheless was headed to a loss in the consular election of 63 B.C., which would have ended his political ambitions, so he conspired to overthrow the Roman state, intending literally to decapitate the official vote count on election day by killing the consul overseeing it—Cicero—and seizing violent control of the government.

Cicero could be considered something of a moderate, an institutionalist who revered the Republic as he rose to power in its capital despite being what the Romans called a “new man,” one who had made his own way from an undistinguished upbringing in the hinterlands (“Cicero” means “chickpea,” a literal and uncomplimentary nod to the family’s roots).

Upon uncovering the conspiracy, Cicero called an emergency meeting of the Senate to denounce this attempt to short-circuit the election and end republican government through violence. Cicero was surprised that Catiline dared pompously to show himself at the day’s proceedings, as if his efforts to undermine the state were perfectly proper, and to deny he was doing what everyone knew he was doing: “When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?”

But what is most notable about the famed opening of this first and greatest oration is Cicero’s clear astonishment at the blasé reaction of much of the Senate to this open assault on republican values. “O the times, O the customs,” he responds, and then continues:

“The Senate understands these things, the Consul sees them; yet this man still lives. He lives? Indeed, he even comes into the Senate, he takes part in public debate, he notes and marks out with his eyes each one of us for slaughter!”

Despite the fact that, at this point, Catiline’s intent to murder Cicero and various other members of the Senate, to stop the vote count and overturn the foregone election results, and unlawfully to seize the levers of government through violence is well known to all of them, a good number of these very same legislators and leaders shrug the whole thing off. Some sympathized with his political program; others were implicated in the plot; still others were basically in the same boat as Catiline, having committed similar crimes and sexual debaucheries that limited their political futures; and still others were perfectly fine with ending the trappings of republicanism if it meant they retained their power and Senate seats. And some simply couldn’t be roused to care.

The conspiracy ultimately collapsed and was defeated, but not without further militant uprisings aided by Rome’s enemies abroad. Catiline, a demagogue but in the end not the best of politicians or insurrectionists, was killed. Democracy, and the old order of things, seemed to have survived, and matters returned to a more-or-less normal state under Cicero’s stable hand.

But it turned out to be a brief reprieve. The rot had already set in. What mattered most in the long-term was not the immediate threat of the insurrectionists, but rather the complacency, if not sympathy, of the other ostensibly-republican leaders. It revealed the hollowness of not just their own souls but also the nation’s.

Another 10 months in America, another 15 years forward on the Roman sundial. At this rate, we’re about a year before midnight.

Dan Frank Was a Gifted and Generous Editor

2021-05-25T15:47:47-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

I don’t know how many people in the reading public would recognize the name Dan Frank. Millions of them should. He was a gifted editor, mentor, leader, and friend, who within the publishing world was renowned. His untimely death of cancer yesterday, at age 67, is a terrible loss especially for his family and colleagues, but also to a vast community of writers and to the reading public.

Minute by minute, and page by page, writers gripe about editors. Year by year, and book by book, we become aware of how profoundly we rely on them. Over the decades I have had the good fortune of working with a series of this era’s most talented and supportive book editors. Some day I’ll write about the whole sequence, which led me 20 years ago to Dan Frank. For now, I want to say how much Dan Frank meant to public discourse in our times, and how much he will be missed.

Dan Frank during a 2015 interview with Thomas Mallon at the Center for Fiction in New York

Dan started working in publishing in his 20s, after college and graduate school. While in his 30s he became editorial director at Viking Books. Among the celebrated books he edited and published there was Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick, which was a runaway bestseller and a critical success. It also represented the sort of literary nonfiction (and fiction) that Dan would aspire to: well-informed, elegantly written, presenting complex subjects accessibly, helping readers enter and understand realms they had not known about before. As it happened, Gleick worked with Dan on all of his subsequent books, including his biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, as well as Faster and The Information.

In 1991, after a shakeup at Pantheon, Dan Frank went there as an editor, and from 1996 onward he was Pantheon’s editorial director and leading force. As Reagan Arthur, the current head of the Knopf, Pantheon, and Schocken imprints at Penguin Random House, wrote yesterday in a note announcing Dan’s death:

During his tenure, Dan established Pantheon as an industry-leading publisher of narrative science, world literature, contemporary fiction, and graphic novels. Authors published under Dan were awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, several National Book Awards, numerous NBCC awards, and multiple Eisners [for graphic novels] ….

For decades, Dan has been the public face of Pantheon, setting the tone for the house and overseeing the list. He had an insatiable curiosity about life and, indeed, that curiosity informed many of his acquisitions. As important as the books he published and the authors he edited, Dan served as a mentor to younger colleagues, endlessly generous with his time and expertise. Famously soft-spoken, a “writer’s editor,” and in possession of a heartfelt laugh that would echo around the thirteenth floor, he was so identified with the imprint that some of his writers took to calling the place Dantheon.

There are surprisingly few photos of Dan available online. I take that as an indication of his modesty; of the contrast between his high profile within the publishing world and his intentionally low profile outside it; and of his focus on the quiet, interior work of sitting down with manuscripts or talking with authors. The only YouTube segment I’ve found featuring him is this one from 2015, when Dan interviewed the author Thomas Mallon at the Center for Fiction in New York. (I am using this with the Center’s permission.)

Dan is seated at the right, with his trademark round glasses. The clip will give an idea of his demeanor, his gentle but probing curiosity, his intelligence and encouragement, his readiness to smile and give a supportive laugh. Watching him talk with Mallon reminds me of his bearing when we would talk in his office at Pantheon or at a nearby restaurant.

Everything that is frenzied and distracted in modern culture, Dan Frank was the opposite of. The surest way to get him to raise a skeptical eyebrow, when hearing a proposal for a new book, was to suggest some subject that was momentarily white-hot on the talk shows and breaking-news alerts. I know this firsthand. The book ideas he steered me away from, and kept me from wasting time on, represented guidance as crucial as what he offered on the four books I wrote for him, and the most recent one where he worked with me and my wife, Deb.

Dan knew that books have a long gestation time—research and reporting, thinking, writing, editing, unveiling them to the world. They required hard work from a lot of people, starting with the author and editor but extending to a much larger team. Therefore it seemed only fair to him that anything demanding this much effort should be written as if it had a chance to last. Very few books endure; hardly any get proper notice; but Dan wanted books that deserved to be read a year after they came out, or a decade, or longer, if people were to come across them.

The publisher’s long list of authors he worked with, which I’ll include at the bottom of this post, only begins to suggest his range. When I reached the final page of the new, gripping, epic-scale novel of modern China by Orville Schell, called My Old Home, it seemed inevitable that the author’s culminating word of thanks would be to his “wonderful, understated” editor, Dan Frank.

What, exactly, does an editor like this do to win such gratitude? Some part of it is “line editing”—cutting or moving a sentence, changing a word, flagging an awkward transition. Dan excelled at that, but it wasn’t his main editing gift. Like all good editors, he understood that the first response back to a writer, on seeing new material, must always and invariably be: “This will be great!” or “I think we’ve really got something here.” Then, like all good editors, Dan continued with the combination of questions, expansions, reductions, and encouragements that get writers to produce the best-feasible version of the idea they had in mind. Their role is like that of a football coach, with the pre-game plan and the halftime speech: They’re not playing the game themselves, but they’re helping the athletes do their best. Or like that of a parent or teacher, helping a young person avoid foreseeable mistakes.

You can read more about Dan Frank’s own views of the roles of author, editor, publisher, and agent, in this interview in 2009, from Riverrun Books. It even has a photo of him! And you can think about the books he fostered, edited, and helped create, if you consider this part of Reagan Arthur’s note:

Dan worked with writers who were published by both Pantheon and Knopf. His authors include Charles Baxter, Madison Smartt Bell, Alain de Botton, David Eagleman, Gretel Ehrlich, Joseph J. Ellis, James Fallows, James Gleick, Jonathan Haidt, Richard Holmes, Susan Jacoby, Ben Katchor, Daniel Kehlmann, Jill Lepore, Alan Lightman, Tom Mallon, Joseph Mitchell, Maria Popova, Oliver Sacks, Art Spiegelman, and many, many others.

Deb and I will always be grateful to have known Dan Frank, and to have worked with him. We send our condolences to his wife, Patty, and their sons and family. The whole reading public has benefited, much more than most people know, from his life and work.

How FDR Changed Political Communication

2021-05-14T11:39:08-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has a new project called UNUM, about the sources of connection rather than separation in American life.

His latest segment involves “Communication” in all its aspects, and it combines historical footage with current commentary. Some of the modern commenters are Yamiche Alcindor, Jane Mayer, Megan Twohey, Kara Swisher, and Will Sommer. You can see their clips here.

One more of these segments covers the revolution in political communication wrought by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio addresses known as “fireside chats.” It was drawn from Burns’s earlier documentary Empire of the Air, which was narrated by Jason Robards. You can see a clip from that documentary here.

As part of the UNUM series of contemporary response to historical footage, Burns’s team asked me to respond to the FDR segment. (Why me? In 1977—which was 44 years after FDR’s first fireside chat, and 44 years ago, as of now—the newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter gave his first fireside chat, which I helped write. It’s fascinating to watch, as a historical artifact; you can see the C-SPAN footage here.)

This is what I thought about FDR’s language, and how it connects to the spirit of our moment in political time:

For reference, here is the text version of what I said in the Burns video, about those FDR talks, as previously noted here:

The most important words in Franklin Roosevelt’s initial fireside chat, during the depths of Depression and banking crisis in 1933, were the two very first words after he was introduced.

They were: My friends.

Of course political leaders had used those words for centuries. But American presidents had been accustomed to formal rhetoric, from a rostrum, to a crowd, stentorian or shouted in the days before amplification. They were addressing the public as a group—not families, or individuals, in their kitchens or living rooms: My friends. A few previous presidents had dared broadcast over the radio—Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. But none of them had dared imagine the intimacy of this tone—of trying to create a national family or neighborhood gathering, on a Sunday evening, to grapple with a shared problem.

Roosevelt’s next most important words came in the next sentence, when he said “I want to talk for a few minutes” with his friends across the country about the mechanics of modern banking. Discussing, explaining, describing, talking—those were his goals, not blaming or declaiming or pronouncing. What I find most remarkable in the tone that followed was a president talking up to a whole national audience, confident that even obscure details of finance could be grasped if clearly explained, rather than talking down, to polarize and oversimplify.

Consciously or unconsciously, nearly every presidential communication since that time has had FDR’s model in mind. In 1977 the newly inaugurated 39th president Jimmy Carter gave a fireside chat about the nation’s energy crisis, a speech that, as it happens, I helped write. Nearly every president has followed Roosevelt’s example of the basic three part structure of a leader’s speech at time of tragedy or crisis: First, expressing empathy for the pain and fear of the moment; second, expressing confidence about success and recovery in the long run; and third, offering a specific plan, for the necessary next steps.

Some of these presentations have been more effective, some less. But all are operating against the background, and toward the standard of connection, set by the 32nd president, Franklin Roosevelt, starting in 1933. “Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan,” he said in that first fireside chant. “Let us unite in banishing fear.”

The opening words of that talk had been “My friends.” His closing words were, “Together we cannot fail.”

What the Bidens Understand About Community College

2021-05-07T09:57:29-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

In the last week of April, Joe Biden gave his address to a joint session of Congress, which is of course what first-year presidents do, instead of an official “State of the Union” message. In the first week of May, both he and Jill Biden spoke at Tidewater Community College, in southern Virginia.

The theme connecting their presentations is one of the stalwarts in reports over the years at this site: Namely, the role of community colleges as linchpins of education and opportunity in the United States. For more on why community colleges are the institutions of this American moment, please see this dispatch from Michigan, or this from Ohio, or this with responses from Maine to Texas to California and beyond, or this thoughtful reply by Matt Reed for Inside Higher Ed. For now, my goal is to explain why a 93-second video clip, which you’ll find at the end of this post, deserves your attention.

In his joint-session speech, Joe Biden spoke on behalf of his large-scale “American Families Plan” and “American Jobs Plan,” which both followed the immediate stimulus plan he promoted, called the “American Rescue Plan.”

(Here’s a rhetorical note from a one-time political speechwriter: Simpler is always better, when it comes to naming big new projects. Cautionary example: During the Obama era, the U.S. and five other countries reached an agreement with Iran. Nearly everyone, admirer or critic, refers to that agreement as “the Iran nuclear deal”; almost no one outside a bureaucracy calls it by its ungainly formal title, the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” or JCPOA. By contrast, the matched set of three titles for this administration's main programs—American Rescue Plan, American Jobs Plan, American Families Plan—are marvels of concision. Each name is three words long; two of the three words are “American” and “Plan”; and the remaining words are “Families,” “Jobs,” and “Rescue.” Unless they had chosen “Motherhood” and “Apple Pie,” it would be hard to improve on this as a naming strategy. Students of Americana will also note the resonance with the famous three-word titles of many of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, from the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, to the Rural Electrification Administration, or REA.)

The idea and ambition of the new “American (Rescue/Jobs/Families) Plan” programs, as noted in this previous post, involve seizing this moment’s historic opportunity to address long-festering inequalities and failures. Will Americans look back, decades from now, at the sweep of these proposals as something comparable to the New Deal, in brightening prospects for the nation as a whole? Or will they see it as successful in more narrowly defined terms, like the race to space in the 1960s? Or will it be seen as another sad mismatch of intentions and effects? Obviously no one knows the answer now; less obviously but just as certainly, the answer is being determined week by week, through actions of citizens, businesses, and institutions across the country.

"No matter where I go, I feel most at home at community colleges." Jill Biden, the first lady, at Tidewater Community College, in southern Virginia, on May 3, 2021. (White House video)

Joe Biden’s part of the community college saga came last week, in the Capitol, when as part of his lengthy address he proposed guaranteeing two free years of community college to all students. At Tidewater Community College this week, Dr. Jill Biden appeared in her capacity as a long-time English professor at Northern Virginia Community College, outside Washington—where, she said, she was known as “Dr. B.” She spoke before her husband did, and she made the case for community colleges as today’s expressions of an American ideal: of mobility for individuals, of security for families, of revitalization for towns and regions.

“Our schools accept everyone,” she said, “regardless of age or race or income, or family legacy.” If you watch her presentation (on C-SPAN video here), you’ll see her stressing these points, starting around time 3:00. “They offer classes that are flexible, so students don’t have to choose between work and school. They train for real-world jobs. They tailor to the community they serve.”

Obviously community colleges have their failures and shortcomings and scandals, as any institution does. But both of the Bidens emphasized the theme that has struck Deb and me in our travels: how important the community-college opportunity is, for how many people, at a time when so many other avenues of opportunity have been closed off.

America’s K-12 system is the bedrock of public education; its research universities, liberal arts colleges, and other four-year schools are crown jewels. But everyone already knows about the importance of those institutions—the public schools, the famous universities. Right now, in the political and economic straits of the 2020s, community colleges may most deserve extra attention and help.

You can hear both Bidens making the extended case, in the C-SPAN video from Tidewater. But if you’d like the TL;DR version of this argument, I most enthusiastically recommend spending the next 93 seconds of your life watching Raj Shaunak, of East Mississippi Community College, explain what his institution has meant to the people of his state.

Many of them, he says, are “one flat tire away from losing their job, or not finishing their education.” This is a clip from the HBO documentary “Our Towns,” and I think it will give you an idea of why we have become such proponents of strengthening these engines of American opportunity.

A Film ‘for the 80 Percent’

2021-04-14T10:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Last night HBO aired its new documentary, Our Towns, which grew out of a long Atlantic series and later a book, as I described here yesterday. It has a number of upcoming screenings on HBO and is available for streaming on HBO Max.

Coinciding with the film’s debut, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed the film’s creators—Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher of West City Films—and Deb Fallows and me about what it was like to turn print reporting into a movie, and how the resulting theme and message matched the realities of an America that has been coping with pandemic, division, and polarization.

I think the results were very interesting. You can see them here:

Near the end of the session, Jeff Goldberg made a point that rings true to me. He said that this was a film and message “for the 80 percent.” That is, for the substantial majority of Americans who believe in possibility, in practicality, in reasonable paths forward. I hope you’ll hear the interview—and watch the film.

Why the Our Towns Documentary Is Timely

2021-04-13T06:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

This evening—April 13, at 9 p.m. ET—HBO will air its new documentary Our Towns. The film will be available for streaming on HBO Max, and you can see a brief trailer for it here.

Naturally my wife, Deb Fallows, and I have a special interest in this film. It is based on the book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, that Deb and I wrote, which was published three years ago. That book in turn grew out of a multiyear project of traveling around the country and reporting on smaller cities and rural areas, as part of The Atlantic’s “American Futures” series. We had many partners in this project and made many friends along the way, whose stories we told in the hundreds of online dispatches and several print-magazine stories we filed. We have stayed in touch with a large number of these people and communities, and we have continued to follow their successes, setbacks, and the lessons learned and taught since the time of our first visits.

Deb and I spent much of 2019 on the road with our HBO colleagues—the filmmakers Jeanne Jordan and Steve Ascher, of West City Films, and their team—doing the reporting, interviewing, and 100 days of on-location filming work that went into the movie. Then, during the long year of lockdown, Jeanne and Steve, with their partners at HBO, edited and crafted the film in a process that distilled the countless hours of footage into 97 exquisite minutes on screen. (HBO’s longtime leader, Richard Plepler, was the original champion of this project, and the heads of HBO’s documentary division, Lisa Heller and Nancy Abraham, guided it from early stages through release.)

Having presented our view of America strictly in words, Deb and I had no idea how these themes and impressions could be rendered mainly through images and scenes. As print-world people, we couldn’t have explained, or even imagined, what a film version of our journey might ideally look like. But once we saw the first edits we realized, it would look like this. The film exceeded our hopes and expectations for conveying the splendor (and also the scarring) of the American landscape; the passion, humor, and self-awareness (and sometimes self-delusion) of people wrestling with challenges for their communities and their country; and the achievements (and also disappointments) of an America that generally escapes the media’s attention.

So we hope you will watch the film, because we believe it is beautiful, inspiring, surprising, and surprisingly timely. In the months to come, as the weather warms and public life resumes, we hope there will be occasions to show clips from it in viewing sessions around the country, in cities we visited and many more like them.

But the other reason we hope you will watch the film is that we believe the message and spirit expressed in these 90-plus minutes on-screen are even more important in post-pandemic America than we could have foreseen when we began this work.

In short: This film tells the story of America through examples of renewal and recovery that had been on display through decades of the country’s history, and which we captured just before the traumas of the pandemic era set in. As the country begins moving toward the “after” stage of this historic dislocation, those same traits will, we believe, be the keys to successful rebuilding and reconciliation in the years ahead.

A cargo ship in the waters outside Eastport, Maine, from HBO’s new “Our Towns” film (Bryan Harvey / HBO)

It is impossible to fully understand history as we are living through it. But everyone who has lived through, and in many cases been battered by, the turmoil of the past few years understands that these times—our times—will be studied and analyzed long after today’s Americans are gone, as one of the critical moments in the nation’s story.

The United States has endured the worst public-health crisis in living Americans’ memory; its schools and businesses have reeled from the impact, not to mention its families; and its political system has been abused and tested in ways not seen in half a century or more. This has been a dark time around the world, and in certain ways darker for the United States than for many other countries.

The question no one can answer in real time is whether this bad period will eventually be seen as a prelude to conditions that got even worse—or whether, as so many times before in the nation’s history, a time of crisis might shock the country in an era of long-overdue improvements and reforms. Will people a century from now look back on 2021 as a poignant last remnant of the “good old days”—a time before pandemics became even more frequent and uncontrollable, before economic opportunities and rewards became even more skewed, while democratic institutions still seemed repairable, while many of the Earth’s ecosystems might still be saved? Or will our times stand instead as shorthand for yet another of the country’s “bad old days” turning points, in which the country’s institutions and momentum hit bottom and then turned in a more hopeful direction?

No one can know that answer. But nearly everyone can influence what the answer turns out to be.

That is the fundamental idea behind the movie, and the book, and the ongoing efforts Deb and I hope to carry out: That we are all determining, today, what the country will look like tomorrow, and that most of us could use help in doing so. And—the additional idea—at a time when effective new ideas are at a premium, as is the very concept of optimistic possibility, many of the most promising new approaches are being hammered out not in national-level debates but state by state and city by city, town by town.

The importance of flexible, local-level innovation, and the fertile creativity of American society at all its levels, is one of the most familiar themes in American history. It is part of what Alexis de Tocqueville remarked upon in the 1800s. It was the basis of Louis Brandeis’s famous remark, in a 1932 Supreme Court dissent, that localities and states, in their diversity, were the real “laboratories of democracy” for a complex nation. It is a theme that has run through dozens of Deb’s and my reports.

But we believe the concept of local-level experimentation is especially urgent now, because the climate is brightening for putting locally generated ideas into effect. Through several presidential administrations, for a generation or more, national-level politics in this United States has “failed” in its most important functional role. It has become mainly an arena for taking stands and thwarting opponents, rather than matching the still-enormous resources of this nation to its also-enormous problems. In recent times, the place where that matchup has been most likely to work has been not in federal government but at the local and sometimes statewide level. At their experimental and innovative best, local- and regional-level organizations have played a role (loosely) like monasteries in the Middle Ages, as reservoirs of a society’s possibility and learning.

Now, in the wake of the pandemic, the national prospects are changing. This is the result of a partisan event—Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump, and his party’s narrow control of Congress—but it is not fundamentally a partisan phenomenon. How so? The rapid expansion of the interstate highway network in the 1950s, and of public-school science and language instruction in that same era, resulted from a partisan event—Dwight Eisenhower’s ascent to the presidency—but was more a national than a partisan phenomenon. The expansion of the Land Grant University system from the 1860s onward arose from Republican-sponsored legislation but was a cornerstone of a progressive, nationally minded vision.

In 2021, the resources that will soon be flowing to states, cities, and specific communities—for roads and bridges, for modern broadband connections and repairs on antique water pipes, for trains and airports, for health centers and food banks—result from one party’s support but soon will shape the whole nation’s prospects. And how they have that impact—whether we look back on this as a time of renewal, or sloppily missed opportunities—will turn largely on whether past lessons and discoveries of local innovation are successfully applied.

On the last page of the Our Towns book, which we wrote a few months after the presidential election of 2016, Deb and I argued that a moment like the current one could be foreseen. From the 1880s through the 1920s, states and localities had tried out a variety of economic, political, and civic-reform efforts largely ignored at the national level. But “when the national mood after the first Gilded Age favored reform, possibilities that had been tested, refined, and made to work in various ‘laboratories of democracy’ were at hand.” And in our times:

After our current Gilded Age, the national mood will change again. When it does, a new set of ideas and plans will be at hand. We’ve seen them being tested in places we never would have suspected, by people who would never join forces in the national capital. But their projects, the progress they have made, and their goals are more congruent than even they would ever imagine.

HBO’s new movie makes this point in a more emotionally powerful way. Its final scene is of the artist Charles Jupiter Hamilton, known as Charly, whose works include a wonderful history-of-our-community mural on a building wall on the west side of Charleston, West Virginia.

When we came across Charly during our filming, he explained the background of the painting—as you’ll hear in the film. And then, unexpectedly, he pulled out a book of Shakespeare plays, and began reading a famous speech by Brutus, from Julius Caesar.

The passage goes:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat …

“I always felt this way,” Charly told us, as he put down the book. “This is a place where the tide is in. If you put your boats out, put your ventures out, right now, we can make something of ourselves.”

Coming where it does—in the film, in the drama of West Virginia, in the current history of the United States—the presentation has tremendous power. And it is our guiding principle. On such a full sea are we now afloat.

When a Company Invests in an ‘Underdog City’

2021-02-25T19:05:21-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

The country is full of “underdog cities”—communities and regions that are aware of losing out and having been overlooked. Some are in Appalachia, some in the Deep South, some around the Great Lakes, some in inland regions of otherwise-prospering states in the West. The imbalances in American opportunity—by race, by gender, by neighborhood and region, by class and economics—are of fundamental importance in the politics of the past generation, and in the prospects for renewal in the generation ahead.

Today’s installment is the story of how a company that started in one of these places is now involving people and businesses in another—and why that matters in the next stage of equitable American recovery.

The company is Bitwise Industries; its site-of-origin is Fresno, in California’s agriculturally rich (but otherwise poor) Central Valley; and its latest project will be in the once-strong, recently troubled American manufacturing belt along the Great Lakes. This week, Bitwise announced a new $50 million venture to expand a model that has proven effect in California to other “underdog” parts of the country, starting with the city of Toledo, Ohio.

The money has come from private investors—Kapor Capital, JPMorgan Chase, Motley Fool Ventures, and the Toledo-based health-care non-profit ProMedica. Its announced goal, according to Bitwise, is “to support the actions needed to stop the widening wealth gap, end institutional discrimination, and remove the barriers for accessing high-wage, high-growth jobs.” In practice this means creating technology-training centers, incubators for startup businesses, partnerships with schools and universities, and in some cases physical renovations of run-down buildings.

The funding is based on Bitwise’s track record of success in expanding opportunities for tech-related jobs in under-served communities in California. Its first project, in Toledo, will be opening a new training, incubator, coworking, and apprenticeship center in a historic downtown structure that for years has stood vacant and decaying.

For Bitwise, this venture is an application of what its leaders call the “Digital New Deal”—opening more of this era’s opportunities to those who have lacked them. For Toledo it is, as the mayor, Wade Kapszukiewicz, put it to me, “a sign that the city is moving in the right direction,” and that people within the city “whose economic futures have been uncertain, they’ll have a chance to be on a better path.”

As always, whether this will pay off is unknowable. But it is based on ideas and practices that in other parts of the country have so far proved their worth.

Now, a word about the participants, their backgrounds, and the idea.

Fresno and Bitwise: Fresno is the largest city in the Central Valley, whose farms, vineyards, groves, and orchards are acre-for-acre some of the most valuable farmland in the world. But despite the area’s phenomenal productivity, the people of the valley are on average very poor by national standards, and subject to the educational, social, and health handicaps that accompany poverty. By some calculations, if California ever carried out a scheme to divide itself into six states—which it won’t—the resulting new state of Central California would be the very poorest in the Union.

Over the past six years, starting here and here and running through this last year, Deb Fallows and I have frequently reported on economic, civic, and cultural comeback activities in Fresno and the vicinity. One important economic and cultural driver there has been Bitwise. This was a startup firm when we first wrote about it, which has expanded into a combination of software house, tech-training center, and overall civic connector that has played a significant role in the city’s attempts at revival. (We’ve written about similar efforts from smaller tech companies in, for instance, Erie, Pennsylvania.) Deb and I have been impressed enough by their work that we’ve become paying customers of Bitwise on some web-design projects.

The company’s cofounders, Irma Olguin Jr. and Jake Soberal, have been explicit in saying that their goal is to expand tech-economy opportunities for individuals, families, communities, and regions that the larger tech boom has left behind. “Bitwise is a tech ecosystem, activating human potential to elevate underdog cities around the country,” the company says on its web site. “My grandmother came here from Mexico, and my grandfather grew up very poor,” Soberal told me, when I spoke with him and Olguin on the phone this week. Olguin herself grew up in a Central Valley field-working family. The opportunity to go to college, and to start a business in the tech industry, dramatically changed her prospects. She has spoken many times about the countless others who thirst for such opportunities, in the technology business that had traditionally been closed to people from backgrounds like hers.

In 2019, Bitwise raised $27 million in “Series A” startup money, mainly to expand beyond Fresno to other “underdog” cities in California, like Bakersfield, Merced, and Oakland. With this $50 million in new “Series B” money, it intends to go national, toward other places with similar challenges—and potential. “The spread of COVID-19 and events of 2020 exposed the deep flaws that have existed for decades in the United States, and laid bare the unsustainable nature of our current systems/policies, and how they trap people in a cycle of poverty,” Olguin said in a statement announcing the new funding. “The past year showed us that there is no time to waste and we need to be aggressive about driving change now.”

Plans for the renovated Jefferson Center building (Courtesy of the City of Toledo)

“We were really rolling in California, and began asking ourselves, if we were to expand further, where would we go next?” Jake Soberal told me. “We wanted to see where we could have maximum impact.” The answer turned out to be Toledo.

Toledo and ProMedica: What agriculture has been to Fresno’s economy, manufacturing has historically been to Toledo’s. This has especially been true for firms related to the auto industry in nearby Detroit, most notably in glass. Toledo’s nickname is “Glass City,” and it is still the headquarters of Owens-Illinois, Owens-Corning, Libbey, and other major glass makers.

But the city’s biggest employer is now a health-care organization—something that Deb and I found to be true in a strikingly large number of places. For Toledo, that organization is ProMedica, which operates hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices in the area, and senior-care centers in 26 states.

ProMedica is organized as a non-profit, and describes itself as a “health and well-being organization” with a commitment to reviving its local community. Its CEO, Randy Oostra, told me this week that “when you look at health outcomes, it’s 20 percent clinical care, 40 percent social determinants” (and the rest is other things). That is, to foster healthy patients, you need healthy communities.

“An emphasis on social determinants is in our DNA,” he said. “We see our mission as actively looking to improve people’s lives—which include people’s ability to learn, to get a job, to support healthy families.” He said that ProMedica also considered itself an “anchor institution” for the revival of Toledo as a whole. In 2017 it moved its headquarters to the downtown waterfront, where as part of a $60 million construction project it had renovated a huge old steam-power plant. In 2019 it contracted to buy from the city’s school board the huge, once-magnificent downtown structure that had been built in 1911 as the Main Post Office and, after a variety of incarnations, had fallen into disuse.

At a virtual conference last summer, Robin Whitney, ProMedica’s chief of strategic planning, heard Irma Olguin talk about Bitwise’s record in Fresno and its desire to bring its model to other cities. As it happened, Olguin had a connection to the city. After finishing high school in the Central Valley, she had got her computer-science degree in the early 2000s at the University of Toledo. Whitney got in touch and said, what about Toledo?

“They more we talked, the more we realized we were kindred spirits,” Robin Whitney told me. “The passion they had, the idea that you have to give more people a real opportunity, it was a match.”

“My having an understanding of that area was helpful,” Olguin told me, when I asked: Why Toledo? “When I was first there, I was young and inexperienced and didn’t have the experience of starting a company under my belt. But the conversations we have now, and the absolute thirst to uplift the city, make a lot more sense. Too many people feel they have been left out, and need a chance.”

“What people feel about Fresno, or Bakersfield, they feel about Toledo,” Jake Soberal said. “The underdog nature, the willingness to work together.” “Working together,” which sounds like a platitude, has been an important part of the Bitwise model: partnerships among city and state governments, universities, community groups and NGOs, and companies large and small, with a local focus. They felt that they found that level of connection in Toledo.

“I know it’s a cliche to say ‘win-win,’ but I think that’s what this project is, for all involved,” Mayor Kapszukiewicz, a Democrat first elected in 2017, told me about the project. “Whether or not you buy into the notion that everything between the East Coast and the West Coast is ‘flyover country,’”—and by the way, I don’t—“in the economy there are winners and losers. In this region, we have done a lot of losing over the last 70 or 80 years.”

In the long run, he said, cities along the Great Lakes might be enviously referred to as “the Water Belt”—rather than the Rust Belt or the Snow Belt—because “we are sitting on one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water.” With a warming climate, their location could become a strategic plus. But in recent memory, factories had still been closing, and populations falling.

“There are communities and individuals our economy has overlooked,” he said. “People whose economic future is uncertain, they can be put on a path to better themselves and their families, with marketable skills that have real value.” As the mayor himself admitted, any sentiments of this sort sound platitudinous. But the problem he’s describing is very obviously real. And the elements of the response—businesses with an intentional civic focus, partnerships among a variety of groups, guiding focus on inclusion—have proven their value in communities with problems more acute than Toledo’s.

“I don’t know what people on ‘the coasts’ might say about towns like Toledo,” the mayor remarked, when I told him I was calling from my house in Washington. “We’re not New York City, and we don’t want to be New York City. You can get anywhere you want, in 12 minutes. If you pay $200,000 for a house, you can get 3,000 square feet.”

He stopped himself, and laughed—“Yes, this sounds like a mayor being a booster. But I think it’s the case for Toledo, and a lot of towns like this, that we have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder. We get the sense that people might be snickering at us. And we make that an advantage, in the civic zeitgeist. It’s a nice town, we get along, and if someone ‘in the family’ gets picked on, everyone stands up for them.”

The chip on the shoulder, very much the spirit of Fresno—or Erie, or Dayton, or San Bernardino, or many other places we have written about—is part of what the Bitwise founders recognized, and welcomed.

“Toledo has been knocked down and punched in the gut several time,” the mayor said. “But I will say that if there is anything about being knocked down, it’s that you know how to get up. Toledo is a resilient place. We know how to take a punch. Toledo is a place that never gives up.”

Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz (Courtesy of the City of Toledo)

The Jefferson Center: “The property they’re using is an interesting representative of Toledo as a whole,” Nolan Rosenkrans, of the Toledo Blade, told me on the phone this week. He was talking about the vintage-1911 Main Post Office, recently known as the Jefferson Center, which will be the Bitwise/ProMedica site.

“It’s right next to the Toledo Club, another stately historic structure, which is a center of wealth. And on the other side is a homeless shelter and community kitchen. In between is this huge block-long center that’s just empty now, and which is not the easiest kind of structure to redevelop.” He said that he thought most people would be glad the building would survive.

As for the larger success of the project, people in Toledo and elsewhere will have to wait and see. But Bitwise intends this as the first of a series of projects for underdog cities in the Midwest and elsewhere. They will represent important new venues for the drama of whether the American economy can open more possibilities to more of its people.

Learning From the New Deal—For the Next Recovery

2021-02-22T21:10:39-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

A few days ago, I was talking with the mayor of a medium-sized “red state” city about how his community was weathering today’s public-health and financial crises. I told him I was mainly curious about his observations, rather than looking for on-the-record quotes. We talked over some details about his town, and then I asked him about prospects for post-pandemic recovery, in the broadest sense: restoring lost jobs, reviving lost businesses, regaining economic momentum, recreating opportunities for people and communities that have been left out. How did the upcoming wave of national and global trends look, from his perspective a long distance from Washington?

“When I got into politics,” he said, referring to the late 1980s and early 1990s, “it was the era of Jack Kemp for the Republicans, and Bill Clinton for the Democrats. Balance the budget, lean government, and so on.” Twenty-five years ago, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton had memorably declared, “The era of big government is over.”

“All of those things were important, of course,” the mayor said. “But unless I’m misreading things, people now are really ready for a different approach.” That different approach, he said, would be more growth-minded, less constrained by fear of deficits. More Keynes and New Deal, less balanced-budget amendment.

These are not radically novel views to express in early 2021. An excellent, long New York Times Magazine story by Noam Scheiber recently went into this shift, as do frequent reports in The Atlantic and practically every other publication. Personally I’m all in favor of the change, toward a Keynesian/New-New Deal mentality—but my point for the moment is that this mayor volunteered it as the coming trend.

“I have a sense that we’re moving toward an environment where there’s broader support for public spending,” he said. “And that is exactly what cities need. In one word, infrastructure. Roads and bridges and sewers”—and, obviously, electric power systems. “They’re getting old, and they’re expensive to rebuild. My sense is not only that we need it, but that we’re in a political moment where it may be possible.”

That is the drama we’ll be seeing play out on the national stage, as the new administration at the national level either can or cannot enact its new policies. And we’ll see the real test of effectiveness, adaptability, and innovation played out as the policies are implemented city by city, region by region, and state by state.

That too would have resonance with the original New Deal, when the big, sweeping changes that were launched from Washington often drew from earlier experimentation at the local or state level—and took different effects as applied place-by-place. If national-level policy, in the Biden era, is now trying to support economic recovery and renewal of left-behind areas, ideas on how to do that, and the experimentations and implementations on getting it done, are largely going to occur at the local level. (In The Washington Monthly, Daniel Block has a new piece on how a federal renewal effort can best take advantage of the local ability to adapt and innovate.)

As a prelude to more chronicles of this national-local and rural-urban interaction, here are a few leads to reports, ideas, and developments worth note.

Reimagine Appalachia: This is one of the most interesting and ambitious regional-renewal developments now underway. The heart of the idea is to convert America’s stereotypically coal-dependent Ohio River Valley into a center of renewable energy and other forward-looking technologies. You can read an introduction to the project by Bill Lucia at the Route Fifty site here, and see the main site here. A summary of the Reimagine “blueprint” is available on PDF here, and the full blueprint is in a downloadable PDF here.

“Appalachians have a long history of hard work, resilience, and coming together to face enormous challenges,” the blueprint begins. “… Now is the time to put our ingenuity to use and imagine a 21st century economy that works for the people in the Ohio River Valley of Appalachia.” Among the specifics in its proposals, and of more obvious importance after the Texas electric-grid disaster, is a call to modernize the electric and broadband grid of the region, specifically with infrastructure projects involving union jobs:

The Rural Electrification Program, a New Deal innovation, brought electricity to rural areas in Appalachia and the South, where there was no market or financial incentive for private capital to invest ….

It is time for an upgrade: the Rural Grid Modernization Program. Policymakers must invest in a modern rural grid that brings efficient and affordable energy to industries and families. Like the Rural Electrification Program, this program will create tens of thousands of construction, maintenance and utility jobs. Unlike the Rural Electrification Program, this time policymakers must make sure the investment benefits all of us, no matter what we look like or where we live ...

We need a smarter grid, with more efficient and decentralized generation built by union labor, including utility-scale solar farms on remediated brownfields …. [And] High quality, affordable broadband is foundational for a prosperous 21st century Appalachia.

As this passage mentions, in the 1930s the Rural Electrification Administration genuinely transformed much of rural America, by bringing electric power to rural and impoverished places that had never had it before. The imprint was such that, when he was campaigning for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter could remind crowds in the South about the difference the REA had made in his own life, and many of theirs. (Carter spent his boyhood in a farmhouse in rural Georgia with no electric power.) Today’s electric grid needs modernization everywhere; the gap in rural and urban broadband coverage is a rough parallel to the rural-electrification inequalities that the New Deal set out to correct.

When Deb and I can travel again, we look forward to seeing and reporting on some of the Reimagine projects and sites.

“Why Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide Might Save Our Lives”: That is the title of an interview by Maddie Oatman, in Mother Jones, with Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cramer is the author of The Politics of Resentment, a book on the way that “rural consciousness” in Wisconsin paved the way first for Scott Walker as governor, and then for Donald Trump. She has a number of practical tips about reviving the New Deal/REA-type spirit of “we’re all in this together.” For instance:

What has worked for me has been to be with people on their own turf, and just stop talking as quickly as possible. And make it clear that you’re there, whether it’s virtually or in person, to listen and not to convince them of anything, not to persuade them to behave a certain way, but basically to say, ‘What are your concerns? What are your challenges? What is life like here?’ It’s so valuable in a lot of ways because it conveys respect.

As Deb and I have noted countless times in this space, the questions to ask definitely do not include: “What do you think about [Trump / Biden / Obama / Limbaugh / Fox News / the mainstream media]?” or any other instantly polarizing question. Ask one of those, and you’ll never hear anything enlightening. Ask “what is life like here,” and it’s like opening a novel.

Katherine Cramer also has advice on how public-health officials could get across word about the pandemic, masks, and vaccines:

I would send the most down-to-earth ambassadors to local talk radio programs. I would, I’m not kidding. Radio has a lot of power in rural America. A lot of times there’s no other local media. And a lot of these folks have jobs for which they can have radio on in the background the whole time. A lot of times these tractor cabs have satellite radio, all the bells and whistles for really good radio reception. Also they drive a lot, whether it’s to shop or, when school is in session, to get their kids to and from school.

These talk radio shows, they’re like little on-air communities where the callers seem to recognize each other, and the host recognizes the callers, and I think they’re really important sources of opinion leadership.

Also from Mother Jones, see “There’s No Such Thing as Trump Country,” by Becca Andrews, about the stereotyping damage it does to lump rural America into that category.

Relocation plans: This report from Uri Berliner of NPR, and this in the Wall Street Journal by Kerry Thompson, look at the ways in which smaller cities (plus some big ones, like Tulsa) are trying to attract residents who might otherwise head to Chicago or Atlanta—and how the dislocations wrought by the pandemic might change rural/urban patterns. Northwest Arkansas is investing more than $1 million in a program called Life Works Here, which offers a $10,000 cash incentive (and other bonuses) for people to move to the region

Resources and guides. Here’s a list of ones to consider:

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, which is designed to support local business efforts, and has a new study on lessons from Appalachia

“Reopen Main Street,” from the Michigan Main Street organization. This is a library of tips and guides for small businesses that are struggling to survive during the pandemic shutdowns and to recover afterwards.

Community colleges: On the EdNC site, Nation Hahn has a report on how Southeastern Community College, in rural North Carolina, is trying to lead an economic recovery in its county. And in Chalkbeat, Jason Gonzales explains how Colorado Northwestern Community College, in Colorado, is trying something similar for a local economy long dependent on coal.

“We’re Building a Vaccine Corps.” In an essay for The Conversation, Michael Collins, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, proposes another New Deal-inspired project. In essence this would enlist health-care professionals and students in an emergency effort to get Americans vaccinated. As Collins says:

“As new, potentially more dangerous variants of this coronavirus spread to new regions, widespread vaccination is one of the most powerful and effective ways to slow, if not stop, the virus’s spread.

“Mobilizing large “vaccine corps” could help to meet this urgent need.

“We’re testing that concept right now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where I am the chancellor. So far, 500 of our students and hundreds of community members have volunteered for vaccine corps roles. Our graduate nursing and medical students, under the direction of local public health leaders, have already been vaccinating first responders and vulnerable populations, demonstrating that a vaccine corps can be a force multiplier for resource-strained departments of public health.”

Going Home. Steve Grove grew up in Minnesota; went to college in California; worked on the East Coast and overseas (including as an intern at The Atlantic, when it was based in Boston); and then spent a decade at Google. He was head of News and Politics at YouTube, and ran the Google News Lab. Then in 2019 he went back to Minnesota to take what he calls “a government job,” as Commissioner of Employment and Economic Development for the state. Recently Grove wrote an essay for CNN called “I left Google for a government job. Why more people should do the same.” Very much worth reading.

Speaking of government jobs: The Federal Writers’ Project was one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal innovators. Team Biden, get on it!

How Michael Jones Changed Our Daily Lives

2021-01-26T13:07:42-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Last week, at his home in Sunnyvale, California, a man named Michael T. Jones died of cancer, at age 60. This past weekend the local San Jose Mercury-News ran an appreciation of him and summary of his career, which you can read here. He is mourned by the many friends he made over the decades, of course most of all by his wife, June, with whom he recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.

I considered Michael Jones a good friend, and someone with the too-rare combination of intellectual brilliance and temperamental big-heartedness. It was because of both factors—his virtuosity in the technological world, and his generosity on a personal level—that he was a leading figure in an Atlantic article I wrote ten years ago, called “Hacked.” The article described what happened after the email account and related electronic identities of my wife, Deb, were taken over by a hacker.

Courtesy of June Jones

Remember those phony emails you used to get, from what appeared to be a friend’s account? “I regret to inform you that I have been mugged in Manila. Please wire me $10,000 immediately, and include your banking details,” etc. Deb’s account was an early vector for such a scam—pulled off by a hacker, later traced to West Africa, whose first step was to permanently erase the entirety of her existing messages. Michael Jones was at the time the Chief Technology Advocate for the Google company as a whole—a job title invented specifically for him—and, as explained in the article, he helped me understand exactly how the hackers worked; how tech companies were trying to keep ahead of them; and how, eventually, many years’ worth of Deb’s correspondence could be retrieved.

Also I learned: Always use two-factor sign-on systems!

Deb and I had known Michael for several years at that point. I first met him at a tech-world conference where he and colleagues from a small company called Keyhole were describing a new digital-mapping product they had developed. In 2004, Google acquired that Keyhole company and its software, which in turn became the basis of Google Earth. I don’t know how many people around the world would recognize Michael Jones’s name or be aware of his story. But by most reckonings at least a billion people around the world, every day, use the company’s mapping tools—Google Earth, Google Maps, and related products—to get through traffic, to find out if a store is open, to see how their house looks from above. That last example is deliberate: When demonstrating Google Earth’s aerial view to me in the program’s early stages, Michael said that the first thing nearly all users did was enter their own address and zoom in on it.

In 2013, I did a Q-and-A with Michael Jones in the magazine on how always-available mapping had already changed daily life, and what changes lay ahead. One of his answers illustrated his constant linking of technology and the humanities. (Although his formal education lasted only through one year at North Carolina State University, he was deeply informed about history and literature, and their connections with technology). He likened the rise of digital mapping tools to previous revolutions in systematized knowledge:

I would consider this [digitized mapping] like Dr. Johnson’s compilation of a dictionary of the English language, or maybe the rise of the encyclopedia. It’s the creation of a universal reference work, reflecting a lot of labor and great expense, that everybody can rely on.

If you think about Dr. Johnson’s dictionary from the point of view of English literature, you might say, “Well, Johnson—he did a dictionary.” But what else could you do with words on a piece of paper? Maybe you could write mysteries, or comedy, or adventure stories. You can do a lot of things with the words in his dictionary.

We think there will be a new literature from the mapping dictionary that’s now being built.

And another answer reflected what I can only call a boyish joy in discovery and learning, which lasted through his final days. I asked what had surprised him in the effects of mapping technology, and he said that one bad surprise was the touchiness of many governments about geographical-labeling issues. But:

A better surprise has to do with the interest of people in geography.

Geography was a class that few embraced in school. In elementary school, they make you color in maps to show where the oceans and continents are. And yet, when we were starting Keyhole, we read a report that one-fifth of American elementary-school students couldn’t point out the Pacific Ocean on a map.

We thought, “This is wrong. We’re going to fix this problem. We’re going to make learning about the Earth fun, instead of boring …. ”

We were saying … “We are going to make discovering the Earth a joy”—like you’re dating a planet and you want to know it, to hear all about its past and hopes. That’s what we did: we made something immersive and engaging and personal. You can fly to your home—fly to your parents’ home—and remember the time you snuck out in the backyard and did something you shouldn’t do, or the place where you had a first kiss, or the place you got married.

What we didn’t expect was how many people would share that joy with us.

Such was Michael’s polymath curiosity that he also discovered the truth about the unavoidable “boiled frog” cliché. It turns out, as Michael reported here, that a frog will indeed sit still in a pot of gradually heated water, just as the cliché holds. But it will do so only if its brain has already been removed. A normal, sentient frog will hop out as soon as things get too warm. It occurred to a German scientist to demonstrate this experimentally in the late 1800s.

Last summer, the Royal Geographical Society in London awarded Michael Jones its highest honor, its Patron’s Medal, as I noted at the time. He did a revealing interview with the RGS, about the meanings of maps, of geography, and of the inventor’s temperament. In an outtake version of that interview, which June Jones shared with me, Michael said this:

Everyone is an inventor; you need only ignore limits and preconceptions then ask yourself “how should it be?” Inventors are just laborers toiling to make things be as we feel they should.

For me, a key trait is passion for ideas, loving them as parents love children and grandchildren: embracing them, sacrificing for them, excusing the worst and believing the best of them, being patient and supportive with an enduring love as they mature. Like children, they take time to develop into the brightness of their promise.

I have been this way all my life.

I miss Michael Jones and am glad to have known him. Those who never met or knew of him should pause in appreciation of what he and others like him have done.

Why Biden’s Inaugural Address Succeeded

2021-01-22T11:18:10-05:00

Political speeches follow a surprisingly simple set of rules—or at least the successful ones do. Newly sworn-in President Joe Biden observed them all in his inaugural address. Although his 20 minutes at the lectern are not likely to be parsed and studied for rhetorical flourishes, with this speech Biden accomplished something more important: He signaled how he will approach this job and this moment in history.

The first rule in political rhetoric is authenticity. Does the essence of the speech—its vocabulary, its rhythms, its cadences, its tendencies toward “plain” versus “fancy” tone—match the essence of the speaker? Does the rhetoric call attention to itself? Or does it mainly serve to transmit the mood, intention, and ideas the speaker hopes to convey?

Martin Luther King Jr. was modern America’s greatest rhetorician. But the very words and cadences of his speeches that have gone down in history—“I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the promised land”—would have sounded forced and stagey from most other prominent Americans. They would not have rung true even from the first Black president, Barack Obama, whose single greatest speech—his “Amazing Grace” elegy for the victims of the racist gun massacre in Charleston, South Carolina—was delivered at the historic Mother Emanuel Church, where King himself once spoke.

[David A. Graham: A sermon in America’s civic religion]

Obama’s eloquence, as I once argued here, is in the paragraph-scale development of ideas, rather than the sentence-by-sentence coinage of standalone phrases. The American politician I can most imagine presenting a Martin Luther King speech and sounding authentic would have been Barbara Jordan, the late Democratic Representative from Texas—who indeed gave a very King-like speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1976.

When it comes to rhetoric, many politicians would love to be considered another King, another FDR, another Jordan, another Churchill. But the wisest of them aspire to sound like the best possible version of themselves. (And the wisest of speechwriters aspire to make their own work invisible—to serve, in essence, as glaziers, creating transparent panes through which the speaker’s intent can be most clearly seen.)

Joe Biden sounded like the best version of himself on Inauguration Day. Few if any of the sentences he uttered will be chiseled into marble. The exception illustrating the rule was Biden’s summary statement about foreign policy: “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” This line, which he has used in other speeches (and which Bill Clinton also used in his speech nominating Obama back in 2008), was both a distillation of a swing away from Trumpism (as Fred Kaplan observed) and a handy case study of the rhetorical technique called chiasmus, or reversing terms. (Homely example: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s …” High-flown example: “Ask not what your country can do for you …”)

But the speech in its entirety was admirably plain and direct, and therefore plausible. It sounded not like John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama or Franklin D. Roosevelt or any other Democratic president, but like Joe Biden. It sounded like the vice president who served loyally for eight years under Obama, like the candidate who struck and stayed true to a “Can’t we just get along?” tone from the start of his 2020 campaign, like the president-elect who would not rise to the bait of Donald Trump’s taunts or sink to the depths of his discourse but instead calmly reasserted his plans to address the nation’s crises. (But it also sounded like the person who had learned from the bitter fights Obama had when trying to get his legislation and nominees approved, and from the assault on the democratic process itself launched by Trump and many of his allies.) The speech’s tone matched the speaker, and thus the tone was right.

[Daniel T. Rodgers: America desperately needs a new age of moral leadership]

The second rule in political rhetoric is realism. A speaker must seem to understand the world in which the listeners live. By definition, a president, prime minister, or other leader operates from a privileged and powerful perspective. But the effective ones open their ears, their minds, their hearts—and ultimately their voices—to the hardships of their society, and also the long-term hopes. This is why virtually every effective speech in a time of crisis follows a three-part sequence: empathy, for the pain, fear, uncertainty, and suffering people are going through, for instance at the beginning of the Great Depression, after surprise attacks like those at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11, and during civil unrest or a pandemic; confidence, about the strains and struggles the society has withstood before, and thus about the hope of success again; and a plan, about ways to turn things around. (“In our first 100 days, we will …”)

If a speaker omits the first part, listeners feel that their government is hopelessly out of touch. If a speaker omits the second, it’s all the harder to make progress. Despair is a poor motivating tool. And without the third, hopeful promises are “just talk.”

Joe Biden made good on all parts of this formula. His speech was coldly realistic about the bleak prospects ahead—from the pandemic, from economic collapse, from the climate crisis, from the assault on democracy and truth. He called for a moment of silence in memory of the 400,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19, “a silent prayer for those who lost their lives, for those they left behind, and for our country.” In calling repeatedly for “unity,” he seemed aware of forces who do not share that goal. He summed up the larger situation, again with trademark plainness of language and non-sugarcoating of reality:

We face an attack on democracy and on truth.

A raging virus.

Growing inequity.

The sting of systemic racism.

A climate in crisis.

America’s role in the world.

Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways.

But then Biden switched to the theme of becoming, which has been at the heart of all great American rhetoric. The idea of the endless process of improvement links the authors of the Constitution’s ambition to form “a more perfect Union” to Abraham Lincoln’s appeals in all of his major addresses, to Martin Luther King and “I have a dream,” and to virtually all of the presentations at Biden’s inaugural ceremony, including the memorable poem by Amanda Gorman (“A nation that isn’t broken / but simply unfinished”).

On the campaign trail, Biden frequently fell into the pattern of saying “Folks, we’re better than this.” The proper formulation—the realistic and convincing formulation—is “We should be better than this. We can be better.” What I think of as “conditional optimism”—not the naive assumption that things automatically will get better, but the determined conviction that they can– was the central motif of his speech, and of all the presentations of the day. As Biden put it:

We will be judged, you and I, for how we resolve the cascading crises of our era.

Will we rise to the occasion?

Will we master this rare and difficult hour?

Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world for our children?

I believe we must and I believe we will.

And when we do, we will write the next chapter in the American story.

Memorable line by line? No. Effective and right for the moment? In my view, yes—and, again, absolutely in keeping with the day’s explicit and symbolic presentation as a whole. And fortunately, Biden did not have to belabor the “Here is my plan” part of his presentation, both because his speech was already getting long, by inaugural-address standards, and because a few days before being sworn in, he had given a very detailed address about what he proposed to do.

The third rule in political rhetoric, which applies to most speeches but above all to inaugural addresses, is to tell two stories. One of those stories is “Who we are.” The other story is “Who I am.”

“Who we are” is the story of the country: where it stands along history’s arc, what it can hope and what it must fear, what its strengths and shortcomings are. “Who I am” is the story of the person taking responsibility to lead.

[John Dickerson: Boring is better]

The “who we are” part of the saga is as listed above: a nation that is unfinished rather than broken, that is bloodied but unbowed. The “who I am” was an explicit and implicit presentation of a man who understands others’ suffering, who himself knows the unpredictability and cruelty of fate, who thinks of the country as us rather than us and them:

We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.

If we show a little tolerance and humility.

If we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes just for a moment.

Because here is the thing about life: There is no accounting for what fate will deal you.

There are some days when we need a hand.

There are other days when we’re called on to lend one.

That is how we must be with one another.

I cannot remember a presidential address in which the values of the speaker’s faith were as evident as in this one—and not through loud exhortations of piety but through statements and commitments reflecting compassion and empathy. The one line I wrote down as soon as Biden said it was this, playing off a quote from Lincoln upon his signing the Emancipation Proclamation:

Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this:

Bringing America together.

Uniting our people.

And uniting our nation.

My whole soul. The president for whom I worked long ago, Jimmy Carter (whose absence from the ceremonies Biden graciously acknowledged in his speech), similarly based his campaign on the need for moral balm, after a disastrous decade. He was (and is) deeply spiritual, but I don’t remember him so plainly talking about devoting his whole soul to the nation’s cause.

Joe Biden might not prove to be the right person for this moment. As I argued recently in this magazine, he takes office facing more emergencies than any predecessor since Lincoln. But his own story and his version of the country’s match as well as any president’s could at the beginning of a term.

Time for Consequences

2021-01-10T12:03:30-05:00

The most immediate challenge any new president faces is deciding what not to do. For Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the catastrophes of the past four days have not radically changed the way they should make those choices. One week ago, it was imperative that they mainly look forward, to the public-health, economic, and foreign-affairs emergencies that they are inheriting. That is still their duty and imperative now. But for the rest of the government, and much of society, the barbaric and potentially catastrophic storming of the U.S. Capitol, and the culpability of public and private figures who egged the mob on, demand a response. The response of Congress should be to impeach; that of law enforcement should be to arrest and prosecute every participant who can be identified; and that of civil society should be to ensure that there are consequences for those who chose violence and fascism at a decisive moment in the country’s history. Usually “letting bygones be bygones” is wise advice for individuals and for societies. Not in this case.

In the current issue of The Atlantic, I quote Jack Watson, who was centrally involved in two presidential transitions, on the imbalance between the countless hopes, goals, and ambitions with which any new presidency begins, and the handful of challenges it simply cannot ignore. “You have to separate what must be done, soon, from all the other things you might want to do later in the administration,” Watson said.

For this new president and vice president, clearheadedness about this choice is more important, and more difficult, than it was for nearly any of their predecessors. It’s more important because they are moving into a house that’s on fire. They are taking responsibility for a range of emergencies not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt followed Herbert Hoover in 1933, and exceeded only by what Abraham Lincoln faced in 1861. Just a few items on a very long list are a surging pandemic, a damaged and unsustainably imbalanced economy, and a governing system whose basic principles are under direct attack and whose operational competence has been hollowed out.

And their decisions are harder than for most new administrations, because in addition to looking forward, to all the problems they are now supposed to solve, they must look backward, to reckoning with what Donald Trump and his enablers have done. As I said in the magazine article, “As he prepares to occupy the White House, President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do about the man who has just left office, whose personal corruption, disdain for the Constitution, and destructive mismanagement of the federal government are without precedent.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s Removal Is Taking Too Long]

In that article, which was completed two months ago, just after the election, I set out a triage system for how the Biden-Harris team should make these choices. To boil it down, I argued:

On matters of corruption, they should leave the work to state-government authorities, in New York and elsewhere, who already have investigations under way. And for possible violations of federal law, from ignoring the Hatch Act to impeding the U.S. Postal Service, they should appoint an eminent, independent attorney general, and also inspectors general in the executive-level departments, and leave the rest to them. (I did not name Merrick Garland in this article but had in mind someone like him.)
On corrosion of federal competence, from the State Department to the CDC, a new president can and must act directly and immediately. Of the 4,000 political-appointment positions in the executive branch, some 3,000 do not require Senate confirmation. The Biden team can and should get them in place, right away. And because the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia have put the Democrats in control of the Senate, Biden can get the other 1,000 in position without undue delay.
On the catastrophes of this era, from pandemic management to the rise of white-supremacist violence, I suggested longer-term responses a new administration could authorize and encourage. These would include the creation of top-level national commissions, on the model of the Kerner Commission on racial justice in the 1960s or the 9/11 Commission after the attacks of 2001, as the least polarizing, most promising ways to deal with white-hot public crises. (For more on what commissions can and cannot do, see the article.)

All of that was “before”—before a sitting president and several U.S. senators (and the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice) cheered on an insurrectionist horde, before that horde broke into the Capitol and rubbed excrement along its walls, before the Confederate flag was trooped inside a space that had been the seat of Union government. And before eight U.S. senators and 139 representatives—all Republicans, the representatives making up most of the GOP delegation in the House—voted to overturn Electoral College results, for the first time in American history. Now it is “after.” How has the calculation changed?

For Biden and Harris, the right path remains what it had been. Their main job is to cope with the emergencies at hand. Vaccines and resources to deal with the pandemic. Relief, renewal, and innovation to address the grossly uneven effects of economic collapse. Investments, vision, and coordination to make “Build back better” more than just a slogan. The nation’s recovery depends on their focus on such tasks—not to mention their political fortunes, and the Democratic Party’s.

[Read: Americans Were Worried About the Wrong Threat]

The new president and vice president can’t afford to look back. The rest of us have to. The person with the most individual responsibility for this week’s carnage is, of course, Trump. He is stained, culpable, unfit, and forever disgraced. But that is who he has always been—as I argued in 152 “Time Capsule” installments during his 2016 rise, and as he prefigured in his appalling “American Carnage” inaugural address.

Trump could not have fulfilled his dark potential without a complaisant, also culpable supporting cast. That includes a political organization that converted itself from the “Grand Old Party” to a group of “Vichy Republicans,” who cowered rather than standing up to Trump. It includes a highly partisan press claque that magnified Trump’s lies (as Margaret Sullivan has again emphasized), and a self-consciously nonpartisan mainstream press that seemed terrified of using the word lie. (The safe-harbor alternative was without evidence. In other times, this would have given us, “Without evidence, Soviets claim to have landed first on the moon,” or “Without evidence, Richard Nixon claims not to be a crook.”) And it includes social-media companies, notably Facebook and Twitter, that have knowingly been crucial parts of the ecosystem of disinformation. Twitter provided Trump a megaphone for lies and incitement for nearly a decade, until its overdue but welcome decision to deny him an untrammeled platform. Facebook’s own employees have protested the role it played.

These groups acted as they did because they feared the consequences of doing otherwise. The GOP and Fox News info system feared the wrath of Trump and the passions of the base he kept ever more fervently riled up. (The blunt refusal to cower to Trump, by resolutely conservative GOP election officials in Georgia, has drawn so much attention because it is so rare.) The mainstream media acted as they did largely because of a culture that feared criticism for “taking sides.” The social-media companies feared giving up the convenient pose that they were strictly “platforms,” as opposed to being “publishers,” and therefore could not be held responsible for what appeared on their sites. (This is apart from the numerous signs of shared worldview between Donald Trump and his allies, and prominent Facebook officials, including Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Joel Kaplan. Zuckerberg’s role is of course all-important: In addition to being Facebook’s chairman and CEO, he personally controls more than 50 percent of the company’s entire “voting shares,” giving him unconstrained one-man decision-making power over arguably the most influential media outlet in the world.)

Few consequences existed for going along—for standing with a president for whom many senators and representatives express their private contempt (always private), for describing as “controversial” or “without evidence” views that reporters knew to be flat-out lies, for letting social-media technology become the organizational backbone of disinformation and hate. These behaviors, which erode democratic governance in the long run, have carried too few consequences in the here and now. (Consider how freely GOP politicians and officials start criticizing Trump once they’ve stepped down.) The results of these skewed risk/reward calculations are predictable. Day by day, vote by vote, story by story, people make choices that they won’t be proud of later on.

In her latest Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan, the onetime Ronald Reagan speechwriter, made an impassioned argument for, as she put it, lowering the boom on those directly and indirectly responsible for the desecration of the Capitol. “When something like this happens it tends to be repeated,” she wrote. “It is our job to make sure it is not. And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.”

Those instigators, she wrote, began with Trump but included the congressional Republicans who stood with him and against the peaceful transfer of power, notably Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. “They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed”—Hawley a product of Yale Law School, Cruz of Harvard Law. “Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.”

Actions should have consequences, and consequences will affect future actions. How could consequences be adjusted after this week? A non-exhaustive starter list:

Impeachment. Nearly two years ago, Yoni Appelbaum argued in an Atlantic cover story that Trump had already far passed the threshold that would justify impeachment. Now any typical week’s news contains several more potential entries in a bill of impeachment. The recent hour-long taped phone call, in which Trump begged and threatened Georgia election officials to change their state’s vote count, is now seemingly forgotten, but it exceeded everything alleged or suspected about Richard Nixon. Trump’s overt incitement to riot, through tweets and in a speech on the morning of January 6, is fresher in memory and was incomparably worse.

Given the calendar, even a successful impeachment effort is not likely to remove Trump from office much faster than the constitutional deadline will. But it will force members of his party to go on the record for him or against him. It would signal to the world, and to our own country, an awareness that something terrible has happened, and cannot happen again. Societies that shrink from, fictionalize, or paper over the ugliest parts of their past invite even uglier episodes. The claims that impeachment would be “divisive,” advanced by many of the same people who tried to overturn the resounding Biden-Harris win, should be “dismissed with prejudice,” as the legal terminology goes. And in practical terms, a successful impeachment, meaning a two-thirds margin for conviction in the Senate, could bar Trump from holding any federal office again—in turn limiting the destructive black-hole effect he could have on the next presidential race.

The House will consider bills of impeachment tomorrow. It should pass them. The Senate should vote to convict. If, in his final days as Senate majority leader, the ineffable Mitch McConnell refuses to bring the measure to a vote, then Republican senators who present themselves as principled—Mitt Romney? Lisa Murkowski? Ben Sasse? Pat Toomey? Susan Collins?—should agree to caucus with the Democrats for the remaining days until January 20, thus making Chuck Schumer the majority leader, with power to set the schedule. They can always switch back later, if they’d like to rejoin the GOP in its new, post-Georgia minority-party status. (Schumer will, of course, become the majority leader anyway, and McConnell the leader of the minority, after Harris is sworn in as vice president and the 50–50 Senate lineup shifts to the Democrats’ favor.)

Reputation. This matters to people, in practical and emotional terms. Cabinet members and White House staffers are discovering that Trump has at last gone “too far,” and are trying to leap from his diminishing ice floe back onto firmer ground. Resigning “on principle” at this point is a cheap stunt and should be seen as such. It is worse than a stunt for Cabinet members, including Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos, in that it spares them the obligation of taking a side in a Twenty-Fifth Amendment vote to remove Trump from office. Having stayed with Trump, and having lied or dissembled on his behalf, should lastingly stain his associates’ reputations.

In an extraordinary video he released today, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who grew up in post-Nazi Austria, likened the violence at the Capitol to the anti-Semitic Kristallnacht rampage of 1938, “which was carried out by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.” Schwarzenegger said that Trump was most to blame for the lies and hatred that led to the violence. But, he added, “what are we make of those elected officials who have enabled his lies and his treachery?”

The time to stand against Trump was early in 2016, when he was taking over the party; or later that year, when he was en route to taking control of the government; or at latest the beginning of 2020, when Romney was the only Republican member of the House or Senate to vote to remove him from power. Seeing the light when the light has become blinding does not count. (Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post has a typically brilliant new column on this theme: “I see no choice but to resign from this Death Star as it begins to explode.”) Senators Cruz and Hawley might prefer to be known for other things, but the dominant item on their résumé should always be their role in the disaster of January 6.

[Evelyn Douek: Trump Is Banned. Who Is Next?]

The press and social media. Having written 1,000 times in recent years about the mainstream press’s dangerous attachment to “both sides” reportage, I will not write today installment 1,001. Instead I will point toward related analyses from Margaret Sullivan, Jay Rosen, Greg Sargent, and Eric Boehlert, to name a few. The “established” press, and the new digital and social media, has not caught up with the realities of this era—and has to adapt much more quickly than it has so far. (In The Atlantic, Evelyn Douek has a new essay on the practical steps social-media companies should take.) Otherwise only the final two words of Zuckerberg’s notorious “Move fast and break things” dictum will describe its effect.

The mechanics of democracy. The Vichy Republican efforts of the past year have been in direct service of Donald Trump. But their indirect targets have been the fundamentals of American democracy as a whole, of which the most important is a willingness by the losers to respect an election’s outcome. Al Gore’s concession, after his 5–4 defeat in the infamous Bush v. Gore ruling of 2000, is the extreme case of fealty to this principle. Trump’s relentless war against the 2020 outcome is the opposite extreme. As I write, it now appears that Trump will, in the end, give up office, or be forced from it. But (as the Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said after the Battle of Waterloo) it was a close-run thing. The outcome was never guaranteed.

Democracy is not self-maintaining. It has come close to breaking down. Beverly Gage and Emily Bazelon have a new article in The New York Times with specific proposals for preserving it. Once again, I’ll recommend this report, from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on proposals that are both sweeping and practical.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s main contribution to the defense of democracy should be to faithfully execute the office they have democratically attained. The rest of us need to get to work on these other fronts.

What Post-pandemic Repair Could Look Like

2020-12-11T14:49:25-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

The pandemic ravaged America’s big cities first, and now its countryside. The public-health and economic repercussions have been felt everywhere. But they have been hardest on the smallest businesses, and the most vulnerable families and communities.

This is an update, following a report last month, on plans to repair the damage now being done.

1) What the federal government can do: The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a group concentrating on the business-structure, technological, political, and other obstacles that have held small cities and rural areas back—and how they might be reversed.

This month the ILSR released a report on steps the federal government could take to foster business and civic renewal at the local level. The report is available in PDF here, and a summary is here. The larger argument is designed to:

… help the federal government avoid the mistakes made in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis …

Rather than the housing sector [as in the previous crisis], the current economic fallout is decimating America’s small businesses. Nearly 100,000 small, independent businesses have already closed their doors permanently, with Black-owned businesses taking the biggest hit. As of early November, small business revenue was down a stunning 31 percent from January. As small businesses close or hang on by their fingernails, meanwhile, a handful of big corporations are recording massive profits, increasing their already-dominant market share, and dramatically accelerating concentration of the economy….

People are losing their dreams and livelihoods. Neighborhoods are losing beloved local stores and gathering spots. The country is losing much of its local productive capacity. To answer this generational challenge, we must have a federal economic recovery strategy focused on rebuilding, creating, and growing America’s small, independent businesses.

The report covers large policy areas—a different approach to antitrust—and very tangible specifics, like the way credit-card processing fees are handled. It is certainly worth consideration by the Biden team. (And, in the same vein, here is another worthwhile piece, by Maddie Oatman in Mother Jones, on the importance of economic prospects for rural America.)

2) What some state governments can do (a California model): Responding to a crisis that is both global and intensely local naturally involves a combination of measures—international efforts to detect and contain disease, nationwide economic strategies, and city-by-city and state-by-state responses to the problems and opportunities of each locale.

California, which has roughly one-eighth of the whole population of the United States and produces roughly one-seventh of U.S. economic output, also has been responsible for an outsize proportion of innovations. Some of them have run afoul or amok, as Mark Paul and Joe Mathews described a decade ago in their book The California Crackup (and as I mentioned in this 2013 profile of Jerry Brown). Others are a positive model for other states and the nation as a whole—notably, a non-partisan, anti-gerrymandering approach to drawing political-district lines. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor when this reform came in, has been taking the anti-gerrymandering cause nationwide, as Edward-Isaac Dovere reported here.

One of California’s innovations that deserves broader attention is its “Little Hoover Commission.” After World War II, current president Harry Truman appointed former president Herbert Hoover to head a commission looking into broad questions of government organization and efficiency. That was the “big” Hoover Commission.

California’s “Little Hoover Commission” counterpart was created in 1962 and was meant to be a permanent, independent, non-partisan source of oversight and expertise about the state’s long-term challenges, and the state government’s response to them. In my new print-magazine article, I argue that, on the national level, formal commissions have played a surprisingly important role in investigating calamities (the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the 9/11 attacks) or assessing crises and trends (educational failures, resegregation and racial justice). California has, in effect, institutionalized this kind of non-partisan inquiry.

This month, the Little Hoover Commission has released its report on how badly the pandemic-era economic implosion is hurting businesses and families in California, and what might be done about it. The executive summary is here, and the full report is here.

I won’t attempt to summarize the whole thing here, but in essence their recommendation is an emergency effort to link public and private resources of all sorts—individual donors, NGOs, corporations, financial institutions—in a “rebuilding fund.” The fund, in turn, would concentrate on small businesses, and especially those in disadvantaged communities. One of its recommendations:

The state needs to use its megaphone to make financial institutions, private investors, and philanthropic donors aware of the Rebuilding Fund and to encourage high-net-worth individuals, impact investors, and major corporations to lend and/or donate to the Rebuilding Fund.

This may include working with regional business councils to disseminate information about the Rebuilding Fund and explain why it is vital to support small businesses, especially those in underserved communities. It may also include fully leveraging existing state investment networks..

In order to encourage investment, GO-Biz and IBank should also develop a strategy for publicly recognizing institutional investors and explore additional means for incentivizing participation.

In parallel with this effort, two California-based business-and-economic authorities, Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca, have put out a paper on the urgency of a new federal stimulus program. (For the record, both of them are friends of mine.) They say:

It is incumbent on the federal government to provide more generous and flexible funding for state and local governments. Governors and mayors across the country are pleading for help ahead of a challenging winter. Most states and cities have exhausted rainy-day funds and are facing a collective shortfall of $400 billion or more, according to the most recent estimates.

Because most state and local governments cannot legally spend more than they receive in revenues, they need federal funds to cover their growing fiscal gaps. Without such support, they will have no choice but to raise taxes or cut essential services and employment in health, public safety, and education, as many are already doing. Either option will undermine the countercyclical effects of federal stimulus, thereby weakening the recovery.

At the fiat of Mitch McConnell, the U.S. Senate seems likely to end this year without addressing the states’ and cities’ needs. Many states and cities are improvising in useful ways, but national crises require a national response. Help!

(And while I am at it, here is another locally based initiative to create more supportive ecosystems for entrepreneurs.)

3) Ways around the college-degree bottleneck: Research universities and four-year colleges are simultaneously the glory and the heartbreak of America’s educational system. They’re the glory for obvious reasons. They’re the heartbreak because of the financial challenges for many liberal-arts schools, and the student-debt burdens for millions of young people, and the factors that can make higher education reinforce existing privileges, rather than offset them.

The negative power of judging people purely by sheepskin credentials is very familiar. (I actually did an Atlantic cover story about it 35 years ago, here.) But a positive counterpart in the past few years has been rapidly opening pathways to careers that don’t require a four-year degree. That’s what we’ve emphasized in our reports on community colleges, “career technical” programs in high schools, apprenticeship systems, and other ways of matching people with the opportunities of this moment.

Last week The New York Times had a story by Steve Lohr with the headline, “Up to 30 Million in U.S. Have the Skills to Earn 70% More, Researchers Say.”

This is a great headline that conveys the essential point: There are opportunities (post-pandemic) for people who for various reasons have not completed the four-year bachelor’s gantlet. More information is available at Opportunity@Work and through the Rework America Alliance. (For the record, I know many of the people involved in the Opportunity and Reword initiatives.)

As with previous dispatches, none of these approaches is “the” answer to this era’s many crises. But they’re all potential parts of an answer. They deserve attention.

How Biden Should Investigate Trump

2020-12-09T06:00:00-05:00

This article was published online on December 9, 2020.

I. A Crimes Commission?

As he prepares to occupy the White House, President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do about the man who has just left office, whose personal corruption, disdain for the Constitution, and destructive mismanagement of the federal government are without precedent.

Human beings crave reckoning, even the saintliest among us. Institutions based on rules and laws need systems of accountability. People inside and outside politics have argued forcefully that Biden should take, or at least condone, a maximalist approach to exposing and prosecuting the many transgressions by Donald Trump and his circle—that Biden can’t talk about where America is going without clearly addressing where it has been. In 2019, two professors at Princeton, Julian E. Zelizer and Kevin M. Kruse, argued that the most harmful response to Trump’s offenses would be for Democrats and Republicans to agree to look past them, in hopes of avoiding further partisan division. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from California, has proposed the creation of a Presidential Crimes Commission, made up of independent prosecutors. In the summer of 2020, Sam Berger of the Center for American Progress, an influential think tank with roots in the Clinton administration, released a detailed blueprint for conducting investigations and possibly prosecutions. It laid out the case this way:

Whenever the Trump administration ends, there may be good-faith concerns that addressing the administration’s misconduct will be too divisive, set a bad precedent, or lead to political pushback from the administration’s supporters. But the lesson from the past four years is clear: The absence of accountability is treated as license to escalate abuses of power.

Joe Biden, who improbably (or impressively) has lived through exactly one-third of America’s history as a republic, is well aware of this line of argument, and of the risks of papering over the sins of the past. He was in the Senate during the Watergate investigations and, later, when the Church Committee investigated Cold War–era crimes and excesses by the CIA. Modern history is replete with instances of societies that were hampered and distorted by their refusal to face difficult truths.

But how much time can Biden spend looking backwards? Many presidents have taken office with challenges, even crises, immediately at hand. The examples are familiar, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Biden’s challenges as he enters office are larger and appear on more fronts than any other president’s since Abraham Lincoln. He faces a global pandemic that is still getting worse, and an economy that the pandemic has brought to its knees. America’s relations with most of its allies are badly frayed. Conflicts with China are mounting. Many of the federal institutions Biden will supervise have been neglected for decades, and intentionally corrupted and weakened during the past four years. Trust in civic and political institutions has dwindled. For his own ends, the outgoing president has deliberately sought to sabotage the electoral process itself.

“Your most important decisions at the start are what to exclude,” Jack Watson told me recently. In 1976, Watson was in charge of Jimmy Carter’s transition-planning staff as Carter prepared to take over from Gerald Ford, and four years later, as White House chief of staff, he was Carter’s coordinator for the transition to Ronald Reagan. He went on: “You have to separate what must be done, soon, from all the other things you might want to do later in the administration.”

II. Time for Triage

Let’s survey the rubble of the moment’s landscape, imagining the way it will look to future historians. Joe Biden takes office in a strong position, and a weak one. The strength is his nationwide vote total, which as a share of the electorate is larger than Reagan’s in what was considered a landslide win over Carter in 1980. The Democratic Party, usually fractious, minimized its disagreements while Biden was running. He will serve with the first woman, the first Black woman, and the first person of South Asian heritage ever to become vice president. Incoming presidents typically get at least a temporary boost in their favorability ratings when they officially begin the job. Even before being sworn in, Biden had higher popularity ratings than Donald Trump ever enjoyed.

Biden’s obvious great weakness is that, depending on the outcome of the two runoff races in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will likely still control the Senate majority. McConnell, who publicly said in 2010 that his main ambition was to make Obama a one-term president, is too disciplined to be caught saying the same thing about Biden. But it will of course be his strategy, pursued mainly by adding friction to whatever Biden wants to do. That will start with Biden’s need to find, assess, and vet candidates for some 4,000 political-appointment slots, more than 1,000 of which require Senate confirmation. This task, already slowed because of the pandemic, is all the harder because of stonewalling by the Trump team. Rather than cooperating on the transition—a basic civic duty and a long-standing norm—the outgoing administration for weeks impeded it, starting with its refusal to accept the simple fact that Biden had won.

Illustration by Katie Martin; photographs by Alex Wong / Getty / Charles Dharapak / Jose Luis Magana / AP

Chronicling what went wrong under Trump has already generated tens of millions of words—and has barely begun. Works in this genre may eventually rival Civil War histories in their volume and their depictions of barely avoided national ruin. Daniel Dale, of the Toronto Star and then CNN, compiled a master list of false statements from Trump’s speeches, tweets, and other utterances, until he found, just before the 2020 election, when his list numbered almost 10,000, that he could no longer keep up. Last September, a nonprofit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a compilation of 3,400 instances of corruption or conflicts of interest involving Trump and his family, any handful of which would have been considered scandalous and disqualifying in other administrations. The disproportion between Trump offenses and past political scandals may seem like a tired point, but it has been “normalized” enough by its fire-hose nature that the sense of outrage inevitably fades.

Joe Biden has a set of decisions to make about the record of the Trump era. The record needs to be discovered—in part so that damage can be undone, and in part to ensure that the country faces its failures squarely and through a common lens. To which efforts should Biden personally, as the new president, devote his limited time and political influence? Which efforts should he place in the hands of others?

Through the final months of the campaign, I asked historians, lawyers, and veterans of Republican and Democratic administrations how they would answer those two questions. The conversations, many of them lengthy, touched on a wide range of issues—vastly wider than I can encompass here. But the responses boiled down to an argument for triage.

For Biden personally, as president, the best thing he can do for most of the needed inquiries is simply get out of the way. He has too many other things to contend with. Criminal proceedings require neither his instigation nor his help. There are two tasks, however, where his involvement is essential. One is stemming, and then beginning to reverse, the corrosion of the executive branch. The methodical destruction of the government’s competence and integrity has been nearly invisible but is one of Trump’s most consequential legacies. The second task is launching—but not running or controlling—independent investigations into three national catastrophes: the mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, whose toll continues to rise; border policies under which U.S. officials intentionally separated children from their parents, and in more than 600 cases have not been able to reunite them; and purposeful or negligent destruction of the norms of government, the most important being the electoral process, pushing a diverse democracy close to the breaking point.

III. Corruption vs. Corrosion

For purposes of answering the What must be done? and Who should do it? questions, two realms of Trump offenses should be considered. The first is the category “corrupt and possibly criminal.” This realm is potentially boundless, covers matters great and small, and extends not only throughout the four years of the Trump administration but to the transition period beforehand and even to Donald Trump’s activities prior to entering the White House. Trump will likely be consumed by criminal and civil litigation for the rest of his life. That is his problem; it should not be Joe Biden’s.

Before the end of Trump’s fourth year, seven prominent campaign or administration figures had been indicted, tried, convicted, jailed, or all of the above, more than in any other modern administration in its first term. They included Trump’s former personal lawyer, his former national security adviser, his former campaign chairman, and his former chief strategist. More indictments and convictions could well lie ahead. To take just one example: Tampering with the U.S. mail is a federal offense, and Trump’s postmaster general Louis DeJoy might face charges for doing so on a grand scale, because of allegations that he intentionally sought to delay election-related mail (which he has denied).

[From the March 2018 issue: Franklin Foer on Paul Manafort, American hustler]

All presidents and major-party nominees since Richard Nixon have released their tax returns. Trump promised to do so when his were no longer “under audit,” but that time has never come. The authoritative New York Times accounting of his personal taxes found that he had paid little or nothing in most of the years for which the paper obtained documentation; on two occasions, his annual federal-income-tax payment was $750. (For the record, a lawyer for the Trump Organization disputed the reporting.) Trump declared that he would separate himself from his business holdings when he took office. He did not. Instead he announced after being elected that he, as president, by definition could not have a conflict of interest. It was a counterpart to Nixon’s saying, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Nixon’s claim did not stand up, and Trump’s probably won’t either. What secrets lie in Trump’s financial records? Why did he claim that certain properties were far more valuable when using them as collateral for loans than when valuing them for tax purposes? Was he paying himself and his family members from what were supposed to be campaign funds or official government accounts? Were his Scottish golf resorts essentially elaborate money-laundering ventures?

Questions like these just scratch the surface of what must be asked, and answered, about possible corruption during the Trump era, not to mention before. They should occupy little or nothing of Joe Biden’s attention. The machinery of justice will operate on its own. The matter of a pardon, suggested by some—and a last-minute possibility by Trump himself or conceivably by an elevated Mike Pence—is exciting as a cable-news topic, but is one Biden should ignore. The circumstances today are unlike those during the time of Watergate (when the new president, Gerald Ford, pardoned the president who had just resigned in disgrace, Richard Nixon), and anyway the potential financial crimes are mainly matters of state law, beyond the reach of a presidential pardon. Prosecutors in New York have sought access to years of Trump’s financial and tax records as part of their investigation of “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” in the words of a 2020 filing by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. So far, none of the prosecutions has begun—partly because of the legal gray zone involving actions against a sitting president, and also because of Trump’s wave after wave of unsuccessful appeals. But sooner or later, the full records will fall into the hands of the authorities.

[From the August 1983 issue: Seymour M. Hersh on the pardon]

Possible violations of federal rather than state law are trickier, because a new administration would by definition be involved. These might include the alleged mismanagement of the Postal Service, to cite one hypothetical, or the politicization of the Justice Department by Attorney General William Barr. But Biden should view such cases as opportunities to emphasize dispassionate accountability and rule of law. Trump undermined legal standards through a willing-accomplice attorney general and through the systematic removal of inspectors general, whose common fault was that they initiated investigations of Trump himself or of Trump appointees inside their departments. Biden’s response should be to repair the structure of checks and balances, and then let it do its work. His most important appointment may be a new attorney general, chosen to embody the very principles that Barr, who served in essence as Trump’s personal lawyer and adjunct campaign manager, traduced.

Illustration by Katie Martin; photographs by Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress

Biden needs to select an attorney general who will be seen as the most principled and eminent of all his Cabinet members, and choose correspondingly strong and independent inspectors general for the executive departments. The rest is up to them.

The second category of offense is corrosion of government rather than corruption of government. Here Biden’s responsibility is different—and his response should be very direct.

Everyone knows about the Michael Lewis books that have been turned into movies: The Blind Side, about football; Moneyball, about baseball; and The Big Short, about the 2008 financial crash. But in this moment the book for which he should be known is The Fifth Risk, published in 2018, about the arcane details of managing the federal government, and why Trump’s indifference to them mattered. Questions of operational competence make headlines when an airliner crashes or the electric grid fails. The deficiencies don’t make headlines when they occur deep inside the federal bureaucracy. But they represent a quiet, daily, systemwide calamity—one that a new president can begin to control.

The shift from competence to cronyism is widespread across the government. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the radiologist Scott Atlas—neither with training in epidemiology—had the president’s ear on pandemic control, as opposed to experts like National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Career intelligence officers were kicked out, and loyalists such as Richard Grenell and John Ratcliffe put in their place. Ten days into his administration, Trump fired Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, and then in short order fired the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, and the FBI director, James Comey—all three of whom were reportedly investigating the president or his appointees. Trump fired or drove out officials with professional standing that predated their political support—H. R. McMaster, James Mattis, Dan Coats—and installed more pliant replacements. He undermined the independence of the military in a variety of ways. He signed an executive order that effectively made many professional civil servants subject to political dismissal.

Every executive agency and department needs top-to-bottom attention. A cadre of skilled career professionals has been lost to attrition, unable to countenance the Trump administration’s calculated disemboweling. Biden needs to rebuild the ranks of every part of the executive branch, but a symbolically important first step would involve America’s formal connection with the rest of the world: the State Department, whose capacities and expertise were made a special target during the Trump years. There and elsewhere, Biden can promote career professionals. He can experiment with new ways of bringing in experts with specific skills—in public health, cybersecurity, climate issues, higher education, and many other areas—for temporary mid-career assignments. He can encourage a new generation of Americans to choose public service, so that 20 years from now, the government has a corps of experienced experts. Action and example matter.

IV. The Catastrophes

Halting the corrosion is the very least that needs to be done—equivalent to stabilizing the patient. Just as important, investigations should be conducted into three catastrophes during the Trump years that have undermined our health as individuals, our morality as a people, and our character as a democracy.

The coronavirus pandemic may represent the greatest failure of governance in U.S. history, and responsibility for the extent of its ravages falls squarely on Donald Trump. The pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, triggered a business collapse, and worsened every racial and economic injustice in our society. Here was a case where warnings came at an early stage, and where detailed plans to meet the threat were at hand. Trump was made aware of the imminent danger and chose first to ignore it and then to downplay it. Ultimately he resorted to outright mockery of containment and treatment efforts.

“The pandemic is one of the major mass traumas collectively suffered by humanity during the last hundred years,” Philip Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia, wrote recently. “Such mass traumas are rare. Narratives about such traumas always become enduring touchstones in politics and culture, for better or worse.” The narrative Zelikow refers to is a shared public sense of why something has happened, and how a similar trauma might be avoided in the future. Establishing the correct narrative is especially urgent when it comes to a pandemic that is still raging and that surely prefigures grave public-health threats ahead.

Illustration by Katie Martin; photographs by Mark Felix / Sarah Silbiger / Getty

What can a new president do to this end? The answer, which is more powerful than it may sound, is to establish a commission. True, that’s not a word for bumper stickers or rally speeches. But commissions have played a role in shifting public awareness of major issues. And compared with other, ever more siloed forms of public narrative, from cable TV to food-fight congressional hearings to anything online, they start out with less of a handicap. They are as useful a tool as we now possess for confronting complex issues without immediately being shunted into talking-point posturing. “This would be like the 9/11 Commission,” a person who has worked for presidents of both parties on emergency management told me, “about a disaster unfolding slowly before our eyes. It is a massive failure of leadership, and we’ve got to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

That’s the first investigation. The second, also conducted by a special commission, would look immediately into the cases of children separated from their parents at the border. Examples of the Trump administration acting out of smug vengefulness and casual disregard for human suffering are sadly plentiful. For years, Trump denied aid to Puerto Rico after a devastating hurricane. He only reluctantly issued disaster declarations for California (a state he viewed as politically hostile territory) during a season of unprecedented wildfires. The brutal policy of family separation stands in for every other episode of cruelty, and transcends them all. “We’ve been declared in some respects a state sponsor of child abuse by friends overseas,” John R. Allen, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who now is president of the Brookings Institution, told me. “Having friends and allies declare this as state-sponsored child abuse is a stain on our national soul that will take a long time to remedy.” The immediate charge to the commission would be to do everything possible to find the hundreds of displaced children and unite them with their families—which even before the election Biden promised to do. The further task would be to document, step-by-step, the process by which the president and his officials were able to put this policy of sanctioned kidnapping into place. Separating children from their parents doesn’t simply occur by executive fiat. There are bureaucratic and legal hurdles that action of this kind must surmount—and Trump’s desire surmounted all of them with ease. That demanded complicity by scores of individuals at every level, from White House aides to Justice Department lawyers to the functionaries at the border.

From its immersion in tragedy, the commission could perhaps launch a larger discussion on immigration and immigration policy. But the main focus must be on the process of forcible separation.

The third investigation (and third commission) would probe the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy itself. American democracy depends on rules, and it depends on norms. The rules largely involve setting the balance between majority power and minority rights. The norms involve the informal cushioning that keeps disagreements from becoming civil wars. There is no law spelling out the duty of the loser of an election to concede graciously to the winner. But that is what Richard Nixon did after his hair’s-breadth loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and what Al Gore did after his even narrower (and more controversial) loss to George W. Bush in 2000. Democracy depends on the “consent of the losers,” as political scientists have put it.

Over the past generation, rules and norms have eroded. There is a reason books on guarding against autocracy—for instance, On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder, and Twilight of Democracy, by Anne Applebaum—have become popular. The erosion was transformed into deliberate policy during the Trump years. Even before he was installed in office, and with no evidence, Trump called into question the popular vote in the 2016 election, alleging that millions of ballots had been cast fraudulently. Trump created a task force to look into the matter, which generated headlines (but quietly disbanded when it found no fraud). Elections are in the hands of the individual states. Now emboldened, many state legislatures have used fraud as an excuse to erect new barriers to voting by the poor, by members of minority groups, and by immigrants—reversing the gains of half a century. When the pandemic hit, prompting a shift away from voting in person, the Trump administration falsely equated mail-in ballots with fraudulent votes. When Biden won a decisive victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, the president refused to concede and launched a war of attrition against the legitimacy of the electoral process itself.

An investigation of America’s democratic process must start by decisively separating truth from lies. It must document the assault on voting rights and the cynical distortions of gerrymandering. It must reckon with the most lethal form of domestic terrorism in recent years, that from armed white supremacists. It must also explain what needs to be done to secure elections against interference by Russia and other foreign powers—a threat confirmed by all of the nation’s intelligence agencies, but one whose reality and significance were questioned by Trump. Finally, it must address how to rekindle a spirit of grassroots engagement among ordinary citizens. An excellent place to start is a recent report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences called “Our Common Purpose.”

V. The American Story

There is one further thing Biden can do: frame all of the above in terms of the larger American narrative. The specific steps he should take are not about payback, whatever some will say. They are not even about Donald Trump as an individual. They are about the never-ending mission of forming a more perfect union. As Philip Zelikow has observed, every part of the national experience, tragic or triumphant, lives on most powerfully in story. And stories have consequences. Presidents are often most powerful as storytellers, giving citizens a way to think about themselves, their neighbors, their country, and their times. Barack Obama, who came to national attention before holding any national office, did so with his “red states and blue states” speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Donald Trump told a very different story—of us versus them; of a hostile and cheating world beyond our borders; and of treacherous, devious interests here among us at home—in his “American carnage” inaugural address.

Biden likes to say, of the American-carnage era, “We’re better than that.” In practice, we haven’t been. In theory, we could be. Biden has a chance to tell a different story—a story about our potential—with the first words he utters after taking the oath of office.

This article appears in the January/February 2021 print edition with the headline “How Far Should Biden Go?”

How to Reconnect Rural and Urban America

2020-11-25T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

As it was in 2016, so it is again in 2020: A central axis of national-election results is the rural-urban gulf. Larger cities—really, conurbations of any sort—mainly went for Joe Biden. Donald Trump’s major strength was in the smallest cities and in rural areas.

Obviously there has been more to Donald Trump’s power than purely regional dynamics. (In particular, there are racial dynamics, as laid out here and here and here.) And as Deb Fallows and I have argued for years, the United States looks more hopelessly divided when it comes to national elections than it does from any other perspective. For instance, see these dispatches from western Kansas, back in 2016.

But also obviously, national elections matter, and regional and locational polarization makes every other challenge for America more difficult. In a new paper for Brookings, John Austin argues that Midwestern voting patterns for Trump and Biden show how the sense of being “left behind” fuels resentment-driven politics—and how a sense of possibility can have the opposite effect. August Benzow of The Economic Innovation Group has a related paper on the stark differences within rural America on racial diversity, economic positioning, and political outlook.

Does anyone have an idea of how to blunt these differences and open more opportunities? Especially as a new administration faces all the economic, public health, law-enforcement, and other crises the new Biden team is about to take on? Here are some recent items worth noticing:

1) A Marshall Plan for Middle America: During election years, reporters troop into cities (and especially diners) in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other parts of “interior America” to get political quotes. Then, typically, the press spotlight moves someplace else.

This past weekend in The Washington Post, the mayors of eight of these middle-American cities wrote about what could be done to move their areas ahead. These are places we know and have written about, many of whose mayors we also know personally. The cities are Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Youngstown in Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; and Huntington and Morgantown, West Virginia. All are in the Appalachian or Ohio River Valley regions, often stereotyped in national discourse as the land of coal mines and decrepit factories.

The mayors argue that it is time to draw on the region’s manufacturing heritage, and recreate its economy in a fundamental way. For instance:

According to our research, taking advantage of our community assets, geographic positioning and the strengths of our regional markets can help create over 400,000 jobs across the region by investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency upgrades to buildings, energy infrastructure and transportation assets.

Renewable sources of power are proving less expensive, and fossil fuel companies are increasingly dependent on federal subsidies to survive. Couldn’t these subsidies be strategically shifted to invest in a green economy that keeps these largely suburban and rural jobs but transitions them, with federal support, into new industries that will grow in the 21st century?

Like our friends at Reimagine Appalachia—a grass-roots community and environmental organization—we believe a Marshall Plan-scale reinvestment is necessary. Rather than a “Green New Deal,” our plan would seed long-term regional investments in Appalachia’s rural and suburban communities, while leveraging the technological successes of our tentpole cities to assist them. The same goes for our neighbors in the Ohio River Valley throughout the Rust Belt and up to the Great Lakes region.

I agree with their pitch, and hope their prospectus gets attention. Here is a complementary argument from Bill Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, and another from Annie Regan, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

2) Reducing Polarization by Modernizing Rural Policy: The political and cultural ramifications of a rural-urban divide are hot topics journalistically. “Rural policy,” not so much. But in a new report for Brookings (available here), Anthony Pipa and Nathalie Geismar argue that straightening out the rat’s-nest of programs intended to help rural America could make a big difference.

Rat’s nest? Take a look at this organization chart included in the Brookings report:

Courtesy of the Brookings Institution

“The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to further disrupt local economies that in 2019 were still recovering from the Great Recession” and other long-term disruptions, Pipa and Geismar write. They add:

Just recently, COVID-19 prevalence in nonmetro U.S. areas surpassed those in metro areas for the first time; Rural residents are now almost 2.5 times more likely than urban residents to die from the virus. This is compounded by the decreasing access to health care that many rural communities face …

Now, rural communities must navigate a virtual world of work with intermittent broadband access and adapt to additional shocks to manufacturing and agriculture supply chains ….

Despite these challenges, rural communities are diverse—both demographically and economically—and entrepreneurial. They help power, feed, and protect America at rates disproportionate to other geographies. They house 99 percent of wind power capacity and will play a key role in national climate strategies that require investments in clean energy infrastructure.

The report has many recommendations, but here are the three main ones:

Launch a new development corporation, to invest in local vision and leadership through long-term block grants at the community level and innovative financing tools that give communities a fighting chance to strengthen and renew their local institutions, economies, and vision.

Create a national rural strategy, elevate White House and interagency leadership, and undertake a set of specific and targeted reforms to enhance federal coherence and effectiveness.

Appoint a bipartisan congressional commission to undertake a top-to-bottom review regarding the effectiveness of federal assistance and build political momentum to transform federal rural policy.

3) Local journalism and local recovery: This is a big ongoing theme, which will only gain in importance if recovery efforts like those mentioned above are giving a serious try in communities across the country. Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post, a former editor herself and an indispensable media observer, published a book this year about the accelerating forces working against local news. Just after this year’s election, Dan Kennedy, another important longtime media writer, argued on the GBH news site that shoring up local journalism would have direct benefits community-by-community, plus the broader potential of calming down now-fevered national discussions. On the Poynter site, Rick Edmonds—yet another important longtime media writer—gives a comprehensive overview of how “shoring up” might actually work. For instance:

As the pandemic advertising recession and longstanding negative trends have made the financial precariousness of these enterprises obvious, Congress has pretty much decided it should come to the aid of local news. The question of how remains, together with making the help timely.

My take comes from conversations with a variety of advocacy groups pushing one form or another of legislative assistance. A surprising favorite approach has emerged, too—direct subsidies for news subscribers, local journalists and small business advertisers.

That’s the structure of HR 7640, the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, sponsored by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and more than 70 co-sponsors from both parties.

There is a lot more detail in Edmonds’s piece, and the others. (See also this pre-election analysis at the Ground Truth Project, by Steven Waldman, whose work I have described here.) And while I’m at it, please check out the latest dispatch from John Miller, creator of the film Moundsville, about regional culture gaps. Also this, by Katherine Bindley in The Wall Street Journal, about big-city tech-industry people who have considered entirely different careers, in entirely different parts of the country, because of the pandemic.

Important transformation work is underway at the national level, as I’ll discuss in an upcoming print-magazine article. But that would be doomed, or at least limited, without comparably intense efforts to improve local-level prospects. These ideas are a start.

Trump’s Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide

2020-11-20T10:55:28-05:00

Negligent homicide has a specific meaning in the law books. The standards of proof and categories of offense vary from state to state. But the essence is: Someone died because someone else did not exercise reasonable care.

An adult leaves loaded weapons where children can find them. A factory owner or amusement-park operator ignores the safety standards for their equipment. A motorist in a hurry, or heading back from a bar, roars through a school-crossing zone full of children. A parent leaves an infant “just for a few minutes” in a car with rolled-up windows on a baking-hot day. Prosecutors and juries draw the line between cases like these and murder, based mainly on intent. Did the person who caused the death actually mean to do harm? It’s a distinction that matters a lot to the defendant, but not to the victim. Whatever the legal outcome, a person who—except for another’s indifference to risks that should have been foreseen—would still be living and learning and loving, instead is dead.

That’s the law of negligent homicide. The ultimate legal reckoning for what we are now living (and dying) through will be a matter for legal authorities to take up, or decide to drop, when they have the evidence; I have no standing to do so. Instead, I want to consider the nonlegal, commonsense meanings of the term, and of its more gruesome-sounding cousin, manslaughter.

Many terms that have legal connotations can be useful in their plain everyday sense as well. Not everything we’d call an assault matches the state-by-state standards that define that crime. Not everything we call theft—or blackmail, or even rape—would count as such in an indictment or could be proved in court. Similarly, when removed from their courtroom and legal implications, terms like negligence and manslaughter and, yes, homicide are useful right now. They give us a way of assessing the horror a government is visiting upon its people.

More than a year ago, I argued in these pages that if Donald Trump held virtually any other position of responsibility in modern society, he would already have been removed from that role. The article was called “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot,” and the examples ranged from CEOs to nuclear-submarine commanders to surgeons in an operating room. If any of them had demonstrated the impulsiveness, the irrationality, the vindictiveness, the ceaseless need for glorification that all distinguish Trump, responsible authorities would long ago have suspended them. The stakes—in lives, legal exposure, dollars and cents, war and peace—would be too great to do otherwise.

At the time of that comparison, the main case against Trump involved his temperamental, intellectual, and moral unfitness for the job. But since then we’ve moved into the realm of manslaughter. Yesterday nearly 2,000 Americans died of COVID-19. By Thanksgiving Day, another 10,000 to 15,000 will have perished. By year’s end, who knows? And meanwhile the person in charge of guiding the national response does nothing.

Or worse than nothing. He tweets in rage. He fires anyone suspected of disloyalty. He encourages endless lawsuits that are tossed out of court one after another but that, one after another, do cumulative damage to confidence in elections and democracy. His cat’s-paw in charge of the General Services Administration does what none of her predecessors ever dared, pretending that the outcome of the election is still in doubt. Thus she blocks Joe Biden’s transition team from receiving the funding or cooperation it needs during the rapidly dwindling days until inauguration. (Rapidly dwindling from an incoming administration’s perspective, with so many plans to prepare and staffers to select. Moving like molasses from other perspectives.)

We’re beyond the range of my earlier comparisons to a leader of a museum “who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency” or a CEO “making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse.” The problem with finding analogies to illuminate the Trump administration’s reckless disregard for national welfare now is that all of them seem so extreme.

Is this like Nero fiddling while Rome burns? That’s too mild and clichéd, and it implies a more cultured form of distraction than Trump’s tweeting about Fox and OAN.
Is it like the Allied generals during the grimmest trench-warfare stage of World War I, sending wave after wave of young troops “over the top” and to certain death from German machine guns? At least the generals and the troops thought they were fighting for something larger than themselves.
Is it like an armed school security guard who hears gunfire inside the school building but doesn’t go in to protect the children, not wanting to get shot himself? Something like this has happened, but at least such a guard would be acting on the natural if nonheroic instinct for self-preservation. (Today’s government figures, by contrast, would face no physical risk by making the pandemic the center of their efforts. Their only risk is criticism for defying the will of Trump.)
Is it like an airline captain who stops looking at the instruments because he is wrapped up in a Twitter war, while the plane heads straight into a mountain? No, because under long-developed airline protocols, the other pilot in the cockpit would already have grabbed the controls.
It is like a nurse or doctor strolling past an emergency room just as a patient goes into cardiac arrest—and nonchalantly continuing to stroll to the break room? Or like a Marine Corps medic letting a wounded comrade bleed out on the battlefield while the medic paused for a smoke? Yes, it would be like that—except that such things are impossible to imagine. It’s similar when you try to imagine a firefighting crew, outside an apartment-building inferno, deciding to go home even as residents scream desperately from upstairs windows amid the flames. You can’t imagine it. It wouldn’t occur.

But it is happening with the pandemic. These examples are the equivalent of an administration looking the other way, leaving states and cities and hospitals and families to their own resources—even as first those hospitals, and then the mortuaries, fill up, and medical workers serve endless shifts, knowing that they may be next to succumb. And all of this with the pandemic taking a cruel and disproportionate toll on racial minorities, and on families that are already under pressure from an unequal economy.

In these circumstances a “normal” national leader would be doing several things urgently, and all at once. One is restoring cooperation outside the country—on early detection of new outbreaks; on lessons of failed and successful containment strategies, or travel controls; on the other necessary global responses to a global threat. The next is restoring cooperation within the country—so that equipment availability, quarantine and distancing plans, vaccine rollouts, and countless other measures don’t remain a battle of each against all. The next would be giving a clear, steady, and believable account of where the country stands in this grim journey: how much longer things will get worse, when and where they might get better, what sensible steps should be taken in the meantime. (Imagine, for instance, the president assigning Anthony Fauci or another credible figure to have daily briefings, with no politicians at the microphone whatsoever.) And the next would be using every bit of political leverage to get new financial aid to businesses, families, schools, and city and state governments that are about to be plunged into new economic desperation. (Instead, the U.S. Senate has convened to ram through judicial appointments, and do nothing else.)

Of course, none of those things has happened, nor can, until January 20 at the earliest. The deaths go on, and our national leader looks the other way—at Fox, and in the mirror.

One more parallel to our current predicament comes to mind. It is very different in its legal implications, but evocatively similar in its emotional tenor.

This past summer, viewers around the world saw eight minutes and 46 seconds on video that few of them can ever forget. That’s how long a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on the neck of the prone George Floyd. The officer’s face was impassive, barely showing interest, as his victim pleaded, and struggled, and choked, and died. The officer’s affect was like that of a fisherman, watching his catch flop helplessly toward death as it ran out of breath on the pier. Legally, the courts have yet to determine what those eight minutes and 46 seconds meant; the officer has pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder. But the video had such power because people around the world understood what they were seeing. One man was in control of another. One man calmly watched as another died. In the layman’s sense of the term, these were images of manslaughter, of homicide.

The face in the White House is snarling rather than impassive, gaudily made up rather than unadorned, craving the limelight rather than operating outside it. But as it turns to the public, it reveals the same careless indifference toward lives it should have spared.

What Happens After the Election

2020-10-21T17:28:50-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

What else is going on in the country, with less than two weeks in this consequential election season? Here is a sampling of recent articles and developments worth notice.

Prospects for local journalism: The strength and importance of local journalism have always grown from its attention to the local: What is happening in the town or region, what is getting better or worse, how local institutions are responding. Even as national politics have become more polarized and tribal, local news organizations have often been able to focus attention and engagement on important issues (rather than divisive spectacles) that can be solved (rather than just argued about).

This is why several trends of recent years have been so destructive in civic terms. These include the economic pressures on small, independent news outlets; the gobbling up of many surviving outlets by private-equity chains; and the determination of national TV chains like Sinclair to convert local TV-news outlets into extensions of the national-politics crusades. A recent story by Davey Alba and Jack Nicas in The New York Times has drawn a lot of attention for showing how the Sinclair model—franchised, faux-“local” versions of national messaging—is spreading to the print and online realms.

Some recent developments worth noting, on the other side:

From Poynter, an essay by Steven Waldman on why these new pressures on local journalism matter, and what could be done about them. Waldman, a longtime friend, is among other things a co-founder of Report for America, which I have written about, and of the Rebuild Local News coalition. In his Poynter essay he points out the goods and bads of this moment in local news:

As a point of reference, consider this: One of the most positive trends has been the rise of local nonprofit news organizations. Today, there are about 300 of them, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News. Yes, that’s less than one quarter of the number of these faux news sites that have popped up recently.

The problem is increasingly not that communities will get no information but that they’ll get disinformation, or information whose provenance is unknown.
From David Plotz, long of Slate and Atlas Obscura, the announcement of a new locally oriented podcast series, called City Cast. In a post on Medium describing the project, Plotz writes:

I’m starting City Cast because I believe the future is local ….

Thanks to the pandemic, a staggering economic crisis, the protest movement against police violence and systemic racism, and well, just 2020 in general, America has never needed great local journalism more than it does today ….

Where local news is sparse or feeble, communities suffer: Political activity declines; local businesses weaken; mistrust grows. We become more divided, more insular, and more hopeless. If you live in a community with hollowed-out media, you feel that every day.

Good luck to Plotz and his City Cast colleagues.

For another illustration of an innovative local model, check out Canopy Atlanta, and its inaugural issue on the city’s West End—and this report by Rick Edmonds, of Poynter, about the way three regional papers are trying to expand rather than budget-cut their way to survival.
And, for an economic-development perspective on which accurate local news matters, see a recent installment of The Chung Report, by James Chung, which has had an ongoing focus on development in Chung’s original hometown of Wichita, Kansas. In “Why Transparency Matters,” Chung explores how a medium-sized city like Wichita, with a strong university presence (Wichita State) and a historic role as a center of aerospace technology, can deal with its long-term civic and economic challenges.

Economic recovery after the pandemic: The story of the moment is of accelerating economic and public-health damage from the (disastrously managed) pandemic. The next story will be about the ways families, companies, cities, and regions can begin to recover.

Some of this effort will be national and global in scale. Some will be intensely local. Here are several worthwhile guides:

From the Heartland Forward project, a report on an economic recovery strategy for Northwest Arkansas. Why this part of the country? Heartland Forward’s founders include younger members of the Walton family and, along with the Walton Family Foundation, it has concentrated on economic and civic revival in non-coastal America, notably including the Walmart headquarters area of Northwest Arkansas.

This new report (in PDF here) is largely devoted to both the immediate and the longer-term effects of the pandemic. It also addresses the region’s diversity and racial-justice issues. Historically, this part of the state (which was not part of the antebellum plantation economy) has had a large-majority white population; according to the report, only 2.5 percent of the local population is Black. The report flatly says that to progress, the region must intentionally make itself more welcoming and inclusive:

“It is paramount that the region’s major employers continue to attract and retain diverse talent … In addition, building up diverse populations assists new members to the community feel comfortable and secure, as well as helps to make the existing culture more welcoming to outsiders …. NWA [Northwest Arkansas] should consider ways to make diverse populations feel more welcome in the community …”

Even if you’re not interested in this part of the country, the report is worth noticing as an illustration of how regions with distinctive strengths and limitations can think realistically about their possibilities.

From Jason Segedy, planning director for the city of Akron, two valuable essays on how cities can approach these new rebuilding challenges. One, in The American Conservative, is about how cities can become more “inclusive” even in the face of likely long-term decline. The other, for the Economic Innovation Group, is about how “legacy cities,” of smaller size and yesteryear’s industry, can find a future. He uses the example of another city we’ve written about, Dayton:

There is also a certain level of love for a mid-sized city like Dayton that is often not as present in larger places, where many people might be there for less emotional and more utilitarian economic reasons. This can lead to higher levels of civic engagement and community support. Innovators, entrepreneurs, and the civically-engaged and community-minded can potentially have more of a positive impact, being bigger fish in a smaller pond. “When you really love something, you want to make it better,” says Torey Hollingsworth, senior policy advisor to Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley.

At the same time, the way that the economy has changed over the past four decades has made it far more difficult for these cities to succeed. Consolidation of major industrial corporations has really hurt cities like Akron and Dayton, as these cities first lost thousands of blue-collar production jobs and then ultimately lost most of the white-collar professional jobs that remained.
From Allentown, Pennsylvania, an update on the ongoing redevelopment of the city’s old heavy-manufacturing sites. Several years ago John Tierney wrote about small, modern startups in what was once the Mack Truck plant. (It is now known as the Bridgeworks Enterprise Center.) The next industrial site for renovation is a former steel fabrication plant, known as the Metal Works. You can read about its situation here.

From the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a report on how much money state and local governments have already devoted to sustaining small businesses through the pandemic era—but how much more federal help will inevitably be needed. The report (PDF here), by Kennedy Smith, says:

“The relief programs provided by local and state governments have kept hundreds of thousands of small businesses afloat so far and helped them adapt to the surreal commercial environment the pandemic has created. But absent additional and ongoing funding these crucial programs will cease, leaving hundreds of thousands of small businesses at risk of going under in the coming months.”

Small businesses across the country have been through very tough times these past six-plus months. But—as in so many other aspects of pandemic effects—without help, even tougher times may lie ahead. For a previous ILSR report on steps cities can take to sustain their independent businesses, see this.

One of our ongoing threads through the years has been the importance of skilled-trades jobs, as sources of opportunity and offsets to an ever-more-polarized economy. Advanced-manufacturing jobs, work designing and maintaining robotic systems, jobs in aerospace and health care and advanced agriculture—almost all of these have had more job openings than applicants in recent years, and many do not require a four-year college diploma. NPR has a new segment on this trend, and the importance of apprenticeships. You can read its report by Adedayo Akala and listen to the broadcast here.

Cityscape: I very much enjoyed this map of fall foliage in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where we have spent a lot of time. Check it out. Sample shot below.

Courtesy of the City of Sioux Falls

Where Harris Succeeded and Pence Failed

2020-10-08T09:46:25-04:00

Will this latest debate make a measurable difference in the outcome of the election? Probably not; vice-presidential debates rarely do. But something significant may have happened last night, and it involves what usually turns out to matter, if anything does, from televised debates. Namely, the parts of their personalities and identities each candidate purposefully or unintentionally conveyed.

If vice-presidential debates are remembered at all, it’s usually for stage-business drama or rhetorical zingers. The most famous case is Lloyd Bentsen’s “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” dressing-down of Dan Quayle in 1988. But that line of Bentsen’s, which lastingly affected Quayle’s reputation, didn’t dent the vote share for the Republican ticket that year. (Quayle and George H. W. Bush won in an Electoral College landslide, 426 votes to 111.) The similarly instant-classic moment from last night’s debate was when a black housefly camped on the snow-white hair of an unaware Mike Pence for two full minutes. Depending on how the election turns out, this will eventually be seen as a minor embarrassment, comparable to toilet paper on your shoe (if Pence and Donald Trump should win), or on the contrary as an overobvious portent (if they lose), without itself making either outcome more likely.

When rhetoricians go back to study the transcript, I think they’ll find a number of carefully prepared and effective lines. To me, the debate-prep work that had gone into crafting responses was easier to notice from Kamala Harris than from Pence. This was partly because Harris herself is a fresher and less familiar figure on the national scene; partly because Pence’s answers were mostly versions of what we’ve heard so often in Trump rally speeches; but mainly because Harris at least began most of her answers with a response to the question that had been asked. By contrast, Pence frequently brushed aside the question and talked about whatever he liked.

After the moderator, Susan Page, said she wanted to shift the topic to a vice president’s responsibilities, during an election in which the presidential candidates are the oldest in U.S. history, Pence said he preferred to talk instead about the timetable for a vaccine—and did just that. Neither in that case nor in any other did Page reel him back or follow up to say, “Mr. Vice President, the question was …” When Page asked Pence a question about climate change and he responded, as Trump does, with an answer about “clean air and water,” she did not say, “Sir, I am asking about climate change.” Page’s list of prepared questions was overall very good, but she did not adjust her approach when Pence repeatedly ignored them. If you’d like to see how it looks when a moderator does adjust and insists on getting answers, check out how Ted Simons of Arizona PBS handled himself in this week’s Arizona Senate debate.

With the first words of her first response, Harris presented what was essentially a prosecutor’s opening argument about mismanagement of the pandemic. “The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” she began, looking not at Page or Pence but directly at the camera. Hundreds of thousands of people dead; millions infected; one in five American businesses closed; “frontline workers treated like sacrificial workers … They knew what was happening, and they didn’t tell you.”

She made her case on many other fronts, including in a set piece on why in 1864 “Honest Abe” Lincoln waited until after an election to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Pence had his own responses, again mainly familiar from Trump’s speeches. For now I am going to skip past all those specifics, because if past vice-presidential debates are any guide, policy details from the running mate don’t change many voters’ minds.

What has historically mattered, when vice-presidential candidates present themselves, is temperament. Voters want to know what kind of person they’re dealing with; whether he or she would be ready if called upon; what it says about the presidential nominee that he or she chose this running mate. Back in 2000, it was taken as a “reassuring” sign that the youngish George W. Bush, inexperienced outside Texas, was running with the well-traveled Dick Cheney. (It was a long time ago.) Eight years later, it was a worrisome sign about John McCain that he rolled the dice by choosing Sarah Palin.

In 2020, with two presidential candidates who are so old, the steadiness of the running mate matters all the more. And in conveying temperament, I think Harris helped herself in a way that might matter electorally, while Pence did himself and his running mate harm.

The axis for both displays was Pence’s version of Donald Trump’s rampaging disregard for debate “rules” during the cage-match Trump-Biden spectacle one week ago. That time, Trump yelled and grimaced; this time, Pence was soft-spoken and had an undertaker’s smile. But Pence was nearly as insistent in interrupting Harris, and he was at least as dismissive of the rules that Susan Page, as moderator, was supposed to apply. If anything, Page ended up even less in control of this debate than Chris Wallace had been a week ago. In virtually every round of discussion, Mike Pence reached the end of his allotted time—and just kept on talking, for an average of 20 to 30 seconds more. (Which is a lot, when the supposed limit is two minutes.) Page would futilely say “Thank you” and “Mr. Vice President” as he filibustered, but Pence went on as long as he wanted and made clear who was in control. The main external force that stopped Pence was Harris herself, who occasionally turned to face him as he interrupted her and gave him a steely, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”

What was the result of this dynamic? You had one woman, Harris, who was mainly following the agreed-on rules; one man, Pence, who was mainly ignoring them; and another woman, Page, who seemed less and less able to rein Pence in. Yes, policy details—Obamacare, the trade war, criminal justice—occupy most of the transcript of the debate. But the underlying novelistic or dramatic cast of characters is what leaves an impression after most debates. (The pallid, sweaty Nixon versus the glowing, suntanned JFK in 1960; the taut, harried Jimmy Carter versus the at-ease Ronald Reagan in 1980; the weary George H. W. Bush glancing nervously at his watch in a town-hall session in 1992 versus the buoyant Bill Clinton.) And I think the residual effect will help Harris (and Biden), and hurt Pence (and Trump), in two ways.

The question facing Harris going into the debate was a version of the question faced by the new contenders in these three previous debates: John Kennedy going into his debates with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan going into his debate (there was just one) with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton going into his debates with Bush. The question was: Are they up to it? John Kennedy was young and relatively unknown; Reagan was famous but viewed by many as a kook; Clinton had won office only in Arkansas. How would each of them do when matched up with an incumbent vice president (Nixon) or president (Carter, Bush)? In each case, they did fine—and in Reagan’s case, the polls moved from indicating a fairly tight race to predicting a landslide win after the debate. Political scientists, don’t worry; I’m not saying that the 1980 “There you go again!” debate caused Reagan’s win. But it felt at the time, and still feels to me now, as if Reagan’s easy bearing in that debate allowed people who had wondered about him to think: He’s up to it; he’s okay.

I believe that Kamala Harris’s bearing, in a head-to-head meeting with a sitting vice president, may have a similar effect for her. Of course her temperamental task was vastly more complicated than Kennedy’s, Reagan’s, or Clinton’s. As a woman, she had to walk the inch-wide line that separates being submissive from being harsh. A retort that would be tough from a male politician could be—kiss of misogynist death—shrill from her. For a Black woman, the path that is strong but not angry is narrower still. But Harris has had a lifetime’s practice with such navigation, which she put to use.

My guess is that her knowledgeable, unflustered, controlled-but-forceful bearing will not convert many votes to her camp. Most people who will vote Biden-Harris after the debate had long ago decided to do so. The same is true for most of those who will vote Trump-Pence. But I think that, as with Kennedy and with Reagan, her performance may have reassured people who were already considering her. She’s up to it; she knows the terrain; she’s okay. If they were “undecided” mainly about taking the trouble to vote, they’ll be less motivated to vote against her, or more willing to give her a try. I have no idea of the scale of this potential effect, but its direction seems clear—at least to me, as I think back on these preceding They’re up to it, they’re okay debates

As for Pence, the likely effect is simpler and clearer. Most American voters are women; according to polls, the Trump-Pence ticket is in trouble mainly because the pair have such an enormous deficit among female voters. For 90 minutes on Wednesday evening, viewers saw a smug silver-haired man interrupting, talking over, and hogging airtime from one professional woman, and ignoring the “please, sir” requests for decorum from another. To have any hope of winning the election, Pence and Trump had to gain rather than lose female support through this debate. I’ve learned that anything can happen. But it seemed to me, as another silver-haired man, that Pence’s faux-polite bombast would have just the opposite effect.

The other reckoning from this debate is for the Commission on Presidential Debates itself. Twice in two weeks, it has sent out moderators who were either unwilling or unable to enforce the rules under which discussion was supposed to proceed. Because Mike Pence is a more normal person than Donald Trump, the results in the second debate were less disastrous than in the first. But because Kamala Harris is in a more complicated situation than Joe Biden, the consequences were even less fair for her. (Biden could call Trump a “clown” and tell him to “shut up,” and get praised as being “tough” and “spirited.” If Harris had taken the bait from Pence and gone further than I’m speaking, she would be “angry” and “shrill.”)

Rules that aren’t enforced might as well not exist. Biden and Harris both bore up well under the circumstances. But they shouldn’t have had to put up with this, nor should the rest of us.

A Disgusting Night for Democracy

2020-09-29T22:53:41-04:00

The 90-minute spectacle tonight calls into question the value of having any “debates” of this sort ever again. No one knows more about public life than he or she did before this disaster began; some people know less; and everyone feels and looks worse.

Start with the supposed moderator, Chris Wallace. It became obvious five minutes in that Donald Trump’s strategy was to interrupt, yell, insult, and disrupt as often as he could. This is a strategy that can work only if no one gets in the way of it, and Chris Wallace just let it go on. Maybe Wallace was caught by surprise by Trump’s bellicosity and primate-dominance. (But—c’mon.) Even so, two or three minutes of this should have been enough to adjust. He didn’t adjust. And he let Trump roll over him.

Maybe—I don’t know—the negotiated debate rules prevented Wallace from selectively cutting off the speakers’ mics. Even so, there are ways for the people supposedly in charge of an event to demonstrate that in fact they are in charge. Wallace made clear early on that he was not.

Trump’s instincts are taken from pro wrestling, as with his famous stunt of shaving Vince McMahon’s head. Thus Trump was unconstrained by norms or unenforced rules; Wallace did not enforce the rules, and the result, as it would be in a brawl or an unrefereed sporting match, was one person unconstrained by any of the norms of “allotted time” or “take your turn” or “respectful disagreement,” and another who was half the time constrained by those expectations, and the other half taking the bait in some way.

I recorded a whole detailed minute-by-minute annotation of the debate as it unfolded, but I’m not going to dignify this disaster with any details. It was a giant mess. Did the spectacle change any votes? Who knows. Maybe some people were revved up for Trump by his assertiveness. Maybe other people—I’d guess a larger number, but it’s just a guess—were repelled by his bullying tactics.

Was Biden correctly playing the long game, by turning all topics from Trump’s favored terrain (It’s about me) to Biden’s theme (It’s about you) and addressing the camera rather than Wallace or Trump?

Will either side’s strategy pay off ? I can’t say. And—just for this second—I don’t care. I’ll think about that tomorrow.

But for tonight I’ll say this was a disgusting moment for democracy. Donald Trump made it so, and Chris Wallace let him. I hope there are no more debates before this election. If they happen, I won’t waste another minute of my life watching them.

The modern presidential debate was invented in 1960. We may have seen the end of its useful life this evening.

What Matters in Tonight’s Debate

2020-09-29T20:18:01-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

This evening we’ll see Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the same stage, in the first of what are scheduled to be three debates.

I will confess that I did not think this event would occur—and I am still not sure about the subsequent ones. So many things are outside usual norms this year; so many points of potential disagreement could arise (would there be an audience? who would be the moderators? what about fact checkers—or mask requirements, or allowing the candidates to direct questions at each other?); so little enforcement power is in the hands of the Commission on Presidential Debates, or the networks, or anyone except the candidates and parties themselves.

Many people assume, “Oh, sure, we’ll have debates,” but it turns out that these are among the many fragile norms of modern politics. After the most famous televised debate, which nearly everyone has heard of, between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960, there were no debates for half a generation. Not in 1964, nor 1968, nor 1972, and not until 1976—and then only because incumbent Gerald Ford, far behind Jimmy Carter in the polls, agreed to meet him in debates. (For the record, I was a speechwriter on Carter’s campaign then, including in debate prep.)

Even after the debate tradition was revived in 1976, there was only one debate in 1980—because Jimmy Carter, as the incumbent, would not agree to debates that included not just Ronald Reagan but also the third-party candidate, Republican Representative John Anderson of Illinois.

But here we are. I’ve done print-magazine previews of the previous debate cycles in this century. These include: “An Acquired Taste,” 20 years ago, about the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush; “When George Meets John,” in 2004, about Bush and John Kerry; “Rhetorical Questions,” about Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008; “Slugfest,” in 2012, predicting that the incumbent Obama would not sufficiently prepare for Mitt Romney; and “When Donald Meets Hillary,” four years ago, in which I quoted Jane Goodall on the resemblances between Donald Trump’s on-stage demeanor and the “dominance rituals” she had seen among male chimps.

That was then. This time, I’ll do live commentary on this site. Kickoff comments, an hour before things begin:

Usually debates don’t really “matter.” Tonight’s encounter is a moment of high drama—as I’ll get to, in a moment. And from the annals of debate history a handful of moments stand out and have even become part of popular lore. For instance in 1988, Lloyd Bentsen, then Michael Dukakis’s Democratic running mate, dressing down Dan Quayle, then running with George H. W. Bush, with “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Or eight years earlier, Ronald Reagan lightly dismissing the earnest Jimmy Carter with, “There you go again.” They have been, at times, gripping TV. But political scientists are unconvinced that they have really been decisive axes in most elections.
But we watch anyway, for two reasons. One is: Debates bring the two presidential contenders together in the same place at the same. That almost never happens otherwise. The other: They’re live. Anything can happen. As I write, I don’t know whether one candidate or the other might say or do something significant. No one knows, which is why we watch.
The results are already predictable. Trump supporters will think that Trump has won. Biden supporters and Trump opponents will not. Everything about Trump—his showmanship strengths, his accuracy and comportment weaknesses—is well known, and allowed for, by those who support him and those (like me) who don’t. I have learned that my imagination cannot fully encompass current realities, but it’s hard for me to imagine Trump saying or doing anything that would erode his base of report.
A related point: “Winning” or “losing” in debates, even in more reality-based times than our own, has virtually nothing to do with policies or ideas or factual disputes. It’s about comportment, confidence, the dreaded “likability,” and other factors making voters feel comfortable with the idea of you in their living room.
The incumbent curse: As I mentioned in my Bush-Kerry and Obama-Romney pieces, an incumbent president usually struggles in the first debate of a fall campaign. (Also as mentioned, incumbent Jimmy Carter’s first debate against Ronald Reagan was his only debate, which magnified the effects of his relatively weak performance in that one.) For most presidents, this is because of the preceding years of deference from all they meet, who don’t dare say, “You’re just wrong…” How this will affect a man like Donald Trump, I dare not guess.
The related “expectations game”: Since there is no objective way to determine winners and losers, for decades political aides had worked on beating expectations. This is the political version of beating the point spread in sports wagering. “Our guy held his own,” “he was ready for all their attacks,” “she did surprisingly well”—judgments like these dominate post-debate spin. As I mentioned in my 2004 piece, George W. Bush and his team very consciously played this game. How could he, a humble Texas lad, hope to match fancy phrases with silver-tongued John Kerry? (He had previously used this strategy against Ann Richards during Texas gubernatorial debates.)
For reasons I can’t explain, Trump representatives have mainly tried the opposite strategy with Biden—stressing that he is old, senescent, can barely string together words. We’ll see how this pans out. (After Biden gave a very effective speech at the Democratic National Convention, commentary from Trump partisans was, “That’s nothing, anyone can read from a prompter.”)
The big unknown: Whether Biden and his team will decide to go
angry/outraged in response to Trump’s foreseeable attacks—on Hunter Biden, on Biden’s mental state, on his life in “the swamp,” et cetera—or instead to seem genially dismissive and above the fray. A tell for the first approach would be remarks on the lines of “how dare you...”; for the second, a counterpart to “There you go again,” or even “You’re no Jack Kennedy.”
The other big unknown: How the moderator, Chris Wallace, will wrestle with the foreseeable farrago of false claims by Trump. In his interview shows, he has directly said, “Sir, that’s not true.” Presumably he will leave most of that work to Biden, but some may fall to him.

We’ll see. In the meantime, here are two other articles that I think do a good job of discussing the knowns-and-unknowns this evening. One is by Bill Goodykoontz, in AZ Central. The other is by Matt Cooper, in The Washington Monthly.

Will weigh in later this evening.

A ‘Climate Corps’ of California Volunteers

2020-09-28T06:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, when some people imagined that changes in American life might be a matter of months rather than of years, I wrote about California Volunteers and its response to the crisis.

This is a publicly sponsored organization, serving the nation’s most populous state, designed to do what organizations from the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, to the Kennedy-era Peace Corps, to more contemporary organizations (with a variety of funding models)—from the Job Corps to Americorps to City Year to Report for America to Code for America—have aspired to do. Namely: matching people of all ages (but mainly younger people) who have an interest in service with the most pressing needs for service in the America of these times.

This past week, California Volunteers announced an expansion of its program: a new California Climate Action Corps, designed to address both the causes and the effects (drought, wildfire, mudslides, intense heat) of California’s exposure to climate change. The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced the creation of the Climate Action Corps a day after his executive order that all cars sold in the state (the largest single auto market in the U.S.) meet a zero-emissions standard by 2035.

In practice, this new program will mean that some 250 “climate action fellows” will work on sustainability projects across the state. The benefit for the fellows is that they receive a stipend and experience during their period of service, and afterwards receive a grant to help cover college costs. “We’re going to work city-by-city toward meeting their community goals,” Josh Fryday, the head of California Volunteers, told me last week. “In Los Angeles, it could be helping them meet their tree-planting goals.” In other communities, it could be efforts to support sustainable forestry or agriculture (for instance, with the Grizzly Corps), or to help food banks, or other goals determined locally.

I asked our friend Shelli Stockton, head of Alumni and Community Relations at the University of Redlands, what these Climate Corps members might do in her city of Redlands, which has been closely involved with Josh Fryday’s group in planning roles for Climate Corps members.

She said there were several areas of climate-mitigation work in which a community like hers—in an arid edge of the Mojave Desert, very hot, surrounded by recent wildfires—might use efforts like those the state is now preparing for. (And, to be clear, a “community like hers” is also a “community like mine”—this is the place, in the “Inland Empire” of California, where I grew up and which I still consider home.)

“One was tree planting,” she said, as previously described here. The larger argument is that community-by-community tree-planting efforts obviously are not the answer to the world’s climate issues—but they are nonetheless a large source of impact for most people in most parts of the world.

Others included “food diversion” efforts, to direct “waste” and surplus food from grocery chains and large restaurants to food banks and other organizations that could put the food to use. Also: “fire resilience” efforts, to help protect businesses and homes in the many fire-prone areas in the vicinity.

“But the project I’m most excited about,” Stockton told me, “involves the social-justice aspects of tree canopy cover.” As mentioned in this post about Los Angeles, in the hottest parts of the country, tree cover has been an increasingly important environmental-justice issue. Where there are suburbs and big houses, there have been trees; where not, not. “We’d like to identify the areas with the lowest tree-canopy cover, and send out fellows to help people in the community understand how to help these trees thrive,” she said. “Without help on the front end, a lot of these trees are just going to die.”

California’s Climate Action Corps is not the answer to all of the state’s modern problems. But it is a step in the right direction.