Deseret Magazine - July/August 2022

M AG A Z I N E

CHARITY & THE

CONSTITUTION

BY MATTHEW S. HOLLAND

IS THE SUPREME

COURT

IN CRISIS?

SP ECIAL ISSU E

BY THOMAS B.GRIFFITH

THE FIGHT TO SAVE

A PLACE OF THEIR OWN: IMMIGRANTS & THE

DEMOCRACY

AMERICAN DREAM THE AGONY OF

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CONTENTS

48

SPECI A L I SS UE

THE FIGHT TO SAVE

DEMOCRACY

THE AGONY OF LIZ CHENEY

IS THE SUPREME COURT IN CRISIS?

WHY THE GOP LEFT ONE OF ITS MOST CONSERVATIVE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS OUT IN THE COLD.

BY THOMAS B. GRIFFITH PAGE 16

MILAN SMITH JR., A GOOD JUDGE OF CHARACTER

by michael j . mooney

BY ETHAN BAUER PAGE 24

THE RISING TIDE OF AUTHORITARIANISM

BY GILLIAN FRIEDMAN PAGE 40

JEFF FLAKE TAKES A STAND

BY HAL BOYD PAGE 44

THE POWER OF AGENCY

BY IAN V. ROWE PAGE 70

OUR FOUNDING AFFECTION

BY MATTHEW S. HOLLAND PAGE 74

A FRAGILE FREEDOM

“We’ve had good representation, but nobody is as effective and efficient as Liz Cheney.”

BY DARON ACEMOGLU AND JAMES A. ROBINSON PAGE 76

A NOT-SO-DISTANT WAR

BY LOIS M. COLLINS PAGE 84

80 WEAPONIZATION OF DOUBT

M AG A ZI N E

CHARITY & THE

CONSTITUTION

BY MATTHEW S. HOLLAND

IS THE SUPREME

COURT

IN CRISIS?

SPE C I A L I SS U E

A PLACE OF THEIR OWN: IMMIGRANTS & THE

DEMOCRACY

AMERICAN DREAM THE AGONY OF

DESERET MAGAZINE UPC REFERENCE MARCH

A PLACE OF THEIR OWN NEW CITIZENS FROM AROUND THE WORLD ARE KEEPING THE AMERICAN DREAM ALIVE. by benoît morenne

BY THOMAS GRIFFITH

THE FIGHT TO SAVE

JANUARY

AMERICAN SCIENCE IS UNDER ATTACK. WHO BENEFITS?

56

APRIL

MAY

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

LIZ CHENEY

by lee m c intyre

JULY/AUGUST 2022 VOL 02 | NO 16

JUNE

NOVEMBER

JULY

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DECEMBER

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY CRAIG FRAZIER

JULY/AUGUST 2022

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CONTENTS

MAGAZINE

60

“ This is not a battle about science.

It’s a battle about politics and law and money.”

DREDGING UP THE PAST THE BATTLE OVER UTAH LAKE HAS JUST BEGUN. by benoît morenne

MODERN FAMILY

PUT A RING ON IT

18

The surprising case for marrying young. by w . bradford wilcox

THE WEST

INSIDE OUT How naming emotions can help kids grow.

2

by deborah farmer kris

20

RESILIENCE IN THE CITY OF ROSES

28

A Portlander reflects on the meaning of home in a time of turmoil. by zach dundas

IN THE AIR

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

NEVER SAY AMEN The Supreme Court’s answer to school prayer fanned the culture war.

36

32

The future of summer looks … smoky. by amanda monthei

by kelsey dallas

JULY/AUGUST 2022

7

CONTRIBUTORS

IAN V. ROWE

GILLIAN FRIEDMAN

MATTHEW S. HOLLAND

DEBORAH FARMER KRIS

Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. He has held leadership positions at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the White House and MTV, where he earned two public service Emmys. An excerpt from his book “Agency,” on how understanding American history builds self-reliance, is on page 70.

Before joining The New York Times as the 2020 David Carr Fellow, Friedman was an investigative reporter for the Deseret News. She has won numerous awards including first place from the Society for Features Journalism and the American Jewish Press Association.

Friedman examines the rising tide of authorianism on page 40.

Holland has served as a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since April 2020. He was president of Utah Valley University from 2009 until 2018 and a professor of political science. He is the author of “Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America.”

Holland writes about those bonds on page 74.

A writer, teacher, parent educator and school administrator, Kris also writes for PBS Kids for Parents and the NPR blog MindShift to help kids and families thrive. She has written several books, including “I Love You All the Time” and “You Have Feelings All the Time.” She explains the importance of helping children identify their emotions on page 20.

W. BRADFORD WILCOX

AMANDA MONTHEI

DARON C. ACEMOGLU

TOFUNMI YOSOLA

Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor of sociology. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of “New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.” Wilcox writes about the benefits of marriage for young adults on page 18.

Monthei is a writer, podcast host and former wildland firefighter. She hosts the “Life with Fire” podcast and her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Outside and The Atlantic. During the summers, Monthei is a National Park Service wildfire public information officer.

Her article on wildfires’ impact on air quality and how to address it is on page 32.

An economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Acemoglu is co-author with James A. Robinson of “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” and “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty.” They write about the balance between protection and accountability and the emergence of freedom on page 76.

Yosola is an illustrator and visual artist based in England. Her work has appeared on book covers for Penguin Random House publishing and featured in The Guardian and Texas Highways, the American Bar Association journals and Dear Damsels online publishing. You can see her work on page 21.

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DESERET MAGAZINE

THE BUZZ

OUR READERS RESPOND

cover story, by Eric Balken, explored the complicated and delayed response to the ever-dwindling water levels of Lake Powell and the regional drought’s threat to the Colorado River water storage system (“When the Desert Runs Dry”). Many readers on social media concluded climate change was catching up with the ill-conceived Glen Canyon Dam. “Let all the water flow down the river and stop letting it evaporate. The dam was a terrible idea when it was built and it hasn’t gotten better,” tweeted Rosa Luxemburg. Other readers blamed the dam’s longtime opponents for contributing to the reservoir’s declining water levels by suing for water releases to restore fish habitat. Following the story’s publication, the Deseret News convened events in Washington, D.C., and Phoenix, Arizona, to discuss climate change and drought in the West. “Going back generations, we are standing on the shoulders of giants who laid the framework for people to live in this environment,” Mesa Mayor John Giles told the May 17 gathering in Phoenix. “Certainly there is more acute awareness of that now because of the shortages on the Colorado River.”

Staff writer Benoît Morenne wrote about an experimental program to stem the tide of veteran suicides where other veterans provide the first line of defense (“The Life You Save May be Your Own”). Calling the piece “a harrowing story,” in a letter to the editor, Deseret reader Frank Larkin urged Utah Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney to support the National Warrior Call Day initiative that “calls on all Americans, but especially those who have worn or are wearing the uniform,” to support a warrior who needs it most. Lisa Rein, a Washington Post reporter, called the article a “terrific piece.” And Colby Jenkins, a Green Beret veteran said, “My mind has not stopped racing nor my heart beating strongly remembering my own post-combat struggles … but I’m also seeing much relief and happiness from what you highlight in your story.” Randy McDonald, who is featured in the article, thanked Morenne and said, “I’m happy you painted a picture for those who may not truly understand our struggles.” Rick Staggenborg, a retired psychiatrist at the Department of Veteran Affairs, added: “You may have saved a life or two by dispelling myths about the supposed inferior services (the VA) offers.” Mya Jaradat traveled to Israel to report on the state of the nation 75 years after partition and what it means for dual citizens like herself (“Is This the Future of Israel?”). Journalist Matthew Telle retweeted the article saying, “It takes courage to write like this. I don’t mean war-reporter courage or foreign correspondent courage. I mean solid, deep, valuable, personal courage and character. Bravo Mya, and to her editors at @deseretmagazine for publishing.” Bonnie Glick and Kennedy Lee of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue wrote about the benefits of artificial intelligence and warned how its uses may infringe upon religious freedom (“The Dark Side of AI”). “Chinese authorities have already used a vast system of advanced facial recognition technology to profile religionists,” they write in the article that was featured in a Pew Research Center newsletter. “This data then serves as a hub for authorities to track movements, search people’s homes and detain citizens.” Lois Collins interviewed Liz Bruenig, a Catholic, socialist and family-focused thinker for the magazine’s Last Word (“Meet the Woman Who Confounds the Left and Right”). The Duke Divinity newsletter featured the article and Bruenig playfully tweeted, “this means the Mormons and I are allies now.”

TH E M AY I SSU E ’ S

JULY/AUGUST 2022

9

THE VIEW FROM HERE

THE AMERICAN IDEAL

T

he scene was historic. The U.K.’s prime minister, with his iconic mess of hair, charcoal suit and blue tie, bounded toward Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a symbolic stroll down the streets of Kyiv.

“You are strong,” Johnson can be heard saying in a video of the April exchange. Such a moment seemed unimaginable only weeks earlier, as Russia launched its offensive against Ukraine’s capital city. Since Johnson’s initial trip, leaders from the United States and other nations have made similar visits.

“If there’s anything possibly good to come out of this horrible tragedy and suffering,” U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Jeff Flake, told me during a recent interview (page 44), it may be that “the world is coming together” to support Ukraine, and by extension, their democracy.

Through the sweep of history, authoritarian government has too often been the common default while representative government has been a fragile experiment. Noted economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that stable democratic states thrive within a “narrow corridor” between an extreme overpowering state, on the one hand, and a state that’s too weak to safeguard human freedoms, on the other. They outline these ideas in an essay in this issue (page 76).

Finding and sustaining this sweet spot where democracy can thrive, they explain, is what separates the success stories.

And it’s precisely this sweet spot the founders sought to achieve in creating and ratifying the U.S. Constitution. And yet today, even the Constitution has become increasingly contested in our era of political discord. Elder Matthew S. Holland, a former university president, makes the case for renewed “civic charity,” an underappreciated value for the continued success of constitutional government (page 74).

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DESERET MAGAZINE

This double issue of the Deseret Magazine is dedicated not only to the contemporary challenges facing democracy, but also to the urgent need to fight for its preservation and renewal.

Retired Federal Judge Thomas B. Griffith discusses why an independent judiciary, free from partisan allegiances, best serves the republic (page 16). Benoît Morenne of The Wall Street Journal chronicles the surprising immigrant communities who come to the United States in search of the American dream (page 56). Ian V. Rowe, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, meditates on the value of human agency in a free society (page 70). And Michael J. Mooney profiles Liz Cheney, a politician who finds herself increasingly unpopular in her home state among constituents precisely because she stood up for democracy. She has come to embody Edmund Burke’s “conscience”-minded vision of political representation (page 48).

Reporter Gillian Friedman, formerly of The New York Times, documents the rise of authoritarianism across the globe (page 40) while essayist and author Lee McIntyre explores the perils of disinformation to democracy (page 80). Finally, the last word is a conversation between Deseret Magazine’s Lois M. Collins and Mariya Manzhos, a Ukrainianborn American journalist, who reflects on the war in her home country and why the American experiment and Ukraine’s fight matter (page 84).

“I connect to America most on a local scale,” she tells Collins. “One of my favorite places to take my kids is called Lincoln Park. It’s nothing more than an excellent city park, but it magically brings together people of all ages, nationalities, races, backgrounds. Children play right next to skaters, musicians and dog walkers. It’s where the idea of America feels the closest to me.”

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Deseret Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 16, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in December/ January and July/August.

The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/ subscribe. Copyright 2022, Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved.

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COMMENTARY

AN INDEPENDENT JUDICIARY DISMISSING JUDGES AS POLITICAL HACKS DAMAGES OUR CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

BY TH O M AS B . G R I F F I TH

I

t was an extraordinary moment in 2018 when Chief Justice John Roberts issued a stinging public rebuke of the president. I cannot recall anything like it happening before. The chief justice has tremendous respect for each of the branches of the federal government and the officials who lead them. He is what political scientists call an “institutionalist” — someone who believes that the preservation of the institutions of our society is vital and that critics of their performance should be careful not to undermine their role in American life.

On top of that, Roberts is an amiable man who favors compromise and consensus because he respects the views of others. And yet, when then-President Donald Trump cavalierly dismissed a judicial decision against his administration because it had come from an “Obama judge,” Roberts responded immediately and forcefully: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

I was reminded of the chief justice’s claim during the firestorm of criticism triggered by the recent leak of a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that favors overruling Roe v. Wade. Pundits, commentators and politicians critical of Alito’s conclusion and the support it had garnered among four of his colleagues have accused those justices of pursuing a partisan agenda. To these critics, the justices are partisans in robes, mere political hacks.

Which reminds me of H.L. Mencken’s puckish observation that for every complicated matter there is a simple solution — that is wrong.

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DESERET MAGAZINE

The simple answer critics give when they dislike a decision of the Supreme Court is that the justices are doing the bidding of the party that supported their appointment. That simple answer is profoundly wrong and does great damage to our constitutional order.

Careful study of the work of our federal judiciary shows that although judges are not perfect, most of the time most of them live up to the oath each takes to be impartial.

A word about that oath: I teach a seminar at Harvard Law School on the role of a judge under the Constitution. Our readings cover in detail the debate over whether a judge should view the Constitution as a living document that should be interpreted to reflect the changing sensibilities of the American people or as a charter that protects rights that can only be added to or taken away by “We, the People” amending the Constitution through our elected representatives, and not by judges.

Our study of this debate takes up much of the course, but before we jump into that debate, we spend several days studying the oath of office required of every federal judge. That oath was created in the initial act of the first Congress and requires each judge to pledge to the American people and to God that he or she will be impartial and will not decide cases to favor partisan ends.

Never once in my 15 years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit did I see a colleague cast a vote that I thought was tainted with partisanship. The disagreements were always over what the law requires and not our preferred political outcomes. Cynics may dismiss my report as naïve, delusional or even deceptive, but they would

I’M HAPPY IF MY FULL-THROATED SUPPORT OF JACKSON’S APPOINTMENT WAS A STRIKE AGAINST HYPERPARTISANSHIP, BUT PUSHING BACK AGAINST POLITICAL TRIBALISM WASN’T MY MAIN PURPOSE. SPEAKING UP FOR AN IMPARTIAL JUDICIARY WAS.

be wrong. I was in the “room where it happened.” I’m not naïve. I’m not delusional. I’m not a liar. I’ve never been a Supreme Court justice, so maybe things work differently there? The chief justice claims they don’t.

And Justice Stephen Breyer, a political progressive appointed by a Democratic president, agrees with the chief.

“A judge’s loyalty is to the rule of law,” Breyer wrote in his 2021 book, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.” “not the political party that helped to secure his or her appointment.”

I know the chief justice. I know Breyer. Neither is naïve. Neither is delusional. Neither is dishonest.

Of course, a citizen can’t rely on the pundits’ descriptions of judicial decisions to understand what is at work. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out recently, the best way to determine whether a judge is a partisan, as the critics claim, or keeping her oath of impartiality, as the chief justice and Breyer assert, is to read her written opinions. That’s hard work. For example, the draft opinion by Alito that was leaked to the public in May is 98 pages long. I’m a slow reader. That’s three hours of work for me. And yet how can I conclude the opinion is in error or is correct, is driven by a partisan agenda or a faithful effort to follow the law, unless I roll up my sleeves and do the hard work of studying it for myself?

I was a member of the President’s Commission on the Supreme Court, which was given the task of describing the current debate over the role of the Supreme Court in American society. Most observers viewed the creation of the commission as an effort by President Joe Biden to create a forum for the debate over whether the number of justices on the Supreme Court should be increased. For a year, the members of the commission studied the issue intensely. We read books and articles. We took testimony from experts and comments from any with enough interest in the topic to write. I joined the commission convinced that increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court would be a dangerous gambit. Nothing I read or heard in the year that followed changed my view. Here’s why.

Those pressing for expansion believed judges were partisans in robes.

They didn’t believe the claim of the chief justice, Breyer or me that judges decide cases based on the law and not politics. They were dissatisfied with some of the decisions of the current Supreme Court, and they assumed that they could change those decisions by adding justices who had partisan political ends in mind.

I’m not pleased with all of the decisions of the Roberts court either.

I was overturned by the court in a landmark case that eviscerated a key component of the most significant voting rights legislation in our nation’s history. I think the court gave short shrift to the power given to ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE H I LTO N

Congress after the Civil War to root out racism in the way we conduct elections. But I don’t attribute the court’s approach to an effort to hurt Democrats and help Republicans because I know the justices and I know they take seriously their oath to be impartial. They had a different view than do I about the reach of the 15th Amendment. Such differences over the meaning of the law, not competing partisan allegiances, explain our disagreement.

I was honored that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson asked me to introduce her to the Senate Judiciary Committee at the start of her historic confirmation hearings. I was well acquainted with her work as a judge on the federal district court in Washington, D.C., because I sat on the court that heard appeals from her rulings. Pundits and reporters commented on the novelty of a political conservative appointed by a Republican president endorsing a political progressive nominated by a Democratic president. I’m happy if my full-throated support of Jackson’s appointment was a strike against hyperpartisanship, but pushing back against political tribalism wasn’t my main purpose.

Speaking up for an impartial judiciary was.

As a judicial conservative who believes that a judge plays a limited role under the Constitution, I may end up disagreeing with Jackson on any number of matters, and yet I do not believe for a moment that her decisions will be driven by an interest to advance the policies of political progressives. They will be driven by what she believes the law requires.

The American people have good reason to have confidence in our judicial system. Those who attack our federal judges as partisans for the pursuit of their own political gain do great damage to the Constitution.

Jonathan Haidt warns of “a catastrophic failure of our democracy.” The reason? “We just don’t know what a democracy looks like when you drain all trust out of the system.”

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet empire, I had the good fortune of traveling throughout Eastern Europe and meeting with courageous reformers who risked their lives to establish the rule of law in their countries. They were eager to learn from the American experience, especially about how to create and maintain an impartial judiciary, which they believed was the crown jewel of American democracy.

As Benjamin Franklin observed at the conclusion of the Philadelphia convention that drafted our Constitution, the rule of law is a fragile possibility that is difficult to keep in the best of times. We are not living in the best of times. All the more reason to stop the partisan attacks on a judiciary that has served our Constitution imperfectly but well.

T H O M A S B. G R I F F I T H I S A F O R M E R F E D E R A L J U D G E O N T H E U. S. C O U RT O F A P E A L S F O R T H E D.C . C I R C U I T A N D A F E L L O W O F T H E W H E AT L E Y I N S T I T U T I O N AT B R I G H A M YO U N G U N I V E R S I T Y.

JULY/AUGUST 2022

17

MODERN FAMILY

PUT A RING ON IT THE SURPRISING CASE FOR MARRYING YOUNG

BY W. B R A D FO R D W I LCOX

T

his past summer, Joey and Samantha Paris did something that shocked many of the New York friends they had made working on Wall Street and Broadway: They married at the age of 24. Their decision to marry in their 20s surprised their peers for three reasons.

First, there’s a common perception that the 20s aren’t for marriage, they are for fun. Most of Joey’s colleagues in finance thought that “the 20s are your time to enjoy and have fun and go out,” he says, adding, their view is that now “is the time to be young and free and independent (and …) you can’t have this fun, free lifestyle while still being married.”

Second, by marrying in her 20s, Samantha broke the cardinal rule for ambitious, professional women in New York. That rule, as feminist Jill Filipovic recently advised her readers, is that “women (ought) not to get married before 30.” This ensures women have the opportunity to successfully launch their careers and fully actualize themselves before merging with an equally successful partner and having the requisite one or two children. Marriage is supposed to be a capstone to a successful life, signaling you have arrived professionally and personally as an individual, not a cornerstone designed to launch your common life together as a family.

Finally, and most importantly, the “conventional wisdom” holds, as sociologist Philip 18

DESERET MAGAZINE

Cohen notes, “that early marriage increases the risk of divorce.” The idea is that it’s best to marry around 30 or later to lower your odds of landing in divorce court. After all, the notion is that young adults don’t have the maturity until they are about 30 to forge a strong and stable marriage.

But when I caught up with Joey and Samantha in Dallas, where they had recently

SAVING COHABITATION FOR MARRIAGE SEEMS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR ODDS OF BEING STABLY AND HAPPILY MARRIED.

moved, 20-something marriage seemed no obstacle to fun, professional success or a stable marriage. They sat close and comfortable on a sofa, laughing and finishing one another’s sentences. They were happy with new jobs and they were bullish about their family future.

Based on new research Lyman Stone and I conducted for the Institute for Family Studies, Joey and Samantha’s faith in their family future seems merited. Our analyses indicate that religious men and women who married in

their 20s without cohabiting first — a pattern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a “T” — have the lowest odds of divorce in America today.

We suspect one advantage that religious singles in their 20s have over their secular peers is that they are more likely to have access to a pool of men and women who are ready to tie the knot and share their vision of a family-focused life. Today, young singles like this are often difficult to find in the population at large.

This was certainly Joey and Samantha’s experience. They met at a party put on by Catholic friends. She says that knowing Joey shared her faith made her comfortable getting more serious, especially in a New York scene where many men she had met took a more short-term orientation to relationships.

“The religious guys are more long-term guys, the guys you want to marry and the guys you want to bring home to mom and dad,” she observes, adding, “they’re going to share my morals and my values and have perhaps a similar background.” By contrast, other guys are more likely to be “one-night-stands or (just) looking to have a good time.”

Her intuition here is sound. Shared faith is linked to more sexual fidelity, greater commitment and higher relationship quality. One Harvard study found that women who regularly attended church were about 40 percent less likely to divorce. The family-friendly norms

2

and networks found in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues make religion one of the few pillars of strong and stable marriages in America today.

Many young adults today believe cohabitation is also a pillar of successful marriages, one reason why more than 70 percent of those who marry today live together before marriage. But the conventional wisdom here is wrong: Americans who cohabit before marriage are less likely to be happily ILLU STR ATION BY H A N N A H D E C KE R

married and more likely to break up.

Couples who cohabited were 15 percent more likely to get divorced than those who did not, according to our research. A Stanford study cited other research finding that the link between cohabitation and divorce was especially strong for women who cohabited with someone besides their future husband.

Samantha is not one such woman. She and Joey did not live together before marriage for religious reasons, and both of them see

real-world benefits to waiting until marriage to build a home together. They have seen how living together can devalue the distinctive character of married life.

By contrast, Joey and Samantha have found domestic life exciting. From decorating their first Christmas tree together to spending the night together for the first time, they’ve found their new domestic life to be extraordinary and enjoyable.

Samantha also thinks cohabitation fosters a revolving-door approach to relationships.

Given that most young adults today who cohabit do so with someone besides their future spouse, “they always see leaving as an option,” she says. And once they marry, that “mindset doesn’t really leave — they always can see that there’s a door to leave ... they can leave at any time. Whereas since we didn’t (have previous cohabiting relationships), that’s just not an option we would think of.”

The psychologist Galena Rhoades, who studies young adult relationships, agrees this could be one reason multiple cohabitations are risky for marriage, but also has other theories on the demerits of multiple cohabitations for future marital success. “We generally think that having more experience is better” in life, she says. “But what we find for relationships is just the opposite.” More experience with different partners is linked to worse marriages in her research. Having a history with other cohabiting partners may make you discount the value of your spouse. Sure, your husband, John, is dependable and a great father, but not nearly as charming as Luke or as ambitious as Charles, the two other men you lived with before marrying John. Making comparisons like these could undercut your marriage, in Rhoades’ estimation.

The conventional wisdom holds that spending your 20s focusing on education, work and fun, and then marrying around 30 is the best path to maximize your odds of forging a strong and stable family life. But the research tells a different story, at least for religious couples.

Saving cohabitation for marriage, and endowing your relationship with sacred significance, seems to maximize your odds of being stably and happily married.

Waiting to move in together until after the wedding has made everything “so exciting,” says Samantha, “because since we did wait then it makes marriage that much sweeter.”

W. B RA D F O R D W I L C OX I S T H E D I R E C T O R O F T H E NAT I O NA L M A R R I AG E P R O J E C T A N D A P R O F E S S O R O F S O C I O L O GY AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F V I R G I N I A .

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INSIDE OUT HOW NAMING EMOTIONS CAN HELP KIDS GROW

BY D E B O R A H FA R ME R K R I S

O

ne night not long ago, i called up the stairs to remind my 10-yearold daughter to practice piano.

“Hiss,” she said as she came down.

“What’s the emotion behind that ‘hiss’?” I asked.

She paused to think. “Exasperated with a hint of anger but not enough to override my good-naturedly-ness.” And then she went off to practice.

In my work as a parent educator, I often run workshops on how to help kids build emotional literacy. And one concept that really resonates with caregivers is “emotional granularity.” Coined by neuroscientist Lisa Barrett Feldman, author of “How Emotions are Made,” emotional granularity is the ability to name what we are feeling with a high degree of precision and specificity. Are you enraged or annoyed? Ecstatic or content? Jealous or lonely?

According to Feldman’s research, “people who could distinguish finely among their unpleasant feelings ​— ​those ‘50 shades of feeling crappy’ — ​ ​were 30 percent more flexible when regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them.”

Put simply, when we can find the right words to label our emotions, we are better

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equipped to make good choices.

As a mom, I remember the first time I realized the power of helping kids name their feelings. My daughter was two when we brought her baby brother home from the hospital. An emergency C-section meant I had been away from her longer than we’d anticipated. For two days, she barely acknowledged me. On day three, she erupted into an inconsolable

IT’S HELPFUL TO THINK OF “MAD” AS A TIP-OF-THEICEBERG EMOTION. WITH A LITTLE EMPATHY AND CURIOSITY, YOU MIGHT DISCOVER WORRY, ANXIETY OR CONFUSION BELOW THE SURFACE.

tantrum. Once she wore herself out, I asked, “Are you mad at mommy?” No answer. “Do you feel sad?” No answer.

And then my husband asked, “Do you feel scared?” At that she nodded, began to cry gently and snuggled beside me for comfort. Her life had been upended, and we had offered her

the balm of the right word to express that.

As parents, we need emotional granularity most when it comes to anger: our children’s and our own. It’s helpful to think of “mad” as a tip-of-the-iceberg emotion. With a little empathy and curiosity, you might discover worry, anxiety or confusion below the surface.

When your middle schooler slams the door, it’s tempting to reprimand their disrespectful behavior or to brush it off as a “bad mood.”

But here’s one thing I’ve learned through years of teaching tweens and teens: Angry outbursts are signal flares. That slam might indicate a conflict with a friend, a bad quiz grade, an embarrassing moment on the bus, worry about soccer tryouts, the need for a snack or a lack of sleep. As a seventh grader told me, “I wish my parents would remember that when I get mad at them, it’s almost always because I’m stressed about something else.” expert is Susan David, a Harvard psychologist and author of “Emotional Agility.” She told me that one of our most important jobs as parents is “helping your child show up to all emotions — not this idea that some emotions are good and some are bad, but that emotions just are.”

David describes emotions as “data, not directions.” As she told me, “Sometimes our emotions are signposts that show us what we

MY GO-TO E MOT IONS

ILLU STR ATION BY TO FU N M I YOS O LA

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care about.” For example, nerves before play tryouts might signal to a teen that they care about drama or perhaps that they are excited to be part of a group activity. That’s good information. It motivates them to do their best, but it also gives clues about what to do next if they aren’t chosen to be part of the cast. If the nerves point to their interest in drama, what other performance opportunities could they pursue? If they are more interested in a group activity, what clubs might fill that need?

When we can take the judgment out of emotions, David says, “we can start to help kids create space between their feeling and their response to that feeling.”

Being nonjudgmental is the arena where character is developed: when you can recognize your fear or frustration and still make a choice that aligns with your values. We develop courage and confidence when we can say, “I own my emotions; my emotions don’t own me.”

This work begins with helping young kids label their emotions at a very early age.

April, I visited several preschool classrooms to read my picture book “You Have Feelings All the Time,” a book I wrote to help young kids develop an emotional vocabulary. When I ask the three- and four-year-olds to show me “what happy looks like,” their faces lit up with smiles. When I asked them to show me “what sad looks like,” they puckered out their lips and drooped their shoulders. They clenched their fists for “mad” and hugged their chests or covered their eyes for scared. When it came to these four basic emotions, these kids were pros.

Later that same day, I sat with a class of third graders and told them about this preschool experience. “You are older, so I bet you can name more than four emotions,” I told them. They began to brainstorm words that fell under the umbrellas of happy, sad, mad and scared.

“Mad” generated the most synonyms: frustrated, annoyed, irritated, angry, enraged, bothered, upset. When we moved to “scared,” the kids had questions: “What about stressed and anxious? Do those mean the same thing?”

“Terrified is definitely different than worried — but I think they both go under ‘scared,’ right?”

“Where does ‘surprised’ fit? Sometimes surprises are happy and sometimes they are scary. Can we put it in both places?”

“What about ‘confused’? It can feel stressful

O N E MO R N IN G IN

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when you don’t know what to do. But it can also be frustrating.”

They grew thoughtful when we moved to sad. The first boy I called on offered this word: “grief.” “That’s what you feel when you lose something you really love,” he said.

What if you lose something less important, I asked, like a soccer game? “That’s more like ‘disappointed,’” another student responded.

“Happy” posed a bit of a challenge. They agreed it was a good feeling, but what were the gradations of this emotion?

“Satisfied,” said one student.

“Peaceful,” said another.

“What about excited?” asked a third. “I’m excited my birthday is next week. That’s a happy feeling.”

Now things were getting interesting. Exciting is a high-energy — or high-arousal — emotion. Peaceful is a calmer biological state.

WE DEVELOP COURAGE AND CONFIDENCE WHEN WE CAN SAY, “I OWN MY EMOTIONS; MY EMOTIONS DON’T OWN ME.”

We interpret both as types of happiness, but they could not look more different in our nervous system.

A few days later, I met with a group of high school seniors to talk about the science of emotion, and I brought up this question of excitement vs. peacefulness. Our bodies experience excitement and anxiety in nearly identical ways: Both are states of arousal, I explained. Our hearts race and a surge of cortisol gets us ready to act. Similarly, feeling calm and feeling blue are similar, low-arousal states.

So what’s the difference between these emotions? If naming emotions is powerful and instructive, how do we decide which name we apply to internal states?

A student raised her hand, “I guess it depends on the context. What’s happening around us that prompts that rush of emotion?”

She was right. Our brain, in an effort to keep us safe, constantly assesses our surroundings and makes predictions based on past

experiences. So the difference between excited and scared is a matter of interpretation.

Think about it like this: Two kids are getting ready to go on stage. Both have a fluttering stomach. The one who had success last time they were on stage — who experienced applause — interprets that feeling as excitement.

But what about the child who has never stood in front of an audience? Or the one who froze up the last time they were on stage? They will likely interpret their emotional symptoms as anxiety.

This matters because our instinctive reaction to anxiety is avoidance. Excitement, in contrast, pushes us in the other direction — we want to run toward an opportunity.

“Your body is constantly giving you information,” I explained to them. “Pay attention to what you feel, but remember that while you may not be able to control your emotional reaction to a situation, you can choose your response.”

To help with this, I offered them another tool I learned from Susan David. Instead of saying, “I am mad” or “I am stressed,” try saying, “I notice that I’m feeling sad right now.”

That simple language shift prompts reflection: “I notice that I’m feeling agitated. I wonder why?”

A few days later, I ran into one of these same high school seniors. “I am super stressed about college decisions!” she began. But then she stopped herself: “Scratch that. I notice that I feel stressed whenever I think about what college to commit to.”

“Cool. Tell me more about what you are noticing,” I said.

That began a different kind of conversation — not so much about anxious feelings, but about her values, her vision for the future and competing priorities. “You know,” she concluded, “when I think about this one college, I don’t have that same stressful feeling. It’s not quite as ‘prestigious’ as some of the others, but it has a solid program for the field I want, and the students I met were really kind. I’m going to sit with this some more.”

In that space she’s creating between the emotion she named and the decision she will make, I have full confidence in her capacity to choose thoughtfully. And that’s what we want for our kids, for ourselves, for our world — to use emotions as companions on our journey toward our better selves.

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LEADERSHIP

A GOOD JUDGE OF CHARACTER A CONSERVATIVE IN ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST LIBERAL COURTS WARNS OF ENCROACHING PARTISANSHIP

BY E TH A N B AU E R

P

resident george w. bush appointed Milan Smith Jr. to the federal bench in 2006, though Smith would prefer I not mention that. Not because he has anything against Bush, but because of what such a connection implies in today’s highly partisan political climate. “There’s a presumption,” he explains, “on the part of many people, that if you were appointed by a particular president, then your rulings would be consistent with the political philosophy of the appointing president.”

Smith has spent the past 16 years as a judge sitting on the California-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, long considered a liberal court, trying to combat that perception. He believes viewing judges as political actors undermines the public’s faith in the country’s judicial system — a system that, historically, has been held in higher esteem than the executive and legislative branches of government.

But confidence is falling, reaching a historic low in 2021 even before the leaked draft of the Supreme Court opinion poised to overturn Roe v. Wade entered the public consciousness.

Smith thinks he knows why.

It starts with the simple fact that Congress is impotent — “deadlocked,” to use his word — so new, sweeping legislative change is pretty much impossible and has been for some time.

“So when people want to get things done,” Smith says, “if they can find a way to either reconstruct the statutes previously passed, or more importantly, if they can get the Constitution construed in a particular way to effectuate a policy change, they will far prefer to do

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it.” Politicians know this. That’s obvious in just about any Senate confirmation hearing for judicial nominees, both in terms of party-line votes and lines of questioning. “If you listen to the comments of the senators on both sides in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the things that they go after people for,” Smith says, “it’s very clear that they’re treating these people as if they were political candidates.”

And that, he adds, is a dangerous trend.

Judges have no armies to enforce their rulings.

“We depend on what’s called moral-suasion,”

“POLITICIANS WILL TRY TO TAKE THE MANTLE OF THE LORD AND WRAP IT ABOUT THEIR SHOULDERS, AND CLAIM THAT THEY SPEAK FOR GOD.”

he says, “and the goodwill of people.” In other words, judges can only interpret the law as long as people are willing to follow it. And the more people see judges as umpires rather than managers, the thinking goes, the more willing they will be. Instead, the reverse is happening.

“The level of respect is declining,” he says.

“And, in my view, at an alarming rate.”

At 80 years old, Smith has had a long time to ponder his viewpoint and draw that

conclusion. Long before he attended BYU as an undergrad and the University of Chicago’s law school, he knew he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his storied family’s tradition and become a lawyer. And now, following a stroke of luck that landed him his current job, he’s still following a family tradition of moderation at a time when increasingly few are — though he hopes his example might light the way.

F OU NDAT ION F ORGE D

Smith’s destiny could be called preordained.

As the great-great grandson of John D. Lee, he’s a member of the Lee-Udall political dynasty. His cousin, Mike Lee, represents Utah in the U.S. Senate, while his other cousins, Mark and Tom Udall, used to represent Colorado and New Mexico, respectively. Smith’s brother, Gordon, also served as a senator, representing Oregon from 1997 to 2009. It was Gordon who opened the door to Smith’s spot on the Ninth Circuit, but his approach to the bench starts all the way back with John D. Lee himself.

At least, that’s his contention. His mother, Smith explains, instilled in him “an abhorrence of extremism. And part of that,” he adds, “ironically, can be traced back to our progenitor, John D. Lee, who was not a moderate.”

Her teachings translated to what Smith now recognizes as “the golden mean,” a philosophical staple of the ancient Greeks. Popularized

by Aristotle, the idea is to look for answers between deficiency and excess — for example,

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY M A R K OWE N S

JULY/AUGUST 2022

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between cowardice and recklessness is courage. He’s also been exposed to a variety of perspectives in his own family; Lee and Smith’s brother, Gordon, are both Republicans, while both Udalls are Democrats. And as a longtime speedreader, Smith starts each day by reading The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and a local legal newspaper cover to cover. Sometimes he also peruses Fox, CNN and even Deseret — all in the name of expanding his understanding of the world.

Those perspectives served him well over his long legal career, which included founding his own law firm and serving as vice chairman of the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission. The latter position ended up being consequential for his judicial nomination. While there, he helped secure legislation allowing sexual harassment victims to seek damages in the courts. California’s governor — then a Republican — vetoed the legislation.

Smith, a longtime Republican and “moderate conservative,” found the veto unconscionable and resigned. A decade and a half later, when he met with liberal U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer ahead of his confirmation hearing, she pulled out a copy of that resignation letter. While she preferred a liberal nominee, he remembers her telling him that letter showed character and integrity, and she agreed to support his nomination — as did the rest of the Senate; he was confirmed 93-0.

Smith’s legal philosophy — insofar as he has one; he believes the term to be an “oxymoron” because “if you’re following your oath, you don’t have a full legal philosophy in the sense that will guide your rulings” — could also be summarized by that resignation, and in one word: thoughtfulness. He recalls a talk

by Hugh B. Brown, former first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in which he interrogated the idea of “orthodox” belief.

“He was less concerned with whether people were orthodox,” Smith remembers, “but rather that they were thinking; that they had thought something through.” So even though he’s conservative, he tries to leave that identity behind when evaluating a case, in order to be as thoughtful as possible. It’s an approach that, he admits, probably wouldn’t get him a federal nomination today.

Not only because of the increased importance and scrutiny of judicial nominees in the absence of effective legislation, but because he wouldn’t pass a partisan loyalty test. “The principles that I grew up with as a young man, 26

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I still believe in them,” he says. “But the Republican Party today doesn’t stand for that anymore.” Nor, he adds, does the Democratic Party. Which is why, several years ago, he registered as an independent. I ask whether the goalposts have shifted in recent years regarding what it means to be conservative. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Absolutely.”

FOUNDAT ION S H AK E N

To understand how the ground has shifted beneath him, consider a recent case that, as of this writing, is still under consideration by the Supreme Court: Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. The case involves a football coach at a public high school in Washington state named Joseph Kennedy who, after games, would pray at the 50-yard line. It became a spectacle covered on local television, among other places, and the coach ignored the school district when it told him to stop, in ac“I’M NOT TRYING TO FORCE LATTERDAY SAINT DOCTRINE ON THE UNITED STATES WHEN IT’S CONTRARY TO WHAT THE LAW IS.”

cordance with long-standing interpretations of the Constitution’s establishment clause.

It became a culture war battleground, with conservatives rallying around Kennedy and against a government seeking to stifle his right to religious expression. “I think that’s just the nature of the times in which we live right now,” Smith says. “Particularly on the right, politicians will try to take the mantle of the Lord and wrap it about their shoulders, and claim that they speak for God.” Smith wrote the circuit court’s ruling siding with the school district. And in his opinion denying coach Kennedy a rehearing, he shared his own view on prayer: “I personally find it more than a little ironic that Kennedy’s ‘everybody watch me pray’ staged public prayers (that spawned this multi-year litigation) so clearly flout the instructions found in the Sermon on the Mount on the appropriate way to pray.” That, among other reasons, led Smith to what would surely be labeled as a “liberal” conclusion by the current cultural binary. But in Smith’s eyes, his Latter-day Saint faith was no impediment to this ruling.

Rather, it offered him a very good view of why siding with Kennedy could actually be bad for religious freedom. “If somebody were requiring our children to study Buddhism or to recite the Quran, we would not be happy with that,” he says. And the same would be true of a Buddhist parent, for example, whose child was required to participate in Christianity in public school.

Smith believes the Supreme Court is likely to reverse his decision by overturning long-standing case law regarding public school prayer, “which is their right,” he says. But again, he believes that’s dangerous, regardless of how much conservatives like it. It makes judges look like any other politicians — and whether that’s generally true or not, it’s at least not what the judiciary should look like. Especially in light of the leaked opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade. Smith didn’t want to comment on that since the ruling isn’t official yet, but his thoughts about the politicization of judges may, once more, prove instructive. “If the parties are successful in getting the judges to make what would normally be decisions reserved to the elected branches of government, people recognize that those judges are essentially performing the role of ‘politicians in black robes,’” he once said, “and must be scrutinized, criticized and checked just like political opponents would be.” So, too, with the religious freedom implications in the Kennedy case. “I worship the Lord,” he says, “but I worship the Lord privately. I’m not trying to force Latter-day Saint doctrine on the United States when it’s contrary to what the law is.”

Despite the surrounding rancor, Smith remains optimistic about the future of the judiciary. Foremost, he says, because of his “decent, honorable” colleagues who he believes are overwhelmingly trying to do their best to interpret law outside partisan inclinations. But also because he basically has to; believing anything less would be to lack belief in the American experiment itself. Which is why Smith has no plans to retire. He has said he wishes to “die with my boots on” — ideally after a renewed public appreciation for the Constitution takes root. Despite its imperfections, he says, it provides the framework for a better world — as long as those tasked with interpreting it avoid partisan poisoning. “(The Constitution) was a great improvement over what had existed historically,” he says. “It’s continuing to improve.

It has its problems. It develops. But I think the judiciary is really, really important in maintaining what we do have.”

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THE WEST

RESILIENCE IN THE CITY OF ROSES TWO YEARS AFTER PORTLAND BECAME A NATIONAL FAULT LINE, A LOCAL REFLECTS ON THE MEANING OF HOME

BY Z AC H D U N DAS

T

hat July, it felt like everyone in Portland got the calls. It was often a parent, sometimes a friend, checking in. No one has a transcript, of course. But the exchanges became a common point of reference.

The basic question: “Is Portland OK? Are you OK?” The answer (in spirit, if not exactly these words): “Well, of course. Yes.” The summer of 2020 brought challenges to us all, across the country. We tried to decode the pandemic’s surges, ebbs and peculiar social codes. The presidential campaign staggered on. And across the nation, the Black Lives Matter protests surged after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis cast everyday oppression into sharp relief.

In Portland, in the weeks after Floyd, after Breonna Taylor, the streets filled with diverse, overwhelmingly peaceful crowds. People of color and longtime activists stood at the forefront. But that moment’s particular flavor definitely reflected Portland’s history as one of America’s whitest big cities — about 75 percent white, in current census numbers. We have our own specific history of racism and discrimination. And, also, a widely held obliviousness. Those huge spring crowds included a lot of white people, like my own family, unaccustomed to questioning their own

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place in the scheme of American power.

Spring wasn’t simple. Police used stun grenades and tear gas; arson and vandalism incidents diverted attention from the larger phenomenon. But — especially after months of the pandemic — that season also bore a feeling of awakening: a city snapping back to

OUTSIDE OF THREE CITY BLOCKS, LIFE WENT ON AS WHATEVER PASSED FOR NORMAL IN 2020.

consciousness and starting an awkward, necessary reckoning.

By July, though, the tone shifted. The protests remained large, with a broad base and, of course, a sense of urgency. But after more than a month of daily protests, the most intense activity began to orbit a small area of downtown, centered on the Justice Center, a high-rise of courts and law enforcement facilities, and on the nearby federal courthouse. This bland

swatch of government buildings is usually an afterthought to locals — the opposite of the boutique-filled, character-rich neighborhoods Portland loves. But from the beginning of the month, it was center stage, as protesters and law enforcement faced off: fireworks thrown at the Multnomah County Justice Center, riots declared, arrests on federal charges.

Was Portland OK? Were we OK? You could understand the questions. The turmoil put Portland in a national glare. As the month wore on, federal officers used evermore aggressive tactics around the justice center. By the middle of the month, agents made seemingly random arrests in the protest zone, shoving people into unmarked vans, holding them without charge, a brief but chilling moment.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States tweeted: “We are trying to help Portland, not hurt it. Their leadership has … lost control of the anarchists and agitators. They are missing in action. We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE. These were not merely protesters, these are the real deal!”

Anarchists, agitators, law enforcement under siege — this was now the story. In September, then-Attorney General Bill Barr included Portland on a list of “anarchist jurisdictions” threatened with federal budget cuts. Fox News, in particular, put Portland at the center

SPENCER PLAT T/GET T Y IMAGE S

D UR IN G THE SUMMER OF 2020, PROTESTS FOR B L AC K L IV E S IN P ORT L AND, ORE GON, B E C AME A S U B JE C T OF NAT ION A L FAS C I N ATI O N .

of a summerlong narrative of urban disorder, amplifying tales of “hardcore rioters” and the like. Through the national lens, Portland in July 2020 looked like a city on fire. of it. And yet for me, and I believe I am not alone, talking about the unfolding agitation added yet more layers of strangeness.

The truth was, whatever TV showed, most of the city was basically calm. Especially in privileged neighborhoods like mine, tucked on the other side of the Willamette River, the justice center scene could be out of sight, out of mind. (Smaller protests continued in the outer-lying neighborhoods through the summer.)

I did know some people who turned out to voice opposition to the federal show of force.

Some of those summer nights downtown saw a “Wall of Moms” or a “Wall of Dads,” aiming to get between cops and protesters — very Portland responses to the situation. Black Lives Matter and the host of issues foregrounded that summer certainly stayed top of mind and conversation.

But at the same time, I fell into a strange tendency to downplay downtown — to emphasize that we were fine. The city was not

S U RR E A L E N O UG H, ALL

“on fire.” Outside of three or so blocks, life went on as — well, whatever passed for normal in 2020. People worked on their yards, took many walks, tried to craft pandemic-safe summer plans. In a 137-square-mile city of 600,000 people, almost all of us caught the “anarchy” on a screen, like everyone else.

The portrayal of a fiery land of anarchists and agitators simply stood at mind-bending contrast with the city as I know it. Portland does have a long history of protest and radicalism. (Colorful and confrontational protests against the Gulf War — the early ’90s installment — famously earned the city the nickname “Little Beirut,” now an old mainstay of local jargon.) That spring and summer carried a fierce charge, widely felt, and its expression varied wildly from person to person and protest to protest.

All the same, we’re a tea-drinking town. We have nine months of cardigan weather. Asked to point the way to a landmark tourist attraction, a Portlander will often proudly cite a bookstore — Powell’s City of Books, no less.

In fact, despite its election-night blue ocean, Portland can feel very conservative. Especially in the older core neighborhoods that range along the Willamette, the most coveted

lifestyle seems cut from a 19th-century cloth.

Portlanders walk to the coffee shop, shelter from the gloom in corner pubs. We grow roses, so much so that we’ve earned another nickname, “City of Roses.” Radical? In many local lives, Portland swings toward the twee, cozy and mellow.

We idealize individuality. It’s no coincidence that the city’s most famous company, Nike, began as a runner’s brand in the 1970s, when no one in mainstream America ran. For decades, a reverence for small-scale craft has welded together a distinctive Portland hybrid of culture, lifestyle and business. As Amazon rewired Seattle’s DNA and San Francisco sprouted high-rise tech HQs, Portland’s calling-card brands ran more to Stumptown Coffee, Blue Star Donuts and Dave’s Killer Bread.

In honest moments, a Portlander could admit that “Portlandia,” the cable-comedy sendup of indie earnestness, actually had something: Portland likes seeing itself as a city where a bohemian version of the good life thrives.

Our distinctive Western story comes into play here. Gold-rush seekers and would-be magnates turned north or south when they hit the coast. Our coastal sister cities ended up with much more polish, not to mention JULY/AUGUST 2022

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KATH RY N E LS E SS E R /AF P VIA GE TTY IMAGE S

THR O UG HO UT THE SUMMER AND I NTO THE FALL, L AT E - NIGH T C L AS H E S B E T WE E N P O L IC E A N D LI NGERI NG PROTESTORS WERE REGU L AR E V E NING NE WS E V E NTS .

money. The inland Western cities seem so bumptious and ambitious by comparison, with their energy booms and sagebrush suburbs. Oregon — settled by farmers seeking deep topsoil, built up by dynastic timber companies — developed a circumspect, mossbacked personality. (One of few somewhat famous quotes about Oregon comes from H.L. Mencken: “Oregon is seldom heard of. … It has no poets or statesmen.”)

Portland emerged into the 21st century holding on to that quietude. Lifestyle-minded migrants flocked from the East but from Boise and Albuquerque, too, looking for self-reinvention amid natural splendor. For many transplants (like me), Portland seemed like a big city, but only sort of: not a place of major events — not somewhere things happen. Certainly not a place out to shake the nation.

This downtown thing — it just didn’t feel like Portland. We were, as noted, fine.

LO O K IN G B AC K , THO UGH, that was just too comfortable and easy. We were fine, sure. The worst of it touched a tiny part of the city. But Portland as a whole is not entirely fine. The protest crisis reflected (and fed) a broader, deeper unease about the city’s direction.

For a long time — say, the 1990s through 2010s — self-satisfaction ran high around here. Our neighborhoods thrived. We adopted a suite of progressive policies around urbanism and climate. National media celebrated our urban and cultural successes. But there was always a dark side to Portland’s success,

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likewise rooted in that frontier past. Oregon’s first settlers coded racism into the territory’s laws, attempting to ban all Black settlement.

Wars with Native people and treaties favoring white settlers seized control of the landscape.

These old tragedies set patterns that mutated but persisted. Even in Portland’s 21st-century salad days, with laudatory New York Times features landing thick and fast, working-class people found themselves pushed to the margins economically. The halls of local power remained overwhelmingly white.

And in the last half decade, problems arose that seemed beyond Portland’s scope. Homelessness, notably, proliferated, tent encampments and rusted RVs filling parks, freeway underpasses and side roads. This humanitarian disaster shows no sign of improving. This highly visible, demoralizing prospect stacks atop subtler and longer-running stories about gentrification, sliding public education and economic inequity — familiar stories elsewhere, but with their own ache in a place that calls itself (wielding yet another sobriquet) “The City That Works.” The protests and our moment of national infamy added to a vague but growing unease about the city.

MEANWH IL E , T H OS E S H AL LOW “anarchist jurisdiction” hot takes missed something equally important. For its problems, real enough, Portland harbors abiding strengths. Our inventive side, the reigning interest in artisanship, can be easy to mock. But it’s real. And over roughly the same arc of time that held

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the pandemic and the protests, Portland’s instincts for self-reinvention and creation came into play, too.

The city, along with Oregon and the rest of the nation, is becoming more diverse, and civic identity is slowly — slowly, but noticeably — evolving. The default idea of a Portland person, place or thing grows less fixed, more fluid. The food scene vibrates with Indonesian-Chinese, Chamorro and avant-Mexican influences. A music world long defined by earnest white rockers now fosters electrifying, woman-led acts with Latin roots like Savila and Y La Bamba. Even City Hall — traditionally, the demographic equivalent of a very old-guard country club — feels it: As of spring 2022, people of color hold three of our five City Council seats.

In retrospect, both the national and personal storylines of 2020 were too simple. The many months since have, in their way, unfolded in the big spectrum of reality in between those polar myths of wild anarchy and total normalcy. And maybe that is entirely fitting — by origin and history, Portland resists any one identity: part West, part West Coast, a port hinge between the Pacific Rim and the continent beyond. We’re progressive by self-definition and often very square by preference.

A single true story can be hard to find here, but maybe here’s one: Portland may not be on fire, and it may not be “fine.” It is in the process, long and painful and hopeful, of evolving into its next self.

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THE WEST

IN THE AIR PREPARING FOR A FUTURE WRAPPED IN WILDFIRE SMOKE

BY A M A N DA MO N TH E I

P

eople who have lived most of their lives in the West often talk about the glory days — back when mountain towns still felt like hidden gems (and when home prices reflected that). Recently, nostalgic images of the mountain towns of yesteryear have added another idyllic quality — summer skies not filled with smoke.

Over the past few years, summer has become synonymous with wildfire season. And where there’s fire, there’s even more smoke.

For generations, vehicle and industrial emissions have been responsible for the majority of air pollution across the West. But the quantity of “smoke days” has increased by nearly two full days every year since 2005, rising above 40 days per year. Now, wildfire smoke is responsible for up to half of the particulate matter pollution in the West, and up to 25 percent nationwide, according to a 2021 study from Stanford University.

“I remember up until about 2000, we rarely had bad smoke in Missoula,” Bob Yokelson, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Montana, says. “And now, pretty much the second half of August and the first part of September, you can almost count on it being crappy air quality. Last summer we even had smoke in July.”

Yokelson is a wildfire smoke expert — studying its composition and chemical properties — and can reel off complex smoke data and research casually. But beyond his extensive background studying wildfire smoke, Yokelson

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also lives in an area with a millennium of wildfire history — and as those wildfires grow in size and severity, has had to adapt to the subject of his research just like everyone else.

“I can look out the window and if I can’t see the mountain (I don’t go outside),” he says, referring to the Rattlesnake Mountains that cradle the valley Missoula lies in. “Like, OK, it’s

IN AUGUST 2021, SALT LAKE CITY — WHICH IS ALREADY INCREDIBLY VULNERABLE TO AIR POLLUTION — EXPERIENCED THE WORST AIR QUALITY IN THE WORLD.

smoky so maybe I shouldn’t do my big 20-mile run today. Or maybe I should work on cabinets instead of the roof. Or maybe we should, you know, do soccer practice on Wednesday instead of Thursday.”

HOW DID T H E West get here — a time that some have dubbed the “Pyrocene,” a fire age, cloaked in toxic air? Smoky summers are only a symptom of a much larger issue in this case. While there are myriad overlapping problems that have contributed to more intense and destructive wildfires,

the most fundamental are management practices and changing climate conditions.

The most widespread and impactful forest management policy throughout the 20th century in the United States was full-suppression firefighting, which very effectively removed fire from landscapes. We’re now witnessing the consequences of those policies that kept all wildfires from burning. Namely, forests that haven’t been allowed to burn in a century have become overrun with vegetation and are thus more prone to disease, drought sensitvity and the inevitability of wildfires doing what they’ve always done — but with hotter temperatures, higher consequences and more smoke.

We’ve also added the effects of climate change to the mix; these effects are varied but can look like more extreme weather patterns, diminished snowpack or increased drought, and other climatic variations that exacerbate wildfire potential for longer periods through the year.

As wildfires driven by climate change and mismanagement continue to increase by almost every conceivable measure, it’s clear that communities across the United States will suffer from poor air quality for longer stretches every summer and fall. These impacts will not only affect the communities hardest hit by wildfires, or even just those living in the West.

Recent fire seasons have shown that smoke from California, Oregon, Washington and even British Columbia can affect air quality as

far away as the East Coast and Europe.

“The reality is that we’re just going to see more and more fire,” says Natasha Stavros, the director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This means smoke is going to be more real, and it’s going to be something we have to think about more.” checked the air quality report on a summer day? These reports‚ which you

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can access online at AirNow.gov, are one of the most helpful tools we have as individuals to check whether the air outside is safe on a day-to-day basis. It shows the concentrations of gasses and particulates in the atmosphere at any given time. A daily air quality index (AQI) report can range from zero to higher than 500 — numbers that are increasingly common in areas vulnerable to wildfire smoke.

Yokelson explains that particulate matter

is the primary driver of unhealthy air quality following wildfires. Fine particles are especially harmful, as they can be inhaled deep into the lungs and even into the bloodstream.

They are largely responsible for the long-term health impacts of smoke exposure, like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and certain cancers.

When wildfire smoke begins to block out the sun, air quality has likely breached the 150200 range of the AQI system, which is considered “unhealthy.” Above the unhealthy tier is “very unhealthy,” ranging from 201 to 300.

Anything above 301 is considered “Hazardous.” All three of these tiers may have notable impacts on those with existing medical conditions — considered “sensitive” groups by the Environmental Protection Agency — and on the entire population in affected areas.

Smoke from recent wildfires has regularly exceeded AQI values in recent years, with AQIs well over 500 being measured in some communities over the last few summers — summers marked with air so hazy with pollution that it crowds out light completely, reducing the sun to a dimmed orange bulb in the sky and making headlights necessary in the middle of the day.

These extreme smoke impacts are often limited to areas with certain topographic characteristics that keep smoke in valleys and drainages, “socking in” communities for weeks or months at a time in some cases. But extremely high AQIs are now occasionally seen in major metropolitan areas far beyond the actual burn areas — Portland, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and other major cities have all experienced severe smoke impacts over the last two years alone.

The Portland area had never experienced “unhealthy” on the AQI scale before 2020; however, following the Labor Day fires across Oregon and Washington in September of that year, the city ended up logging three “Very Unhealthy” and five “Hazardous” days that month alone. In 2021, Salt Lake City — which is already incredibly vulnerable to air pollution — experienced some of the worst air quality in the world for multiple days in August.

This takes a toll on folks’ health. Older adults and children are especially susceptible — as elders tend to have a higher likelihood of preexisting conditions that can be exacerbated by smoke exposure, while children inhale more air per pound of body weight compared to adults, leading to more smoke inhalation on days with poor air quality.

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According to a recent study from the University of Georgia, “fresh” smoke — or that which hasn’t aged in the atmosphere — can cause damage to the mitochondria, which are responsible for processing food and energy production at the cellular level. On the other hand, smoke that has traveled beyond the immediate fire area can grow more toxic over time, leading to excess free radical production in the body, which can ultimately lead to cell death, according to the European Research Council.

Experts say these health impacts can be lessened with a few key actions: The first and most obvious is to limit time outside on particularly smoky days. Others include installing HEPA filters or an air purifier for your home, wearing an N95 mask if you need to be outside in the smoke and increasing access to “clean air shelters” for residents who cannot ensure clean air at home.

And while the recommendations for inhome filters and choosing to stay indoors during the worst days of wildfire smoke pollution during the summer will continue to flood the media, not everyone has an equitable opportunity to reduce the risks of the persistent exposure to poor air quality.

For that reason, Oregon has recently developed protections for agricultural workers, with new Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules related to smoke and heat exposure that were to be implemented starting in June and July. These rules require paid breaks to take refuge from excessive heat or smoke exposure and require that employers provide N95 masks for their employees during the fire season. California has implemented similar measures, though genuine enforcement of these measures has been brought into question. And while not enough research has been done to identify exactly what types of health disparities exist in vulnerable communities, it’s still widely understood that these communities will continue to be inordinately impacted by increasingly bad fire seasons and air quality.

HOW W IL DF IR E SM O KE is affecting people right now is a massive concern — but not our only one. Standards from the EPA have lessened the impacts of fossil fuel pollution across the United States over the last 60 years, but wildfire smoke is now rapidly countering those gains. It’s long been assumed that wildfire smoke isn’t as harmful as fossil fuel pollution; however, it’s now clear that wildfire smoke has

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similar levels of toxicity, especially as fires affect more homes, vehicles and infrastructure — all of which create more toxic smoke when they burn.

Yokelson recalls how poor air quality in Los Angeles in the ’50s spurred the realization that air pollution was a nationwide problem that needed to be addressed. “We began cracking down on things like cars and factories, and all kinds of dangerous emissions of pollutants,” he says. “We were making tremendous progress.

But now in the last 10 years or so … we’re starting to reverse the progress we made by cleaning up our industries and our cars, because of the increased wildfires.”

So how do we have any hope for a future where the air is clear and the outdoors is safe?

ONE SEEMINGLY PARADOXICAL SOLUTION TO WORSENING AIR QUALITY DUE TO WILDFIRES IS — GET THIS — MORE FIRE.

Experts like Yokelson agree that one seemingly paradoxical solution to worsening air quality due to wildfires is — get this — more fire.

More fire can come in the form of prescribed fires or “controlled burns,” in addition to indigenous burning practices. These types of fires are set by practitioners and tribes in the “offseason,” when conditions are not as volatile as they are in the summer. This type of burning allows for some level of control over how the fire burns, as well as how much land is treated.

At their best, these burns clear excess vegetation and — if done consistently in the right places — can lessen fire intensity should a wildfire burn into the area, giving firefighters a better chance of suppressing the fire in these “treated” areas. However, windows for getting this type of ecologically beneficial fire on the ground are shrinking by the year. It’s also important to note that prescribed fire is no knight in shining armor for our fire problem — there will still be smoke and its negative side effects. But it is an important step in building forest resilience and, hopefully, lessening future smoke impacts from megafires.

Prescribed fire smoke is also demonstrably less toxic than wildfire smoke.

If you’ve ever seen a nice, clean-burning campfire, you can imagine what would happen if you threw a green branch on it. Smoke.

Prescribed burns limit what — and how much — is burned. When less fuel is consumed, that fuel produces less smoke, and that can add up to about 18 times less pollution per area, according to Yokelson.

While the reality of the prescribed burning of millions of acres of land that hasn’t been allowed to burn in a century is not necessarily optimistic, it could be one of the most important tools we have to limit both wildfire and smoke impacts in the future, especially if combined with meaningful community adaptation to wildfires and smoke. These adaptation measures could include improving access to air filters and purifiers, educating communities about the benefits of fire and how to improve their resilience to it, and developing community clean air shelters for those who are unable to protect themselves in their own homes. It will also require more research from scientists to develop a stronger understanding of wildfire smoke and its increasing public health impacts.

“I’m very excited about all of this work that’s being done to try and think about ways that we can protect people’s health in the face of this exposure,” says Colleen Reid, assistant professor in the geography department at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We can try really hard to do more prescribed burning, or more forest thinning, or all sorts of things to try and lessen the fires. But that’s going to take a long time. And in the meantime, we need to protect people’s health.” guilty, to some degree, of taking life in the West for granted. We get mountain views and after-work hikes and meadows of wildflowers and swims in lakes, but we don’t often consider what the wilderness requires back from us. Increasingly volatile wildfire seasons have forced us to grapple with how deeply intertwined our lives and the wild spaces we love are.

The days of begrimed haze are likely not going anywhere. This isn’t good news but perhaps it will spur some critical action on our part.

We can no longer escape the reality that living in the West will require significantly more accountability to the places and landscapes where we live — or, at the very least, a capacity to coexist with the smoke that settles.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

NEVER SAY AMEN THE FIGHT OVER SCHOOL PRAYER IS A BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE NATION

BY K E L S E Y DA L L AS

W

hen Steven Smith reflects on the magnitude of the modern school prayer conflict, he thinks about how it all started with a prayer that was just a sentence long.

That prayer, produced by the New York board of regents in the early 1950s, had been carefully crafted to avoid causing offense. It was meant to boost public schoolchildren’s moral education, not to challenge whatever their parents or pastors had taught them about God. “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country,” the prayer text reads.

But soon after it became an optional part of the school day, parents from a variety of religious backgrounds lodged complaints. And in the early 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the case.

The legal question in front of the court was whether a government-penned school prayer violated the Constitution’s establishment clause. However, in answering that query, the justices also had to weigh a much bigger question about how religious the American government was allowed to be.

“The cynical view is how much good could a prayer that takes 15 seconds to say really do, but it was quite symbolic to people. It felt to

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many like the answer to whether we do or don’t have a prayer in school could tell you a lot about the character … of our republic,” says Smith, a law professor and co-executive director of the Institute for Law and Religion at the University of San Diego.

For that reason and others, the court’s nearly unanimous ruling against the regents’

SETTING ASIDE TIME FOR PRAYER AT SCHOOL WAS MORE THAN A SHOW OF FAITH. IT WAS ALSO A BRANDING EXERCISE THAT STRENGTHENED AMERICA’S MORAL EDGE.

prayer in 1962 was met with widespread pushback. The outcry grew even louder when, a year later, the justices doubled-down on their decision in a ruling stating that Bible readings in public schools also violated the establishment clause.

Those two decisions ignited a battle over school prayer and the establishment clause that rages to this day. On one side are those

who say the Founders approved and even embraced a variety of government displays of faith, while, on the other, people believe the country only lives up to its founding vision when there’s a clear wall between church and state.

“You have people in good faith disagreeing about the fundamental vision of the character of America,” Smith says. “And both sides have solid reasons” for thinking what they do. fallout from the Supreme Court’s prayer rulings in the 1960s, it’s important to remember what else the country was going through during that time. It was the height of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, two events that reshaped Americans’ sense of themselves.

As part of the battle against “godless communism,” the United States had amped up its religious brand, says Steven K. Green, a law professor and director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University. Just a few years before the Supreme Court heard the prayer case, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” became the national motto. “We went out of our way to align American democracy with God,” he says.

Under those conditions, setting aside time for prayer during the school day was seen by

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many as more than an acknowledgment of the needs of people of faith. It was also a branding exercise, an activity that strengthened America’s moral edge.

“School prayer has always been very symbolic even to people who might not care much about prayer,” Smith says.

Even Catholic leaders, who had long fought against Protestant control of public schooling, had come to see Protestant-led prayer and Bible reading as a good thing. “By that time, they saw them as a little bit of religion in public education that was needed,” Green says.

To be clear, when the Supreme Court ruled, only around 40 percent of schools continued to lead students in formal religious practices, according to Green. But many Americans still experienced the court’s rulings on school prayer as an attack on their values.

“This was a major shock to many religious conservatives,” Green says.

And by that point, there was a growing concern over the Supreme Court’s power over civic affairs. Rulings like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which desegregated public schools, had led some to claim the justices were more interested in controlling the country than interpreting the Constitution. The school prayer rulings amplified that concern.

“I read one place that (the ruling on the regents’ prayer) produced more hostile letters to the court than any decision in decades,” Smith says.

I N AD D ITIO N TO damaging the Supreme Court’s reputation, the school prayer rulings in the 1960s derailed a growing consensus around the establishment clause. Prior to that, conservatives and liberals alike were coming to accept the idea that the First Amendment’s ban on establishing a state religion mandated a broader separation of church and state, Green says.

Under this broader vision of the establishment clause, the government was prohibited not just from choosing an official religion, but also from privileging certain religious institutions and practices over others. It couldn’t force citizens to attend a specific church or say only certain prayers. It had to remain a neutral actor in the realm of faith.

“In the Protestant community, the concept was pretty roundly supported,” at least in the context of school funding debates, Green says.

But for many of these same Americans, the Supreme Court’s conclusion that the establishment clause also outlawed certain forms of

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school prayer and Bible reading was a bridge too far. They felt the court had gone beyond ensuring the government was neutral and essentially evicted faith from the public square.

“The fear was that the court was adopting a model of secularism over religious pluralism,” Green says.

That fear helps explain why conflict over school prayer has become a full-fledged culture war over the past 60 years. To this day, Americans, including legal experts, don’t agree on whether the Supreme Court’s rulings in the 1960s represented an attack on faith or an embrace of religious freedom in its fullest form, Smith says.

THE SUPREME COURT’S 1962 SCHOOL PRAYER RULING PROTECTED STUDENTS, BUT ALSO TORE THE COUNTRY APART.

“A lot of our cultural division dates back to that time,” he says.

So does much of the ongoing tension over the establishment clause, says Richard Garnett, professor of law and political science at the University of Notre Dame. In the decades since the 1960s, increasingly contentious claims have been made about what it means to separate church and state, including in this year’s praying football coach case.

“In my view, I don’t think it’s a good idea for anybody to put people in a position where they feel a kind of subtle pressure to engage in a religious activity they don’t support. But I don’t think you can use the establishment clause as a way of policing that,” he says.

ON I TS PAT H to the U.S. Supreme Court docket, the New York prayer case made a stop on the desk of state Supreme Court Judge Bernard S. Meyer. Meyer, according to Smith, was no fan of school prayer. He initially wrote an opinion blocking the practice before changing his mind in 1959.

“In the end, he wrote a long opinion … saying the prayer was not unconstitutional. He thought you couldn’t draw that conclusion based on our history and law,” Smith says.

However, the decision emphasized that schools should take pains to accommodate religious diversity. Students need to know the prayer is optional, Meyer wrote, and that they’ll have teachers’ support if they decide to say no.

The ruling “wasn’t a perfect solution” to a difficult case, since it assumed young students were more resistant to peer pressure than they probably are, Smith says. Still, he can’t help but wonder if the country would have been better off if the case had ended there.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling did more to protect students, but it also tore the country apart. We might have been able to avoid a culture war, Smith says, if the justices had made it clear that schools, and other public spaces, don’t have to be totally secular.

“If the cases had been decided that way, the result with respect to school prayer might have been the same, but it wouldn’t have had the symbolic effect of reading secularism into the establishment clause as essentially the meaning of America,” he says.

As it stands, the court’s school prayer rulings exacerbated tension over how to apply the establishment clause and the true meaning of church-state separation. It feels as if they also led Americans to give up on working through those tensions on their own, Smith says.

“Whatever you think the best solution is, I think we can agree there’s too much judicial involvement. These things get handled by the courts instead of communities talking with each other,” he says.

Green, on the other hand, believes it was good and necessary for the Supreme Court to take a stand against certain kinds of school prayers. In the educational context and elsewhere, people have a blind spot when it comes to understanding the experience of minority religious communities, he says.

“The court had to say, ‘This prayer may be nonsectarian for you, but it’s sectarian for your neighbors,’” Green says.

In his mind, ongoing conflict over school prayer was all but inevitable. Even if the Supreme Court had ruled differently in the 1960s, we’d likely still be fighting about church-state separation today.

“This issue is easily politicized,” Green says, since it exposes conflicting ideas about how religious the country is meant to be.

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THE RISING TIDE OF AUTHORITARIANISM LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IS IN RETREAT AROUND THE WORLD. SHOULD AMERICANS BE WORRIED?

BY G I L L I A N F R I E D MA N

I

n april, hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán was reelected, despite being accused of rigging the election and deploying state power to control the media — including passing sweeping laws allowing journalists to be jailed for reporting on the Covid-19 crisis.

In April, France nearly elected far-right populist Marine Le Pen — who has advocated for hard-line immigration policies and who pledged to ban Muslim women in France from wearing headscarves — over political centrist Emmanuel Macron.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and usurpation of the power of democratically elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues unabated.

In the past year, authoritarian leaders have taken major steps to restrict the rights and freedoms of people within their own countries and have even crossed borders to impose their rule on others. These events are part of a troubling trend that has been accelerating across the globe for decades, in which authoritarian leaders have gained increasing popularity and power.

According to political scientist Larry Diamond, the world is experiencing what he has termed a “democratic recession.”

The world is in its 16th consecutive year of democratic decline, according to a report 40

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released in February 2022 by Freedom House, an organization based in Washington, D.C., that produces research on issues related to democracy, political rights and civil liberties. The report found that 60 countries suffered democratic declines in 2021, while only 25 improved, and that only 20 percent of the world’s population now

LAST YEAR, A STUDY FOUND ONLY 20 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION LIVES IN COUNTRIES DESIGNATED AS “FREE.”

lives in countries the organization designated as “free.”

“Authoritarian governments are getting better and more coordinated in their attacks on freedom,” said Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, executive vice president of Freedom House.

And it’s an issue that is not just affecting the rest of the world — but cropping up in America, too.

“Democracy is in retreat,” said Antonio Ugues Jr., director of the Center for the

Study of Democracy at St. Mary’s College.

“Authoritarianism is not just on the rise, but really flexing its muscles.”

‘GAS ON T H E F IRE ’

The pandemic has only made things worse.

“The pandemic has been like an accelerant, like gas thrown on the fire of democratic backsliding and erosion,” said Ugues.

This is in part because the pandemic created widespread uncertainty and fear.

“When you have disruption on such a grand scale, it makes people nervous,” said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “They see a lot of chaos, and they often turn to strong leaders who claim that they can deal with the disorder.”

For those authoritarian leaders who were already in power, the health crisis provided a unique opportunity to curtail citizen’s rights and freedoms, perhaps indefinitely.

For example, China used sophisticated surveillance technologies — a network of security cameras, facial recognition software and even talking police drones — to rigidly control the movement of tens of millions of its citizens during the pandemic.

“It created an emergency where

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governments could vastly expand their power and had popular support for taking emergency measures they might not necessarily relinquish,” said Ben Dubow, a nonresident fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

I S AME R IC A N E X T?

To understand the way that authoritarianism is manifesting itself in the American context, it may be most helpful to think of authoritarianism as a spectrum, rather than something a country “has” or “doesn’t have,” said Tom Costello, a psychological scientist and doctoral candidate at Emory University who has studied the psychology of authoritarianism.

To be sure, the United States is still a strong democracy with functioning institutions, elections and courts that work, and a free and open media, according to Sedaca of Freedom House. But increasingly there is “a questioning or an undermining of those institutions,” she said.

“We are seeing the early stages of authoritarianism in the United States,” said West, with the Brookings Institution. “There’s less freedom of the press. The courts are getting politicized, so there’s no guarantee of legal justice anymore. The political system has really deteriorated in its ability to function effectively.”

Legislative gridlock has made it nearly impossible for the country to address serious public policy challenges, which has left much decision-making power in the hands of the executive branch — giving the president more power than ever to make decisions by executive order.

Perhaps the most striking example of the erosion of American democracy occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, when armed rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an organized effort to overturn the results of the presidential election. After that day of violence, the continued insistence that the election was illegitimate by some people — including government officials — is concerning, said West.

Political polarization is a powerful driving force behind rising authoritarianism in the United States, said Yuko Sato, a postdoctoral fellow at the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute, a research institution based at 42

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the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Political polarization can cause some people to vote for authoritarian leaders who might not otherwise do so because they believe they have no other option. For example, some people who voted for former President Donald Trump did so simply because they would not vote for a Democratic candidate, despite having objections to some of Trump’s policies, Sato said.

This polarization has fueled the rise of “authoritarian populism,” in which one leader or group of leaders claim to be a solution to a nation’s problems, and the people’s salvation from enemies both internal and external.

WHILE MOST AMERICANS HAVE A PRO-DEMOCRACY ORIENTATION, THERE IS ALSO A HIGH LEVEL OF SUPPORT FOR AUTHORITARIAN RHETORIC AND ORGANIZING SYSTEMS.

Though populists may gain power through democratic means, they often promote limits of the power of the people and on checks on the executive.

“Authoritarian populist leaders often have to rely on non-democratic authoritarian practices or behaviors that are inherently counter to the democratic process,” said Ugues.

THE FAT E OF DE MOC RACY

Despite rising authoritarianism, “popular demand for democracy across the world remains strong,” according the the Freedom House report. People continue to protest against authoritarianism and fight for their rights or leave their countries to seek freedom elsewhere.

In America, at least part of the problem may simply be the way we perceive one another — especially across political lines, according to a recent study by More in Common, a pro-democracy think tank. The study found that a force behind political polarization may simply be a distrust in and underestimation of the other party’s attitudes toward democracy.

The report showed that both Democrats and Republicans significantly underestimate the other side’s commitment toward basic democratic practices and underestimate how much the other side values living in a democratic society.

Asked to imagine the preferences of Democrats, 55 percent of Republicans said Democrats would be willing to get rid of elections if it meant their own political party would remain in power, when in actuality, only 10 percent of Democrats felt this way. Similarly, Democrats thought that few Republicans believe that elections in the country are generally conducted fairly and with integrity when over a majority of Republicans felt this way.

“The U.S. has a very serious threat that we need to grapple with,” said Dan Vallone, the U.S. director of More in Common. “There is an alarmingly high level of support for authoritarian rhetoric and organizing systems.

At the same time, at the societal level, we still see most Americans have a pro-democracy orientation.”

This coming winter, the Biden administration plans to hold its second Summit for Democracy, in which leaders from government, civil society and the private sector will gather together to “set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal.” The first summit was held in December 2021.

Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International’s U.S. office, an organization that works to fight political corruption, has high hopes for the summit.

“We are talking about the fate of democracy around the world,” Kalman said. “This is an opportunity to rally the global community to take some very specific actions to protect the kinds of people that we think are most at risk.”

But fighting against authoritarianism — both in America or abroad — is not just the province of government officials, said Sedaca, of Freedom House. Individuals also have an important role to play.

“This trend will only be reversed if democratic governments choose to push back on authoritarian governments,” said Sedaca.

“We need a strong government in the United States willing to stand up to dictators, but we also need business leaders and citizens to push back against undemocratic processes at home and abroad.”

Photography © Henry Leutwyler

Misty Copeland

Picture yourself winning.

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LETTER FROM THE FIELD

JEFF FLAKE TAKES A STAND DEMOCRACY’S STATUS IS CONTESTED AROUND THE GLOBE, AND AMERICA’S MAN IN TURKEY IS SPEAKING OUT: FREEDOM AND STABILITY HANG IN THE BALANCE

BY H A L B OY D

I

t’s 7 a.m. at the swanky Lugal hotel in Turkey’s capital city of Ankara, and U.S. Ambassador Jeff Flake is on the cusp of beating me in squash — for the third time.

Flake’s regular hitting partner, a local Turk named Ali, is on the sidelines icing what we suspect is some kind of muscle tear. While expressing our sympathies, it becomes clear that I’m Flake’s last remaining hope for completing his morning workout.

My patriotic duty calls.

I go up 6-0 on Flake. But then the “Mormon Kowboy” (Flake’s favorite nickname from local social media) mounts a comeback. I’m learning that squash is as much a game of strategy as it is about speed and agility.

And the 59-year-old former U.S. senator from Arizona is putting me through a master class on well-placed drives and drop shots.

Off the court, the ambassador isn’t finished talking strategy, including America’s foreign policy interests in Turkey.

Glance at a map of the region, as I did upon entering the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, and what immediately stands out is Turkey’s bruiser of a neighborhood. To the country’s east is nuclear aspirant Iran, and across the Black Sea are Ukraine and Russia. To Turkey’s south are war-torn Iraq and Syria.

Turkey is now home to some 3.6 million Syrian refugees.

As the rare NATO-allied democracy in the region, Turkey is of high importance to the United States. That’s why foreign policy pencil-chewers 44

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are flagging warning signs that Turkey’s little “d” democratic institutions are slipping.

When I ask Flake about this directly, he assures me Turkey’s elections and institutions “remain strong.” And yet, he’s not shy to point out that there are nearly as many journalists jailed in Turkey as there are in China. A failed coup attempt in 2016 led to a government crackdown against members of the press and judiciary in particular.

But it would be a mistake, Flake contends,

FLAKE AND HIS WIFE, CHERYL, WOULD ONLY ACCEPT A POSITION IF THEY COULD TRULY HELP IN A PLACE THAT, IN HIS WORDS, WAS “CONSEQUENTIAL” TO THE NATION’S FOREIGN POLICY.

to view Turkey as anything other than a vital ally to the United States. If you need evidence, he says, look no further than the two Turkish bases housing U.S. military personnel within their borders.

He also underscores how Turkey is handling the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, facilitating peace talks and enforcing the little-known 1936 Montreux Convention, which empowers Turkey during war time to limit naval access

to the Black Sea through the country’s Dardanelles and Bosporus straits.

This latter move may yet prove central in restricting certain Russian naval vessels from bringing reinforcements to the fight in Ukraine. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, with whom Flake huddled during our visit, announced the implementation of the Montreux Convention in late February, at a time when many were still cautiously calling the war an “invasion” or “conflict.” He stated: “It is not a couple of air strikes now, the situation in Ukraine is officially a war.”

As we talk, I glance down at my notes.

There’s a question I’ve starred: How will the U.S. persuade Turkey — a country with so many commercial and cultural ties in the East — to remain committed to democracy in the long run?

Flake believes there are answers. And as I shadowed him through the back boulevards of Ankara for the better part of two days, it became apparent that America’s man in Turkey also appreciates the high stakes: nothing less than regional and global stability hangs in the balance.

The United States, Flake says, must start at home by exemplifying the best that representative government has to offer. The U.S. model has to work to remain persuasive.

Freedom and democracy, he says, are always hills worth dying on — from Bunker Hill in Boston to Mariupol in Ukraine — but the true test is sustaining the very causes which call forth our “last full measure of devotion.”

sit down in Flake’s office at the U.S. Embassy, my passport needs to be cleared. My cellphone is placed far away from the SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility,” which is Pentagon-speak for an area secure enough to send and receive classified information. Think red phones, but for the 21st century.

I enter a dated yet elegant oval office punctuated by the Turkish and American flags.

They flank a marble fireplace opposite a seating area. I begin to thumb coffee table books highlighting Turkey’s impressive landscapes as Flake ducks into a partially camouflaged door in the wall.

He quickly reemerges with two Coke Zeros.

We begin discussing the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, which are taking place in Istanbul on the eve of my visit. Even though the talks eventually, in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, hit a “dead end,” it’s a weighty moment for Turkey.

Turkey is a predominantly Muslim nation with a population of some 85 million, which makes it slightly larger than Germany and the

18th most populous country in the world. It has long served as a bridge between Asia and Europe, with Istanbul acting as its cosmopolitan, transcontinental gateway.

Turkey joined NATO in 1952, only three years after NATO’s founding. But recently Turkey has been raising the collective blood pressure of allies by purchasing a missile defense system from Russia. Soviet aggression, of course, was a chief reason behind NATO’s founding in the first place, and today Russia remains its central preoccupation.

But Turkey is determined to keep its eye on interests in both the East and the West.

This rightly makes the United States nervous, and the U.S. responded with sanctions in late 2020 in the wake of Turkey’s purchase of the S-400s from Russia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defended its Russia deal in an interview with CBS News last September.

“In the future, nobody will be able to interfere in terms of what kind of defense systems we acquire from which country at what level,” Erdogan said. “We are the only ones to make such decisions.” Turkey also maintains that it

wasn’t able to get a satisfactory deal on an air defense system from any NATO nations.

Before popping open my Coke Zero, I’m politely asked by embassy staff to step outside for a moment as Flake engages in what diplomats refer to as the “high side” of the work (that is, the “classified side” of the work).

When I ask what constitutes the low side, Flake pauses and replies: “email.”

As I leave, the ambassador confesses there’s been a whole lot of “high side” work as of late.

But if the recent headline from The Daily Beast is accurate — that “Flake got more than he bargained for” when President Joe Biden nominated him as ambassador to Turkey — Flake is hiding it well.

In fact, he tells me later he’s actually getting precisely what he bargained for.

No one would have balked had the Flakes taken the kind of cushy ambassadorship that the government had to almost pry former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown away from in New Zealand. And rumors in the press were that the Flakes would indeed land among the Kiwis, or, alternatively, in South Africa, where

TU RKISH PRE S IDEN TIA L PRESS S E RVI /A FP V IA G ETT Y I MAG ES

B E FO R E WE F O R MA LLY

NEWLY APPOI NTED U. S . AMB ASSADOR TO T U RK E Y JE F F F L AK E , L E F T, ME E TS WIT H TURKI SH PRESI DENT RECE P TAYY IP E RDOGAN AT T H E P RE S IDE NT IAL COMP L E X IN ANKARA.

JULY/AUGUST 2022

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Flake served as a young missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The New Zealand posting went to his former Senate colleague Tom Udall, a Democrat from neighboring New Mexico.

But behind the scenes the Flakes were sending a far different signal to the Biden administration. Flake and his wife, Cheryl, would only accept a position if they could truly help in a place that, in his words, was “consequential” to the nation’s foreign policy.

So far, “consequential” seems like an understatement.

Although Flake has no past ties to Turkey, for Cheryl the role has been something of a homecoming. Over 30 years ago, as a college student, she toured the country for several weeks performing as part of Brigham Young University’s Young Ambassadors group. They did song and dance diplomacy, she says.

Cheryl fell in love with the country. She remembers writing in her journal that Istanbul was her favorite city in the world.

Now, together with her husband, she’s trying her hand at some culinary diplomacy.

Cheryl admitted to eating more shish kebabs than any foreigner might reasonably be expected to stomach. But their efforts may be winning local goodwill. Cheryl says one Turkish man approached her, in line at Burger King of all places, and told her that he’s convinced the Flakes care about Turkey because their Instagram account always shows them eating shish kebabs.

And the local press, eager to capture the Flakes in their element, have filmed the two baking cookies together. Things went fine until Ambassador Flake made his first major diplomatic faux pas: mistakenly pouring a cup of salt into the mix thinking it was sugar.

The crew also filmed Cheryl at the piano and on the tennis court. The ambassador’s residence, a sprawling 10-acre U.S. government estate, is a bit like Noah’s ark — there are two of everything: two tennis courts, two greenhouses, two kitchens and two outdoor pools (one for kids and one for adults).

There is, however, an exception to this pattern: only one pet cemetery. Embassy employees use it to properly memorialize their four-legged companions — a high priority in the foreign services.

At all times, security forces are stationed along the perimeter of the gated compound.

But the residence feels welcoming and is frequently opened for diplomatic events. The annual Fourth of July celebration draws upward of 46

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D O GU KAN KE S KINKILIC/ANAD OLU AGE NCY VIA GE TTY IMAGE S

LETTER FROM THE FIELD

T U RK E Y NE W U.S . AMB ASSADOR TO ANKARA JE F F F L AK E , C EN T E R , S P E AKS TO ME MB E RS OF P RE SS U P ON ARRIVAL WIT H H IS WIF E C H E RYL F L AK E , RE AR L E F T, IN ANKARA, T U RK E Y, ON JANUARY 7, 2022.

1,500 guests to the residence’s back lawn.

Fittingly, the edge of the property abuts the residence of the Canadian ambassador, Jamal Khokhar, one of Flake’s closest diplomatic colleagues. Flake tells me that the two recently had to confer about a pressing matter through their shared fence. When I respond with a reference to Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor and his neighbor Wilson, Flake momentarily breaks his elder statesman mien with a smile.

TO AP P RE C IAT E Turkey’s dilemma over democracy, it helps to first understand its rare status in the region.

Before touching down in Ankara, I traveled to the World Government Summit hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai. After spending a handful of days in the UAE, the success of its unique governmental form — a federation of seven emirates — is hard to overlook.

Though not without controversy, the infrastructure is world class. Crime is almost nonexistent. Upward mobility is improving and the economy seems to be working hard to prepare for the end of oil.

Locals brag about having more tower construction cranes in Dubai than in any other place in the world.

An overnight layover in Doha — another low-crime locale — reveals Qatar’s own infrastructure feats and extensive World Cup 2022 preparations. Though UAE and Qatar are competitors in the region, they share similarities.

Nondemocratic governments are making

ambitious moves, and others in the region can’t help but take notice.

In a widely read Atlantic article diagnosing what’s ailing Western democracies — and America in particular — the celebrated social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses findings from the Edelman Trust Barometer, which seeks to gauge the level of trust citizens place in core institutions within their respective countries.

As Haidt writes, the most recent trust barometer “showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list,” in terms of levels of trust.

Meanwhile, the more “contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea, scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).”

Back at the ambassador’s residence, I present some of these CliffsNotes to Flake.

The ambassador and Cheryl Flake are now sitting side by side in a sunny drawing room surrounded by tall panoramic windows. They listen carefully as I ask a different version of that same starred question from my notes: How does the U.S. make the case for democracy and freedom in Turkey, given democracy’s increasingly stiff competition?

Flake begins with a story from when he and Cheryl were a young married couple living in Namibia, a nation located in southwest Africa. Flake had a job as the executive director of the Foundation for Democracy, and it was the same year Namibia gained its

independence from South Africa.

Namibia, he remembers, held its first election the same week the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989.

“That was a heady time to be an American abroad,” Flake recalls. “It was the ‘end of history.’ The liberal world order had won.”

Today, he continues, “even in our own country democracy is more fragile than we thought. Around the world, it’s tough to say that democracy is in ascendance everywhere you look.”

But, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.

Flake notes that “what you’re seeing in Ukraine might change the tide. If there’s anything possibly good to come out of this horrible tragedy and suffering, it may be that the world is coming together to support Ukraine in defending a governmental system that has a greater likelihood of maximizing freedom and happiness in the long run.”

And what of the “enlightened” autocratic models like China?

Flake admits that it can work for a season, especially when steeped in more free market economic philosophies and an openness to pluralism. But, in the end, “centrally planned economies don’t run very well,” he says. Concentrated power is only one bad leader away from failure.

“So my bet is still with the West, and with democracy. And I hope the United States remains a valued example of the good that can happen over time.”

The best way to persuade the world — and Turkey — is for the United States to live up to the full measure of its ideals, Flake explains.

Showing a democratic model that builds unity, cooperation and prosperity out of diversity will always inspire. The fight for freedom, he continues, is what’s moving so many to rally around Ukraine.

This includes behind the scenes efforts by Turkey that Flake is unable to fully discuss.

In another era, extolling the virtues of democracy might have seemed like nothing more than banal platitudes. But increasingly, upholding republican ideals is the kind of work that, as Thomas Paine put it all those years ago, tries men’s souls.

Flake knows about this more than most. of President Donald Trump, then-Sen. Flake gained a reputation for challenging his own party’s leader. And, before declining to run for reelection, Flake penned a book called the “Conscience of a

A F TE R THE E L E C TION

Conservative,” which makes the case for returning to an ideas-driven Republican Party, something he believes has been lost in recent years. Even as Flake became a piñata within the GOP, angry left-leaning constituents still felt he was too soft on the president. Large groups would sometimes show up in force to protest the senator.

Then, in 2017, politics became a matter of life or death when Flake found himself dodging live ammunition rounds after a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter took aim at congressional Republicans practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise and others were left in critical condition. Scalise and the other victims would pull through, but the gunman was killed. A year after those events, the Flakes began receiving specific threats aimed at their family.

Others might have simply lost faith in the American project after experiencing such vi“EVEN IN OUR OWN COUNTRY DEMOCRACY IS MORE FRAGILE THAN WE THOUGHT. AROUND THE WORLD, IT’S TOUGH TO SAY THAT DEMOCRACY IS IN ASCENDANCE EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK.”

olence and personal threats. But the Flakes are pounding the pavement in Turkey — true believers in the United States of America and the cause of democracy.

When I ask Flake if he still considers himself a Republican, there’s little hesitation: “yes.” In fact, he tells me, he recently reaffirmed his political affiliation while registering to vote in Utah, where the Flakes spent a significant amount of time before leaving for Turkey. I wonder aloud whether Flake would ever consider running for office in Utah.

The Flakes look at each other for a moment, but hesitate to give an answer. I then ask how Flake navigates being a Republican serving under a Democratic president. Biden and Flake don’t always see eye to eye on everything, he explains. Flake offers his best thinking on matters, but he knows his current role is to represent the United States of America and the policies of the administration that appointed him.

“I didn’t change my entire political philosophy when I took a job to work for the Biden administration,” he remarks. But he argues there’s more overlap when it comes to representing U.S. interests abroad than when it comes to policymaking in Congress. Flake says there’s a lot of truth to the axiom that politics stop at the water’s edge.

“Democracy can survive bad policy,” Flake continues. “It’s not positive, but it can survive.

But what our country can’t survive is a failure to respect elections and their outcomes.”

Back at the squash court, Ali is gingerly testing whether he can place weight on his injured leg. He casually asks me how long I’ll be in town. I tell him the trip is brief and that’s probably for the best given that my presence here appears to have brought him bad luck, as I gesture to his leg.

Ali doesn’t miss a beat: “Please go to Russia next.”

Always the diplomat, Flake is listening and chuckles. But he refrains from comment. We are on the record after all.

Later, I press Flake about Turkey’s current tensions — human rights, its posture toward the Russia-Ukraine war and its relationship with the United States. Flake emphasizes the mutual goodwill he’s encountered in the country and expresses a hopeful outlook.

He then tells me about his first meeting with Erdogan, Turkey’s president.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Flakes refrains from drinking alcohol, tea or coffee. This can be difficult in a region in which tea plays an important role in formal meetings and especially in diplomatic settings.

Though Flake’s religious affiliation is well known there — Turkey is by most estimates 96 percent-99 percent Muslim — the ambassador hadn’t mentioned any religious-based dietary restriction to Turkish officials. The Flakes assumed they would simply politely decline the president’s customary offering of tea.

They were pleasantly surprised when during the ambassador’s first meeting with Erdogan, the president dispensed with tea and instead offered them pomegranate juice — undoubtedly a nod to making sure he and Cheryl felt comfortable.

Erdogan then explained (more than once) that pomegranates, a staple of Turkish cuisine, are packed with healthy antioxidants.

Flake drank to the health of the two nations’ democracies — antioxidants could only help.

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THE AGONY OF LIZ CHENEY how a changed gop

—

and a changed wyoming

—

has left one

of the most conservative members of congress out in the cold

by michael j . mooney

|

illustration by c . f. payne

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THERE’S A SURPRISE for the audience hidden behind the thick red curtain onstage.

Nobody in the crowd seems to have noticed this surprise as the room slowly filled up or when everyone stood to pledge allegiance to the American flag hanging at the front of that same stage. But the surprise is sort of a joke, so the timing of its reveal is everything.

Many of the 100 or so Wyomingites here, ranging in age from early 20s to late 70s, have driven more than an hour to be at tonight’s event. Plenty of them are wearing Trump hats and shirts — a woman near the back has a sweatshirt that reads “Clean up on aisle 46,” a reference to President Joe Biden — but the audience isn’t here to see former President Donald Trump. They’re here, in a low-slung, wood-paneled room at the Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge in Casper on a Friday evening in mid-May, to hear from the only congressional candidate in Wyoming endorsed by Trump: a Cheyenne land-use attorney named Harriet Hageman. More specifically, the crowd is here to meet the woman they hope will replace Liz Cheney as the Republican Party nominee for Congress.

Hageman, wearing a cobalt blue trench coat and black shoes with buckles, was literally kissing babies as audience members came in. They surveyed the Swedish meatballs and Little Smokies — finger-size sausages cooked with sugar and barbecue sauce — and took their seats in the metal folding chairs lined up in front of the stage. Hageman starts her speech by describing her family’s four-generation history ranching in Wyoming. She excoriates the Biden administration, emphasizing the effects of nationwide inflation. Several minutes pass before anyone mentions Cheney by name. But when it happens, it’s the cue to reveal the surprise behind the curtain on stage.

One of the event’s organizers tells the crowd that the group hosting tonight’s rally reached out to the Cheney campaign and invited her to Casper. But they were told that Cheney 50

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AP PH OTO/J. S COTT APPLE WH ITE

LI Z CHENEY PLAYED A STARRI NG ROLE I N THE PRI ME TI ME AI RI NG OF THE JANUARY 6TH SELECT COMMI TTEE FI NDI NGS I N J UNE 2022.

wouldn’t attend because the organizers are also members of the far-right anti-government militia known as the Oath Keepers. (Cheney’s campaign didn’t confirm this, but it seems plausible.)

That’s when someone retrieves a life-size cardboard cutout of the congresswoman from Wyoming and brings it to the front of the stage. Surprise! The cardboard Liz Cheney is smirking, wearing a blue blazer and pearls and holding a piece of paper and a pen.

At the sight of their least favorite Wyoming pol — in their minds either too afraid to debate Hagerman or too afraid to confront Oath Keepers — reduced to a defenseless, two-dimensional simulacrum, the crowd laughs in unison.

Just a few years ago, a gathering like this in Wyoming would have been unthinkable. No Cheney has lost an election in this state in more than 40 years. Not so long ago Cheney’s father, the former vice president, was the driving force in the Republican Party in America.

And carrying on her father’s values, Cheney is perhaps the most conservative member of the House, as pro-gun, pro-life, pro-business and pro-fossil fuels as anyone. She’s got an A rating from the National Rifle Association and has voted on the same side as the Heritage Foundation at nearly every opportunity. Liberal groups like Progressive Punch have given her an F every term she’s served.

Until recently, that’s all that mattered to voters. In 2020, the last time she was on the ballot, Cheney beat her closest opponent by more than 40 percentage points. But in the

limited polling done ahead of the state’s August primary, Cheney is trailing Hageman — someone who was once a Cheney supporter and a family friend — by 30 points.

So what did Cheney do to lose so much political favor in her home state? What did she do to lose so many friends and allies? A hotmic gaffe? A tabloid scandal? No, something much worse. Liz Cheney has made an enemy of Donald Trump.

The race has become the most-watched congressional contest in the country because the entire thing boils down to a single issue: Cheney has dared to suggest that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen. She has repeated the notion that not only is Biden’s presidency legitimate, but that Trump incited an insurrection in an effort to subvert the constitutionally sanctioned peaceful transition of power. Cheney was one of only 10 Republican representatives who voted to impeach Trump.

But she didn’t stop there. She helped lead the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection and what role Trump may have played in inciting the rioters that day as part of a coordinated campaign to overturn the election. During the primetime hearing unveiling the committee’s findings on June 9, she took center stage, declaring that the assault was the culmination of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election: “He summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”

For standing up to Trump, Cheney has received resounding praise in national media.

EARLY IN THE afternoon of January 6,

2021, Liz Cheney was in the Republican cloakroom, just off the House floor, when she got a phone call from her father. The elder Cheney informed his daughter that Trump had just

mentioned her during a speech he was giving to supporters at the “Save America” rally outside the White House.

“We got to get rid of the weak Congress, people, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world,” Trump had told the crowd. “We got to get rid of them.”

Then Trump told his supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.

And you have to be strong.”

On the phone, Cheney’s father, the former vice president, wanted to know if she was safe.

He wanted to know if this would have any impact on her decision to speak on the House floor in favor of counting electoral votes and certifying the election.

A few minutes later, Trump’s supporters famously stormed the Capitol. As members of House were being escorted out of the chamber and away from the mob, Cheney saw Rep. Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, in the aisle. Jordan explained that they needed to get the ladies out of the aisle and offered to help Cheney. She slapped his hand away.

“Get away from me,” she told Jordan. “You (expletive) did this.”

That night, members of the House didn’t return to the chamber until sometime around 9 p.m. Furniture used as a barricade against the rioting mob remained stacked against the walls. The chamber-door glass was shattered.

There were still gas masks piled around the floor. Before House went back into session, Cheney decided to take a walk.

First she went to Statuary Hall, where the House of Representatives met from 1807 to 1857. There are brass plaques on the floor that mark where the desks of John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln once sat. The room is lined with statues of prominent Americans from history: Samuel Adams, Ethan Allen, Sam Houston, Thomas Edison, Brigham Young.

Most days the room is filled with tourists.

That night, though, it was filled with police officers, many of whom were wearing black tactical gear. They were sitting on the floor, leaning against the statues, exhausted from hours of hand-to-hand combat with a violent mob. Cheney would later say that she tried to thank the officers, “but my words that night seemed inadequate.”

Before she left, Cheney stopped at the door

DONAL D T RU MP T RAV E L E D TO C AS P E R, WYOMING IN MAY 2 02 2 TO S U P P ORT C H E NE Y ’S GOP P RIMARY C H AL L E NGE R, H ARRIE T H AGE MAN.

CHET STR ANGE /GE TTY IMAGE S

She was featured on “60 Minutes” and in The New York Times Magazine. She was given the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But for sinning against Trump, Cheney has also been all but exiled from the party where her family was long-standing royalty. She was voted out of her leadership position in Congress. She was censured and essentially disowned by the GOP in Wyoming. Because she won’t back down — and she certainly won’t apologize for her criticism — Cheney has earned the ire of MAGA-supporters from all over the country.

In Hageman’s campaign ads, she accuses Cheney of not “riding for the brand,” a not-sosubtle callback to the code of the West, when cowboys were expected to do the bidding of the rancher who hired them. Trump himself has repeatedly called Cheney — someone who voted with Trump more consistently than even his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows — a RINO, a Republican in name only.

While Cheney has barely appeared in public in Wyoming for the better part of a year, Hageman has driven back and forth across the state, racking up thousands of miles stumping at events like this one in Casper, where she was introduced to the audience as a “true-blown Wyomingite.”

Looking at the cardboard cutout of Cheney, Hageman tells the room she hopes to send the sitting congresswoman “back to her home state — of Virginia.”

To an outsider, this is all so strange: Liz Cheney locked in a battle for her political future, Republicans convinced she isn’t Republican enough, liberals heaping praise upon her, the eyes of the nation turned to its least populated, most conservative state. The cardboard cutout, the strong aroma of sugared sausages — it’s a surreal and droll affair.

After talking to more than a dozen people who’ve worked with Cheney over the years, it’s clear that her supporters and detractors agree on at least one thing: This primary in Wyoming isn’t just about who will represent the state in Congress. It’s about something considerably more monumental. It’s about the future of the Republican Party.

“THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.

There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

— REP. LIZ CHENEY

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“What distinguished Liz Cheney is her

COURAGE TO SPEAK THE TRUTH in the knowledge of the consequences.

It is uncommon courage like hers that America so dearly needs.”

KEV IN DIE TSCH /GE TT Y IM AG ES

— SEN. MITT ROMNEY

administration worked with President Barack Obama’s team, even after a bitter election. It occurred to Cheney as she walked the halls of Congress that this tradition, this sacred obligation had been honored by every American president in history — except one.

“This is what America is not,” she told Fox News on the phone that day. “This is absolutely intolerable and unacceptable, and the mob will not prevail.”

When she got back to the House chamber that night, Cheney voted to certify the results of the election. And one week later, on January 13, 2021, she voted to impeach Trump.

“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” she said at the time.

“There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

under one of the oldest statues in the Capitol.

It’s a sculpture of Clio, the Greek muse of history, riding in a winged chariot that represents the passage of time. In Clio’s hands is a book that records the deeds of humanity in the pages of history.

From Statuary Hall, Cheney walked to the Capitol rotunda, where some of the most beloved leaders in our nation’s history have laid in state. It’s surrounded by more statues: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan. There were more police officers there, dressed in riot gear. Federal agents leaned on the walls near historic paintings depicting some of the most important moments in America’s creation: The signing of the Declaration of Independence, the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, George Washington voluntarily resigning his commission as commander of the Continental Army — an early symbol for the peaceful transfer of power in America.

Cheney thought about this American tradition, the way often-opposing presidential administrations work together during transition periods. In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy called the transfer of power in America “a celebration of freedom.”

President Ronald Reagan called it “a miracle.” She thought about how her own father’s

T H E C HE N E YS WE R E ONCE REGULAR — AND CELEBRATE D — F IX T U RE S ON F OX NE WS . T H AT ’S C HA N GE D AS DONALD TRUMP HAS SEI Z ED CONTROL OF T H E RE P U B L IC AN PART Y.

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THERE’S NOT AN enormous amount in her history that would make you think that Liz Cheney, of all people, would break fiercely with the leaders of her own political party.

Her family has been a fundamental part of the Republican Party for nearly her entire life.

When she was nine, her father became President Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff.

She’s told stories about how the elder Cheney would bring Liz and her younger sister, Mary, to the White House on Saturday mornings.

As the adults were busy governing the country and piecing together the Republican Party in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Liz and Mary would sit on the floor of their dad’s office and watch cartoons on the wall of televisions. Sometimes the girls would wander over to then-domestic policy staffer Donald Rumsfeld’s office and search the desks of his assistants, looking for candy.

Liz went to middle school in Wyoming as her father campaigned for the same seat she now holds. She went to high school in suburban Virginia, where she was a cheerleader.

She went to college in Colorado, law school in Chicago, worked at a Department of Defense consulting firm and for the State Department, an up-close witness to the inner gears of governance and bureaucracy.

When Dick Cheney became vice president in 2001, his oldest daughter, then 35 years old, became the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, promoting investment in the Middle East. She also worked on his campaigns, speaking at events around the

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LY N N E CHENEY, VI CE PRESI DENT DI CK CHENE Y AND L IZ C H E NE Y IN T H E VIC E P R E SIDENT’S OFFI CE AT THE U.S. CAPI TO L IN 2 0 02 . C H E NE Y RE P ORT E DLY CO NSULTS ON THE PHONE WI TH HER FAT H E R NE ARLY E V E RY DAY.

country in an attempt to make Republican voters out of suburban and single women. Along the way, she married a D.C. attorney-lobbyist named Philip Perry and they had five kids. In her Twitter bio, she describes herself as a “proud rodeo mom, soccer mom, baseball mom, hockey mom,” and then as a “constitutional conservative.” She’s said that one of her daughters, a barrel racer, taught her the phrase “cowgirl up.”

During the Obama administration, Cheney became a fixture on cable news shows. She had the same plainspoken, sometimes-sneering delivery as her father, but with soundbites more conducive to the age of social media. It’s always about policy, history, facts, though. She seems constitutionally opposed to discussing her feelings in public. Last year a colleague told The New York Times that even while under fire from her own party, Cheney is “as emotional as algebra.”

In the summer of 2013, she announced that she would run for the U.S. Senate against Wyoming incumbent Mike Enzi — and Cheney was immediately accused of carpetbagging, having purchased a home in the state less than two years earlier. She played up her family’s roots in Wyoming, dating back to the 1850s, but her Facebook post announcing her run was geotagged to McLean, Virginia. Less than six months after announcing her run, Cheney dropped out of the race.

During that campaign, Cheney also voiced

a strong opposition to same-sex marriage, despite the fact that her sister Mary is married to a woman, which led to a public family feud.

(In contrast, their father voiced his support of same-sex marriage as far back as 2000.) When asked about this public stance on a 2021 segment of “60 Minutes,” Liz Cheney declared emphatically that she’d been wrong. She said she’d discussed the issue with Mary, and that she loved her sister and her sister’s family.

“Wow,” a stunned Leslie Stahl said during the “60 Minutes” interview. “I was not expecting that.”

IN 2016, CHENEY ran for Congress, and this campaign went much smoother. When she was elected — the same night as Trump — she seemed to prove that smart, policy-minded conservatives could ride the crude populist Trumpian wave into power. During the presidential campaign that year, Cheney called Hillary Clinton a “felon,” and after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape where Trump boasted about grabbing women, Cheney released a statement saying Clinton had done “far worse.” On policy, Cheney and Trump were on the same side of most issues: She voted against Obamacare, against gun control, against protections for the environment.

It’s hard to believe now, but when she was first elected, conservative leaders wondered aloud whether she might one day be the first

Republican woman president. By the end of her first term, her party elected her to become the House GOP’s conference chair, the third most powerful Republican in the House.

Cheney didn’t agree with Trump on everything. She’d seen Republican Party leaders disagree with Republican presidents her entire life, so it probably seemed like she was upholding tradition when she criticized Trump’s removal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria and his coziness with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Those splits from the president might have actually given her more credibility when she sided with Trump during his first impeachment, for pressuring Zelenskyy to investigate Biden.

Even then, though, Cheney didn’t defend the merits of Trump’s behavior. In fact, she called Republicans “shameful” for questioning the patriotism of Alexander Vindman, the Army officer who testified against Trump. But Cheney was more critical of the Democrats’ rush to vote. On the House floor, she suggested the vote to impeach Trump “may permanently damage our republic.”

She started parting with Trump more publicly during the pandemic, perhaps because her father — someone she’s said she speaks to nearly every day — famously has some preexisting health conditions that would make coronavirus especially risky. When Trump and his supporters vilified Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Cheney tweeted that Fauci was “one of the finest public servants we have ever had.” In September 2020, when Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition if he lost the election, Cheney tweeted: “The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic.

America’s leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. We will uphold that oath.”

After the 2020 election, when some Republican elected officials started appearing at “Stop the Steal” rallies, Cheney’s office produced and distributed a 21-page memo highlighting the judicial decisions striking down fraud claims by Trump’s allies — many by judges appointed by Trump. She also made the case that the Constitution doesn’t allow the legislative or executive branches to overrule certified elections.

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to put the 2020 election behind them. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day, no question about it.” Sen. Ted Cruz originally called the riot a “terrorist attack.”

“All I can say is count me out,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on the floor of the Senate.

“Enough is enough.”

THOSE SENTIMENTS DIDN’T last

long. Within weeks, Cruz apologized for his harsh comments about the Capitol attack.

McCarthy went to Florida to start rehabilitating Trump. Graham said any Republican leaders need to have a working relationship with Trump. McConnell has said he’d support Trump if Trump is the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.

Not Liz Cheney, though. She was the most vocal of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment. She didn’t just defy Republican leaders by agreeing to be on the committee investigating what happened on January 6, 2021. Cheney has essentially been the face of the group, taking the lead in all the most prominent hearings.

“The president formed the mob. The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob,” she’s said repeatedly since the insurrection. “He lit the flame.”

The blowback started quickly. Two weeks after the impeachment vote, Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s most staunch allies, flew to Cheyenne to campaign against Cheney — more than a year and a half before the 2022 primary.

“We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican Party,” Gaetz told a crowd on the steps of the state capitol. “And I intend to win it.”

Donald Trump Jr. called into the rally. “Liz Cheney’s favorables are only slightly worse than her father’s shooting skills,” he said, alluding to the elder Cheney’s famous South Texas hunting accident.

A few weeks after Gaetz’s appearance, the Republican House conference held a fourhour meeting to decide whether to remove Cheney from her leadership position.

A long line of speakers stood up to tell the group why they were voting against Cheney.

One colleague told her he didn’t like her “defiant attitude.” Another said she wasn’t a “team

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player.” Another said that witnessing Cheney side with Democrats, against Trump, was like being at a football game and “You look up into the stands and see your girlfriend on the opposition’s side.”

Cheney was asked to apologize for her vote.

She said she wouldn’t. She was asked to resign her position. She said she wouldn’t.

It became clear that many of her Republican colleagues believed just as Cheney did, that the election was legitimate and that Trump’s actions on January 6 were appalling.

But nobody else, except maybe Rep. Adam Kinzinger from Illinois, was willing to raise the ire of Trump or risk their political career battling MAGA nation. The fact that Cheney has been willing to risk those things and willing to speak the plain truth about Trump — it’s emasculated a lot of Republicans.

Cheney won that February conference vote on her leadership. But the tides continued to turn. Trump and his allies repeated the claims of election fraud at every opportunity. So even as dozens of defendants from across the country were arrested — including the founders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — polls showed more and more Republicans believed that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that the events of January 6 were overblown.

In May 2021, House Republicans held another vote on Cheney and she was replaced by Elise Stefanik from New York. Stefanik had only voted in favor of Trump policies around 70 percent of the time, compared to Cheney, who sided with Trump on 93 percent of her votes. But Stefanik backed Trump's attempts to overturn the election.

In November 2021, the Wyoming Republican Party voted to stop recognizing Cheney as a member. In February 2022, the Republican National Committee voted to censure both Cheney and Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the Capitol attack.

Still, Cheney hasn’t backed down. When Trump officially endorsed Hageman, he released a statement replete with his trademark capitalization: “Harriet has my Complete and Total Endorsement in replacing the Democrats number one provider of sound bites, Liz Cheney.”

Cheney tweeted a screenshot of Trump’s announcement along with a message of her own.

“Here’s a sound bite for you,” Cheney wrote. “Bring it.”

EVEN WITH POLLS showing her way

behind among Republicans, Cheney might

have a glimmer of hope in the August primary: Wyoming has open primaries. Any registered voter can change party affiliation the day of the election. So, if they’re inclined, Democrats and other non-Republicans can declare themselves Republicans for the day and cast a vote for Cheney over Hageman.

The fact that Cheney’s best hope of keeping her seat might be Democrats, less than two decades after her father was essentially Democrat enemy No. 1, is yet another strange twist in this bizarre political saga. But even that seems like a slim chance. Wyoming Democrats don’t have a great track record of showing up in midterm election primaries, and even if every Democrat in Wyoming changed parties and voted for Cheney it still might not be enough. There just aren’t that many Democrats in Wyoming — just under 45,000, compared to the roughly 200,000 registered Republicans in the state.

While Trump supporters in the state feel Cheney was not “riding for the brand,” many liberals and moderates have come to deeply respect her. Which is to say that at both ends of the political spectrum, the election comes down to a single issue: You’re either with Trump and his claims that the 2020 election was rigged, or you think Cheney has displayed unusual courage and integrity while speaking truth to power.

The same weekend as the Hageman rally in Casper, proponents of abortion rights held a march on the other side of town. It was part of the nationwide “Bans Off Our Bodies” rallies. Many women who attended said they disagreed with her on nearly every issue, but that they’d vote for Cheney in the primary anyway.

Because for some people, defending the Constitution and the foundational principles of Democracy trump every other issue.

Cheney has said she believes enough people in the state side with her in the split with Trump — and that Trumpism is bad politics in general. After all, under his leadership, the Republican Party lost control of the House, the Senate and eventually the White House.

But nearly every person who’s worked with and supported Cheney through the years also went out of their way to note that this isn’t some political calculation by Cheney. Her allies think she’s doing what she believes is best for the country and for Wyoming.

Sen. Mitt Romney voted against Trump on both impeachments and has long supported Cheney in her fight with the MAGA crowd.

“There are many people who solicit credit

BACK AT THE Fraternal Order of Eagles

lodge in Casper, it doesn’t take long before the conversation diverts into conspiracy theories. A man in the crowd asks Hageman if she believes Biden is “the legitimate president.” Hageman doesn’t say he is and she doesn’t say he isn’t.

“He’s the guy in the office right now,” she says.

A woman sitting near the back asks Hageman what she thinks of the theory that Trump installed a “Jason Bourne-type spy” high up in the government and that maybe Trump is still secretly president. The woman cites a website she’s read run by someone who uses Patriot as a last name.

Again, Hageman doesn’t take the bait, but she also doesn’t disavow the over-the-top theory. With a nodding smile, Hageman says she’ll look into it.

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for truth they have spoken,” he told me. “What distinguished Liz Cheney is her courage to speak truth in the knowledge of the consequences. It is uncommon courage like hers that America so dearly needs.”

Wyoming state Rep. Landon Brown, a moderate Republican who also supports Cheney, told me that while there are plenty of Wyomingites who will never vote for Liz Cheney again — like his parents — there are also a lot of people who know what she’s done for the state, especially in the fossil fuel industry that employs so many people here. She hasn’t simply fought in favor of energy companies and against environmental regulation at every turn, she’s gone as far as asking the Department of Justice to investigate environmental advocacy groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Nobody has worked harder for this state in that House than Liz Cheney,” Brown says.

“We’ve had some good representation, but nobody is as effective and efficient as Liz Cheney.”

Brown has known Cheney for six years.

He says the fact that she’s struggling among conservatives, and might actually need the support of liberals to win, never stops being strange.

“The name Cheney here in Wyoming means politics,” Brown told me. “It means smart. So this is a ‘Twilight Zone’ for her every single day. She’s waking up going, ‘I cannot believe this.’”

After a pause, Brown added: “I also think she knew what she was getting into.”

C H E NE Y RE MAINS ONE OF T H E MOST H IGH - P ROF IL E T RU MP C R I T I C S , DE S P IT E P U NIS H ME NT F ROM H E R LOC AL AND NAT IONAL GOP CO LLE AG U E S .

Despite Cheney’s best efforts, this is the mainstream of the Republican party right now.

It’s not serious policy discussions. It’s conspiracy theories and petty rivalries. At some point while she’s answering questions from the crowd, Hageman volunteers that she’ll vote against all government spending until our country builds a wall along the Southern border — nearly 1,000 miles by car from Casper.

See, there’s an argument to be made that this whole thing is the fault of Cheney and her brand of conference-room Republicanism, too. She and so many other party leaders used Trump’s popularity to kick through all manner of conservative laws regarding everything from defense spending to environmental regulation.

People like Cheney were complicit, so wary of a public battle with Trump that they didn’t speak out early enough or often enough. So, say some, it’s no wonder their voters believe his claims about the election. For years Trump has claimed he won the popular vote in 2016. He created a government commission to find evidence. Republicans knew he didn’t win the popular vote, knew this was an ego-driven waste of time and money, but they said nothing.

Two weeks after this gathering in Casper, Trump will be in town, his first visit to Wyoming.

There will be shirts and banners, all the hallmarks of his speeches. He will again call Cheney a RINO and again recommend Hageman.

Around that same time, Cheney will be at the JFK Library in Boston accepting her

Profiles in Courage Award. In her speech, she’ll recount her walk through the Capitol on the night of January 6. She’ll quote leaders praising the traditional peaceful transfer of power and call Trump a danger to democracy.

Of course, even if Cheney loses in August, all of this might be preamble. She’s said she hasn’t ruled out the possibility of running for president, if that’s what it takes to rid her party of Trump. So the real battle between Liz Cheney and the powers of MAGA country might actually take place in 2024.

Meanwhile, when Hageman is done talking at the Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge, she sticks around for at least another half-hour, shaking hands and making small talk with the people of Casper. When she leaves, some of the stragglers in the crowd make their way over to the bar on the other side of the building. Some go straight home. Within a few hours, everyone here will pour out, go back to their lives.

And someone will turn the lights out on the cardboard cutout of Liz Cheney.

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A PLACE OF THEIR OWN As we celebrate America, we can’t forget the many immigrants who weave its magnificent tapestry — or the hardship of building a new life here

BY BENOÎT MORENNE — ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT NEUBECKER

T

he idea of america is something like a Rorschach test — a vast, messy spill whose outlines one fills with their dreams and aspirations, fears and expectations.

In the ink, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, an 18th-century French immigrant and perhaps the most eloquent eulogist of the American experience, saw what America was not. Unlike Europe, it wasn’t a rancid society underpinned by hoary structures. “Here, there

are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops,” he writes in “Letters From an American Farmer,” his account of provincial farming life in then-colonial New York first published in 1782.

Here’s what America was: a tabula rasa, an open space and a catalyst that could sublimate woe and apathy into prosperity and shared purposefulness. “In this great American asylum. … the idle may be employed, the

useless become useful, and the poor become rich,” Crèvecoeur writes, foreshadowing the 20th-century American dream. At the time, this promise drew a great profusion of Swedes, Germans, English, Scots, Irish and French.

On the face of it, I have little in common with Crèvecoeur — I’m no nobleman; my forebears were German peasants. But I’m a Frenchman, too, and a visitor to this country. Like him, I’ve had a first-row seat to this JULY/AUGUST 2022

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GET Y Y IM AGES

MORE T H AN 2 ,70 0 NE W U.S . C IT IZ E NS TAK E T H E OAT H OF AL L E GIANC E DU RING A NAT U RAL IZ AT ION C E RE MONY IN MONT E B E L LO, C AL IF ORNIA.

country’s quest to decipher its own identity.

Two hundred forty years after the publication of his letters, the central question spanning his writing still gives off a burning glow: “What … is the American, this new man?”

To start answering that question, Pittsburgh is as good a place as any.

There, the Cathedral of Learning, a 535-foottall Gothic edifice of stone and steel, towers over the Oakland neighborhood. On the first and third floors of the building, set under cavernous, arched ceilings, visitors find “nationality rooms.” Each was gifted by one of the ethnic communities that helped build the City of Bridges — and, by extension, America.

Here’s the Swedish Room, all in beige tones and furnished with an 18th-century farmhouse-style fireplace. The Chinese Room typifies imperial palace architecture, with walls painted a cherry red and intricate ceiling panels swirling with dragons. Columns in the Greek Room espouse the ionic style of the Acropolis’ Erechtheion; 10 chairs around a wooden table bear the names of famous Hellenic locales and philosophers, carved on the seats.

All three were dedicated before 1942. Today, a total of 31 rooms have taken on foreign accents — Syrian, Ukrainian and Korean, 58

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among others. In 2019, ceremonial dancers from the Filipino community advanced in procession inside the cathedral to the melody of a kulintang — a traditional instrument consisting of bronze gongs lined up on a frame. They were celebrating the opening of the Philippine Room, the latest addition to this modern tower of Babel.

The monument is a testament to the elasticity of America’s fabric and the ever-expanding definition of Americanness. When he laid out his vision for the building in the 1920s, Chancellor John Bowman probably hadn’t anticipated just how diverse America would become. The building now has 31 “nationality rooms,” and two more have been spoken for by local Iranian and Finnish groups, but there’s only so much space. Meanwhile, beyond these finite physical walls, new ethnic groups and nationalities keep building spaces of their own.

Traveling across the nation today, Crèvecoeur would find a landscape dotted with mosques and Buddhist and Hindu temples.

Were he to sojourn in Las Vegas, he could saunter about a sprawling Asian Night Market. Further East, he’d find a vibrant community of refugees from the Congo in Grand Rapids, Michigan, served by no less than 11

Congolese houses of worship. In Miami, he’d stumble upon newly arrived Venezuelans — a burgeoning community. Pushing through the door of an Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, D.C., he’d be able to feast on Ye’ater Kik Alicha we’t, a meal of yellow split peas cooked with oil, onions, garlic, curry and ginger. The nation’s capital is home to the largest concentration of Ethiopians in the U.S. The forces that drive and draw immigrants away from their homes are manifold. Some, like me, are eager to avail themselves of the opportunities afforded by one of the world’s largest job markets. Many others flee abject poverty or political, religious or ethnic persecution.

Consider the Lhotshampa. These ethnic Nepalis have been living in neighboring Bhutan since the 17th century, but starting in the 1990s, repressive elites moved to expel them from the country, which became the “world’s biggest creator of refugees per capita.” The U.S. started taking in these Bhutanese in 2007, and more than 80,000 have since resettled here, including in Texas and Georgia.

America’s embrace of these populations speaks to the central role immigrants play in its epochal tale. As the sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes, they reinforce this country’s belief that it’s a good place to live; after all, “they have had more of an opportunity to think about why it does or does not make sense to live in America.” There’s a corresponding belief, Wuthnow says, that they will be rewarded after leaving their homes and families behind — that if they work hard enough, they will attain success.

This was true at the time of Crèvecoeur, and it’s still true now. The first immigrants wasted no time before tilling the land and engaging in whatever rustic endeavor would put food on the table, and perhaps help them achieve material wealth. The same ethos animates newcomers today — they labor in some of the most physically demanding sectors of the economy. As of 2017, they represented a third of workers in agriculture, a quarter of construction workers and nearly 20 percent of workers in manufacturing, according to the Pew Research Center.

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keep going, juggling her duties at a nail salon with raising her kids.

Uncertainty had defined much of her life in this new country, and it would keep doing so.

“You never know what can happen in the future,” she told me. I wonder what Crèvecoeur would have made of Maria-Juana’s quiet resignation. He, too, experienced a devastating loss.

While he was away in France, Native Americans raided his farm in Orange County, New York, and killed his wife. Crèvecoeur only found out when he returned to his adoptive country. Despite this cruel twist of fate, he remained in his newly appointed role as consul of France in New York City for seven years, enthralled by the rise of this young nation.

Perhaps this is what keeps drawing new immigrants to this country: the clatter and the noise, the chaos and the alchemy in a crucible the size of a continent. The promise that in this ever-changing landscape, to be different is to belong. I like to think that in a heavenly room somewhere, Crèvecoeur and Huerta get together and talk about America — two immigrants who shared the same dream, two centuries apart.

C ATH E D R A L O F LE A R N I N G I N PI T TS B U R G H , PE N N SYLVA N I A .

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Immigrants toil away in demanding industries, but they also embrace entrepreneurship — that most American of proclivities — at a high rate. In 2019, they represented 21.7 percent of all business owners, despite making up 17.1 percent of the labor force, according to New American Economy, a bipartisan research and advocacy group. Their ventures run the gamut, from mom-and-pop shops to Silicon Valley darlings.

But as with every story, there’s a darker side to the one America tells itself.

I often think about Segundo Huerta, an Ecuadorian immigrant who worked on construction sites in New York until his death in 2019.

Huerta was undocumented. For years, he’d been trying to bring his family together in the U.S. He died before he could do so when the third floor of the building he was working on collapsed. Labor advocates said it was the result of unsafe working conditions. When I met his widow, Maria-Juana, for an article I was writing, she was pushing a cart stacked with laundry in the Bronx. Her twins, Jean Carlos and Joana, trailed along behind her. Her husband was dead, and she had no choice but to

I MMI GRANTS BECOME U.S. CIT IZ E NS AT A NAT U RAL IZ AT ION C E RE MONY IN H IAL E AH , F LORIDA.

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UP THE PAST TH E

W E ST

HAS A T RO U B L E D H I STO RY WITH LAKES, D E V E LO P M E N T A N D LOSS .

OUR N E W E ST D I L E M M A? T HE L A R GE ST H UMA N -M A D E I S L A N D PR OJ E C T I N HI STO RY JULY/AUGUST 2022

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GRAVEL PATH STRETCHES SOUTH FROM THE LINDON MARINA, TRACING A WOBBLY LINE ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE OF UTAH LAKE. CALM WATERS REFLECT THE SAW-TOOTHED SILHOUETTES OF THE WASATCH RANGE, FRAMED BY RUST-COLORED REEDS AND THE FEELING THAT — EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE VERY MUCH IN THE MIDDLE OF A VALLEY FILLED WITH RIBBONS OF HIGHWAYS, DENSE HOUSING AND HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE — YOU’RE AMONG NATURE. In the coming decades, this serene place could be disrupted by the din of one of the largest development projects in Utah history. If Lake Restorations Solutions, a Utah-based business, has its way, 60 dredgers could soon be digging into the lake, scooping up enough mud to fill 300,000 Olympic swimming pools. According to an application received by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers earlier this year, this lakebed mud would then be chiseled into artificial islands, which would cover one-fifth of Utah Lake’s surface. A sprawling subdivision connected by roadways and bridges would rise as hundreds of thousands of people move into newly built homes.

Lake Restoration Solutions says this radical overhaul could cure the lake of a bad case of algal blooms, turn its water from turbid to pristine and improve its storage capacity — an arresting proposition in a fast-growing state in the throes of a megadrought. On top of all that, the company posits that the real estate opportunities would provide a private funding mechanism and take some of the pressure off a tense housing market.

But many, including Jacob Holdaway, a shoreline landowner conducting a wetland restoration project on his property, are calling the project a smoke and mirrors operation that would leave the state worse than it found it. “I think it’s the dumbest idea,” Holdaway says.

A number of lake scientists and civil engineers are expressing similar doubts, albeit veiled in more diplomatic terms. This

BY BENOÎT MORENNE PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK OWENS

JACO B HO LDAWAY, A F O UR TH- GE N E R ATION U TA HN , HAS B E E N WO R K IN G TO C R E AT E A PUB LIC PA R K O N T HE SHO R E S O F UTAH L AK E F O R M O R E THAN F O UR Y E A R S, DUB B ED T HE “ WA L KA R A WAY” P R OJE C T — A F TE R T HE TIM PA N O GOS T R IB A L LE A DE R . N OW, HO L DAWAY’ S WO R K I S ON HO LD A MID TH E U TA H R E STO R ATIO N S O LUTIO N S P R O P OSAL.

enterprise, they caution, could cause irreparable harm to Utah Lake. Dredging it could rip apart its ecological fabric and have catastrophic effects downstream. Constructing a new city on the lake could lead to more pollution entering the water. And new residents could find themselves at the mercy of punishing floods or constant drought.

“When you’re creating a system with so many weak links, it doesn’t take much to create a big disaster,” says Rajagopalan Balaji, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Now, debates over the proposal have reached a breaking point. Signs reading “Don’t pave Utah Lake” have popped up on the lakeshore as environmental groups and local scientists mobilize against the project, calling it out as a land grab cloaked in a salesman’s pitch. Meanwhile, Lake Restoration Solutions and investors have squared off against the project’s opponents in press conferences and in editorials, and the company has gone so far as to sue one of its most vocal critics, prompting accusations it is willing to bulldoze its way through to a time when you can drive to lunch in the middle of Utah Lake.

In many ways, the fight over the future of development here has become the latest episode in a long history of disputed commercial projects, fraught restoration efforts and disputed water management projects in Utah and in the West at large. At its heart is a fundamental question, one that punctuates much of the past and future: What does the beneficial use of our natural resources really look like in 2022 and beyond?

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AC O B H O L DAWAY ’ S great-great-great-grandfather, Shadrach, was only 26 when he made his way to present-day Utah. A stern-looking man with pursed lips, he’d served in the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican-American War and, while based in San Diego,

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struck gold at Sutter’s Mill. He and his wife bought equipment in St. Louis for a woolen mill and, sometime in the 1850s, set up their own in Provo.

The Holdaways may have called themselves pioneers, but they were really newcomers.

The lakeshore where they grazed cattle bore the invisible footsteps of the Fremont people and of the Shoshone, Paiute and Goshute who came after them. In the early 19th century, as many as 70,000 Timpanogos and associated Indigenous people lived by Utah Lake, which is why the 11,752-foot mountain that presides over the lake bears their name today. When Brigham Young and his Latter-day Saint

followers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, it was the Native Americans who allowed them to settle and share the land and lake.

The pioneers found a lake brimming with wildlife, including 13 native fish species.

Among them was the June sucker, a fish that saved them from starvation when crops failed in the mid-1850s. But the lake would provide more than just sustenance.

Developers, realizing the lake’s potential as a tourist destination, rushed to build bathhouses, dance pavilions and even a racetrack on the shore. In newspaper ads, they beckoned vacationers with the promise of “Pure lake breezes. Boating! Bonfires. BATHING!” But in the following decades, the rapid development of cities on the shore — Spanish Fork, Springville, Orem and Provo — created new sources of pollution. Sewage from wastewater plants and chemical-filled runoff from nearby farms washed into the lake, adding more phosphorus and nitrogen, both compounds that are already naturally present in the water. The excess gasses were gobbled up by algae, spurring large, toxic blooms. Phragmites, an invasive species of tall reed grasses, sprouted on the wetlands surrounding Utah Lake, stifling native species. Carp, which a fish commissioner had introduced to the lake in the 1880s, became the dominant animal species, altering its ecosystem and threatening the June sucker’s existence. Utah Lake didn’t really look like Utah Lake anymore.

In the collective psyche, it became a stinky, algae-filled mess best to be avoided. From 2010 to 2017, the number of annual visitors dropped from about 300,000 to slightly above 100,000, according to state figures. Dramatic pictures of Utah Lake suffocating under a green layer of algae in 2016 captured the attention of national media, prompting state legislators to adopt a resolution urging restoration. Utah, it seemed, was craving radical solutions.

T H E F U T U RE OF U TAH L AK E , AS E NV IS IONE D

BY L AK E RE STORAT ION S OLU T IONS . WH IT E L IN E S INDIC AT E CONNE C T ING ROADS , C AU S E WAYS A N D B RIDGE S TO H U MAN- M A D E IS L ANDS , WH IC H WOU LD E V E NT UAL LY COV E R O N E F IF T H OF T H E S U RFAC E ARE A OF T H E L AK E .

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ABOVE: J ON BENSON, CHI EF OPERATI NG OFFI CER OF LAKE RESTORATI ON SOLUTI ONS, BELI EVES THAT THE I SLANDS DEVELOPMENT PROJ ECT ON UTAH LAKE COULD HELP EASE UTAH’S HOUSI NG AND WATER I SSUES.

N 2 0 1 7, Lake Restoration Solutions, a company led by two Utah entrepreneurs, came up with a pitch: fixing Utah Lake by dredging its lakebed, where nutrients bond with sediment. Removing this muck, the thinking went, would be akin to removing a tumor. But this seemingly simple fix would require a historic display of engineering power.

Deepening the lake by an average of seven feet, as Lake Restoration Solutions suggested, would require moving nearly one billion cubic yards of sediment. This initial phase would take up to 15 years and cost an estimated $2 billion,

making it one of the most expensive ecological restoration projects in American history. But it would be worth it, the company says. The dredging, combined with upgrades to wastewater treatment plants and the installation of biofilters to treat the lake water, would create “a vibrant crown jewel of waterfront living and outdoor recreation,” Lake Restoration Solutions wrote in a brochure.

But there will be myriad benefits other than environmental ones, the company claims. It argues that adding new units to the housing inventory would go a long way toward loosening up a cramped market. As of March, the median sales price for a home in Utah County, where Utah Lake is located, was $535,000 — a 31.5 percent increase from the same period last year, according to data from the Utah Association of Realtors.

In the coming decades, developers will have to play catch-up with a booming population: The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah projected that Utah County could add an extra one million residents by 2065. “There’s an affordability problem on the Wasatch Front,” says Jon Benson, Lake Restoration Solutions’ chief operating officer.

Developing islands “is a tool to help pay for

everything, but it’s also a benefit to have additional housing.”

Additionally, dredging Utah Lake could increase its water storage capacity by 400,000 acre-feet and turn the shallow lake into a much-needed reservoir, Benson says. Utah hasn’t built a reservoir since 1992, and the Utah Division of Water Resources has said changing weather patterns mean it’s expecting to receive new requests to investigate potential reservoir sites.

State legislators, won over, passed a bill authorizing the transfer of the lakebed in 2018 — under state jurisdiction — to private entities in exchange for restoration services.

The artificial island proposal, it seemed, was a shoo-in, and moved along relatively undisputed for three years. In December 2021, the company submitted an application to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for review, which is currently being processed.

But as new details have emerged about the proposal, a chorus of voices has started questioning its environmental cost and feasibility.

More than 100 scientists and experts recently penned a letter denouncing what they described as the company officials’ disregard for the lake’s environmental history, their JULY/AUGUST 2022

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departure from traditional principles and methods of ecological restoration and their inadequate expertise.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, some experts say, Lake Restoration Solutions faces massive environmental and technical challenges. In theory, deepening the lake could decrease water temperatures and help preserve habitat, says Kevin Rose, an associate professor of freshwater ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. But this could also make it harder for the wind to push water around, resulting in less oxygen circulating in the lake.

This, Rose says, could actually kill aquatic life and turbocharge chemical reactions that produce phosphorus — one of the very nutrients the Lake Restoration Solutions project is seeking to eliminate.

Disturbing the lakebed could also “activate” nutrients trapped in it and push the lake into overdrive, with detrimental consequences for its ecology, according to Aris Georgakakos, the director of the Georgia Water Resources Institute at Georgia Tech. This means that for however long it takes to dredge, “water quality is going to be significantly worse,” says Gustavious Williams, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at BYU. 66

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But even if the dredging does end up having positive effects, they may be quickly negated by planned urban development. The proposal calls for sculpting dredged mud into 18,000 acres of artificial islands connected to the shore by bridges and causeways, which would bring the project’s total cost to $14 billion on the low end, as estimated by Williams and the Army Corps of Engineers, putting it on a financial par with plans to build smart cities in Southeast Asia and artificial islands off the coast of Dubai. Lake Restoration Solutions puts the total budget at $6.5 billion and says the estimate was based on “many monthslong analyses that involved leading project professionals with experience implementing multi-billion-dollar projects” and that “the budget will continue to be refined.” Regardless, building this mammoth infrastructure would require gas-guzzling barges to ferry equipment and construction materials across Utah Lake. “This will put so much pollution into the lake,” Balaji says.

Then, there’s the issue of managing a sprawling subdivision built on water. Hundreds of thousands of residents would generate large amounts of wastewater and pollution, including pesticides and nutrients

applied to their lawns and petroleum spills from their boats and cars, says Upmanu Lall, the director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University. “Just comparing this with the past population of Provo-Orem-American Fork and what they loaded into the lake, my fundamental question is: How is that going to be handled?”

Because the level of Utah Lake fluctuates, the advent of a new wet period could mean floods and submerged homes, much like what happened in the Great Salt Lake in the 1980s, says Lall, a former professor of civil engineering at Utah State University. “The Utah Lake islands may spend years underwater.”

But the pointed criticism hasn’t deterred Lake Restoration Solutions. The company hopes to raise at least $6.5 billion in funding for the project, including through debt securities provided by Citigroup and a federal loan of about $900 million, and says it has already secured $25 million in private investment commitments. It has hired Geosyntec Consultants, a Florida-based consulting and engineering firm, to navigate the permitting process and oversee the collection of samples in the lake later this year. “This could be a turning point for Utah,” says Benson.

L EF T: B E N A B B OTT, A N ASSISTA N T P R O F E SS OR O F E COSYSTE M E COLO GY AT BYU, IS C U R R E N TLY FAC IN G A L EGA L B ATTLE WITH U TA H R E STO R ATIO N S O LUTIO N S, WHIC H S U ED HIM F O R $3 M I LLIO N A F TE R HE S P O K E O UT AGA IN ST T HE ISL A N DS P R O P OSA L .

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ITH PUBLIC CRITICISM casting new doubts on the proposal, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will move to authorize it. In March, the Legislature passed a bill adding new legal and financial hoops for the company to jump through, but also another bill (HB232) that critics contend is designed to provide Lake Restoration Solutions with a back door to lead the project to completion. Even if the state greenlights the project, it will still have to be approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to move forward, a process that could take years.

Company officials insist that if the project is found not to be viable, they will gladly move on.

“What would be the point of developing the islands and putting homes on it, if they’re just going to be surrounded by cesspools of algal blooms?” asks Robert Annear, an engineer at Geosyntec involved in the project.

If it goes through, it won’t mark the first time a Western state has decided to press ahead with a controversial plan to alter natural resources. In the late 1980s, Utah disbursed $60 million to build three massive pumps to siphon water out of the flooded Great Salt Lake and regulate water levels for the long term. But since, drought and overuse have lowered the lake’s level and the machines have since remained idle. A railway crossing the same lake from east to west was intended to allow a transcontinental route to bypass the steep Promontory Mountains.

But an unforeseen consequence

B E LOW: WAT E R AND DE V E LOP ME NT H AS ALWAYS B E E N A CONT E NT IOU S ISS U E I N T H E WE ST. IN T H E MID- ’8 0S , U TA H TAX PAY E RS F U NDE D T H E $ 6 0 MIL L ION P U MP S INSTA LLE D O N T H E GRE AT SALT L AK E TO E AS E F LOODING. T H E P U MP S H AV E SAT IDL E S INC E 1 9 89, AND ST I LL COST $ 1 0,0 0 0 ANNUAL LY TO M A I N TA I N .

of the design has made the north arm of the Great Salt Lake much saltier than the south arm, making that half less hospitable to certain organisms vital for local industry, according to research published in the PLoS One scientific journal in 2015. Many have called for the Glen Canyon Dam, one of the most contested public infrastructure projects in the West, to be decommissioned amid a historic drought. If Lake Powell dries up, thousands of tons of radioactive waste contained in silt at the bottom could be exposed, blown away by the wind and potentially pose a threat to human health, some scientists say.

Whatever damages past developments may have done to the environment and taxpayers, the fact remains that each of these publicly funded ventures sought to bring benefits to a large swath of the population, says Balaji, who has spent nearly two decades studying the Colorado River. But in the case of the island project, revenue generated by new developments would go to Utah County. Transforming the lake might attract some tourism dollars, but “what tourists would come to see half a million people having houses in the lake?” Lake Restoration Solutions says that less than 10 percent of the new land would be turned into estuaries and recreation islands, but this may not be feasible since this could mean exposing the public to contaminated sediments, according to Lall.

There is always the chance that once Lake Restoration Solutions and developers have made a substantial profit, taxpayers could find themselves on the hook for cleaning up an epic environmental disaster, Balaji says. “What’s the plan for the next 20-25 years?” he asks.

It’s not reassuring that the company has disregarded these questions and shunned criticisms. Earlier this year, it sued Ben Abbott, an assistant professor of ecosystem ecology at BYU, for $3 million, accusing him of spreading misinformation about the proposal. So, Abbott countersued in February under Utah’s anti-SLAPP law, which protects defendants from lawsuits they believe were filed in retaliation for participating in a public debate.

In June, his lawyers filed a motion to dismiss Lake Restoration Solutions’ lawsuit against him. “This is not a battle about science,” says Abbott. “It’s a battle about politics and law and money.”

When I asked Benson whether he thought

bringing a lawsuit against Abbott would help him gain the support of the scientific community, he paused. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

He added that he could point to independent scientists who supported the project, but he cautioned that they were “pretty shy to talk to reporters” in “today’s environment,” choosing to not acknowledge the role his own company has played in shaping this very environment.

Now, word of the lawsuit against Abbott has some scientists thinking twice before commenting on the project, even from beyond Utah’s borders. When I reached out to Hilary Dugan, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she declined to comment on Utah Lake, referencing the lawsuit.

“Not sure I necessarily want to wade into those waters,” she said.

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U TA H LA K E IS THE STAT E’ S LA R G E ST F R E S H WATE R L A K E , ST R E TC HIN G O UT F O R 24 M IL E S AC R OSS U TA H VA LLE Y. “ I S T H IS N OT A T R E ASUR E THAT E V E RYO N E WO ULD WA N T? ” ASKS JACO B HO L DAWAY.

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N ABBOTT’S VIEW, the fact that the project has made it this far into the approval process can’t be solely explained by lawmakers’ support or the company’s aggressive push. Rather, he blames Utahns’ disregard for Utah Lake and a widespread misconception that it’s in its death throes. One key element in Lake Restoration Solutions’ proposal is the argument that the project could “turn back the clock on 150 years of lake ecosystem degradation.”

But scientific evidence shows that the lake’s water quality was never as clear as company officials say it once was, Abbott says. Swimmers bathing in Utah Lake in the 1880s would have done so in cloudy waters. That’s because it naturally belongs to a category of lakes known as eutrophic, characterized by turbid water and a high presence of nutrients — here, phosphorus eroding from rocks in the shallow lake.

This isn’t to say all nutrients are good for the lake, or that the lake is in mint condition as of now. It’s still unclear how many nutrients are too many nutrients for Utah Lake, and

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where that tipping point is, says Eric Ellis, the executive director of the Utah Lake Commission. To try and answer this question, his agency has been conducting intensive research into the lake’s water quality.

In parallel to these efforts, the state has been funding a plethora of restoration projects to rehabilitate Utah Lake. The Utah Division of Water Quality subsidizes programs that encourage farmers to use enhanced sprinklers that reduce the amount of water used for irrigation, and, as a result, toxic runoff, Ellis says.

It has been using the state’s funds to assist with upgrades to wastewater treatment plants in Utah County. If the division finds that further reductions in nutrient-loaded discharges are warranted to reduce algal blooms, it could incentivize more stringent regulatory practices, Ellis says, although they wouldn’t kick in until 2030. Recently, a multiagency effort to remove over 30 million pounds of carp fish from the lake has brought back the endangered June sucker. In the winter, specialized tractors now trample down the phragmites smothering the wetlands, which has reduced their reach by about 70 percent, breathing new life into stifled habitats.

The lake has been on the mend. Algal blooms have decreased in size and last for shorter periods of time as a result, Abbott

says. When the weather permits, boaters sail from the Lindon Marina near Provo and take to the lake on 30-foot O’Day sailboats and Catalina yachts.

In a few decades, they might have to zigzag between islands and sail under bridges.

That’s a future that in many ways looks like the past — one where humans tamper with nature, at the risk of opening Pandora’s box of unintended consequences. Or they could glide unhampered across the lake, the wind meeting no obstacles in its way. This is a future of unglamorous but proven solutions to complex problems, environmentalists say.

“This critical and symbolic body of water deserves the very best of environmental science,” says Craig Christensen, the executive director of Conserve Utah Valley, a nonprofit that opposes the Utah Lake Restoration Project, “not a callused reengineering of a very delicate ecosystem.”

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IDEAS

THE POWER OF AGENCY WHY UNDERSTANDING AMERICA’S EXCEPTIONAL HISTORY BUILDS SELF RELIANCE

BY I A N V. R OW E

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y parents, Vincent and Eula, came to the United States in 1968.

They were Black immigrants who arrived during the tumultuous year in which both Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, and the country suffered through a wave of civil disturbance and race riots. Yet while they had both left their homes and families in Jamaica, my parents were not running from a tyrannical regime or impossible economic conditions. Rather, they were running toward a brighter future in the United States. Although they were fully cognizant of the nation’s struggle with racial discrimination and its legacy of slavery, nevertheless, they wanted to live and raise their children in a “land of opportunity” where anything was possible.

My parents’ focus on family, religion, education and entrepreneurship, their model of hard work and marriage over 48 years — and, yes, their decision to come to this exceptional country with its many opportunities and possibilities — all contributed to what I have become today. I like to think that my mother and father see me now as the embodiment of what they envisioned so many years ago.

My parents, like so many before them, saw 70

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the United States as a beacon of hope for billions of people around the world. They believed our founding principles — liberty, equality, personal responsibility — were central to the realization of the American Dream.

It strikes me that one building block of agency in young people is that they must believe that

they live in a good country, if not a great one; a country that is not hostile to their dreams and that, however flawed, is still full of possibilities that will reward you with great works in return for your great work. This symbiosis of possibility between individual and country is artistically exemplified in the song introducing

Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash musical “Hamilton”: Hey yo, I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry, And I’m not throwin’ away my shot! . . .

I prob’ly shouldn’t brag, but dag, I amaze and astonish.

The problem is I got a lot of brains but no polish I gotta holler just to be heard.

With every word, I drop knowledge!

I’m a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal Tryin’ to reach my goal. . . .

Ev’ry burden, ev’ry disadvantage I have learned to manage . . .

The lyrics of “My Shot” make plain the critical linkage between the sense of possibility in one’s country and the sense of possibility in one’s own life. You cannot say you are not “throwin’ away my shot” if you think your country doesn’t give people like you — “a shiny piece of coal” — an opportunity to succeed. Learning to manage “ev’ry burden, ev’ry disadvantage” and “tryin’ to reach my goal”

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IDEAS

OUR NATION HAS A FLAWED AND TRAGIC HISTORY AND A BEAUTIFUL AND AN INSPIRING PAST.

will have no meaning if the system is stacked against you.

Building agency in the next generation will depend partly on teaching our young people to appreciate and embrace America’s founding principles rather than teaching them to denigrate and reject those ideas as somehow illegitimate because they have been too often violated in practice. Those principles have been a pathway to success for legions of marginalized groups who have shouldered “ev’ry burden, ev’ry disadvantage.” That is why we must oppose distorted histories that paint America as an irredeemably racist or inherently unjust nation. Meta-narratives of a permanent American malignancy of oppression such as those promoted in The New York Times’ 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s “The People’s History of the United States” (1980) are not just fraudulent as history, they also hurt kids.

They rob our children of agency and turn them into disempowered victims. Again, why worry about not throwing away your shot if the game is rigged anyway? cONSIDE R T H E 1 61 9 P ROJE C T. “The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery,” the paper said in introducing a special interactive version of the project on its website. “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

The 1619 Project made a series of specious claims: The introduction of slaves in 1619, and not the Declaration of Independence in 1776, marks America’s true founding. The practice of American slavery, and not the principles of the declaration (“all men are created equal”), define the American project to this day. The nation’s founding ideals were “false when they were written” and our “nation was founded on both an ideal and a lie.” According to the 1619 Project, “anti-Black racism runs in the very DNA of the country.”

Dozens of the nation’s most well-respected historians discredited the project’s history, particularly its claim that the American Revolution was fought to defend slavery. In particular, Brown University religious studies professor Michael Satlow drew a bead on the project’s use of the DNA metaphor in a deadon letter to the Times. “The metaphor is misleading and perhaps pernicious, as it obscures

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agency,” he wrote. “Every generation receives traditions, found in laws, customs and institutions, but every person in every generation has significant leeway in how to understand and live those traditions. Traditions — perhaps the meaning of ‘DNA’ in this metaphor — make racism easier, but ultimately it is the quotidian choices that we have and continue to make that cause racism, as they will (cause) its eradication.” He is exactly right. Regrettably, The New York Times was not satisfied with simply putting out a special edition of its publication.

It also partnered with the Pulitzer Center to create a curriculum that has now been adopted in thousands of classrooms. School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York — interestingly enough, some of the country’s poorest academically performing districts in the country — incorporated the project into their K-12 course materials in early 2020. Sadly, the 1619 Project’s messaging is not an aberration. Young people of all races and ages are being taught to see racism and oppression everywhere. In one enrichment block at Hanover High School in New Hampshire, students were asked to complete a “Race Literacy Quiz.” The quiz included the following question: “The rise of the idea of white supremacy was tied most directly to: A. Indian removal, B. Slavery, C. The Declaration of Independence, D. The U.S. Constitution, E. Ancient Greece.” Astonishingly, the “correct” response was C, the Declaration of Independence. The answer key explained that “it was freedom, not slavery, that gave rise to modern theories of race.”

This defamation of the nation’s founding document so disturbed New Hampshire Board of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut that he asked me to testify before the state board in March 2021. Inspired by my colleagues at the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, here is part of my testimony: Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human. In many instances, we see faculty forced into professional development or students in their classrooms divided by race, and forced to confess their status as oppressor or oppressed.

Yes, our nation has a flawed and tragic

history and we have not always lived up to our founding ideals. Moreover, our schools should address this dark history. But our nation also has a beautiful and an inspiring past. It is a story — a uniquely American story — that chronicles the struggle to live up to those noless-great principles in practice. Our students should be taught this part of the American story, too. (It is worth noting that in 2018, only 15 percent of all eighth grade students scored as “proficient” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History assessment, which examined students’ understanding of historical chronology and differing perspectives across time and their grasp of historical facts and contexts.)

In the middle of his work to overcome the legacy of slavery and reality of that day’s Jim Crow racism, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the New York Civil War Centennial Commission’s Emancipation Proclamation Observance on September 12, 1962. An excerpt of what he said that day highlights the importance of our founding principles in our nation’s history: “If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil” (italics added).

I N HIS 1 835 classic, “Democracy in America,” French writer and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville explored the norms and culture that made America so unique — observations from his tour of the United States that have stood the test of time. “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation,” he wrote, “but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” I have always found this statement compelling because it accords with the notion that America is always in pursuit of becoming “a more perfect union.” Our founding principles — principles beautifully set down in the Declaration of Independence — are the measure of perfection, as the Rev. King would come to understand.

While America’s founders laid out inspiring ideals that they themselves did not always personally fulfill as individuals, the legacy they left is a country constantly working to fully live up

to those ideals. America’s founding and governing documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other constitutional amendments — are the tools of national betterment, the mechanisms for national repair and renewal.

We cannot escape the fact that America’s history will forever be scarred by the horrific stories of chattel enslavement. But today’s revisionist history projects ignore the peculiar duality of America. As Hendrik Hertzberg and Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in their comment on the 1996 New Yorker special edition “Black in America,” “For African-Americans, the country of oppression and the country of liberation are the same country.”

The peculiar duality can be seen in the fact that this is the country in which enslaved people with a certain skin color at one time were once considered only three-fifths of a human being. Yet it is the same country that has now twice elected Barack Obama, someone of that same skin color, to the presidency. It is the same country that, in 2020, elected Kamala Harris, a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent, as vice president. That’s the duality. The question is this: What are we going to lead young people to believe they can achieve? Are we going to teach them a narrative of oppression, tyranny and victimization? Or are we going to provide them with the character and tools to thrive? Are we going to promote a mindset of victimization? Or are our schools, families and faith communities going to encourage our young people to prepare themselves to seize the opportunities that are out there and not to throw away their shot?

On March 18, 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama spoke at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. It was an important speech, one that’s even more relevant amid today’s fierce debates over what to teach young Americans about the nation’s origin story and true birthdate. Obama argued that, despite America’s original sin, the abomination of slavery, he was optimistic that future generations would continue to make progress toward “a more perfect union.” Why did he think so? Because our nation was founded on the principles embedded in the Constitution.

In closing, Obama described the path toward a more perfect union: “For the African American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it

also means binding our particular grievances, for better health care and better schools and better jobs, to the larger aspirations of all Americans. … And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that, while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism. They must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

Just as our founding ideals have allowed America to continue to become a better nation, they also help us as individuals to better ourselves. That is what we need to tell our children — that they also have an inner strength and can learn the tools of self-betterment and self-repair and renewal. That is the mindset and skills that the mediating institutions of family, religion and education need to celebrate and cultivate.

Of course, as it relates to the United States and its young people, our future is still to be written. Here again, Miranda captures the linkage between the promise of America and its people in the closing song that marks Alexander Hamilton’s death: Legacy. What is a legacy?

It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.

I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.

America, you great unfinished symphony, You sent for me.

You let me make a difference.

A place where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints and rise up.

Our young people have the power to shape their legacy. As adults, it is our responsibility to prepare them to write the next stanza in their own and their country’s unfinished symphony. Rather than teaching them to lament what was or might have been, we need to teach them that they can make a difference in what is to come. We need to show them that they themselves have the capacity — the agency — to wise up, rise up and leave their fingerprints on what is to be.

I A N V. R OW E I S A S E N I O R F E L L OW AT T H E A M E R I C A N E N T E R P R I S E I N S T I T U T E . T H I S E S S AY I S E XC E R P TE D F R O M “AG E N C Y, T H E F O U R P O I N T P L A N FO R A L L C H I L D R E N T O OV E R C O M E T H E V I C T I M H O O D NA RRAT I V E A N D D I S C OV E R T H E I R PAT H WAY T O P OW E R ,” P U B L I S H E D BY T E M P L E TO N P R E S S. C O PY R I G H T 2 0 2 2

BY I A N V. R OW E .

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IDEAS

OUR FOUNDING AFFECTION A ‘SPIRIT OF AMITY’ AND ‘MUTUAL DEFERENCE’ WERE ESSENTIAL TO PRODUCING THE CONSTITUTION. SUCH A SPIRIT REMAINS VITAL TO MAINTAINING CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

BY M ATTH E W S . H O L L A N D

A

t the end of the American Revolution, Gen. George Washington — still this nation’s greatest warrior for liberty—had a vital message for the fledgling country.

In a letter sent to all the states announcing his retirement from military service, he offered an “earnest prayer” that God “would incline the hearts of the Citizens to ... entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another.” Without “these things” he declared, “we can never hope to be a happy nation.” He might have said, “We could never hope to be a nation, period.”

Just a few years later, in the summer of 1787, when 55 delegates from Maine to Georgia crowded into the Pennsylvania State House for the Constitutional Convention, things were hot, humid and tense. Doors and windows remained shut to deter eavesdroppers, and men with vastly different opinions, priorities and constituencies, deliberated for four to six hours each day, six days a week. Despite strenuous debate and divergent interests, flashes of incivility proved the exception rather than the rule. Benjamin Franklin praised the “great coolness & temper” he saw prevail among delegates. And Washington himself, who served as president of the convention, would later write that this “spirit of amity” and “mutual deference” were essential to producing the Constitution.* Such a spirit remains vital to the continuing health of our country’s constitutional order.

Yet, we live in contested times, rife with statistically established markers of increased partisanship and observable increases in rancor.

The evidence of this hardly needs recounting.

The presence of it is most alarming.

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understand that reversing this contagion of political contempt begins with the two great commandments, to love God with all your heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-40). In the scriptures, these two commandments are summarized in a single word: charity. The apostle Paul admonished, “let all your things be done with charity” (1 Corinthians 16:13). Presumably, “all your things” is encompassing enough to include even politics.

As a graduate student and later as a professor, I developed a profound appreciation CHRISTIAN CHARITY INFLUENCED SOME OF THE MOST CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS COUNTRY.

for the way that Christian charity fostered a broad civic virtue that greatly influenced some of the most critical moments in the development of this country.

Civic charity stresses the public importance of the love of neighbor, and even our enemies, as inspired by a wide range of religious perspectives. This thread, which began even before the nation’s founding, and influenced Washington and the miracle in Philadelphia, also influenced key elements in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and many others.

The contest for the presidency between John Adams and Jefferson was as bitter as, or worse than, any election we have seen here in

modern times. To unite the divided nation, newly elected Jefferson famously declared in his first inaugural, “We are all republicans, we are all federalists.” During the campaign Jefferson was attacked for his less-than-orthodox religious views, and some New Englanders reportedly hid their Bibles for fear of confiscation under his administration. Ironically, throughout this period, including his presidency, Jefferson was assiduously studying the New Testament trying to glean moral precepts taught by Jesus that he found “more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers.” During his inaugural, Jefferson made it point to praise “religion” for inculcating throughout the Republic “honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man” (emphasis added). Following the speech, reports indicate that old friends who had long been divided over partisan differences were reunited.

More than half a century later, and only a month before his assassination, Lincoln used his second inaugural address to speak to a nation boiling with the acids of human hatred spawned by civil war. In an unmistakably biblical voice, Lincoln urged “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” as America’s bloodiest conflict neared its conclusion. By resisting the great temptation to focus on his own magnificent accomplishments as a leader, by implicating both the North and the South as contributing to God’s wrath over the injustice of more than two centuries of human slavery, and by calling for care for all the soldiers, widows and orphans across the country, Lincoln’s speech reduced many to tears and began to do just as he asked, to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” The great, black abolitionist

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THE SI GNI NG OF THE CONSTI TUTI ON OF T H E U NIT E D STAT E S AT T H E CONST IT U T IONAL CONV E NT ION OF 1787.

Fredrick Douglass called it a “sacred effort.”

Importantly, during this speech Lincoln also reminds us that “charity for all” does not preclude “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” To the extent civic charity asks us not only to love our neighbor but also to love God, we must “strive on” to cherish, honor and defend those things God tells us are good, right and true. It was in this very spirit that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. bravely denounced and tirelessly worked to unwind the injustices of the segregated South and elsewhere but always did so through peaceful means and with a generous spirit toward those who opposed or failed to help. To borrow his own phrase, he embodied “a tough mind and a tender heart.”

God’s love for all of his children, and his invitation for us to love each other, must continue to inspire our own efforts to foster cooperation and civic charity between different groups, even — perhaps especially — when those groups have past or present points of divergence.

Such has been the aspiration of recent efforts between the NAACP and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2018, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson first met with a member of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in Jackson, Mississippi, where together they honored the legacy of Medgar Evers, the great civil rights martyr. They went to Evers’ home and visited the NAACP office where Evers once walked the halls. After the visit, Latter-day Saints PA INTING BY H OWA R D C H A N D LE R C H R I ST Y

and members of the NAACP began laboring together in a joint project to refresh and refurbish the Medgar Evers’ NAACP office.

Later that year, NAACP President Johnson and church President Russell M. Nelson took the bold step of establishing a relationship of cooperation between the two organizations. In 2021, they jointly announced that the church, working with the NAACP, would support humanitarian efforts in key cities across America, fund a significant number of academic scholarships administered by the United Negro College Fund, and organize a fellowship — named in honor of prominent civil rights leader the Rev. Amos C. Brown — for young people to travel to Ghana to learn about African history and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

This same spirit of civic charity has also guided the church in engaging with religious freedom advocates and members of the LGBTQ community to find common ground.

In Utah, representatives of the LGBTQ community and leaders of the church worked to advance nondiscrimination protections for members of the LGBTQ community in employment and housing while also securing religious freedom protections. The 2015 Utah legislation has served as a model for similar collaborative efforts in other states and at the federal level. This year, the church worked with a broad coalition of religious and civic leaders to introduce similar legislation in Arizona. And, at the federal level, the church has

worked alongside various LGBTQ leaders and other religous organizations to support the Fairness for All Act. As Elder David A. Bednar, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, recently said at the National Press Club in Washington, “We are proud to stand with our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. While we may not agree on everything, we surely are building a foundation of mutual respect and understanding.” We have a responsibility to be peacemakers. This does not mean a posture that is passive or weak. Quite the opposite — it takes steady courage, initiative, discipline, and prudence to foster unity in an era of so much strong disagreement.

But followers of Jesus Christ are always called to a higher way — one inspired by genuine charity, the “greatest” of all the Christian virtues (1 Corinthians 13). In the past, America has asked for the “better angels of our nature” in moments of peril. This means reaching into places where hope and social harmony sometimes feel lost. As Christ himself reminds us, no citizen is beyond the reach of love’s long arm. The times today call for nothing less. *See the work of Derek Webb, particularly his 2012 article in the South Carolina Law Review “The Original Meaning of Civility: Democratic Deliberation at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention,” as well as the writings of retired federal Judge Thomas B. Griffith, including his 2020 Harvard Law Review article “The Degradation of Civic Charity.”

M AT T H E W S. H O L L A N D I S A G E N E RA L AU T H O R I T Y S E V E N T Y O F T H E C H U R C H O F J E S U S C H R I ST O F L AT T E R- D AY S A I N TS. H E WAS P R E V I O U S LY A PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND THE P R E S I D E N T O F U TA H VA L L E Y U N I V E R S I T Y.

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A FRAGILE FREEDOM LIBERTY EMERGES WHEN THE STATE AND SOCIETY STRIKE A BALANCE BETWEEN PROTECTION AND ACCOUNTABILITY

BY DA R ON AC E MO G LU A N D JA M E S A . R O B I N S O N

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he state of Wyoming evolved out of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, which called for the construction of a railroad to connect the eastern and western United States.

By July 1867, settlers were already arriving and Gen. Grenville M. Dodge, chief engineer of the Union Pacific, began the survey for a city at Cheyenne, which would become the capital of the state. It was to be four miles square with well-organized blocks, alleys and streets. The Union Pacific, the beneficiary of a huge land grant from the government as an incentive to get the railroad constructed, started selling off the lots three days after Dodge surveyed them. The first went for $150.

By August 7, though Cheyenne was mostly a city of tents, a mass meeting in a local store chose a committee to write a city charter. On September 19 the first newspaper of the town, a triweekly tabloid called the Cheyenne Leader, was launched. By December the newspaper was advising its readers to carry guns at night for self-protection because of “frequent occurrences of garroting.” On October 13 of the next year, the editor asserted: “Pistols are almost as numerous as men. It is no longer thought to be an affair of any importance to take the life of a fellow being.”

At this point Cheyenne resorted to vigilante justice to solve the problems endemic to the American frontier. In January 1868 three men were arrested for theft but released on bail.

The next morning they were found tied together with a sign that read “$900 stole … $500 Recovered … Next case goes up a tree. Beware of Vigilance Committee.” The next day 76

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vigilantes caught and hanged three “ruffians.”

In the rural cattle areas, things were much worse. As Edward W. Smith, of Evanston, told the U.S. Public Land Commission in 1879, “Away from settlements the shotgun is the only law.” As the cattle spread, conflicts between ranchers and homesteaders grew, and the reaction of the cattlemen led to the Johnson County Range War. On Tuesday, April 5, 1892, a special six-car train sped north from Cheyenne, carrying 25 Texas gunmen along with another 24 locals who had joined them.

The men had a “Dead List of seventy men” they intended to kill.

MIGHT DOES NOT MAKE RIGHT, AND IT CERTAINLY DOES NOT MAKE FOR LIBERTY.

We don’t have information about the homicide rate in Cheyenne in the 1890s, though data for the mining town of Benton, California, suggests that there it may have reached an incredible high of 24,000 per 100,000! More likely it was closer to 83 per 100,000, the rate during the California gold rush, or 100 per 100,000, the rate in Dodge City, Kansas, in the days of Wyatt Earp.

Things turned out quite differently in Wyoming. The anarchy, fear and violence were contained. Those Texans with the kill list were

soon holed up at the TA Ranch surrounded by lawmen from the town of Buffalo who were tipped off about their arrival. After three days of siege, the cavalry came, ordered in by President Benjamin Harrison, and shackled all of the Texans and their collaborators. Today, Wyoming largely enjoys freedom from fear, violence and dominance. It has one of the lowest homicide rates in the United States, about 1.9 per 100,000.

Wyoming has a pretty good record when it comes to helping people break free from the cage of norms, too. Take the subjugation of women. Even during the worst of times, women in Wyoming did not face the same restrictions as those in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan or many parts of Africa. But as everywhere else in the world, women in the first half of the 19th century had very limited power and no say in public affairs, and had to put up with myriad constraints on their behavior, both because of their unequal status in marriage and because of the norms and customs of their societies. That started to change as women got the right to vote.

The first state to grant female suffrage was Wyoming in 1869, earning it the nickname the Equality State. This wasn’t because Wyoming’s customs and norms favored women compared to other parts of the world. Rather, the state’s Legislature granted them voting rights, partly to make it more attractive for women to move to this new state, partly to ensure that there would be enough voters to meet the population requirement for statehood, and partly because once African Americans began gaining

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B E LOW: E N GLISH P O L I TIC A L P HI LOSO P HE R THO MAS HO B B E S, 1 588–1 679.

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R I G HT: F R O N TISP IE C E O F “LE VIATHA N , T HE M ATTE R , F O R ME A N D POW E R O F A CO M MO N -W E A LTH E CC L ESIASTIC A LL A N D C I V I L ,” BY THO MAS HO B B E S, 1 6 51 .

full citizenship and voting rights, it seemed less acceptable to leave women out of this process. There are many reasons why the cage of norms often starts breaking down once a state capable of shackling the hoodlums and enforcing laws is in place.

It’s not just murder that makes the lives of stateless societies precarious. Life expectancy at birth in stateless societies was very low, varying between 21 and 37 years. Similarly short lifespans and violent deaths were not unusual for our progenitors before the past 200 years. Thus many of our ancestors lived in what the famous political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described in his book “Leviathan” as “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

This was what Hobbes, writing during another nightmarish period, the English Civil War of the 1640s, described as a condition of “Warre,” or what Kaplan would have called “anarchy”— a situation of war of all against all, “of every man, against every man.”

Naturally, people would look for a way out of anarchy, a way to impose “restraint upon themselves” and get “themselves out from the miserable condition of ‘Warre,’ which is necessarily consequent … to the natural Passions of men.” Hobbes had already anticipated how this could happen when he introduced the notion of “Warre,” since he observed that “Warre” emerges when 78

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“men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe.” Hobbes dubbed this common Power the “great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH or STATE,” three words he used interchangeably. The solution to “Warre” was thus to create the sort of centralized authority that the members of anarchic, stateless societies did not have. Hobbes used the image of the leviathan, the great sea monster described in the Bible’s Book of Job, to stress that this state needed to be powerful. The frontispiece of his book featured an etching of the leviathan with a quotation from Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.” (Job 41:24) Point taken.

Hobbes understood that the all-powerful leviathan would be feared. But better to fear one powerful leviathan than to fear everybody.

The leviathan would stop the war of all against all, ensure people do not “endeavor to destroy, or subdue one another.”

Sounds great, but how exactly do you get a leviathan?

Hobbes proposed two routes. The first he called a “Common-wealth by Institution … when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one” to create such a state and delegate power and authority to it, or as he put it, “to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgments, to

his Judgment.” So a sort of grand social contract (“Covenant”) would accede to the creation of a leviathan. The second he called a “Common-wealth by Acquisition,” which “is acquired by force,” since Hobbes recognized that in a state of “Warre” somebody might emerge who would “subdueth his enemies to his will.” The important thing was that “the Rights, and Consequences of Sovereignty, are the same in both.” However society got a leviathan, Hobbes believed, the consequences would be the same — the end of “Warre.”

This conclusion might sound surprising, but Hobbes’s logic is revealed by his discussion of the three alternative ways to govern a state: through monarchy, aristocracy or democracy. Though these appear to be very different decision-making institutions, Hobbes argued that “the difference between these three kindes of Common-wealth consisteth not in the difference of Power; but in the difference of Convenience.” On balance, a monarchy was more likely to be convenient and had practical advantages, but the main point is that a leviathan, however governed, would do what a leviathan does. It would stop “Warre,” abolish “continuall feare” and seek to preserve “Peace and Justice.”

The influence of Hobbes’s masterpiece on modern social science can hardly be exaggerated. In theorizing about states and constitutions, we follow Hobbes and start with what

problems states and constitutions solve, how they constrain behavior and how they reallocate power in society. But even more profound is his influence on how we perceive states today. We respect them and their representatives, regardless of whether they are monarchies, aristocracies or democracies. Even after a military coup or civil war, representatives of the new government, flying in their official jets, take their seats in the United Nations, and the international community looks to them to enforce laws, resolve conflicts and protect their citizens. It confers on them official respect.

Just as Hobbes envisaged, whatever their origins and path to power, rulers epitomize the leviathan, and they have legitimacy.

Hobbes was right that avoiding “Warre” is a critical priority for humans. He was also correct in anticipating that once states formed and began monopolizing the means of violence and enforcing their laws, killings declined.

The leviathan controlled the “Warre” of “every man, against every man.” Under Western and Northern European states, murder rates today are only 1 per 100,000 or less; public services are effective, efficient and plentiful; and people have come as close to liberty as at any time in human history.

But there was also much that Hobbes didn’t get right. For one, it turns out that stateless societies are quite capable of controlling violence and putting a lid on conflict, though as we’ll see this doesn’t bring much liberty. For another, he was too optimistic about the liberty that states would bring. Indeed, Hobbes was wrong on one defining issue (and so is the international community, we might add): Might does not make right, and it certainly does not make for liberty. Life under the yoke of the state can be nasty, brutish and short, too.

The leviathan that got the “Warre” under control and started to break the cage of norms in Wyoming is a different kind of beast from the ones we have discussed so far. It wasn’t absent except in the very early days. It had the capacity to shackle the Texans. Since then it has massively expanded this capacity and can now resolve myriad conflicts fairly, enforce a complex set of laws and provide public services that its citizens demand and enjoy. It has a large, effective bureaucracy (even if it is at times bloated and inefficient) and a huge amount of information about what its citizens are up to. It has the strongest military in the world. But it doesn’t use this military power and its information to repress and exploit its citizens (for the most part). It responds to its

citizens’ wishes and needs, and it can also intervene to loosen the cage of norms for everybody, particularly for its most disadvantaged citizens. It is a state that creates liberty.

It is accountable to society not just because it is bound by the U.S. Constitution and by the Bill of Rights, which emphatically exalts the rights of the citizens, but more important because it is shackled by people who will complain, demonstrate and even rise up if it THE CAGE OF NORMS OFTEN STARTS BREAKING DOWN ONCE A STATE CAPABLE OF ENFORCING LAWS IS IN PLACE.

oversteps its bounds. Its presidents and legislators are elected, and they are often kicked out of office when the society they are ruling over doesn’t like what they are doing. Its bureaucrats are subject to review and oversight.

It is powerful, but coexists with and listens to a society that is vigilant and willing to get involved in politics and contest power. It is what we’ll call a “shackled leviathan.” In the same way that the leviathan can shackle those Texan gunmen, so that they cannot do harm to ordinary citizens, it can itself be shackled by common people, by norms and by institutions — in short by society.

It is not that the “shackled leviathan” isn’t Janus-faced. It is, and repression and dominance are as much in its DNA as they are in the DNA of the “despotic leviathan.” But the shackles prevent it from rearing its fearsome face.

Liberty has been rare in human history.

Many societies have not developed any centralized authority capable of enforcing laws, resolving conflicts peacefully and protecting the weak against the strong. Instead they have often imposed a cage of norms on people, with similarly dire consequences for liberty. Wherever the Leviathan has shown up, the lot of liberty has hardly improved. Even though it has enforced laws and kept the peace in some domains, the leviathan has often been despotic, thus unresponsive to society, and has done little to further the liberty of its citizens.

Only shackled states have used their power to protect liberty. The “shackled leviathan” has been distinctive in another sense, too — in creating broad-based economic opportunities and incentives and promoting a sustained rise in economic prosperity. But this “shackled leviathan” has arrived on the scene only late in

history, and its rise has been contested and contentious.

It isn’t that we are heading toward the end of history with the inexorable rise of liberty. It isn’t that anarchy will spread around the world uncontrollably. It isn’t even that all countries around the world will succumb to dictatorships, whether digital or just of the good old-fashioned sort. These are all possibilities, and this diversity, rather than convergence to one of these outcomes, is the norm. Nevertheless, there is also a glimmer of hope, because humans are capable of constructing a “shackled leviathan,” which can resolve conflicts, refrain from despotism and promote liberty by loosening the cage of norms. Indeed, a lot of human progress depends on societies’ ability to build such a state. But building and defending —and controlling — a “shackled leviathan” takes effort, and is always a work in progress, often fraught with danger and instability.

All in all, we are seeing a rather different picture from the one Hobbes painted. The problem in societies where the leviathan is absent isn’t just uncontrolled violence of “every man, against every man.” Equally critical is the cage of norms, which creates a rigid set of expectations and a panoply of unequal social relations producing a different but no lighter form of dominance.

Perhaps centralized, powerful states can help us achieve liberty? But we have seen that such states are likely to act despotically, repress their citizens and stamp out liberty rather than promote it.

Are we then doomed to choose between one type of dominance over another? Trapped in either “Warre” or the cage of norms or under the yoke of a despotic state? Though there is nothing automatic about the emergence of liberty, and it hasn’t been easy to achieve in human history, there is room for liberty in human affairs and this critically depends on the emergence of states and state institutions. Yet these must be very different from what Hobbes imagined — not the all-powerful, unrestrained sea monster, but a shackled state. We need a state that has the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts and provide public services but is still tamed and controlled by an assertive, well-organized society.

E XC E R P T E D F R O M D A R O N AC E M O G LU A N D JA M E S A .

R O B I N S O N ’S “ T H E NA R R OW C O R R I D O R ,” P U B L I S H E D

BY P E N G U I N RA N D O M H O U S E . D A R O N AC E M O G LU I S T H E E L I Z A B E T H A N D JA M E S K I L L I A N P R O F E S S O R O F E C O N O M I C S AT T H E M AS S AC H U S E T TS I N ST I T U T E O F T E C H N O L O GY. JA M E S A . ROB INSON IS A POL ITI C A L S C I E N T I ST, E C O N OMIST AN D A UN IV ERSITY P RO F E S S O R AT T H E U N I V ERSITY OF CHICAG O.

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THE WEAPONIZATION OF DOUBT SCIENCE IS UNDER ATTACK. WHO BENEFITS?

BY L E E MC I N TY R E

W

e hear a lot of talk these days about how truth is threatened in the age of misinformation. I understand that misinformation is a terrible problem, and that it has downstream effects on science, trust, institutions, our society and just about everything else that we care about. But I think the real culprit is properly labeled not as misinformation but disinformation.

Let me explain.

Misinformation is a mistake. It is when we say that some falsehood is true when it is not, but this happened by accident. Say I am out walking my dogs and a passing car stops and asks for directions to Boston. I say, “Go down three blocks, make a left and get on Beacon Street. That’ll take you straight to Boston.”

Easy enough and the person happily pulls away. Then, to my mortification, I realize that I’m not where I thought I was and I’ve told him to go exactly the wrong way. I said to make a left on Beacon, when I should have said right.

Now he’s going to be headed out to Wellesley and — if he keeps going — eventually the New York border. I made a mistake but it wasn’t malicious. That’s misinformation.

Now imagine, by contrast, that I intentionally wanted to misdirect someone, because I had a gang of friends who were waiting to carjack a Mercedes, and I took this opportunity to give the motorist directions that would lead him directly to them, so that they could take his car, chop it up and sell it for parts. In this case, perhaps I might also have told him to go left rather than right, but now it is disinfor80

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mation. I did it on purpose. I did it because it served my interests for the motorist to believe a falsehood. And this is where the whole thing is relevant for science.

I maintain that the reason we live in an age in which there is so much science denial — about the climate, Covid and so much else — and where we have witnessed such rapidly diminishing trust in science — is not because it is some sort of accident or mistake that false information leaks out onto the internet. It is

IF WE CANNOT FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT DISINFORMATION, A NUMBER OF OUR TREASURED INSTITUTIONS, LIKE SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY, MAY BE AT STAKE.

instead the result of a deliberate campaign of deception and falsehood cooked up to mislead us. There are forces at work who want us to believe false things about the climate and Covid — about evolution and vaccines and GMOs — not because it serves our interests, but instead because it benefits the interests of the people who are creating and spreading these falsehoods.

Science denial is not an accident.

People don’t wake up one day wondering whether the California forest fires were due to a Jewish space laser, or if Bill Gates put microchips into their Covid vaccines. Those are the result of a deliberate propaganda campaign that is meant to create doubt and distrust.

Of course, to the person who is going in the wrong direction, you might wonder why it’s worse that the mistake was deliberate. Yet as you can see in my original example, it’s because the consequences can be quite terrible for the person who is being misled, depending on the stakes of the lie. The difference between driving to Wellesley and turning around versus driving to Wellesley and getting carjacked is not trivial. Imagine asking a scientist why fraud is worse than error. They’ll give you a funny look. Anyone who has ever done a little science understands that it is hard enough without having to deal with people who are cheating. Of course, even mistakes in science aren’t really welcome, but at least you might be able to learn from error. But what is the point of building upon someone’s work when even they know it isn’t true? And I submit that the same holds with the distinction between misinformation and disinformation. It matters why you are driving the wrong way.

But let me make another qualification.

Couldn’t you say that to the person who acts on bad information, it hardly matters what the original intent was? After all, the person who hears a piece of disinformation and then spreads it — believing it to be true — has done so without any malicious intent. So doesn’t it at

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that point become misinformation? Now I’m a philosopher. And we could spend a couple of weeks sorting that out. But let’s not. Because the important point I’m trying to make here is that if you want to fight bad information you have to know where it is coming from and why. And if you are trying to defend science from the science deniers and the charlatans, it is important to keep in mind not just that they believe false things, but that they believe false things because they are being lied to.

That is the nub of the problem.

As with most effective lies, a science denial campaign usually starts with a kernel of truth.

And it employs a tactic we all think of as very good and in fact quite scientific. Doubt.

Scientists doubt things, and it is good that they do so. As Carl Sagan once said, the amazing thing about scientists is that they are both open-minded and skeptical at the same time.

Now the trick is to be open-minded enough to want to learn new things that might change your mind about what is true, but then immediately suspend your judgment over any particular hypothesis until you hear the evidence for it.

You always want to test things.

Doubt in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, because doubt about any particular scientific finding can be overcome with sufficient evidence. Indeed this is how scientists reason.

Scientists are skeptical. This is why they turn to the evidence. But the real problem comes when mere doubt morphs into distrust. For doubt can be overcome with evidence, but distrust cannot.

The goal of disinformation is not merely to raise doubt but to weaponize it into distrust, and eventually, denial. This occurs when our fellow citizens are encouraged not just to disbelieve certain scientific facts but to distrust the scientists who have discovered them — to see them as biased or even liars — which undermines the process by which scientific knowledge is created in the first place.

In an earlier book called “The Scientific Attitude,” I argued that what is most special about science is that scientists care about evidence and are willing to change their minds in the face of new evidence. Although they may start with doubt, when the evidence is sufficient to overcome their reservations, a good scientist will give their assent. This is not to say that they necessarily believe that a hypothesis has been proven to be true, or that we are certain about it, because those are unreachable goals.

No scientist can ever prove a theory. Science is not deductive logic or Euclidean geometry. But 82

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when there is sufficient evidence, it is rational to believe that a theory is true … that is until new evidence mounts to change one’s mind. In the philosophical trade this is called “fallibilism” and it means that you give your assent to a well-corroborated belief while always holding out the idea that in the long run it might not be true. That is a rational way to form one’s beliefs.

We assert what we think is true, then revise as necessary.

Compare this to the way that a science denier reasons.

A few years back I went to the Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, where I spent two days mingling with folks who genuinely believe that the Earth is flat, that Antarctica isn’t a continent but an ice wall around the perimeter, that there is a dome over the top, and that we have never been to the moon. They believe this because they distrusted the scientists who told them otherwise. It was all part of a giant conspiracy theory, whereby the scientists were benefitting somehow from keeping this a secret. But this, of course, wreaked havoc with the flat Earther’s claim that their beliefs were not based on faith but instead good evidence, for who could they trust to provide that evidence in experiments they had not done themselves? And if they demanded proof as a standard for belief, why did they believe in flat Earth?

It is not just that their beliefs were wrong, it is that they were reasoning about them in the wrong way. Nothing could convince them.

They would never say what — if any — evidence might compel them to change their minds. They did not have the scientific attitude. So it’s not just that their conclusions were mistaken, it’s that they were not willing to reason about an empirical matter like a scientist would. But the reason was that they distrusted the scientists.

And it works this way for all science denial.

Some years back, a few researchers found that all science deniers reason in the same way. This is not to say that the content of their beliefs is all the same — or that if you’re a science denier about one thing you are necessarily a science denier about everything. Rather it means that whether the topic is climate denial, flat Earth, anti-vax, anti-evolution or something else, all science deniers follow the same flawed reasoning strategy, which is: 1. Cherry-picking evidence.

2. Belief in conspiracy theories.

3. Engagement in illogical reasoning.

4. Reliance on fake experts.

5. Belief that science has to be perfect to be credible.

These five tropes sound pretty familiar don’t they? We all understand that vaccine deniers cherry-pick unvetted claims from the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) website or rely on fake experts on the internet (who sometimes have alternative cures to sell) to support their spurious claims.

But here’s the payoff. By understanding this flawed reasoning strategy it allows you to push back against them. To address not just the content of their beliefs but the flawed logic behind them.

Consider for example the fifth trope: the idea that science has to be perfect. This is a common one among science deniers, who will often say “just give me proof ” and then say “aha” when you can’t. “Let’s wait for more evidence on climate change,” they’ll say, or “just prove to me that the vaccines are safe.”

They don’t understand how science works.

They are reasoning about empirical beliefs in an illogical way, because when you are dealing with inductive reasoning strategies you cannot have proof. You have to rely on warrant and evidence, not certainty.

To a science denier, though, they feel virtuous for their great “skepticism.” They often say that they are the true skeptics. That they’re being more scientific than the scientists. But they don’t really understand what skepticism means either. Science deniers are what I call “cafeteria skeptics.” They are not usually “anti-science” but instead just skeptical about the piece of science that treads on their ideological beliefs or piece of their identity they want to protect. This is why they are so inconsistent in the way they reason about evidence. They insist on a standard of evidence tantamount to proof for the things they don’t want to believe, but ask for almost no evidence at all for the things they do want to believe. They embrace a double standard that would never be tolerated in science. Instead of being skeptics, science deniers are usually quite gullible.

It is worth reflecting on all this for a moment, because it will help us to see what we can do to fight back. Research reported in “Nature Human Behaviour” in 2019 shows that one can push back against science deniers, and sometimes even convince them to give up their irrational beliefs based on understanding the five tropes above. But it

is hard. And it doesn’t always work. It works better than anything else, but it is a salvage strategy. It is what you do when the disease of denialism has already spread to a virgin population and there is nothing else you can do but try to treat it.

But what if you could get to the vulnerable people first, before they were radicalized? Because remember … science deniers are made.

Their beliefs are created by someone whose interests are served by radicalizing them. And by understanding that, maybe we can address this problem before it gets any worse.

You can stop a disease by treating the sick but also by “removing the pump handle” that is getting everyone infected in the first place.

One way to do this is to “prebunk” false beliefs, by publicizing the flawed reasoning strategy that all science deniers use to arrive at them. But another is to expose the fact that the science deniers are being duped in the first place. That they are victims. That they are doing someone else’s bidding without even realizing it.

Don’t forget where we started with this.

Science denial is based on disinformation. It is the weaponization of doubt, which means that someone must have weaponized it. But who? doubt into a modern science denial campaign began in the 1950s, when executives of six of the nation’s largest tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and hired a public relations firm to advise them what to do about growing research showing a link between smoking and lung cancer. The advice? Fight the science.

They accomplished this through a public relations campaign that involved full-page ads in American newspapers, doing their “own research” in a precursor to The Tobacco Institute and creating an alternative narrative that they could feed to journalists encouraged to tell the “other side of the story” by admitting that the causal link between smoking and cancer had not yet been proven. (Which of course is true, though it would cause David Hume to spin in his grave, because all causal links based on inductive reasoning are less than certain.)

The tobacco companies didn’t have to prove that smoking did not cause cancer. All they needed to do was create enough doubt about whether it did to continue to sell cigarettes.

As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway report in their wonderful book “Merchants of Doubt,” this “tobacco strategy” was then followed over

THE MANUFACTURE OF

the next six decades in denialist campaigns about acid rain, the ozone hole and later about climate change, so that special interests could profit. But a dangerous thing happened during those decades. On several topics, science denial morphed from profit to politics. The goal was no longer merely to make money but to protect one’s ideology; to create an army of deniers. And for that the manufacture of doubt was not enough. The goal was distrust that could be created only through the cynical manufacture of disinformation.

The point of a full-fledged denialist campaign is not just to create doubt about some particular scientific fact, but to foment alienation and polarization — to divide the world into “us versus them” — so that folks might begin to distrust scientists in general. After all, what use are facts if you don’t trust the people providing them?

Consider vaccine denial. If it were motivated merely by doubts about whether the vaccines caused infertility, say, it could be overcome by data showing that they do not. But if you look at how people come to have such suspicions it is because they have been fed propaganda that encourages them to think that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are lying to us. When you enter a world where the skeptics become “us” and the scientists become “them,” the battle is already half lost. Because at that point the facts don’t really matter, do they?

Why would you believe any alleged facts if they were shared by a liar?

In April 2020, just a month into the pandemic, a story appeared in a publication called the Oriental Review that claimed that any future Covid vaccines developed in the West would have biometric microchips in them, courtesy of Bill Gates, who had taken out a patent on this technology numbered 060606. At the bottom readers were encouraged to share this story on Facebook and Twitter.

What readers did not know, however, is that the story had been created by Russian intelligence, which was pumping out Covid denial propaganda through four of the English language news outlets that it controlled, which includes the Oriental Review.

This was not the first time Russia had been involved in creating and disseminating disinformation that undermined Western confidence in science, about topics such as climate change, GMOs, vaccines and a host of health-related topics. An article in The New York Times two years ago titled “Putin’s Long War Against

American Science” detailed how, for more than a decade, Putin’s Russia has been trying to undermine trust in Western scientific institutions.

The story about microchips was just the latest in a long line of disinformation intended to destabilize American society. And this has been wildly effective.

By May 2020, CBS News reported that, according to a new poll, 44 percent of Republicans surveyed believed that any Covid-19 vaccines might have biometric microchips in them.

That’s quite a payoff for one month’s propaganda. And you know the rest of the story.

Or do you?

I am not saying all of the scientific disinformation on the internet has come from a Russian troll farm. But some of it did, and the purpose of this is to exploit the existing fault lines in Western society and keep us at each other’s throats, so that we are less likely to have the time and resolve to pay attention to what other countries are doing. Given the political climate, it is not hard to see how the politicization of science denial has now become a weapon and — worse yet — an example that has blazed the trail from science denial to reality denial about topics that reach far beyond science.

It is a dangerous moment in history, and the stakes are high. If we cannot figure out what to do about the problem of disinformation in this country, and around the world, a number of our treasured institutions like science and democracy may be at stake.

I submit that part of the answer in fighting back is that we have to learn how to talk to one another again. I recommend a strategy for respectful conversation with those who are distrustful of science. But this is only part of the solution. We must also try to figure out how to stop the flow of disinformation so easily on the internet, where it is picked up and amplified by those with nefarious intent. What we really have before us are three problems: the creation, the amplification and the uptake of disinformation. We need all hands on deck.

The first thing to do is recognize the real problem that we are up against. That this is not all due to misinformation, but instead disinformation. Someone is doing this on purpose. We must face this and not hide behind euphemisms or the reluctance to name names.

It is time to stop asking merely, “Why do people believe such crazy stuff?” and instead ask “Who wants them to believe it?”

We are in an information war. And the first step to winning an information war is to admit that it’s well underway.

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THE LAST WORD

A NOT-SO-DISTANT WAR CAN A YOUNG DEMOCRACY SURVIVE?

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

O

n the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Mariya Manzhos made a video call home. It was 10:30 p.m. in Boston. The news spoke of explosions rocking the capital city of Kyiv, where her parents still lived. It was 5:30 a.m. there when her mother answered. “Mom,” Manzhos said from 4,500 miles away, “the war has started.”

Manzhos has long straddled two cultures, belonging to “both and neither,” as she recently wrote in a personal essay for The Washington Post. One — Ukraine — is very much on the world’s mind, following the monthslong Russian invasion that has pummeled but not broken her homeland. She carries bits of Ukraine with her — a notebook with her favorite poems, “whispered to myself like little prayers.” When she gets homesick, she writes.

A recent U.S. citizen, the longtime journalist is sought after right now for her essays and the insights she formed in a country now under siege. A polyglot who speaks Ukrainian, English, Russian and French, she sometimes translates Ukraine’s stories, told in videos and 84

DESERET MAGAZINE

interviews. And though she’s been in the United States for two decades, the war is her story, too.

As days passed, the 37-year-old plotted with a childhood friend also living in the U.S. to get both their parents safely here. They

“I’VE BEEN WRESTLING WITH HOW TO TALK TO MY SON ABOUT HIS IDENTITY, WHO HE IS AND WHAT IT MEANS TO HIM, BEING MULTICULTURAL.”

obsessively checked schedules and pondered checkpoints, talking to people who’d made the journey and others who offered to help.

These nights, though, Manzhos sleeps more snugly because her two-bedroom-and-an-attic

apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, holds those she holds most dear: husband Zach Davis, children Ari, 9; Beata, 5; Ester, 2; and her mom and dad, Nataliya and Oleksandr Manzhos, who did safely leave Ukraine in March.

Words are her craft, her desire to help others tell their stories, too, which is why she and a friend co-founded Kleio, a storytelling service that helps individuals and families tell and capture their life stories.

Her own American story began when her father, a physicist, converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1991.

Two years later, he baptized his wife and only child into the church. At 17, Manzhos left Ukraine to attend Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, then worked for several years in the U.S. in jobs that didn’t ignite her passions. She had a hankering to go back home and seek a path, but was torn; she had a beau in America.

He went to Ukraine with her, and they eventually married there. She joined the English-language Kyiv Post — which some staff

later left to found the upstart Kyiv Independent, now the stalwart that helps those in and out of the war zone figure out what’s really going on — where she wrote stories like why Ukrainians are obsessed with sushi. But when her immigration paperwork came through, the couple moved to Boston, where Manzhos worked in local news and went to journalism school at Boston University.

Deseret talked to Manzhos about war, prayers for peace and choosing to be an American.

HOW DID YOU BECOME A JOURNALIST?

I’ve always been a writerly person. But I’ve also been curious about the world and enjoyed talking to people and trying to figure out what lies behind what we see. I was back in Ukraine after graduating from BYU and spending about four years in D.C. working at an international nonprofit, when my husband saw an ad in the Kyiv Post looking for a lifestyle reporter. I had a blog recounting my own experiences and thoughts, and I presented that as proof that I knew how to write. The job was basically to go around and observe. I was an insider who spoke the language, but I was also an outsider after spending about 10 years in the U.S. So I could see the culture with fresh eyes.

But people there weren’t particularly open or warm. Generally they are more skeptical and a little more guarded.

DO YOU STILL HAVE PEOPLE IN UKRAINE THAT YOU WORRY ABOUT?

I am an only child and my parents are here now. But all of their life is fully there. They have an apartment. And my mom has a sister who has a family, including a cousin I grew up with who’s like my sister. They left Ukraine, but I’m in touch with my cousin and I have friends from school that I’m in touch with. I also grew up a Latter-day Saint and some of my friends from church are still there. I’m close to them. Then there are Ukrainian friends who are here — people who are going through the same experience that I was with family back home.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE GETTING YOUR PARENTS OUT OF UKRAINE?

I had help from one of my oldest friends, because we were evacuating our parents at the same time. We were on the phone all the time during those first weeks, talking

ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE H I LTO N

about the best route to take, all the practical things — basically, checkpoints and how long it takes to get from one place to the next, where hotels were available and where they could sleep overnight. And where to get a train. There were so many uncertainties, nobody knew exactly what to do. There was no scripted guide, “How to Evacuate.” It was chaos. There were all these people asking the same questions over and over, everybody looking for help for their relatives. It was just constant information messaging management all day long, trying to figure out the logistics.

DID THEY GET ANY HELP OVER THERE?

People came out of the woodwork. There were a few members of my church who my dad knew from when he used to be a church leader in Gdansk 20 years ago and just some guys who ended up being in the field. And they were like, “We know what’s happening on the ground,” and then called my parents and explained where to go. They ran into some other church members at the border, and there were some people that called and coordinated. I’m very grateful for everybody who offered help — logistical, financial, and just asked how they were doing. There was a lot of that.

DO YOU TALK TO YOUR 9-YEAR-OLD ABOUT THE WAR?

We’ve been playing this song at our house that’s become a kind of national anthem of the war. He’s very musical, he sings in the choir and he’s been trying to figure out how to sing it. He doesn’t speak Ukrainian, but he found the words in English. It’s hard to grasp something massive like war and all the deaths. But he can see my mom being anxious and worrying about things like her plants and her house. Even the song — my mom tears up when she hears it. Just to see the way that people he loves are experiencing this war, even though he might not understand it, and I think he understands more than I probably give him credit for. Still, we’re so assimilated to life here. I feel like sometimes he forgets that he is half Ukrainian. I’ve been thinking more about how to talk to him about his identity, who he is and what that means to him as I’ve been wrestling with that question, to help him know that he has these roots and give him some prompts that can get him thinking about his family being multicultural.

ARE YOU DOING ANYTHING TO HELP UKRAINE?

I’ve been helping with translations of Ukrainian videos and messages, primarily for The Washington Post. Although it’s not volunteer work, I feel like I’m contributing my skills to helping the world understand what’s happening. I just started helping out with an organization, Global Disaster Relief Team, that is doing incredible work to help refugees in transit. Right now, a lot of my time also goes to helping my parents get the medical care they need. I set up appointments, accompany them on doctor visits to translate and help them get their meds.

HOW DOES YOUR MULTICULTURAL IDENTITY FIGURE INTO DAILY LIFE?

I’ve just recently become American, but I’ve never voted in the presidential election and I feel like my knowledge of American history is awful. So I’m not a great American. I’m also Ukrainian, but I don’t live there. I’m not fully either of these identities, but each of them is part of me imperfectly, like being a mom and a person of faith. And each is a relationship. If you want to maintain that identity, you have to nourish it. Neither gets enough attention, but I do feel like both make me a richer person. I’m grateful to have a voice in a country where anyone can be part of the solution to whatever problem they see as the most urgent, where people constantly wrestle with how to best create an equal society. But I connect to America most on a local scale. One of my favorite places to take my kids is called Lincoln Park.

It’s nothing more than an excellent city park, but it magically brings together people of all ages, nationalities, races, backgrounds.

Children play right next to skaters, musicians and dog walkers. It’s where the idea of America feels the closest to me.

ANY LAST WORD?

We should trust the experiences of others — trust that what the person is going through is real and is deserving of respect and care. We’re sometimes too quick to dismiss other peoples’ experiences if they don’t match our own, or to find a way to justify their struggle if it makes us feel uncomfortable. Instead, we should just listen, trust and respond with love.”

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PARTING SHOT

“We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.”

STA R TR A I LS MON UMEN T VA LLEY, A R IZON A PHOTO BY PAUL A DA MS

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JULY/AUGUST 2022

ISSUE 16

16

M AG A Z I N E

CHARITY & THE

CONSTITUTION

BY MATTHEW S. HOLLAND

IS THE SUPREME

COURT

SPECIAL ISSUE

THE FIGHT TO SAVE

DEMOCRACY JULY/AUGUST 2022 VOL 02 | NO 16

IN CRISIS?

BY THOMAS B.GRIFFITH

A PLACE OF THEIR OWN: IMMIGRANTS & THE

AMERICAN DREAM THE AGONY OF

LIZ CHENEY