Deseret Magazine July/Aug 2023

THE CONSTITUTION ISSUE

E PLURIBUS DISUNION HOW DID WE BECOME SO POLARIZED?

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CONTENTS

“Can you cover politics in a way that feels like it’s in the middle? I don’t even know how you’d measure that.”

40 JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE NEWS CAN CNN REBRAND ITSELF AS IMPARTIAL NEWS IN POLARIZED AMERICA? by ethan bauer

48 E PLURIBUS DISUNION?

56

HEALING AMERICA’S DIVISIONS

UNBRIDLED PASSIONS

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT P. GEORGE, ASMA UDDIN, COLEMAN HUGHES, SHIMA BARADARAN BAUGHMAN.

HOW PRESIDENTS EXPLOIT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPORTS AND POLITICS. by chris cillizza

by hal boyd

O N THE COVER: I L LUSTRATION BY PEP MONTSERRAT

JULY/AUGUST 2023

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CONTENTS

“A brazen, radical break with the Supreme Court’s long-standing tradition.”

IDEAS

PRAY FOR THE COURT

70

The Supreme Court’s ‘neutral’ stance on religion helps no one. by steven smith

COMMENTARY

A SHARED COMMITMENT TO FREEDOM

CONSTITUTION IN CRISIS

15

Finding the ground beneath our cultural rifts.

The danger of calls for reform from the left and right.

by stephanie barclay

by john yoo

MODERN FAMILY

THE UNOFFICIAL SOUNDTRACK OF SUMMER

THE ENDURING PROMISE

20

by paul edwards

by jennifer graham

CULTURE

SOLD-OUT SHOW ROCKETS’ RED GLARE

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

16

IN THE RIGHT

Deconstructing America’s pyrotechnic obsession.

The fight over parental rights is long and storied.

by alexandra rain

by natalia galicza

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

COURTESY OR CENSORSHIP?

18

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

The resurgent fight over politically correct speech.

Freedom and religious tolerance may be on the rise in the Middle East.

by natalia galicza

by hal boyd

66

Why the Declaration of Independence still rings true today.

Nothing says “summer” like drive-thru orders and singalongs.

BREAKDOWN

62

Can movie theaters make a blockbuster comeback?

24

by natalia galicza

THE WEST

THE COST OF A STATE LINE

28

76

30

Can the “Greater Idaho” movement put its money where its mouth is?

THE LAST WORD

TO DISAGREE IN GOOD FAITH

80

by laurenz busch

A constitutional scholar’s plea for mutual empathy. by lois m . collins

JULY/AUGUST 2023

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CONTRIBUTORS

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STEPHANIE BARCLAY

COLEMAN HUGHES

CHRIS CILLIZZA

Barclay is an associate professor of law and director of the Religious Liberty Initiative at Notre Dame University. She previously was an associate professor of law at Brigham Young University.

Prior to her academic career, she litigated First Amendment cases in Washington, D.C., and served as a law clerk to Justice Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court. Her commentary on pluralism in America is on page 48.

Hughes is a writer and host of the popular podcast “Conversations with Coleman.” His opinion columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review and The Spectator. On page 48, Hughes discusses pluralism and polarization with Robert P. George, Asma Uddin, Shima Baradaran Baughman and Deseret Magazine Executive Editor Hal Boyd.

Cillizza is a widely read political commentator who has worked for CNN, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Roll Call and The Cook Political Report. He is the author of “The Gospel According to the Fix: An Insider’s Guide to a Less than Holy World of Politics.” An excerpt from his latest book, “Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency,” appears on page 56.

JOHN YOO

GIULIO BONASERA

BROOKE SMART

Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, he served in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush. His essay on the Constitution in crisis is on page 62.

Bonasera is an animator and illustrator whose work is recognized by the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Communication Arts Magazine and 3x3 Magazine. His work has also been published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, GQ and the Economist. Bonasera’s art appears on page 48.

An illustrator of several children’s books, such as “Families Can” and “Families Belong.” Smart’s artwork has also been installed in elementary schools, building murals and businesses across the country. Her clients include Random House, Rise x Penguin Workshop, Viking, Abrams, Greystone Kids, Mindy, Peachtree Publishing, The New York Times and Bravery Magazine. Her illustration appears on page 20.

DESERET MAGAZINE

THE VIEW FROM HERE

THE PROMISE OF UNITY

R

eading our founding documents can feel, as an old law professor once put it, a bit like mixing cement with your eyelids. But when we take the time to understand how the words on parchment reflect deeper covenants and commitments to our fellow citizens, they take on greater meaning and power in shaping our relationships for the better. This issue of Deseret Magazine is dedicated to the U.S. Constitution, but even before the miracle at Philadelphia, a spirit of pluralism and cooperation was already at work in pockets of colonial America.

The Mayflower Compact between the highly religious Pilgrims and the more secular “settlers” who traveled with them helped sketch the parameters of colonial self-governance. When the Mayflower unexpectedly arrived at Cape Cod instead of Virginia, some gave “mutinous speeches” stating “none had power to command them.” So, the group formed a new “civil body politick” to enact laws and choose officers “as shall be thought most meet ... for the general good.”

Equally important was the treaty between Wampanoag leader Massasoit and the English at Plymouth Colony. Massasoit was initially apprehensive about the Pilgrims, but after meeting face-to-face he believed they could help his community, and the two promised amicable relations and mutual aid against enemies.

These relationships were not without rough patches, but the initial “covenants,” as the Pilgrims put it, provided the framework for overcoming differences and low points. When Massasoit was near death, suffering from what was likely typhus, it was the future governor of Plymouth Colony, Edward Winslow, who went to his bedside, scraped his mouth and tongue from the “corruption” and fed him broth and fruit preserves.

As Massasoit’s health revived, he asked the Pilgrims to do the same for others in his community. As Nathaniel Philbrick recounts in the book “The Mayflower,” the two-person English envoy carried out the task dutifully, though Winslow later admitted the task gave “much offensive to me, not being accustomed with such poisonous savors.”

Massasoit exulted: “Now I see the English are my friends and love me.”

The American idea, though riddled with contradictions and imperfections, is nonetheless rooted in bringing differences into a more perfect union. This issue is dedicated to the role the U.S. Constitution plays in fostering this process today.

Thinkers Shima Baradaran Baughman, Robert P. George, Coleman Hughes and Asma Uddin engage in a conversation about how to recover the nation’s motto “e pluribus unum” (page 48.)

Constitutional scholars Stephanie Barclay (page 15) and Steven Smith (page 70) discuss how courts best accommodate diverse religious expression from Apache coming-of-age rituals to school prayer. Paul Edwards of the Wheatley Institute leads a discussion with father-daughter duo William and Danielle Allen, who see the Declaration of Independence’s importance from two different political perspectives (page 66). John Yoo, who advised Vice President Mike Pence on his duties in certifying the 2020 election, discusses calls on the left and the right to revise the U.S. Constitution (page 62) while Tara Leigh Grove tells us how to disagree better (page 80).

There are also patriotic pops about presidents and sports by Chris Cillizza (page 56), the history of fireworks (page 16) and an ode to the American family road trip (page 20).

We celebrate freedom this time of year, but it’s important to remember why freedom matters and how it’s rooted in responsibility to one another.

After Roger Williams and John Clarke both experienced religious persecution at the hands of those who had fled England to avoid religious persecution themselves, they left to Rhode Island. It was there they were able to secure a charter with explicit protections allowing citizens to “freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments.” The work to more fully make good on that promise was underscored during America’s founding, but there’s no question it continues today.

—HAL BOYD JULY/AUGUST 2023

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Deseret Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 26, ISSN PP325, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/February and July/August.

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DESERET, PROPOSED AS A STATE IN 1849, SPANNED FROM THE SIERRAS IN CALIFORNIA TO THE ROCKIES IN COLORADO, AND FROM THE BORDER OF MEXICO NORTH TO OREGON, IDAHO AND WYOMING. INFORMED BY OUR HERITAGE AND VALUES, DESERET MAGAZINE COVERS THE PEOPLE AND CULTURE OF THAT TERRITORY AND ITS INTERSECTION WITH THE BROADER WORLD.

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THE BUZZ

MAY’S COVER STORY (“The Conservative Case for Climate Action”) explored the unlikely efforts of Republicans, led by Utah Congressman John Curtis, to address climate change. Marc Peterson, co-coordinator of Citizens Climate Lobby, said he hopes the story will bring political factions together.

“There’s a lack of trust between the parties that impedes their ability to come together on meaningful legislation. It is articles like this one that help encourage a rational discussion of the scientific and political issues associated with climate change.” Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a grassroot bipartisan organization, said this on Twitter: “Excellent eyes-wide-open piece on the conservative shift on climate change led by Rep. John Curtis.” Lauren Noble, founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute at Yale, wrote about the consequences of self-censorship on college campuses (“Campus Chill”), which hit a nerve for many readers. “Here’s an outstanding ‘must read’ essay on the terminal condition of free speech on U.S. campuses — driven largely by bloated DEI bureaucracies,” tweeted Hank Kopel, praising the essay as a “wake-up call.” Reader James LaForce observed, “The argument seems centered on whose rights get stepped on more. The discussion should be centered on disagreeing without being disagreeable. Maybe society has just gotten too pig-headed to listen to another person’s opinion without stomping on it. Say what you will, believe what you want, live how you wish. But understand that it is a two-way street.” And reader Nicolaas Unlandt added, “All your bickering about the First Amendment makes me … speechless?” Mya Jaradat reported on GOP-led legislative efforts like the Social Media Child Protection Act (“Why Red States Are Coming For Big Tech”) to mitigate digital media’s influence on youth. “Why do Republicans favor the government raising their children? If they don’t want their children exposed to the evils of the internet, then be a parent. It is the parents’ responsibility to control their children’s behavior.

‘But that’s too difficult’ is no reason to expect the government to be a surrogate parent,” Phillip Daughtery wrote. “The ability to obtain information and interact with others from afar is not going away. I don’t disagree with the spirit of the legislation but it won’t matter, the path has been set.” Lee Benson recalled the successful community response to combat the 1983 Salt Lake City flood (“Hell or High Water”). Utah Gov. Spencer Cox tweeted the story, saying, “I have spent a lot of time studying the ’83 floods (I was 7, but remember filling sandbags with my dad). We don’t believe this year will be anything like that, but I love living in a state where I know we will respond the same. The FEMA after-action report is the best.”

CAN CONSERVATIVES

SAVE THE CLIMATE? WHY RED STATES ARE COMING FOR

BIG TECH HOW SMARTPHONES ARE CAUSING A

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“All your bickering about the First Amendment makes me … speechless?”

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OPENING SHOT

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PATRIOTIC KENNY PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHANIE BASSOS

when amanda kline (above) met her neighbor Kenny Jary she learned why the exuberant U.S. Navy veteran was known as “Patriotic Kenny” around Willernie, Minnesota. She created a TikTok account to share videos of his contagious personality with the world, attracting 2.6 million followers.

“Everybody loves him,” Kline says.

That fame came to Kenny’s rescue after his mobility scooter broke down, leaving

him trapped with no way to get around.

His TikTok fans convinced Kline to launch a GoFundMe account to buy Kenny a new scooter. Within days, the account had raised $5,000, more than double the amount needed for the scooter. Kenny was overwhelmed and decided to pay it forward.

To date, the Patriotic Kenny Foundation has raised $145,000 to purchase mobility scooters for other veterans.

JULY/AUGUST 2023

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COMMENTARY

A SHARED COMMITMENT TO FREEDOM THERE IS HOPE THAT BENEATH OUR DEEP CULTURAL RIFTS LIES SOLID GROUND

BY ST EP HA N I E BA R C L AY

T

he woman gestures to the meadow in front of us in a place the Apache call Chi’chil Bildagoteel, or Oak Flat. She explains that for generations spanning 1,500 years, Apache women have come here to perform the sunrise ceremony — a coming of age ritual that marks a girl’s transition to womanhood. Part of the ceremony involves painting the girl with white clay taken from the earth, symbolic of molding her into the woman she will become. When her eyes are wiped clean, she is a new woman, forever imprinted with the spirit of Oak Flat. The woman accompanying us stoops to the ground and scoops the Arizona earth in her hand. “If the government allows the copper mine project to move forward,” she explains, “all of this will be destroyed, and lost to my people forever.” As she opens her palm, I watch the dust disappear in the wind, just like the Apache fear this place will vanish.

My first trip to Oak Flat to learn about the plight of the Apache people was in 2015, shortly after the federal government decided it would give this place to Resolution Copper, a foreign-owned mining company. Today, Oak Flat is truly on the brink of destruction. In a matter of months, the Forest Service could transfer control over this sacred site, allowing the mining project to move forward. Resolution Copper plans to build a crater nearly two miles wide and over 1,100 feet deep, swallowing this hallowed land, placed under federal protection by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Earlier this year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held a rare 11-judge “en banc” hearing to decide whether the mining project should move forward. I argued before the court that our religious freedom laws should allow the Native people to bring a claim that their rights are being burdened. And to deny that would lead to a troubling double standard in our law.

The ongoing fight to protect Oak Flat represents many things to many people. One thing it represents to me is our Constitution’s vision of pluralism. Over the course of the lawsuit, a broad coalition of faith groups have defended this space sacred to the Apache. They include Seventh-day Adventists, the Islam & Religious Freedom Action Team of the Religious Freedom Institute, the Christian Legal Society, the Mennonite Church USA, the Sikh Coalition, the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, Becket, the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative that I direct, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These groups understand that Oak Flat is just as important to Apache religious exercise as the Vatican is for Catholics, the Western Wall for Jews, Mecca for Muslims or Angkor Wat for Buddhists and Hindus. Though these groups do not share the beliefs of the Apache people, they have a mutual understanding of our nation’s constitutional commitment to protecting everyone’s rights.

This shared belief is at the core of a functioning pluralistic democracy: The idea that we protect the rights of others, whether or not we share those common interests, even if we disagree. This is what allows a constitutional democracy to thrive.

Our Constitution creates a framework to protect the rights and the ability of everyone to live his or her life peacefully, alongside other people who hold different beliefs. When we step back and think about it, this was truly an astonishing idea. England had just escaped a century of religious war; Europe was boiling with conflicts between ethnic, religious and cultural factions. The belief that a new republic could develop between people of different ancestries, cultures and beliefs must have been laughable to many.

But the founders were determined — so determined that this belief in the possibility of pluralism became the foundation of the Constitution.

I worry that this principle is being threatened with the rise of polarization and tribalism: the idea that those who are different should be at best ignored and at worst treated as “other.” One recent study found that in the U.S. polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in eight other countries examined. The rise of an “us versus them” mindset is evident from outright civil unrest and riots to the decline in Americans’ willingness to marry someone from the opposing political party.

The diverse groundswell of support for Oak Flat stands in welcome opposition to this trend. Despite deep rifts in our culture, there is reason to hope that beneath those rifts is solid ground: a shared commitment to freedom and flourishing for ourselves and our neighbors. All of this might begin simply, like my journey did, with a conversation between people seeking to understand what is important to others and why. When others’ beliefs and priorities look different from our own, these conversations are more important than ever.

S T E P H A N I E B A RC L AY I S A N A S S O C I AT E P RO F E S S O R O F L AW A N D D I R E C T O R O F T H E R E L I G I O U S L I B E R T Y I N I T I AT I V E AT N O T R E D A M E U N I V E R S I T Y.

JULY/AUGUST 2023

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THE BREAKDOWN

ROCKETS’ RED GLARE DECONSTRUCTING AMERICA’S PYROTECHNIC OBSESSION

BY A L EXA N D R A R A I N

A MATCH FLARES, a fuse burns and we watch,

waiting for fireworks to dazzle and jolt our senses, sparking an adrenaline rush. Now and then, that momentary fear gets real, and the devices we light to express our patriotism get out of hand, starting fires or causing injuries. More often, the sights and sounds traumatize our pets, our children and even bald eagles. None of that seems to bother Americans, who spend more money on pyrotechnics every year.

Why are we still so fascinated? And how did minor explosives become synonymous with Independence Day? Here’s the breakdown.

A.D. 142

Wei Boyang, China’s “father of alchemy,” wrote the first known reference to what was probably gunpowder, a blend of three substances that would violently “fly and dance.” Hoping to ward off evil spirits or find the secret to eternal life, the alchemists instead invented the first explosive.

Gunpowder became so common that Chinese revelers started pouring it into their traditional firecrackers — bamboo stems tossed into fires to crackle and explode. By the 12th century, sophisticated fireworks and even rockets were entertaining and startling emperors of the Song dynasty.

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QUEEN ELIZABETH I

JULY 4, 1777

The last Tudor monarch appointed a “Fire Master of England” to conduct royal pyrotechnic shows in the late 16th century – about 400 years after gunpowder reached Europe, via trade along the Silk Road or the Mongol invasion under Batu Khan, one of Genghis Khan’s many grandsons. The Mongols reportedly used “fire catapults” in battle, and Europe quickly started developing guns. But fireworks became popular as part of religious celebrations.

Elizabeth made them a patriotic symbol.

A year after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, that city celebrated with the ringing of bells, a performance by a Hessian band and cannonades from ships on the Delaware River, adorned with red, white and blue streamers. That night, the first Fourth of July fireworks show illuminated the city commons, culminating with a volley of 13 rockets — one for each colony freed from British rule.

COPPER BURNS BLUE

While gunpowder provides the “boom,” pyrotechnicians use metal salts to imbue fireworks with the desired colors and lighting effects. The Chinese first used the technique to use colored smoke and fire as military signals. Today, aluminum makes hand-held sparklers burn silver or white.

Barium burns green; strontium burns red; copper burns blue; and zirconium burns ultra-bright, useful for “waterfalls.”

11,500 ER VISITS

‘COMBAT VETERAN LIVES HERE’

$2.3 BILLION

That’s what Americans spent on consumer fireworks in 2022, matching the Biden administration’s budget for modernizing the nation’s power grid.

We burned through 461.7 million pounds of fireworks that year alone — more than the launch weight of 100 space shuttles — from whistling fountains to orchestrated spectacles in the sky. The United States imported about 10 times more than

any other country in 2021. Most of them probably came from China, the world’s largest fireworks exporter by a factor of 11.

ILLU STR ATION BY LE XI N I LS O N

This phrase on a yard sign is a plea for neighbors to temper their patriotic enthusiasm.

The same explosive effects that thrill fireworks lovers can make Independence Day a torturous experience for those who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after fighting America’s wars. “It’s not that I don’t want people to have fun,” Iraq war veteran and former Marine Kevin Rhoades told NBC News. “But when you get woken up at two, three o’clock in the morning, it brings back those memories.”

That’s one way to measure the casualties of fireworks in 2021, as reported by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Among them, 1,500 were caused by firecrackers and 1,100 by sparklers. Burns accounted for 32 percent of injuries.

Hands and fingers were most likely to be hurt, followed by heads, faces and ears. Nine people died in fireworks accidents not related to their jobs.

THE AMYGDALA

Neuroscientists say we like fireworks because they frighten us, according to Popular Science.

Flashes of light alert the amygdala, a collection of nerves in the brain that is activated by fear. Booms and cracks confirm our perception of a looming threat, like thunder or an explosion. The unpredictable rhythms of fireworks keep us on our toes, but we also know the threat is contained, so we can skip to the good part, when our brain releases dopamine — a hormone that stimulates pleasure — to soothe our fear.

“In an age when highly-polished and sophisticated computer-generated images are the norm, a live firework display feels like ‘border country.’

It’s a rare mix of controlled, careful choreography with that exciting sense that anything might happen.”

— ROY LOWRY, CHEMIST AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH

19,500 FIRES

Fireworks have played a role in notorious explosions from San Francisco to Beirut, but they also contribute to thousands of fires across the U.S. each year. According to the National Fire Protection Association, this results in $105 million in annual property damage, affecting homes, businesses and wildlands. In 2022, for example, nearly 100 families evacuated their homes in response to the Deuel Creek Fire in Centerville, Utah, just north of Salt Lake City.

JULY/AUGUST 2023

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POINT / COUNTERPOINT

COURTESY OR CENSORSHIP? THE RESURGENT FIGHT OVER POLITICALLY CORRECT SPEECH

BY N ATA L I A G A L I C Z A

N O I S S U E H A S defined the culture wars like political correctness, ever since

the idea took hold in the 1990s. Merriam-Webster calls it “a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” Proponents see this as a comprehensive modern approach to the age-old mandate to be polite and respectful to people of different groups and backgrounds. But opponents, leery of the motives behind it, bristle at the idea that they can’t say whatever they want in the manner they’re accustomed to. What does it all come down to?

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LANGUAGE EVOLVES WITH SOCIETY

SPEECH RESTRICTIONS HURT EVERYONE

Being more conscientious about the words we choose and expanding our vocabulary can make language more flexible and accurate. This allows our speech to reflect a growing understanding of social realities as we strive to see our world from different points of view — particularly with regard to gender, race and other facets of identity. From this perspective, political correctness helps us to speak with respect for others whose experiences we might not share or understand.

We should expect language to keep changing along these lines, as the public discourse casts light on historical inaccuracies and inequities that persist in our words.

For example, recent research into American slavery has spurred the use of “enslaved person” in lieu of “slave,” in an effort to avoid dehumanizing the subject while clarifying they were forced into that situation. This term has been adopted by the Library of Congress, National Archives, national parks and other institutions.

“When we use a category in English or any language, it defines someone as that’s who they are,” says Gregory Ward, professor of linguistics, gender and sexuality studies, and philosophy at Northwestern University. “To say that slaves were slaves eliminates their identity of being anything else.”

Political correctness tends to work in this fashion.

People consider a label unrepresentative of an identity, lobby for change and start using a new alternative.

Eventually, if the new phrase takes hold, it gets adopted by institutions with the power to shape our everyday language more broadly — as The Associated Press did in 2020 by deciding to capitalize “Black” to match other racial and ethnic descriptors like “Latino.”

Proponents argue that it comes back to choice. Yes, an individual should have agency in how they speak, but they argue that people should also have agency in how they are spoken about, from demographic labels to personal pronouns. “The people who say they’re silly aren’t the people who belong to the groups that are impacted by those terms,” Ward says. “They tend to be the majority, who have always had the benefit of being the arbiters of language.”

Some react derisively to the stilted constructions and sometimes precious distinctions that have become hallmarks of political correctness — like “unhoused” over “homeless” or “mummified persons” replacing “mummies.” But opponents also raise serious concerns, arguing that the movement stifles speech across the board and makes it difficult for people to engage in healthy discourse about social and political issues. Some warn of a blowback effect, with otherwise courteous people acting out against the imposition of new rules. They don’t support harmful speech, but rather oppose limits on dialogue and personal choice.

These fears are exacerbated when restrictions are imposed by powerful institutions. In 2022, Stanford University’s failed harmful language initiative flagged more than 100 words as potentially offensive — including terms like “master” and “slave” for connected hard drives and everyday words like “American.” The initiative was canceled after national media outlets called it “Orwellian,” and a student newspaper complained that the school “continually pressures students to submit to the woke newspeak regime.” The case highlights free speech issues, says Zach Greenberg, senior program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “For an authoritative university body to come down and say these are the end-all be-all bad words, it shuts out debate or discussion.”

In general, labeling certain speech as correct or incorrect deters people from exchanging ideas. A 2017 survey titled “The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America” by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that 71 percent of respondents believe political correctness has silenced discussions that are important to society. It also found that while a majority of Americans view hate speech as morally unacceptable, they oppose laws to regulate hate speech.

Perhaps the most notable backlash has occurred in electoral politics. Former President Donald Trump became a hero to many after not only refusing to sanitize his speech, but defying the concept of civility as an impediment to progress. Once unorthodox, his behavior has become a model for others — including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s main rival in the GOP, who has waged a war on “woke” speech in Florida.

ILLU STR ATION BY M I G U E L DAV I LLA

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MODERN FAMILY

THE UNOFFICIAL SOUNDTRACK OF SUMMER DAD JOKES, DRIVE-THRU ORDERS AND SINGALONGS — HOW BITTERSWEET ARE THE SOUNDS OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY ROAD TRIP

BY JE N N I F E R G R A H A M

A

s my children get to the ages where it feels vaguely wrong to call them “children,” I have reached the Clark Griswold-in-the-attic stage of parenting. If you’ve ever watched “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” you know what I mean.

There’s this scene where Griswold, the goofy dad played by Chevy Chase, gets locked in the attic and proceeds to pass the time by tearfully watching old family movies with a turban on his head.

That’s me — minus the turban — rewinding the tape of family summer road trips in my memory.

There were multiple trips up and down I-95 to visit grandparents in South Carolina when we lived in Richmond, Virginia; Potomac, Maryland; and ultimately Boston.

The sweet sound of toddlers gently snoring in their car seats and the maddening earworm of Pokémon battle music. The smell of shared french fries and a diaper that needs changing. The bizarre, random sights: a horse-drawn buggy clopping down a road in Pennsylvania Amish country. A Burger King on fire by an exit in suburban Virginia. Nights spent piled together in hotel rooms hurriedly booked when Mom 20

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or Dad decided they could not drive a mile more. Then, the joy of waking up to a free(!) continental breakfast with a waffle maker and all.

Never mind that, at the time, these trips didn’t seem all that great. No one puts four or five small children in an unreliable car and hits a crowded interstate for nine hours

AT THE TIME, THESE TRIPS DIDN’T SEEM ALL THAT GREAT. BUT IN RETROSPECT, THOSE LONG HOURS IN THE CAR CREATED WHAT ARE NOW SOME OF THE SWEETEST TIMES WE HAD AS A FAMILY.

for the purpose of having fun. The fun is supposed to happen when we get to wherever we’re going. But it’s funny how, in retrospect, those long hours in the car created what now seem to be some of the sweetest times we experienced as a family.

They almost make me want to pack the

car, litter the carpet with cookie crumbs and empty Capri Sun pouches, and go pick up my kids — who are mostly adults now and would be very confused.

Road trips, of course, are embedded in America’s DNA. Our passion for them — a combination of our love of cars, wide-open spaces and McDonald’s drive-thrus — can be traced to 1906. That’s when a group of businessmen gathered in Salt Lake City to brainstorm ways to promote tourism in the West and came up with the slogan “See America First.” It turned out to be a slogan with legs — er, wheels. And it’s one that people even recognize today.

It was born of a concern that Americans were spending too much of their disposable time and money in Europe. “The organization desires that this Pactolian stream should be as much as possible diverted, like other streams, to irrigate the arid places of our own continent,” The New York Times reported on April 1, 1906. The writer went on to suggest that the “See America First” proponents drop the “first.”

Of course, at that point in time, horses still shared the roads with cars. It wasn’t until the 1920s that car ownership became common. Even then, many families traveled

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by train. The wide, open road and its promise didn’t come fully into being until the advent of the Eisenhower Interstate System in the 1950s. Interestingly, the idea for it came via a grueling road trip that then-Lt. Col. Eisenhower took in the summer of 1919.

Believing a cross-country road trip would be a “genuine adventure,” Eisenhower set out with his military buddies to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Adventure, it was. Fun, it was not. Seems vaguely familiar, eh?

This inaugural highway road trip took the caravan 62 days to traverse 11 states, its misfortunes including mechanical failures, water shortages, mud and bad luck. At one point, the caravan had to cross 200 yards of quicksand, which it managed to do, but it took seven hours. The road conditions were uniformly terrible, from East to West.

By comparison, I-66 in a minivan with five children on the Fourth of July weekend is practically a breeze. But don’t tell that to a weary mom or dad who is mediating a fight over the auxiliary cable or attempting to disperse gummy bears in order to break up a squabble over whose leg or arm has strayed into a sibling’s space.

According to a recent report by The Vacationer, some 100 million Americans plan to take a road trip of more than 250 miles this summer. For families, driving still just makes sense. Especially since the chances of quicksand being an issue are much lower these days, despite what your children’s preoccupation with the phenomenon — and Eisenhower’s mishap — might suggest.

Driving is relatively cheap. There’s no being yelled at or patted down by the TSA when someone inadvertently goes through security with a plastic Mickey Mouse in their jeans pocket (that would be me). You can take all the liquids and lithium batteries you want. The minivan won’t leave you behind if you’re running 10 minutes late (and even when it threatens to, those threats are always empty). When, mere minutes after departure, the first of 12 bathroom emergencies occurs, there will be plenty of well-equipped facilities to choose from and 22

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the lavatory won’t look like it was designed for garden gnomes.

Inside your car, you can play games with your family, loudly. You can tell dad jokes.

You can point out unfamiliar license plates and funny bumper stickers. You may sometimes have to get off at an exit unexpectedly and go three miles in the wrong direction because someone was tossing a football their brother made in sewing class in the backseat and somehow it went out the window, and lo, the many, hot, angry tears. You will do all these things, as a family, not as individuals trapped within the silent silos

DRIVING IS A CHANCE TO BE TOGETHER WITH NOTHING ELSE TO DO. AND THAT’S WHEN MEMORIES — THE KIND YOU WANT TO REPLAY — ARE MADE.

of headphones, or stuffed into narrow airport seats surrounded by grim strangers who don’t love your messy, noisy, drooling children quite like you do. (And if you think otherwise, just do a quick Google search for “crying baby on plane.”)

Most importantly, driving is a chance to be together with nothing else to do. And that’s when memories — the kind you want to replay — are made. A family road trip done right will have a soundtrack, one that, when you hear a song from it decades later, will make you go full Griswold-in-the-turban.

One year, driving 800 miles with a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old, our family soundtrack was actually a soundtrack. Notably, the soundtrack from “The Lion King” movie. “Hakuna Matata” is a reliable time machine now — when I hear it, I’m on I-95 in a Jeep Cherokee long demolished, the car littered with sippy cups and Goldfish, board books and stuffed animals. I can look behind me and see my son and daughter, blissing out in their car seats with Simba and Pumbaa. (The diaper-changing in rest stops is mercifully harder to drum up.)

Later, when there were more and older kids, we cut our own family CDs for road trips. When my youngest daughter was in her “Rocky” stage (just as I’d had a “Rocky” stage 30 years prior), we decided that every time we’d cross a state line, we’d play the “Rocky” theme. I still can’t pass a state boundary without the opening notes of “Gonna Fly Now” trumpeting in my head.

There were bad times, too. Of course.

But in retrospect, there were important lessons passed on. When they, too, become parents and hit the wide open road with an SUV full of booster seats, they will know to wait a few hours — or preferably a day — before hitting the road on the day before or after Thanksgiving.

Nowadays, I dwell in a liminal space of parenting — waiting for college-tuition payments to end and grandchildren to start.

It’s a good place. And I still love traveling with my kids — some of whom are gainfully employed and can buy their own plane tickets. As such, we’ve been able to take some great trips together — most recently, Ecuador and Italy. There is no prouder mother than one whose daughter can ask, “Where are the bathrooms?” for her in another language.

Still, as much as I love flying with my adult and semi-adult children, I’m always looking for a reason to get everyone on the road together. The car is our happy place; contained mayhem on wheels that took us over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house, to the beach, to the mountains, to family reunions, to funerals, to the 9/11 memorial in New York City, to the monuments in Washington, D.C. Someday, if I’m really blessed, maybe my home will be the destination of my children’s own family road trips. And when they show up tired, late, full of gas station snacks and singing songs that have been stuck in their heads for too long, I’ll remind them to savor it all. The memories we make today are the warped, french fry-greased frames of nostalgia that we want to rewind back to tomorrow.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

IN THE RIGHT WHO LOSES IN THE FIGHT OVER PARENTAL RIGHTS IN SCHOOLS?

BY N ATA L I A G A L I C Z A

T

he Rayburn Reception Room of the United States Capitol is an addition to the historic building. Its walnut woodwork and marble mantles are new, but made in the image of designs now two centuries old. It’s a model of “what’s been” becoming “what is.” As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy delivered the Parents Bill of Rights from the room in March, it felt like the appropriate setting. “One thing we know in this country is education is the great equalizer,” McCarthy said. “And we want the parents to be empowered, and that’s what we’re doing today. That you have a say in your kids’ education. Not government, and not telling you what to do.”

If the Parents Bill of Rights passes the Senate, the law would fundamentally reorder the administration of public schools. It would give parents an unprecedented say over their children’s education from classroom curricula to library books; officially staking a claim in a generational issue that has included movements to ban the teaching of evolution in the 1920s and to limit sexual education in the 1990s.

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“Whenever cultural norms or cultural values are at odds when it comes to parents, there’s more of an incentive to be involved in trying to shape the debates of curriculum or what’s being taught in schools,” says Melissa Deckman, chief executive officer of the Public Religion Research Institute, a

THE PARENTS BILL OF RIGHTS COULD CREATE A NEW LANDSCAPE FOR EDUCATION IN AMERICA. WHETHER THAT’S FOR BETTER OR WORSE DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK.

nonprofit that researches the intersection of religion, culture and public policy. But the protected rights parents would have to shape curriculum under the Parents Bill of Rights could create a new landscape for education in America. Whether that’s for better or worse depends on who you ask.

“Too often today, I think the K-12 system

is wedging itself between the parent and the child and training our children in a worldview that’s antithetical to most parents’ values,” says Will Johnson, a parent of three children — 6, 8 and 10 years old — who attend public schools in Minnesota.

The family moved from Colorado last year, though Johnson believes a new address is not enough to prevent what he sees as a faltering of the school system. “You have underperforming academics, you have politically charged activism, and parents too often being pushed away or kept out of the loop. And what you get is parents from across the state, banding together, becoming more involved in their schools, in their school boards, in their districts, and in states because they know that we can and must do better for our kids.”

Some parents, like Johnson, are rallying behind parental rights in an attempt to rid public schools of top-down political ideology. Others view the movement itself as politically motivated — stifling efforts to evolve classroom discussions meant to reflect a changing world at large. “From

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

the top down you have political elites … sounding the drumbeat that things in public schools are not good,” says Deckman.

“They’re talking about issues that are going to indoctrinate our children when it comes to issues about gender, or critical race theory, or sex education. I think what’s really brought this to a head right now is that we have a lot of political elites discussing these sorts of things.”

Yet even without the current political climate, it’s unlikely these concerns will cease anytime soon. Schools, after all, are entirely capable of indoctrination, largely because education and indoctrination are synonymous. The original use of the word “indoctrinate,” dating all the way back to 1620, simply means “to teach.” This leaves both sides stuck playing a decades-old game of tug-of-war with what gets indoctrinated into the public school system. But what happens when the rope breaks? “When we focus on politically-charged activism at the expense of academics,” Johnson says, “no one wins.”

TINA DESCOVICH RAN for a seat on the Brevard County, Florida, school board in 2016 on the foundation of parents rights. She didn’t know it at the time, but four years later the Covid-19 pandemic would thrust the country into quarantine and offer parents an unobstructed view of their children’s remote schooling. What they saw would bring more dissatisfied mothers and fathers to school board meetings than ever before.

That culminated in Descovich co-founding Moms for Liberty, a prominent parental rights group with enough sway to advise Gov. Ron DeSantis on which educators to boot in Florida and flip school boards across the country to host conservative majorities.

Descovich’s school board campaign was inspired by standardized testing requirements. She advocated against federal oversight that created “a complete breakdown of communication between the state, lawmakers, the local school board and the parents.” And although testing does not share many similarities with the current

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movement’s key concerns like critical race theory or gender ideology, it’s founded on familiar ground: That children can be indoctrinated by what schools decide to — or decide not to — teach. “Ultimately, the majority of American children are in public schools,” she says. “And if we don’t let our voices be heard, if we aren’t part of the civic process of local education in our communities, education will continue to go downhill.”

But what is downhill to one parent may be on track to another. “I worry every day about what kids are thinking about this. … It’s really troubling to me because it’s not just the educators who are witnessing this, it’s people’s kids,” says Carolyn

NEITHER IDEOLOGICAL “SIDE” LOSES IN THE FIGHT OVER PUBLIC SCHOOL CURRICULUM WHEN PARENTS ARE PRESENTED WITH OPTIONS.

Foote, a retired Texas high school English teacher of 10 years and school librarian of 29 years. “As we try to build ever a more inclusive America, people are struggling with (asking themselves), ‘What does that look like?’ and, ‘What do I feel comfortable with?’”

It could be standardized testing or all-gender bathroom policies. Or it could include — like in Johnson’s case, who cited an example of a teacher wearing a shirt that read “Stop pretending your racism is patriotism” — political messaging that appears in schools. The path forward is up for interpretation, it seems. But the most powerful force in shifting it is also the least partisan: fear of indoctrinating children.

That fear is what led parents to oust teachers suspected of preaching communism in the Cold War era of the early 1950s and created Senate subcommittees

dedicated to eradicating “subversive influences into the nation’s education system.”

It even paved the way for developments like the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Engel v. Vitale to rule mandatory prayer in public schools unconstitutional.

Both liberals and conservatives fear the revocation of freedom, which is what gives the parental rights movement uncharacteristically broad appeal. The crux lies in how freedom is interpreted: as a freedom to be exposed to all perspectives or as a freedom to protect children from certain perspectives.

“There are parents who are motivated by different things,” says David Bernstein, father of two high school seniors in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools and founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, a nonprofit advocating against causes considered harmful to Jewish communities. “Some want their kids to learn conservative values. And others don’t want their kids to be indoctrinated — like me.”

He details how one of his sons now feels uncomfortable asking questions about racism in the classroom and challenging the notion that all members of marginalized groups feel inherently oppressed, leaving no room for discussion. “I think it’s inimical to critical thinking when you tell somebody exactly what they must think about who has power, who has privilege, who are victims and who are oppressed. You are teaching them an ideology,” Bernstein says. “It’s a narrative that holds America ultimately in contempt.”

Through the late 19th century and through the mid-20th century, Native American boarding schools were considered acceptable education. These institutions forbid Indigenous languages, names and religions.

Native students had their hair forcibly cut and were abused for practicing their own culture, stripping them of their identity and families — practices that are now illegal and considered morally abhorrent. Up until 1983, during the AIDS epidemic, it was wrongly believed that the virus was spread by nonsexual physical touch. Children were

taught to stay far away from those infected, further ostracizing gay men who were once wrongly believed to be the only recipients.

Today, the fact that American schools were faulty in these instances is held as an uncontested fact. It serves as a reminder that what is held as morally acceptable and truthful — to say, what admissible indoctrination looks like — is subject to change, time and time again.

Irish philosopher Kieran Egan dissected this idea in his 2008 book “The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up.” In it, he writes: “Now we tend to be very acute at recognizing the ways in which ‘others’ indoctrinate their children, but we are largely oblivious to the forms of indoctrination we deploy ourselves; ‘they’ indoctrinate, ‘we’ educate.” The buzzwords that define this debate are nothing more than one-way mirrors. When searching for the source of indoctrination, we see others’ views as the problem. In Egan’s words, “We label as indoctrination those that are most in conflict with our own.”

Research shows that exposure to diverse perspectives could be vital in preparing students for American adulthood. A 2021 National Academy of Education report on Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse cited that the ability to respect multiple points of view and foster dialogue across differences is “not only essential for students to prepare for citizenship, adulthood, and active membership in communities, but is also essential for the functioning of democracy itself.”

S O H OW D O we move forward to protect children while also allowing various perspectives to enrich American education and democracy? Bethany Bustamante Van Vleet, director of the online family and human development graduate program at Arizona State University, has found that neither ideological “side” loses in the fight over public school curriculum when parents are presented with options. She herself has had to call on different options as a mother of six by moving her kids from

public to charter schools and back when she found it necessary.

Most states offer the option to opt out of sexual education, and parents can opt their children out of school surveys from anywhere in the country. Students have options for prayer in public schools — so long as the practice is not mandated by higher-ups.

The very fact that books can be petitioned to get taken off shelves and that school boards or state legislatures can continually impact curricula points to how malleable education is. When choices to opt in or out are threatened by legal quarreling, the real loser becomes the public school system.

Schools across the country are already facing teacher shortages exacerbated by the pandemic. A National Education Association survey found last year that 55 percent of educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than they’d planned. A Government Accountability Office report also found last year that hundreds of thousands of teachers have already quit between 2019 and 2021. Those dips in numbers are worsened by the tensions around parental rights, and are projected to continue worsening as these efforts grow more widespread. “All the issues with book challenges and everything else going on, that’s all time not spent with kids teaching them stuff that prepares them to be good consumers of information in the future,” says Foote. “So it’s just been a very difficult environment.”

American education is upheld by its teachers and their relationships with their students. It’s a system that amounts to nothing without the people, places and perspectives that make learning possible. But it is not a rigid institution. As the world introduces new obstacles to schooling — a pandemic, a mass exodus of teachers, a battle against the idea of indoctrination — it may also introduce new opportunities. Among them: a bolstered freedom of choice within the school system. Educators like Bustamante Van Vleet and Foote continue to hope that the right to choose will lead us to focus more on what children are learning, rather than simply what they are taught.

THE CRUX LIES IN HOW FREEDOM IS INTERPRETED: AS A FREEDOM TO BE EXPOSED TO ALL PERSPECTIVES OR AS A FREEDOM TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM CERTAIN PERSPECTIVES.

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

THE WINDS OF CHANGE THE MIDDLE EAST IS IN THE MIDST OF A GENERATIONAL SEA CHANGE. COULD THAT MEAN MORE FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE?

BY H A L B OY D

I

t’s midnight at the Mina A’Salam, a marble-lined resort on the Persian Gulf where palm trees and Rolls-Royces surround the hotel valet in about equal measure. Such glitzy spectacles are commonplace in Dubai, a city whose reputation for ambition is hard to overstate.

Home to the largest constellation of artificial islands in the world, Dubai is also the iconic movie set where Tom Cruise once dangled from the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, in a mission about as impossible as the city’s own rise from the desert sands.

Lacking the large oil reserves of its neighbors in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai made a big bet on tourism and hospitality, producing a futuristic skyline that blends Las Vegas attractions with New York City high-rises all without the crime and vice — but also without the freedoms of Western democracy.

And yet, I’ve come to the Mina A’Salam resort not for a stay, but to better understand how the Middle East is increasingly opening up to the rest of the world — changing in ways that may not be harbingers of eventual democracy but represent a generational move toward greater pluralism and religious tolerance.

I’m here to meet with the former U.S. Ambassador to UAE, John Rakolta Jr., before he leaves on an early flight back to the United States. A broad-shouldered 28

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septuagenarian with a distinctly Midwestern swagger, Rakolta sports a well-pressed blazer and an impeccably groomed mustache, especially given the hour.

Rakolta is a Harvard Business School graduate who transformed a family-held, Detroit-based construction firm into one of the largest contractors in the United States.

A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a Republican, Rakolta has long been involved in various civic causes as well as national Republican fundraising, helping support former President

THE MIDDLE EAST IS INCREASINGLY OPENING UP TO THE REST OF THE WORLD — CHANGING IN WAYS THAT MAY NOT BE HARBINGERS OF DEMOCRACY BUT REPRESENT A GENERATIONAL MOVE TOWARD GREATER PLURALISM AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE.

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and serving on the national finance committee for Mitt Romney’s two presidential runs.

Rakolta’s wife, Terry, is also a sibling of Romney’s former sister-in-law, Michigan politician Ronna Romney. Notably, Ronna Romney’s

daughter, Ronna Romney McDaniel, is currently serving her third term as chairwoman of the national Republican Party.

In the resort’s bustling lobby, Rakolta discusses his time as ambassador from 2019 to 2021 and says he’s returned at the country’s request to speak at the World Government Summit, a Davos-style convening where local ministers in kandoras discuss big ideas with global thinkers and jetsetters.

The summit, now in its 10th year, is directed by one of UAE’s rising young stars, the country’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama, who has managed to draw marquee names like Barack Obama and Elon Musk to the gathering.

But this year, a single name on the program jumps out: Uri Levine, the Israeli co-founder of Waze, a GPS navigation app used extensively throughout the Middle East.

Prior to the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between UAE and Israel, and which were negotiated during Rakolta’s tenure, an Israeli like Levine wouldn’t have received a visa to the UAE, let alone a speaking invitation. But there he was, not only on the program, but standing on an intimate stage in a T-shirt and jeans cracking jokes, fielding questions on startups and doling out his email address.

Nearly three years since the Abraham Accords, this isn’t all the pact is

TOM DULAT/GETTY

B U RJ K H AL I FA TOW E R S OV E R D U B AI .

accomplishing, Rakolta explains. In addition to UAE and Bahrain, today Morocco and Sudan also have opened formal diplomatic relations with Israel. And there have been other pockets of regional thawing even as neighboring Saudi Arabia and Qatar don’t recognize Israel and argue a Palestinian state should be prioritized.

And yet, during the World Cup, Qatar extended visas to Israeli citizens allowing tourism to the country, and in 2022 Saudi Arabia permitted commercial airlines to use airspace for travel between Israel and UAE. There have also been discussions about Saudi Arabia eventually permitting direct flights from Israel to the kingdom for Muslim residents traveling to Mecca on their hajj pilgrimage.

Back in the UAE there are still other emerging signs of greater religious and cultural pluralism. In the capital city of Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House — an interfaith space that combines a mosque, synagogue and church for Christian denominations in a single campus — opened in 2023, as did a center in Washington, D.C., for the Alliance of Virtue, an initiative that brings together prominent Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in support of certain shared values.

“In terms of security, financially and culturally the Abraham Accords have been a success,” says Clifford Smith, the Washington Project director of the Middle East Forum, a right-leaning think tank. “And I don’t think they’re going to be abrogated.”

“They have a massive staying power because they have benefited all three major signatories so well,” Ibish Hussein, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, explains. “The UAE, in particular, has benefited tremendously from new ties with Israel, and vice versa.

They are exploring trade, R&D, high-tech ventures and even space exploration. It’s a very serious budding partnership.”

But, he observes, the accords don’t mean a reversal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will happen anytime soon. In fact, the accords could be read as a sign of the conflict’s intractability with nations looking to make diplomatic decisions based on other factors, knowing the conflict is unlikely to be resolved. And if the accords have faced criticism it’s been for their lack of impact on many of the conflicts that continue to define the Middle East.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, then a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, told The Atlantic

after the 2020 pact, “The reality of Palestinian politics is that the overall stalemate, the threat of annexation, and now the Emiratis and Bahrainis making their separate arrangements will cause the Palestinians to dig in. This all just reinforces an instinct toward resistance.”

A recent Arab News-YouGov poll found 64 percent of Palestinians oppose the Abraham Accords with only 10 percent in support. But as experts have repeated to me, attempts to change dynamics in the region are at least better than the status quo alternative.

As time winds down in our interview, Rakolta is approached by two representatives from the UAE, eager to catch him before he departs for the airport. They’ve come with a special delivery — a golden UAE visa providing long-term access to both work and reside in the country.

The former ambassador is flattered by the gesture. He is bullish about UAE’s welcoming posture to different cultures and faiths, noting the publicly announced plans to allow the construction of a Latter-day Saint temple in Dubai, a first in the region.

It’s one more sign among many of growing pluralism there, he says. It’s also maybe a reason he holds onto that golden visa.

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THE COST OF A STATE LINE EASTERN OREGON WANTS TO JOIN THE STATE OF IDAHO. BUT CAN OREGON AFFORD TO LEAVE OREGON?

BY L AU R E N Z B U S C H

O

n a clear day, Kevin McCadden can see the Seven Devils from his house on the slope at the edge of town.

Rising to well over 9,000 feet, their snowcapped peaks stand guard over the rolling grasslands of Wallowa County — a visceral reminder of a century-old dividing line between here, Oregon, and there, Idaho.

Beyond the peaks lie the politics of Idaho — fewer regulations, lower taxes and conservative ideologies. But here, tucked away in the northeast corner of Oregon, near the town of Enterprise and far from the metropolitan grip of Portland, decades of rural resentment have made it easier to imagine that line shifting. Maybe, one day, McCadden might wake up in Idaho.

“There’s a lot of people that are really fed up, feeling like their voice isn’t heard,” he says, hoping someday, “we would have a government that’s representative of us.”

The sentiment is one that many share — that their rural communities have been forgotten, drowned out by the left-leaning urban hubs that drive the economic and legislative engines of a state with 70 percent of its population in the Willamette Valley. And 30

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over the past few years, talk of secession has gained steam.

McCadden, 61, a local science teacher, may know better, but Idaho is seemingly in reach. It’s only 35 miles as the crow flies from his living room window.

Between those peaks and that last bit of “OREGON HAS PRIDED ITSELF OVER THE YEARS FOR BEING THE FIRST TO DO CERTAIN THINGS. WHY CAN’T OREGON BE THE FIRST TO SOLVE THIS RURALURBAN SITUATION

BY ADJUSTING THE BORDER?”

Oregon is a literal chasm. Where the Snake River grinds away at the Earth lies Hells Canyon, the deepest in the country, presenting a seemingly insurmountable crossing.

An undeniable divide. A not-so-arbitrary place to draw a line.

Despite the analogous nature of this, some still think it’s possible to go the distance — to

redraw the bounds of statehood — and embed eastern Oregon into a larger Idaho.

A “Greater Idaho.”

TWELVE COUNTIES IN Eastern Oregon have

voted to begin commissioner-level talks to entertain the idea of creating “Greater Idaho.” Wallowa County became the 12th in May. It’s a symbolic vote — it by no means commits the counties or the state of Idaho.

But it does highlight the will, or the discontent, of the people.

“We’re asking as free citizens, doing it the right way, doing it by the vote,” says Mike McCarter, the president of two Oregon secession organizations: Move Oregon’s Border and Citizens for Greater Idaho. “We’re doing everything legal and we’re just saying, we want to live where we live but we want to change who governs us.”

It’s one thing to get counties to vote on an idea, but it’s another trying to convince states to dive headfirst into a complicated, unprecedented and undoubtedly expensive rabbit hole. Early this year, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a memorial of their willingness to begin discussions with

K E V IN M CC A D D E N , SC IE N C E T E AC H E R , O R E G O N R E S I D E NT AND P R O P O NE NT O F TH E G R E ATE R I DAH O M OV E M E NT.

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY G LE N N OA KLE Y

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Oregon, but the measure stalled in the Senate. A similar one exists in Oregon’s legislature but has yet to receive much interest.

It’s not just a question of whether Idaho can afford to accept these counties. It’s also a matter of asking: Are the people of eastern Oregon — and, to some degree, the taxpayers of Idaho — willing to accept less funding, fewer benefits and, for some, less equitable taxes in the name of like-minded neighbors?

“Moving a state border is not just drawing a line on a map,” says Norman Williams, the Ken and Claudia Peterson professor of law and director of the Center for Constitutional Government at Willamette University. “There are assets and liabilities that have to be transferred … and when you’re talking about two-thirds of the landmass of one of the largest states, geographically speaking,

in the nation … that’s going to be measured in the billions of dollars.”

One thing advocates of succession have failed to consider is that of Native American sovereignty and the effect a border move would have on tribes in the area. It’s unclear how four Native American reservations — the Burns Paiute, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Klamath Tribes, and the Paiute and Shoshone Tribes of Fort McDermitt — would be impacted if the land around their sovereign nations becomes Idaho. Although they receive funding from the federal government and are not subject to all state laws, there are symbolic implications for those whose land has been systematically stolen from them and questions of how such a move might benefit or harm them financially if the tribes have to

renegotiate current agreements such as gaming practices or water rights.

Another, the Warm Springs Reservation, which is north of Bend, is on the proposed westernmost border. Those within the movement believe the tribe would have no interest in joining, but have not included them in conversations. “We perceive, based on the way they voted, that they wouldn’t necessarily want to be part of the state of Idaho,” says Matt McCaw, a spokesperson for the Greater Idaho movement. “But what we’ve come to realize is we’ve kind of made that assumption for them — we need to talk to these folks and find out their feelings on this.”

The conversations and fervor around ideology and representation have superseded practical implications and considerations.

In more metaphorical terms, tires aren’t

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being kicked before putting rubber to the road. “There’s always a lot of questions. …

What about driver’s licenses? Is Idaho going to have to pay money for Oregon’s land?

Some of those things we can’t answer from our level, it’s got to be done at the government level,” McCarter says. “Oregon has prided itself over the years for being the first to do certain things like the bottle bill … the first to — even though I don’t agree with it — (decriminalize) hard drugs. Why can’t Oregon be the first to solve this rural-urban situation by adjusting the border?”

Yet the movement also underscores the worst parts of our country’s political hyperpartisanship and abhorrence to opposition rule — a staple of democracy — by harping upon the urban-rural divide. That narrative can lead to further galvanizing people into believing that the solution is political segregation. “We’ve seen a lot of state legislatures controlled by one party who seem entirely indifferent to meeting the needs of the minority in their state,” Williams says. “(But) we can’t just keep changing state lines every time some political minority feels like they would be better off in the state next door.”

GREATER IDAHO JOINS a long list of seces-

sion movements in American history. It may not be of the same ideology that calls for forming new states or complete separation, but it’s in a similar vein — where leaving is painted as the only option left.

Texas has threatened to leave ever since it joined the Union. Half of Washington has mumbled about the State of Liberty for some time. The movement of “Cascadia” seeks to combine Oregon, Washington and parts of British Columbia. The list goes on.

“Like other movements in American history, it reflects both local grievances on the ground and larger political divisions in the nation at large,” says Richard Kreitner, a historian and author of “Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union.” “The obstacles to success are quite high (but) unlike many others, I don’t think that means it’s impossible.”

When it comes to actual examples of states moving their borders, history provides nothing of the same magnitude. West Virginia breaking away in the Civil War is the most famous example, but its use as a contemporary comparison is somewhat useless. Back then, the country was at war with itself, the government was much smaller, and the interconnectedness of institutions, agencies, and the private and public sectors was a far cry from today’s world.

One recent example does exist, however.

North Carolina and South Carolina shifted their common border in 2017 to fix historical survey errors. The process moved the state line 50-100 feet in some places and took over two decades to complete. Ultimately, it hung in the legislative hinges

“YOU’RE FUNDAMENTALLY SHAKING UP AND SPILLING OUT NEW OVERLAPPING GOVERNMENTS WITH DIFFERENT RESPONSIBILITIES. IF YOU FLIP THIS SWITCH, YOU WOULD BE FLIPPING A LOT OF SWITCHES ALONG WITH IT.”

because of — get this — a gas station that would have had its pumps moved to North Carolina, forcing it to adhere to higher premiums. A law was passed specifically for the gas station to continue selling at South Carolinian prices.

Moving a state border hundreds of miles is without precedent. Idaho and Oregon could be forced to reckon with an unknown number of similar situations as in the Carolinas, changing the fate of thousands of homes, schools, institutions and businesses.

“You’re fundamentally shaking up and spilling out new overlapping governments with different responsibilities. There’s the state government that would change, but are you in a county, are you in a town, are

there special districts, are there school districts — (those all) require different taxes and require different spending,” says Richard Auxier, a senior policy associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “If you flip this switch, you would be flipping a lot of switches along with it.” a study was released by Points Consulting in Moscow, Idaho. The study, funded by the conservative think tank The Claremont Institute, offers the only analytical window into the potential economic implications of shifting the Idaho border to include 22 Oregonian counties.

“The hardest adjustment would be people working the public sector … (and) people who are really, really low-income. You’re not going to be getting the same benefits that you were getting as a resident of Oregon,” Brian Points, the president of the consulting firm, says. “Just purely in terms of impact, there’s a lot of people who would be very positively impacted as well: business owners, entrepreneurs, farmers, manufacturing and transportation, those types of industries.”

Economically, Idaho brings less to the table. Its $84 billion gross domestic product is only a third of Oregon’s with just under half the population. Its state budget of $13.2 billion is $300 million less than Oregon’s recently proposed education budget alone.

The counties for whom Idaho would be responsible, despite low population densities, come with high poverty levels, unemployment and lower economic output that requires extensive state subsidies that fund their infrastructure and welfare programs.

The Claremont study found that Idaho would need to subsidize the counties “to the tune of $78 million” (or $42 per Idahoan) a year, far from the $1.22 billion Oregon currently pays. Simply put, the counties which are heavily subsidized by higher income earners in the Willamette Valley would see about 94 percent of state funding disappear.

Shelley Wyllie and her husband Kelly I N E A R LY 2 02 3 ,

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B ELOW: MIKE MCCARTER O UTSIDE T HE CROOK CO UN TY COURT HOUS E IN PRI N EVILLE, OREGON.

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recently joined fellow locals in voicing their opposition to Greater Idaho at a meeting in the Grant County courthouse, 33 miles away from their home in Dayville, Oregon.

Dressed in matching T-shirts, the group of individuals — which Wyllie clarified is not an official group — argued that moving the border could harm residents. “We wanted our family, friends and community to be fully aware of the financial impact of moving the border,” she says. “Thirty percent of Oregonians qualify for Oregon’s Health Plan, but 35 percent of Grant County

residents qualify for that service. … I don’t think people have any idea, and Idaho has no plan for that.”

Although some fluctuation is expected as pandemic-era extensions end, Idaho would see an influx of Medicaid enrollees by accepting Oregonian counties. Even just the 12 counties that voted in favor have 98,829 enrollees — that’s around one-quarter of Idaho’s current total Medicaid enrollment, which already costs the state over $1.2 billion. If all 22 Oregonian counties of the Greater Idaho movement were to join the state, Idaho’s Medicaid enrollment would almost double to over 700,000 enrollees.

“The most logical conclusion would be that, well, you’re now in the state of Idaho so you play by these rules,” Points says. “So a lot of those people just aren’t eligible anymore.”

In a “Greater Idaho,” former Oregonians’ lofty minimum wage (which ranges between $13.20 and $15.45, depending on the county) would drop to $7.25 an hour. Idaho would also implement a 6 percent sales tax, costing the new residents around $706 million. Although not necessarily bad, Auxier explains that sales tax is regressive, equating a larger percentage of yearly income for poorer earners than wealthier individuals.

“If you went from having no sales tax to having a sales tax, you would be shifting a larger burden of your overall tax burden onto lower-income residents,” he says. “If a lower income person just moved from Oregon to Idaho, their relative tax bill would go up.”

Income taxes would also change for the seceding counties. The Claremont study found that Oregonians could pay less if they were living in Idaho, but Points clarifies that while Oregon taxes lower-income people more than Idaho does, they also “receive a lot more benefits as well.” In the end, “it’s not just a matter of what the changes in tax home income are, it’s also about the reduction in benefits, which can’t precisely be pinned down on a household income basis.”

When it comes to trade and industry, Idaho could have better outcomes for residents.

But in recent years, Oregon’s economy has

K E LLY A N D SH E L L E Y WY L L I E AT TH E I R H O M E I N DAYV I L L E , O R E G O N.

also been buoyed by the production of recreational marijuana, which is illegal in Idaho. One of the pro-Greater Idaho counties, Malheur, is one of the state’s biggest producers, selling $2,900 worth of marijuana for each of its 31,000 residents every year.

If Malheur were to suddenly find itself in Idaho, the legislature — which has been reluctant to legalize cannabis — would need to decide whether to allow production in some counties or shutter businesses and abandon tax revenue on the county’s $100 million industry. “I don’t know how you get that genie back in the bottle,” Points says.

“Seems like a problematic situation.”

might be enough to get politicians to start paying attention.

McCadden says he voted for the measure hoping for more discussion. He doesn’t want to be represented by politicians who

“WE CAN’T JUST KEEP CHANGING STATE LINES EVERY TIME SOME POLITICAL MINORITY FEELS LIKE THEY WOULD BE BETTER OFF IN THE STATE NEXT DOOR.”

BACK IN WALLOWA County, a group of locals

can be found eating breakfast at the Cheyenne Cafe in downtown Joseph. It doesn’t take much for the conversation to snake to moving the state line. Most agreed on one thing: that nobody is listening to rural concerns and that voting for a “Greater Idaho”

don’t share his values. When he sees issues such as homelessness, drug use and protests coming out of Portland, he can’t help but look toward Idaho and see more common ground. Even the Wyllies, who vehemently oppose a “Greater Idaho,” agree that

something must be done. “The core issue is getting the residents of Eastern Oregon to be heard,” Shelley Wyllie says, believing a community collaboration project may be the answer. “Oregon has led on so many different things nationally. … I would like to see us lead on this collaboration because we’re not the only conservative place in the United States having these issues.”

Meanwhile, about 300 miles away near Mount Hood, conservatives met at the Dorchester Conference in late April. Along with social gatherings and guest speakers situated on a golf resort, Republican Party members, including legislators, gathered to cast their vote on the Greater Idaho movement. Another symbolic signaling event for overall interest, it was an important one largely because the movement’s success will eventually be completely dependent on the interest of politicians to support them through the halls of their legislature.

They voted “no.”

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THE PROBLEM WITH GOING OFF-GRID DISCONNECTING FROM THE MAINSTREAM MAY NOT BE AS WISE AS WE ONCE THOUGHT

BY H E ATH E R H A N S MA N

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ive years ago, when Erin and Josh Myers first bought 73 acres of offgrid farmland in the mountains of West Virginia, they were living in a trailer with their three children, trying to figure out how to dig a well and install solar panels.

Now, more than a million people follow along on YouTube as they work on their off-grid farmhouse.

These days, people living off the grid are less likely to look like hermit Jeremiah Johnson and more likely to be a young photogenic couple like the Myers. As the technology to disconnect from mass utilities has become more commercialized and environmental reasons for reducing emissions have spurred individual action, a new wave of people are “getting back to the land.”

In a 2019 paper from Nova Southeastern University, professor Eileen Smith-Cavros looked at off-grid households in Utah, which she defined as “unconnected to a public utility power grid, water or sewer system.” Her research found that the numbers of folks living off-grid were hard to track (surprise), but that the number is growing, and that most people were moving off-grid from a desire for low-impact living or deep independence. From high-end architecture firms like Anacapa designing off-grid estates 36

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for tech moguls to middle-class millennials choosing off-grid living for an opportunity to own a home and land, the once-unorthodox decision is expanding roots in facets of the American demographic that normally don’t have much in common.

Living off the land is appealing in a lot of ways, but, as what it looks like to do so changes, it’s also a privilege — one that could trend toward reducing access to resources and increasing deeper inequi-

A NEW WAVE OF PEOPLE ARE “GETTING BACK TO THE LAND.”

ty within America as a whole. “Even the perception that participants had of independence had strong aspects of social construction,” Smith-Cavros found.

Going off the grid can work well for a single household that’s wealthy enough for the upfront costs it takes, but it’s categorically out of reach for low-income families or for renters. And as those households who can afford to do so move away from collective resources, the burden to support things

like the power grid will fall to people who can’t defect. If we don’t sustain the systems that sustain the most vulnerable among us, what happens?

There are bellwethers to look to. We see it playing out in the individual consumption of resources. For instance, in the Arizona suburbs where water is scarce, wealthy individuals are paying to truck in their own water. It’s a clear example of how individual rejection of a communal system can impact the communal good. It’s a wicked problem because there are very rational reasons why people might choose to defect from public utilities.

On the other side of the coin, we’ve seen big flaws in how the current energy system works — especially in the face of climatically induced power outages, like the ice storms that took down the Texas grid and the fires that have crippled California’s power system. Moving toward small-scale renewable sources can both insulate users from outages and help reduce carbon emissions. Plus, utilities — particularly electricity — are expensive and getting more so as our grids and transmission lines age and the price of fossil fuels increase. “Today’s electric grid is aging and is being pushed to do more than it was originally designed to do,” the Department of Energy stated back in June 2021.

ILLU STR ATION BY H A R RY C A M PBE LL

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LIVING OFF THE LAND IS APPEALING IN A LOT OF WAYS, BUT THESE DAYS IT’S A PRIVILEGE — ONE THAT COULD TREND TOWARD REDUCING ACCESS TO RESOURCES AND INCREASING DEEPER INEQUITY WITHIN AMERICA AS A WHOLE.

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Because of that, utility prices are going up at a time when the cost of small-scale renewables like rooftop PV and batteries is going down. That means homeowners in places like California could save money by going off the grid as early as 2031, according to a study from the climate think tank Rocky Mountain Institute. Mark Dyson, RMI’s managing director for carbon-free electricity, says that in Hawaii, where power is particularly costly, it could be sooner than that. Their study found that utilities could see a significant fraction of customer electricity sales erode by 2030. Consulting company Accenture estimates that 12 percent of American households will utilize off-grid energy by 2035.

Dyson says he’s less concerned about full grid defection and more about load defection, where people with their own energy systems only use the grid when it’s convenient or cheap for them, thereby leaving folks who don’t have flexibility with the consequences. The same is true of resources like water, which has been particularly clear in disenfranchised communities like tribal reservations, and where collective infrastructure has been neglected or never built. More than a third of residents of the Navajo Nation don’t have access to running water, so water has to be trucked in. More than 1 million California residents don’t have access to clean drinking water because their water infrastructure is underfunded and out of compliance, according to a California Healthline study. Last year, the California Department of Water Resources found that a record number of private wells in the state ran dry.

We’re neglecting public infrastructure in vulnerable areas, and operating individual water or power generation systems isn’t working well for a lot of people, either, including the 20 percent of Americans who aren’t hooked up to wastewater systems.

Pollution and contamination from those systems, many of which are aging across the country, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, can be unhealthy and expensive. For instance, a study from

the state of Florida predicted cleaning up those systems will cost the state $1 billion a year for the next 20 years.

Electricity and power generation are clear examples of the disconnect, and how we could do better. “Because of the cost and the upfront investment required to have enough for such a big system, it’s limited to folks who can pay for it,” Dyson says. “And that’s a bad thing for the rest of us who are stuck with a $5 trillion project.” There’s an idea that’s been catching on across the country — including quickly in Utah: virtual power plants. It’s a plan to link individual homes’ energy systems through digital networks, and then connect them to a utility’s power grid. Folks would still have their own independent systems to use as they chose but it would allow the utility company to use the power, essentially giving the utility storage through a series of small batteries while compensating or helping the individual energy providers. RMI projects that virtual power plants could be creating 200 gigawatts of power nationally by 2050.

It gives individuals essentially the same benefits of an off-grid system, with some added financial or moral benefits when they kick energy back into the grid. “Virtual power plants are a timely example of what good looks like,” Dyson says. “If we encourage and pay people to invest in resources that not only benefit them and other customers, but aggregate them and integrate them into the grid, we can reduce costs overall.”

They’re an example of taking that individual desire for power, reliability, affordability and sustainability and turning it into something that can benefit the community and the world.

It’s not just a theoretical idea — the federal government is on board. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has proposed interconnection reforms to make connecting small-scale renewables quicker and more streamlined. The Department of Energy has been focusing efforts on things like microgrids, small regional power centers, demand response (which ramps power up and down when necessary) and smart

storage, which makes renewable energy more effective. All of that makes virtual power plants and decentralized power generation more practical and useful.

Utility companies have been leading the charge toward virtual power plants, in part because they have the most to lose if users fully defect from the current system. In 2017, Green Mountain Power, the biggest utility in Vermont, was the first one out of the gate. It had trouble with customers at the far ends of distribution lines losing power in ice storms and other extreme weather events. The utility came up with a plan to subsidize batteries in customers’ homes up to $10,500. Homeowners could power themselves in exchange for giving GMP access to the power individual systems created. It gave GMP a range of small, flexible battery storage that created carbon-free power. Customers can keep the lights on — as well as things like critical medical devices — no matter the weather, and the financial benefits flow back to them, to the tune of up to $3 million a year, says Kristin Kelly, GMP’s director of communication. She says they now have 2,900 customers in the program, and 4,800 batteries installed, which creates 22.5 megawatts of power. They have a waitlist for new members that stretches out until 2025, and Kelly says they’re in conversation with other power providers. “We hear from utilities across the country all the time because what we’re doing here is a real world example of putting tech to work and benefiting customers,” she says.

Utah is right behind. Rocky Mountain Power is working on a similar virtual power plant through a program they call Wattsmart Battery Program, where it worked with battery company Sonnen to help customers get batteries. Sonnen is also responsible for the Soleil Lofts, an all-electric apartment building near Salt Lake City that functions as a virtual power plant. It’s an example of how multifamily living can add to the grid, and that renters can be a part of the program, too. Today, 2,500 households have signed on for Wattsmart, according to Jonathan Whitesides, communications specialist at Rocky

Mountain Power. It’s starting to catch on in other places as well. Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, PacifiCorp, expanded the program to Idaho and is looking at doing the same in California, Oregon and Washington, where businesses can already participate. In California, Tesla partnered with PG&E to offer the service and has recently launched a program in Texas.

We could be at a significant tipping point for power and other collective resources.

The Inflation Reduction Act has pumped $370 billion into low-carbon subsidies and technological advances — like better battery storage and innovations in small-scale water treatment — have made it easier to take advantage of local resources. Virtual power plants are an example of that, but it applies across a range of utilities. That kind of flexibility is being modeled in water management in places like the Grand Valley of Colorado, where agricultural producers can share unused water with municipalities, or store it for future use. Researchers from Colorado Mesa University who tracked the pilot program along with The Nature Conservancy found that it saves the community about $100 per acre-foot of water, and has secondary benefits — like increased power generation and revenue from hydropower, more river flow for ecosystems and long-term economic stability for the ranchers and farmers. Flexibility and sharing resources have long-tail benefits, but the challenge was, and remains, setting up systems to connect them.

Like the Myers family and others have learned, going off the grid can be a way to reduce your impact and live by your values, on your own terms. But it doesn’t have to happen in isolation. Like it or not, we’re all connected. “Note the positive feelings of independence most of our participants displayed when they realized they had energy choices and gained what they saw as a degree of energy control or freedom,” Smith-Cavros wrote, in her survey of off-grid living. Now the challenge is channeling those positive feelings toward interdependence, too.

WE’RE NEGLECTING PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE IN VULNERABLE AREAS, AND OPERATING INDIVIDUAL SYSTEMS ISN’T WORKING WELL FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE, EITHER.

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JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE NEWS CNN wants to rebrandpritself as a medium ar for impartial news.

Is that possible — and profitable — in a polarized America?

By ETHAN B AUER

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By ETHAN BAUER

Illustration by MIKE McQU ADE

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Illustration by MIKE McQUADE

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WITH THE CLOCK CRAWLING TOWARD 6 P.M.

W HEN TED TURNER DE BU T E D C N N IN 1 9 80, HE I N TR ODUCED TH E WOR LD TO A 24- HOU R CYC LE IN WHICH “NEWS WAS T HE STA R .”

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on the afternoon of June 1, 1980, Ted Turner swaggered onto a temporary stage outside a retrofitted country club in midtown Atlanta. Inside, his crew tinkered and prepped for the momentous launch of a then-revolutionary idea: A round-the-clock news network, made possible through the then-emerging technologies of satellites and cable. Outside, Turner — nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” for his brash personality and showmanship — decided to mark the occasion, for at least a moment, with unusual solemnity. He pointed at three flags flapping in the wind nearby: one for Georgia, one for the United States, and one for the United Nations. The latter, he explained, was especially significant. “We hope that the Cable News Network, with its international coverage and greater-depth coverage, will bring both, in the country and the world, a better understanding of how people from different nations live and work together … so that we can perhaps, hopefully, bring together in brotherhood and friendship, in kindness and peace, the people of this nation and this world.”

It was a high-minded declaration from a man who once lived by the mantra “no news is good news.” He had long believed that the news was too depressing — and, even back then, that its slant was too politically liberal. But with the launch of his most ambitious project, he’d since changed his mind. News, he’d decided, could influence opinions and situations in a good way.

News could be a uniting force. News could

save the world. Or, at least, that’s what he said at the time.

More than 40 years later, when the now-ousted Chris Licht first visited CNN’s Atlanta headquarters shortly after becoming the company’s CEO in April 2022, that goal still echoed in the network’s mission statement. Employees should be “united by a mission to inform, engage and empower the world,” it says. But Licht’s arrival, unlike Turner’s, was not heralded with pomp and circumstance and a rendition of the national anthem. Once Donald Trump left the White House, CNN’s ratings tanked.

And regardless of your political persuasion, the network had failed during the Trump presidency. For conservatives, it had leaned way too hard into the “resistance.” For progressives, it had not done enough to combat Trumpism.

The company had just been acquired by a new owner, the Warner Bros. Discovery media conglomerate, and all reports indicated the new owner had major changes in mind. Licht’s directive, then, was a course correction. “There was definitely a sense of impending doom,” says one current employee, “and this being the person who is bringing it.” The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from her employer.

“There (was) a general sense that he’s not going to be here that long,” she added. “We (thought), he’s the guy who is going to come in, make all these big changes and then somebody else is going to step into place for him.

And most other people I’ve talked to have said something similar.” As it turned out, those people were correct. In early June, Licht was fired. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced the decision on a company editorial call, wishing Licht well and taking personal responsibility for his failures. “For a number of reasons, things didn’t work out and that’s unfortunate,” Zaslav said. “It’s really unfortunate. And ultimately that’s on me.”

Zaslav had hired Licht to rescue CNN from a ratings nosedive, and while the cable network no longer reaches as big an audience as it once did, it still remains highly influential.

Over 60 percent of American adults, per Pew Research Center, still sometimes or often turn to television for news. And when it comes to older Americans, who tend to vote at a much higher rate, TV news still has significant reach: 74 percent of Americans from the ages of 50 to 64 say they get at least some of their news from TV, while a whopping 85 percent of Americans over the age of 65 say they do.

And while those numbers include local news broadcasts and rabbit-ear-accessible network programs like NBC’s “Nightly News,” it’s cable news that holds an outsized influence over agenda setting — the medium that’s more likely to tell viewers what to think, rather than just what happened today, and therefore wields enormous power over how Americans perceive the world, their politics and their democracy. With that kind of potential to shape the nation’s future, Licht’s CNN wanted to rebrand itself as what it once was: a reliable source of accurate information and reasonable, thoughtful analysis.

And the approach he took in the beginning did resemble the company’s original architects’ vision as a place where news is the star. “This role as the One True Reliable Source is, I think, the one that CNN wants to regain,” Slate correspondent Justin Peters wrote last September. But is it even possible to be the “one true reliable source” in 2023 and beyond?

And even if the answer is yes, does anybody want objective, down-the-middle news anymore?

A COMMON REFRAIN among one segment of CNN critics is that the network should stick to “just the facts,” harkening back to an idyllic time when anchors read the news and left the hot takes and squabbling to the viewers. Among such critics is John Malone, a billionaire media mogul and influential shareholder in CNN’s new parent company. “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with,” he told CNBC in November 2021, “and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.” To be sure, the balance between hard news and opinion

CABLE NEWS HAS AN OUTSIZED INFLUENCE OVER AGENDA SETTING — AND THEREFORE ENORMOUS POWER OVER HOW AMERICANS PERCEIVE THE WORLD, THEIR POLITICS AND THEIR DEMOCRACY.

has shifted over the years, at every TV network. But did this simpler time ever really exist?

Certainly, trust in news media used to be much higher than it is today — despite what Turner saw as a liberal bias among network anchors and the depressing nature of many news stories. His first cable success, an outfit called Channel 17 that eventually became TBS Superstation, even sought to counterprogram the evening news with comfort viewing, like reruns of “Star Trek” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Despite his eventual conversion, CNN didn’t come about because Turner changed his mind about news and its importance.

It was — and, importantly, remains — a profitable business opportunity. Turner wasn’t even the one who came up with the idea; one of his deputies did. “It wasn’t Ted Turner’s vision to have news be the star. It was the people he hired. Ted Turner didn’t care,” Lisa Napoli, author of the book “Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News,” told me. “All he cared about was this interesting confluence of technology in cable television and satellites, and he wanted to find a way to deploy it.

And news just seemed like the easiest thing for him to wrangle.”

Turner was happy to support such a vision, but it quickly became apparent that the idea of having an entire day to gather and deliver the news, rather than a half-hour at suppertime, did not necessarily translate to more nuanced and substantive coverage. Some observers, according to Napoli’s account, dismissed CNN’s early approach as “junk-food news.” The reputation grew following the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, when CNN had to fill hour after hour with a huge story — despite very little new information.

As Napoli writes, from that day forward, “news would mean following an endless shower of unfolding details, right before your very eyes. News, in other words, had become sports.”

CNN’s influence continued to grow in the decades following its launch, most memorably in 1991 when the network provided live, expansive, on-the-ground coverage as bombs fell on Baghdad to begin the Gulf War. “That was compelling to watch,” New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen told me. “It didn’t necessarily give you good information about what the entire war effort was … but it became a regular part of the media and the news system.” From there, Rosen says, CNN’s identity as a not-left, not-right, “we’re just the news” network started to develop.

Despite occasional controversies over bias and fairness, that was, at the very least, the brand the company was courting; as recently as the 2012 presidential election, CNN JULY/AUGUST 2023

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BY IM M E N SE PR OFITS BU T A LSO CON T R OV E R SIA L, E N T E R TA IN M E N TD R IV E N D E C ISION S.

advertised its coverage under the slogan, “The only side we choose is yours.”

The central question facing CNN today is whether it’s possible to “evolve back” within a very new and different media environment. “The U.S. is a divided government.

We need to hear both voices. That’s what you see,” said Zaslav, the man who hired Licht, in a May interview with CNBC. “When we do politics, we need to represent both sides. I think it’s important for America.”

That sure sounds a lot like how Turner saw the company when it was founded; as a forum to promote a reasonable exchange of competing ideas; as a place where we could listen to each other and find commonalities and understanding through rigorous, fact-based reporting. But while Zaslav echoed Turner’s original vision of a “both sides” view of the political landscape, such a view doesn’t take the current moment into adequate account — nor does it promise profit. When the CNBC interviewer asked Zaslav whether people would actually watch CNN’s new approach, he was optimistic — but he also didn’t offer any concrete reason to believe him. “We’ve got a great political season coming,” he said. “This is a new CNN.” CNN’S CURRENT IDENTITY crisis traces back

to 2013, the year Jeff Zucker became president. His background was in both news and entertainment. He began his career first as a producer on the “Today Show,” then as president of NBC entertainment, and, in 2007, was appointed president and CEO of NBC Universal. When he came to CNN, he brought that entertainment bent with him.

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one ex-CNN staffer. He started a sports show hosted by then-ESPN reporter Rachel Nichols. Anthony Bourdain’s hit show, “Parts Unknown,” began during Zucker’s first year. “The reality was Jeff’s attempts to put on sports and lifestyle and entertainment, it fell apart,” says the ex-employee. “That fell apart the moment Trump came down the escalator.”

That was true not only at CNN, but across most of the mainstream press. When Trump announced his bid for the GOP nomination in 2015 he challenged, at a level no politician ever had, two traditional assumptions of political reporting: cordiality and (at least some semblance of ) a good-faith give-and-take. No sitting president had vilified the press since the advent of TV news

THE FEAR AMONG MEDIA OBSERVERS IS THAT, IN THE NAME OF APPEARING NEUTRAL, CNN WILL APPLY CRITICISM TO BOTH PARTIES ON A BASIS OF EQUAL TIME RATHER THAN EQUAL MERIT.

to the extent Trump did. CNN in particular constantly found itself in his “fake news” crosshairs, culminating in the revocation of a reporter’s press credential in November 2018 after a feisty exchange during a White House briefing. “(Some people) describe what happened (at CNN) when Trump showed up as shifting to the left or becoming more liberal. And I don’t buy that at all,” Rosen says. “What happened is, the president of the United States was an incredible liar. … So what you have is the most powerful source of misinformation in the culture is also the elected president of the United States. That’s a crisis for news organizations.”

Conservative observers — who’ve long

been more skeptical of mainstream media than liberals — could argue that what Trump really provided CNN was a lucrative excuse to shed the albatross of “objectivity” once and for all. It’s certainly true that the network heaped (often negative) coverage of Trump onto its airwaves far more than past presidents; according to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, CNN devoted well over twice as much airtime to discussing Trump during his four-year term as it did to former President Barack Obama during his second term. The most recently available data shows that CNN has so far covered President Joe Biden about 30 percent less than Trump. The disproportionate coverage could, in part, be the result of CNN pundits feeling like they’d suddenly been granted a license to bludgeon a despised politician. But even Trump’s biggest fans largely admit that he really is something different. Indeed, that was part of his appeal.

And a mainstream cable network’s coverage of him, the thinking appears to have been, demanded difference, too.

CNN first responded to the unprecedented situation by hiring pro-Trump pundits to basically fight with the rest of their pundits on air. “And that can be exciting in a way. It can be satisfying to see someone put down on live television,” Rosen says. “But it’s a very weird solution because one person you’re paying is kind of making it harder for another person you’re paying to speak the truth.” CNN, according to one study, was found to have booked fewer conservative speakers as the Trump presidency unfolded, while Fox News doubled down. Whether that could really be called “moving left,” it at least exacerbated polarization in a very noticeable way.

Josh McCrain, a University of Utah political science professor who has documented this polarization, said he can’t speak with certainty about CNN’s motivations, but he suspects its apparent “move to the left” had to do with courting an audience. “One thing that we know very reliably about people’s media diet is that they want to consume media that basically confirms their prior beliefs. People do not choose to consume

media, especially about politics, that is outside of things that they don’t already agree with,” he says. “That’s sort of what Fox News figured out relatively early on: If they appeal to one side of the political spectrum, then that’s a pretty viable business model.”

Zucker was a master at juicing ratings, and given his entertainment background, such a model would seem perfectly acceptable, at least business-wise, to direct CNN’s future.

But as early as 2016, Rosen had already observed how Trump’s candidacy — let alone his eventual presidency — could “fry the circuits” of mainstream American media. His observation rested on the idea that journalists generally assume politics are a question of “warring philosophies.” They assume both political parties are symmetrical — two competing teams with competing ideas, but grounded in a mutual level of respect, sincerity and commitment to basic facts. Think John McCain shutting down a supporter who called his then-political rival, Barack Obama, an “Arab” during a town hall in 2008. And that’s the rule book mainstream journalists were playing by when Trump was elected. So, “Imagine what happens,” Rosen wrote, “when over time the base of one party, far more than the base of the other, begins to treat the press as a hostile actor.” Imagine what happens, he continued, if a major political leader is a hurricane of misinformation and conspiracy; if he denies the legitimacy of any outcome that doesn’t declare him the winner; if he refuses to engage with basic, verifiable facts.

Rosen’s advice to news organizations facing such a storm is to favor a “pro-democracy agenda.” Which, at the current moment, sounds a lot like saying a pro-Democrats agenda, but Rosen insists that isn’t the case.

Republicans are perfectly capable of being pro-democracy, and Democrats are perfectly capable of being anti-democracy. But the movement Trump started, he argues, simply cannot be given the same good-faith platform media organizations have traditionally given politicians. The question then becomes, “Can you cover politics in a way that feels like it’s in the middle?” says

one former CNN staffer. “I don’t even know how you’d measure that.”

Zucker resigned in February 2022 after failing to disclose a romantic relationship with a colleague — which one ex-employee described as a very well-known secret around the office. She viewed the rationale for his ousting as a scapegoat to bring in someone with a new vision for the company. And though this ex-employee didn’t much care for how Zucker handled the network’s coverage of the Trump presidency, she notes that he courted plenty of loyalty. First and foremost because of his unprecedented

rating success — a chance to claim the moral high ground while also stacking the company coffers. “During the Trump era, I got paid more on my bonuses than I had ever been paid,” the ex-employee says. She also liked that Zucker took a uniquely personal role in directing the company’s day-to-day operations. “He’d come sit in your meetings, he’d come sit by your desk and talk to you. Everybody felt like they knew him,” she says. “And Chris (Licht) was not like that.”

LICHT BEGAN HIS tenure with a major trim.

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he’d taken the job, he announced that the company’s $100 million streaming service, CNN Plus, would be discontinued after barely three weeks of operation. Then came a string of high profile sackings. In August, the company fired longtime media critic and host of “Reliable Sources,” Brian Stelter. In September, the ax found White House correspondent John Harwood.

In December, a massive round of layoffs snagged political commentator Chris Cillizza, business reporter Alison Kosik and anchor Martin Savidge, among others. And none of that accounts for multiple employees who left the company amid the new direction, like investigations editor Pervaiz Shallwani. Licht also moved nighttime anchor Don Lemon to a revamped morning show (before eventually firing him).

Major changes were afoot. But, to hear Licht tell it, the common understanding of his vision — one where CNN is a “centrist,” vanilla network to balance out Fox News and MSNBC — was not correct. “You have to be compelling. You have to have edge. In many cases you take a side. Sometimes you just point out uncomfortable questions,” he said in a November interview with the Financial Times. “But either way you don’t see it through a lens of left or right.” In other words, his philosophy seems to have been when Trump makes news, report on it. When he lies, call him out on it — and treat Joe Biden the same way.

On the surface, it sounded refreshing compared to what CNN’s programming often looked like during the Trump presidency. “I’m a big fan of … independent reporting and telling people what’s going on and doing it in as thoughtful and sensible a way as you possibly can,” says Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. In his view, CNN hasn’t done a ton of that of late. “It’s usually people sitting around the table. Sometimes they’re bringing in the reporters from Ukraine, or Washington, or Boise, Idaho, or something. But a lot of it is commentators on both sides kind of providing their special sauce of the day.”

But “telling people what’s going on” isn’t as simple a task as it once was. CNN and 46

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Fox News told their audiences very different things about “what was going on” in the aftermath of January 6. And the fear among media observers is that, in the name of appearing neutral, CNN will apply criticism to both parties on a basis of equal time rather than equal merit.

And then there’s the phenomenon of Trump, who has demonstrated a Svengali-like genius to attract media attention. If the thinking is to talk about Trump only when he “makes news,” he’ll make sure he’s the focus 24/7.

Which raises the question of how much will actually change. “The way I view (Licht’s) strategy is to say (CNN’s) changed more than (it’s) actually changed,” one former staffer told me in May. In other words, to create a

“YOU HAVE TO BE COMPELLING. YOU HAVE TO HAVE EDGE. IN MANY CASES YOU TAKE A SIDE. SOMETIMES YOU JUST POINT OUT UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS.”

middle-of-the-road option is.” Especially when the internet provides so many options for content — even the most “centrist” person in the world can find an outlet that suits them more than an aggressively nonpartisan cable news channel. “CNN isn’t going to regain its pre-internet stature, because that stature was largely a function of the era’s structural limitations,” Peters, the Slate contributor, writes. “People have more options now, and the big names in news and opinion no longer serve the same unifying roles that they once did.”

Yet in service of that goal, the faces on the network have changed. Licht made a much-publicized trip to Capitol Hill last June to invite Democrats and Republicans alike on air, but one of his major prerogatives was to convince Republicans that they wouldn’t be attacked — at least not outside the bounds of the particular policy issue they’d agreed to discuss. Come to CNN, he told them, to stress test your messages to a more mainstream audience than you’ll find on Fox or other conservative outlets. No more hosts seeking viral moments for viral moments’ sake; just thoughtful policy questions.

Soon, though, the new CNN showed itself to be something else entirely.

TODAY’S CNN HEADQUARTERS in downtown

veneer of neutrality and impartiality, while still holding Trump accountable for his lies.

“The volume is three or four decibels lower than it used to be,” the ex-staffer added. “But it’s still the same song.”

Underneath the high-minded overtures about journalism and truth, the question of the new CNN’s profitability still simmers.

Ratings remain terrible in comparison to rivals, having dropped to a 10-year low in February to a little more than half a million viewers in prime time. Which is why it’s worth remembering that despite the clear vision of the company’s new leadership, their approach is still a gamble. “There’s not a huge amount of untapped demand for, quote unquote, ‘centrist reporting,’” McCrain says. “I’m not convinced that there really is a business model for whatever the

Atlanta no longer showcases the United Nations flag that marked the original. Instead, inside the sunlit atrium in the center of the building, above a display of flags from around the world, is a giant American flag. Which seems appropriate enough as a metaphor for how Turner’s Cable News Network has changed. The company that claimed at its inaugural event in 1980 that it could usher in something very close to world peace — an “It’s a Small World” ride but with chyrons — is now left trying to retain relevance in its home country.

America, too, is a very different place in 2023. When it came to programming, Licht opted to bide his time. He fired people and helped revamp the network’s morning show — but he waited more than a year to make a splash hire or fill a primetime slot or initiate a defining event. It finally arrived

DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY

CHRIS LICHT, W HOSE R OC KY REIGN END E D IN JU N E 2023, HAD SAID H E WA N T E D TO R E T U R N T HE NETWO R K TO ITS FOR M E R JOURNALIS M - C E N T R IC GLORY.

in May, when CNN announced it would air a live, hour-long town hall event with Trump.

The event would take place in New Hampshire, a full nine months before the state’s primary, supposedly to help undecided voters and the American public in general hear from the GOP’s undisputed presidential favorite. Many observers — Rosen and Grueskin among them — warned that it would be impossible to contain Trump; that giving him such a prominent platform would misinform its audience more than provide any useful new information. But CNN was unwavering. This was exactly the sort of thing the network wanted. “President Trump is the Republican frontrunner, and our job despite his unique circumstances is to do what we do best,” a CNN public relations rep said in defense of the network’s decision.

“Ask tough questions, follow up, and hold him accountable to give voters the information they need to sort through their choices.”

The event, held on May 10 — in front of a crowd stacked with Trump supporters

and undecided Republicans who planned to vote in the primary — came only one day after Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll.

“We’re here,” host Kaitlan Collins began, “to give voters the answers they deserve.”

She then asked Trump why Americans should elect him once more when he still hadn’t acknowledged the 2020 election results. “Unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happened (in that election),” he answered. “That was a rigged election.”

He talked about stuffed ballot boxes. He talked about how Mike Pence should have helped overturn the results — to raucous applause. He got a round of giggles for calling Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy,” as well as for calling Carroll a “whack job.” Collins herself got laughed at when Trump took issue with her attempts to refute his lies and called her “a nasty person.”

One moment in particular was perfectly illustrative of Trump’s brilliance as a master media manipulator. Of all things, it occurred when Collins asked about raising the debt ceiling. “You once said using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge could not happen,” she said.

“Sure,” Trump answered, “that’s when I was president.”

“So why is it different now?” Collins asked.

“Because now I’m not president.”

When asked whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election, he said he would only “if I think it’s an honest election.” Which, as we learned in 2020, means an election where he wins.

The next day, one CNN journalist told Vanity Fair, “The mood (at the company) is absolutely the lowest it’s been in the Licht tenure, and that’s saying a lot.” And despite CNN’s own media critic observing that “it’s hard to see how America was served by (that) spectacle of lies,” Licht felt vindicated.

At least that’s what he said. In a morning meeting with disgruntled employees, he expressed his understanding of the event as an unqualified success. “America was served very well by what we did last night,” he told them. He also defended putting

Trump on stage with an overwhelmingly supportive audience, because the audience represented “a large swath of America” that was overlooked in 2016.

Which could be true, though it’s hard to argue that particular “swath” of America is still overlooked at this point. Trump-haters and Trump-lovers alike all know exactly who he is. So what did CNN’s town hall accomplish? The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, who spent a year conducting on-the-record interviews with Licht and dozens of CNN employees for a 15,000-word piece published in early June, wrote that while Licht expressed outward confidence about the outcome, even he was transparently worried about what he’d unleashed. Self-doubt had infected the once-confident CEO, Alberta reported. That and other revelations elicited a firestorm in the media world, with more calls for Licht’s resignation.

Soon, Zaslav elevated a trusted lieutenant, longtime Discovery executive David Leavy, to be CNN’s new chief operating officer and Licht apologized to his staff for his failures, vowing to “fight like hell to win back their trust.” It wasn’t enough. On June 7, five days after The Atlantic story dropped, Licht was fired.

The network’s future remains uncertain.

Licht had, in the eyes of many observers, squandered whatever opportunity he had to build something transformative. At a time when cable news’ relevance is tied to the drama, the controversy, the spectacle; at a time when America is so polarized that we can’t agree on a shared set of basic facts or see our fellow citizens as much more than political labels, CNN should be uniquely positioned to bridge that divide. Yet nearly every move the network has made in the past year suggests a different approach — one with an uncertain future, and an already-undeniable impact.

Long before the town hall, before his advisors expressed their giddiness over the outcome, Trump took to Truth Social to declare his enthusiasm for the event and the new approach. “Going into the heart of Enemy territory,” he wrote, “but maybe the Enemy is changing?”

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E Pluribus Disunion?

A conversation with scholars and commentators reveals a low point in an American ideal and signs of recovery

By Hal Boyd Illustration by Giulio Bonasera

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Governing a society of diverse religious, racial and political backgrounds has been an American ideal since the Rhode Island Charter was granted 360 years ago. Our political and legal institutions are designed to achieve that utopia of pluralism. But from the beginning of the American experiment, it has been messy finding that pluralistic sweet spot as political, religious or racial majorities see competing interests and beliefs as threats to eliminate rather than as ideas to accommodate.

Elections, school board meetings, congressional hearings, lawsuits, editorials and social media posts are all part of the ongoing churn of democracy moving forward and back — mostly toward that common goal of respecting individual rights for the overall good of society.

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Deseret Magazine executive editor Hal Boyd invited four leaders in the legal, religious, academic and media arenas to discuss whether the nation has reached a nadir of division and rancor that poses a unique challenge to pluralism. Their conversation explores how that happened and what individuals and institutions can do to keep the country moving toward the founding ideal of a pluralistic society.

The panel included Shima Baradaran Baughman, an associate dean of the University of Utah College of Law and a distinguished faculty fellow at the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University; Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University; Coleman Hughes, a writer and host of the popular podcast “Conversations with Coleman,” where he engages with an eclectic array of luminaries across the political spectrum; and Asma Uddin, a visiting professor of law at Catholic University of America and a fellow with the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program. The wide-ranging discussion was edited for clarity and length.

S H I M A B AR ADAR AN BAUGH MAN

R O B E R T P. GE O R GE

HAL BOYD: At the end of the 2016 election season, a writer declared in The Atlantic that pluralism’s future was in peril. But Americans’ anxieties about politics, identity, crime, or race relations have been long standing for at least the last half century. Is America uniquely divided today or not?

COLEMAN HUGHES: The story since the

1990s has been increasing partisan polarization. The percentage of Democrats who say they hate Republicans has gone up.

The percentage of Republicans who say they hate Democrats has gone up. And what’s really interesting to me is the good feelings about race relations that were held by the majority of Black and white Americans and Hispanic Americans 20 years ago didn’t start changing until 2013.

So you ask what happened around 2013, I think the best explanation is that’s when a critical mass of people had smartphones and social media and that led to a different way of consuming information, which led to a kind of pessimistic view of race relations. You can now see a video of a police officer brutalizing a Black American that couldn’t go viral before. And the algorithm actually promotes that which angers you the most. I think that’s the key thing that changed around 2013. It’s not that racism went up actually. Most indicators of racism continue to go down. It was that our perceptions of racism went up at that time because of smartphones and social media. That’s consistent with data, showing that Americans who are on social media believe and report more racist

CO L E M A N H UGH E S

AS M A UDDI N

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experiences in their own life than Americans who are off social media. Social media has given people a misperception of how bad things are in the country.

“Pluralism is a challenge that any truly free society faces. But it’s a good challenge to have because it’s a good thing to be a society in which people enjoy freedom of thought.”

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ASMA UDDIN: I think the axis upon which we’re being divided is changing. The guides are more intrinsically and essentially ideological. Also, the way that race, along with religion, sexual orientation, and a number of other traits, including what we drive and what we eat, where we live and so on, are being sorted and clustered into mega identities, and those identities are making Americans feel more divided.

HAL BOYD: If polarization and civil animosity is a problem of technology that we’ve created, is it one that can be fixed, and if so, why haven’t we fixed it? Is something deeper going on?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Pluralism is a challenge that any truly free society faces.

But it’s a good challenge to have because it’s a good thing to be a society in which people enjoy freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion. Not everyone is going to converge on the same conclusions on both the superficial questions of life and the big questions of human nature, human good, human dignity and human destiny.

And in a proper democratic republic there will be no permanent winners and losers. If you lose this time you always have the opportunity to revisit the issue in the next election, or go to work trying to change public opinion. But today, we have a very big problem as people aren’t satisfied with democratic resolutions to the questions that divide us. They want to win. And I get that. I have views that I hold very strongly and would prefer they prevail because I believe they are what’s just and true and right. But the problem is when we are entirely caught up in winning, we tend to degenerate into tribalists who view those who disagree with us, not as reasonable people of good will but as

bad people, as enemies. Not friends to debate, but enemies to be defeated and even destroyed.

And to Coleman’s point, technology makes it easier and more tempting to fall into a kind of tribalism as we communicate with each other as disembodied figures. People will get really outrageous and mean and nasty on social media in a way that, in my experience at least, people would be much less likely to do if they were dealing with each other face to face. So I think the points that Asma and Coleman have made are both right, and the problem is, we can’t really see the way out of this mess we’ve fallen into.

HAL BOYD: What role have politicians and media played in exacerbating polarization and causing division among people?

SHIMA BARADARAN BAUGHMAN: I’m an

expert on crime and drugs and I’ve had so many different encounters with reporters where they’re trying to get the extreme story, and sometimes when I give them the more balanced story, they don’t want to hear it, and you can’t blame any of the actors in the system. It’s just a system where the most extreme, the most negative gets the most exposure, and exposure is dollars and advertising. And so it’s hard to say where the real problem lies. Is it the politicians? Is it the media? Is it pundits on cable news? It’s all of those people because we’re all part of a system.

You look at the police killings of African Americans. They’ve been pretty steady since 2016 or so, a few more in the last couple of years. Obviously it’s a problem.

But that’s just one example in crime.

Crime has gone down steadily since the ’90s from 700 crimes per 100,000 people to now we have 400. We are way less violent in society, and yet people perceive it to be different.

If we can make a plea for data and for truth and try to see each other’s viewpoints, I think that’s something. Personally, what I’ve done is try to balance my intake of social media as well as reading things from

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the very left and very right. But whatever side you are, I think that’s one way to start on this division that we have.

HAL BOYD: If we do have the

self-determination to balance our media diets why can’t we fix this problem? Surveys show that Americans are fed up with polarization.

So, it seems as though there’s a public will to solve this problem.

COLEMAN HUGHES: Yeah, there is. I think

almost everyone’s saying that. And in the moment they stop saying it, they’re as likely to be grabbed by the next salacious headline. So, we’re all complicated beings with multiple wills. And I’m no saint in this department. I have best practices.

At the same time, I’m as vulnerable as anyone to getting outraged at things, and not working hard enough to see the other side. Conversations like this one are certainly making a difference. But those of us who want to make progress on this issue are up against very powerful systemic and financial incentives.

HAL BOYD: At times religion is cast in a light of discouraging unity, but what role can faith play in fostering pluralism?

ASMA UDDIN: Religion helps us to navigate our divides and cultivate pluralism.

Certainly, I think it is a big issue right now and a topic of a lot of discussion in religious liberty circles is the ability to express dissent, which is becoming harder and harder.

As someone who started on international religious freedom issues with a specific focus on blasphemy laws, and all of the tragic outcomes of laws like that, I have to say I think that there’s been a shift here in the U.S. moving closer and closer to something that looks like a blasphemy regime. While we have broad rights to free speech, I think there’s just so many pressures and real ramifications for people saying things that are considered

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wrong or offensive. The blasphemy laws are essentially enshrining the right not to be offended. And I think that is something that’s very much the case in the United States. So, while it might be true, as a number of you have pointed out, that there has been a decrease in physical violence, I would argue there’s been lots of other types of harassment threatening people’s livelihoods, and so on. It’s in some ways more troubling because it is so pervasive.

HAL BOYD: Professor George, you’ve been in the academy for a few years now. Do you feel as though the environment has shifted over your career? Do you think there is a chilling effect, often we use the term cancel culture to talk about it?

norms that made pretty much everyone afraid to discuss certain topics, certainly in most classes, except for certain professors who would do a good job of signaling that you can have any opinion in this class. And most people are not in that situation. I get messages from people who listen to my podcast, saying, “Oh, thank you so much for talking about this subject, etc. I have a job, I have a family.

Something is going on at work that I have issues with and I fear that I can’t voice those without bringing penalties and punishments upon me that I just can’t justify at this point in my life.”

HAL BOYD: What can the person listening to

or reading this, who may work at X Corporation or run a small business, do to preserve these ideals or pluralism and democracy?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: There’s no question

about it. A kind of climate of fear and intimidation has descended on academic institutions. This is also true of the broader intellectual culture. People often censor themselves. They don’t speak their minds because they fear retaliation. Sometimes it’s very easy to retaliate against a person using social media, and people are afraid to speak their minds on an issue for fear of being tarred as a bigot of some sort of racist, a xenophobe, all these labels that people use to harm the reputation of people they disagree with. It’s a very serious problem right now, and we’re starting to see pushback against it by organizations like the Heterodox Academy, Freedom Alliance and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) designed to liberate people to speak their minds.

COLEMAN HUGHES: As an independent me-

dia person I’ve created a space for myself where I don’t have speech codes, where I can talk to whomever I want, and I have an audience that supports me. So, I’m in a very different situation, socially and career-wise than when I was at Columbia University, where there were heavy speech

SHIMA BARADARAN BAUGHMAN: They can

help build our public institutions. They can go to churches, they can go to community organizations, help do homeless work, refugee work. These are the types of institutions that help people of different faiths and different beliefs and ideological groups come together and build a country like America. As much as there is cancel culture, and colleges are the worst offenders, there’s still also a lot of hope where college students spend a lot of time doing pro bono work and serving in communities. This is the kind of work that’s going to keep our pluralism alive and keep us a uniquely diverse country.

ASMA UDDIN: When we’re kind of in the everyday grind, we forget the positive side of things. Early on I learned to appreciate that concurrent to my work in international religious freedom, where I was learning more and more about the restrictions on speech and the ability to think critically in so many other countries, I was at the same times having conferences where people in the Muslim community were coming together to interrogate questions

around marriage and gender roles, and religious dress and all kinds of other things related to the broader question of men and women and their place in Islam.

So, I appreciate the ability to have those critical conversations, but not to feel like I was going to be limited, or so in any way to take on a particular position.

I think also as a parent, there’s just so much anxiety around the ability to raise your children in a way that you see fit.

There’s so many external influences that I think a parent is always worried about.

But, at the same time, I’ve seen huge strides in the culture around questions of religious diversity. In comparing my childhood to the childhood that my children have to celebrate their own religion and see it in the public space in a way that’s more visible and exciting than anything that I experienced when I was a kid. So, I think those are all signs of good things, of the promise of what this country offers all of its citizens.

ROBERT P. GEORGE: I think we should ask ourselves the question: What do we owe each other as fellow citizens? We owe each other the courtesy of engaging as fellow citizens by making arguments and marshaling evidence for our views. We owe it to each other not to be demagogues, not to be shouters, not to be hurlers of invective, not to be manipulators, not to lie, not to cook the data. We owe it to each other to be truthful, to give our reasons, make our arguments, provide the evidence that we have to support our views, and then I think we owe it to each other to effectively support the constitutionally prescribed mechanisms of deliberative democracy by which we make our decisions.

But I don’t think we owe each other more than that, or that we need more than that to hold this fragile, admittedly fragile, experiment in republican government and morally ordered liberty together.

Religious people need to be able to work with secular folks because these

days there are a lot of secular folks who are worried about the same crushing of civil liberty that religious folk are worried about. So there are what would have looked, maybe 20 years ago, like unlikely alliances that are forming and I think that is a very good thing and promising thing.

It doesn’t guarantee victory. There’s no guarantee that civil liberty and a constitutional republic government are going to prevail in the end. It’s an experiment. As I said earlier, it’s a bet. And we’re always just one generation from losing it. Each generation has got to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining it. So my exhortation to this generation is, we’ve got to do our part and hand it on to the next generation, and hope that they’ll do their part.

COLEMAN HUGHES: It is a bet, and the

instability that you see in our republic is not always evidence of something going wrong. In a way it’s evidence of something going right. What do I mean by that? I mean in alternative systems, authoritarian states, states without free speech, states without pluralism, they can look very stable until they collapse in a violent revolution and implode. Whereas the American system, where we are constantly discharging a bit of our anger, each faction is constantly able to win the next election, and so forth. The alternative is, we always seem to be fighting, and that’s not always necessarily a bad thing in some ways that can be a strength of why we don’t devolve into revolution after a period of seeming 50 years of stability.

The bet has been working for a very long time, other than the Civil War, although it is based on what might seem like a thin veneer of unity, namely the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. If we examine and look into the reasons why it has worked and try to continue feeding the good parts of the system then I think we can be conditionally optimistic about it working in the future.

“When we are entirely caught up in winning, we tend to degenerate into tribalists who view those who disagree with us, not as reasonable people of good will but as bad people, as enemies. Not friends to debate, but enemies to be defeated and even destroyed.”

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UNBRIDLED

PASSIONS PASSIONS PRESIDENTIAL PURSUIT OF SPORT THE

REVEALS COMPETITIVENESS AND

AMBITION

SEARCHING FOR A

TARGET

By CHRIS CILLIZZA

Illustration by FRANK J. STOCKTON

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PRES IDENT TH EO D OR E R OOSE V E LT UNDERSTOOD TH AT SPOR TS A N D POLIT IC S H AD A SYMBIOT IC R E LAT ION SHIP T HAT COULD BE EXPLO IT E D BY LE A D E R S.

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football was on the verge of being canceled entirely.

The sport was ludicrously violent, with 18 players having died in just that year alone.

Almost 50 people had perished in the five years since the turn of the century. Broken backs and necks were common. Concussions were legion. One player — Harold Moore of Union College — died in November 1905 of a cerebral hemorrhage after being kicked in the head while trying to make a tackle. (Helmets wouldn’t become mandatory in college football until 1939.)

Enter Teddy Roosevelt, the president of the United States and an avowed fan not just of football but of violent play, more generally speaking. “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports,” Roosevelt once said. “I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”

Roosevelt brought the presidents of Yale, Harvard and Princeton together twice in the fall of 1905 to see if they could agree on a series of reforms that would keep football going while making it safer for its participants. (The Ivy League was, at the turn of the 20th century, the center of the college football universe.)

By the start of the 1906 season, a series of new rules had been adopted — including the forward pass, which led to the evolution of modern football. Roosevelt’s interest in saving football was about a lot more than his enjoyment of the game; he believed that young men engaging in (at times) brutal physical combat was the proper training for a future as a soldier in the service of the country.

Wrote Roosevelt: “There is a certain tendency ... to underestimate or overlook the need of the virile, masterful qualities of the heart and mind. ... There is no better way of counteracting this tendency than by encouraging bodily exercise, and especially the sports which develop such qualities as courage, resolution and endurance.” (Dwight Eisenhower would put it even more bluntly: “The true mission of American sports is to prepare young people for war.”)

Roosevelt then is rightly understood as our first sporting president — in both the sense that he wrestled, boxed, hunted and fished, and that he understood that sports and politics had a symbiotic relationship that could be exploited by leaders. As historian John Sayle Watterson noted, Roosevelt was “the first president to use sports extensively for political purposes.”

Of course, while Roosevelt was the first president to meld sports and politics, the fact is that the two pursuits have been intertwined for thousands of years.

In 776 B.C., the first Olympics were held as both a tribute to the Greek god Zeus and a way for the various city-states of the country to prove their superiority over one another. It was a showcase for champions of each island and city-state.

“We know there was total chaos for a week because anyone who wanted to raise their profile, this was the place and time to do it,” said Paul Christesen, a professor of ancient Greek history at Dartmouth.

By the time of the Roman Empire, the notion of using sports as a way to placate and pacify the people had been officially codified into a phrase: “bread and circuses.”

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It comes from a line from the poet Juvenal: “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

The idea went like this: To keep the people of Rome happy — and pliant — emperors did two things: (1) they gave out free wheat to keep citizens fed; and (2) they staged gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum that slaked people’s more primal urges.

“Paying for spectacular games, blood sports, parades, religious festivals and chariot races became a standard tool for politicians to win Roman elections during the Republic,” wrote Linda Ellis, a professor at San Francisco State University. “Even in the absence of elections, Roman emperors and provincial governors continued to sponsor lavish entertainment events to demonstrate their generosity and justify their retention of power.”

Since the end of the Second World War — and especially since the advent of television — presidents have leaned more and more on sports to cast a positive image of their presidency and speak to audiences they might not be able to reach any other way.

No one epitomized that notion better than John F. Kennedy. Despite a sickly childhood — and a series of illnesses throughout his presidency — the prevailing image of Kennedy for most Americans was of him and his extended family engaged in games of touch football at their compound in Hyannis Port. That Kennedy was often

S P O R TS CAN CAST A P OS I TI V E I M AG E O N A P R E S I D E NCY. NO P R E S I D E NT E P I TO M I Z E D TH AT M O R E TH AN J O H N F. K E NNE DY (C E NT E R ) WATCH I NG A F O U L B AL L D U R I NG M AJ O R L E AG U E B AS E B AL L’ S 1963 S EAS O N O P E NE R .

barely able to walk due to back issues — much less able to fully participate in quasi-tackle football — was glossed over. He was regarded as a hale and hearty presence by the public — thanks in large part to his purposeful close associations with sports.

The man Kennedy beat in 1960 — Richard Nixon — was an awkward presence on the football field, effectively used as a tackling dummy during his collegiate years.

But the future president was a rabid fan, quoting facts and figures about players and games to anyone who would listen. For the socially challenged Nixon, sports talk was a way to humanize him — and for him to talk to regular joes with whom he felt as though he had little else in common.

If Kennedy was the first modern president to grasp the power of sports to make myths, it was Ronald Reagan who took the mixing of sports and politics to the next level. Reagan was, by all accounts, a decent young athlete — he claimed to have saved 77 people from drowning during his years as a lifeguard. But Reagan’s real genius was

“THE TRUE MISSION OF AMERICAN SPORTS IS TO PREPARE YOUNG PEOPLE FOR WAR.” — DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

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PRES IDENT RICHARD N IXON WAS A R A BID SP O RTS FAN WH O LOVED TO TA LK A BOU T PLAY E R S A ND STATS TO ANYON E W HO WOU LD LIST E N .

SPORTS IS A RELEASE VALVE FOR MANY OF OUR NATION’S LEADERS, A WAY TO SATE A COMPETITIVE FIRE WITHOUT LOOKING TOO FORWARD OR ARROGANT IN DOING SO.

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in his understanding that being next to great athletes — and, as important, winners — was just as good as being one himself.

While championship sports teams had, on occasion, visited the White House before Reagan’s term, the “Gipper” formalized the process — welcoming in winners and flashing the showmanship that had made him a successful actor. (After the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in 1987, Reagan allowed members of the team to dump a Gatorade bucket full of popcorn — one of his favorite foods — over his head.)

The best overall athlete — in terms of the breadth of the sports he played and the longevity with which he continued to play them — to ever grace the White House was George H.W. Bush. (Yes, Gerald Ford was the best football player — obviously — to ever serve as president. But Bush was more well-rounded. He played tennis. Golfed.

Parachuted. Played baseball in college. Did almost any sport that could reasonably be called a sport — and did it well.)

Bush grew up playing tennis with his mother, who was a skilled and competitive player. He was a light-hitting and slick-fielding

first baseman on the Yale baseball team, and even got to meet Babe Ruth just weeks before the Sultan of Swat’s untimely death.

In office, Bush’s competitive fires ran deep — so deep that he organized a March Madness-like tournament of horseshoes played by the permanent White House staff. (There were brackets and everything!)

After leaving the presidency, Bush, like all the men who had held the office before and since, found an outlet for his competitive drive in sports. In addition to being an avid golfer and tennis player, Bush even laid claim to inventing the phrase “You da man!” Yes, seriously.

Barack Obama was the first — but probably not the last — baller president. Obama had a basketball court built on the White House grounds, and invites to his regular pickup games were more precious than getting asked to a state dinner. Obama viewed his competitiveness in pickup as an analog for his competitiveness in politics; once he was in the mix, he wanted to win — and was willing to do whatever it took to bring about that desired result. Obama’s rise also dovetailed with the surging popularity of the NBA. Just as Obama was redefining cool in politics, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant were doing the same on the hardwood.

Then there is, of course, Donald Trump.

Like so much else with Trump, the story of his athletic prowess is exaggerated. He was a good baseball player in high school but almost certainly not, as he has often claimed, the best baseball player in the state of New York. He is a good bordering‑on‑very-good golfer, but the stories of his many club championships won require a good deal of creative math.

He spent years pursuing an NFL team, and if he had managed to buy one — or turn the USFL’s New Jersey Generals into one — he might never have had the itch to run for president. Sports and politics appealed to Trump for the same, visceral reasons: Someone won and, more important, someone lost. He liked that — as long as he was on the winning team. Always.

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RONALD REAGAN (LEFT) REALIZED BEING NEXT TO GREAT ATHLETES — AND, AS IMPORTANT, WINNERS — WAS JUST AS GOOD AS BEING ONE HIMSELF.

George Orwell once called sports “war without shooting.” And there’s no question that our modern presidents have understood that sports can be used to unite us and to divide us in equal measure. Nixon saw bowling as a way to not only court the middle of the country — his “silent majority” — but also cast them against the coastal elites who looked down on bowling as a sport for the middle class.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there were very real questions about whether sports should continue at all. They did — and, roughly a month later, President George W. Bush strode to the mound at Yankee Stadium to throw out the first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series.

Wearing a bulletproof vest — and with an air of worry palpable in the stadium — Bush threw a perfect strike, a moment that felt like a catharsis, a signal that even though we were down as a country, we weren’t out.

And, after four years of the abnormalities and excesses of Trump, it was sports that Joe Biden reached for to make things more, well, normal. “He’s certainly going to look to sports and sports figures to help bring us back into alignment as Americans,” Francis Biden, the president’s brother, told ESPN. Sports, like politics, hold a mirror up to us and those we elect to lead us — showing

them for who they really are when all the spin, hype and hyperbole are stripped away.

For our presidents, what so often is revealed in their athletic careers, their fandom, and their leisure pursuits is a raw and unbridled competitiveness and ambition in search of a target.

For George H.W. Bush, raised to always be mannerly and kind to others, sports was where he could let his inner animal out. For his son, George W. Bush, the maniacal running and biking he took up after giving up drinking was a way to funnel his energies and compulsions. For Nixon, his fanatical fandom gave him a way to connect with Joe Q. Public and appear just a little less awkward (and unathletic). Trump viewed sports the way he viewed life — a life-and-death competition where the goal wasn’t just to win but to destroy one’s opponent.

Competition is sanctioned — and encouraged in sports. It’s a safe space where these men felt unafraid to want and want and want — in ways that would have been dismissed as overly forward or arrogant in the context of politics. Sports then was a pressure release valve for many of our nation’s leaders, a way for them to sate the ever-burning competitive fires without looking too, well, extra in doing so.

But sports did more than that, too. They

showed us the best of what we could be — even if they forced us to face uncomfortable political truths in the process.

Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball led the way for the broader integration of the country. The protests of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics shone a light on inequality in America.

Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam forced Americans to come to grips with what we were really doing in Southeast Asia. The U.S. women winning the World Cup in 1999 redefined what “plays like a girl” meant. LeBron James wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” warmup shirt forced the country to focus on how the police treat young African American men.

“There’s a reason that every country has its sports it loves,” explained Condoleezza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Bush. “They embody somehow the nation and the national spirit and the national pride, and they rally around these sports figures. At times of national triumph, we rally around them in joy. At times of national tragedy, we rally around them to remember who we are.”

E X C E R P T E D F RO M “ P OW E R P L AY E R S : S P O RT S , P O L I T I C S , A N D T H E A M E R I C A N P R E S I D E N C Y,” © 2 0 2 3 C H R I S C I L L I Z Z A A N D R E P R I N T E D BY P E R M I S S I O N F RO M T W E LV E B O O K S/ H A C H E T T E B O O K G RO U P.

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CONSTITUTION IN CRISIS CALLS TO REMODEL THE CONSTITUTION COULD SPELL DOOM FOR THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

BY JO H N YO O

P

olitics today strains against the Constitution. President Joe Biden claimed that the Covid-19 pandemic gave him the authority to suspend all evictions, mandate vaccines in the workplace, and cancel most student loans. The Supreme Court found Biden’s first two executive orders went beyond his powers, and it will likely hold the third unconstitutional this June. Biden’s mounting losses in the courts have not deterred his progressive plans. His proposals to impose nationwide limits on electricity use and to foist environmental and social justice goals on business wait in the wings.

Challenges to our constitutional order, however, come not only from progressives.

In 2020, for example, President Donald Trump pressured state officials to change electoral votes and then asked Vice President Mike Pence to block the count in favor of Biden. Just last December, Trump wrote: “Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

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performed his constitutional duty honorably, and power transferred peacefully in our republic on January 20, 2021, just as it has for the last 230 years.

These political attacks on the Constitution, however, seem to exceed the normal jousting of everyday politics. They take up a deeper challenge to our political order.

A growing number of states, for example, wish to ignore the Electoral College system in favor of choosing the president by a simPOLITICAL ATTACKS ON THE CONSTITUTION SEEM TO EXCEED THE NORMAL JOUSTING OF EVERYDAY POLITICS. THEY TAKE UP A DEEPER CHALLENGE TO OUR POLITICAL ORDER.

ple national majority. Leading politicians want to redraw Washington, D.C., or add Puerto Rico as a new state in order to unbalance the Senate. They would also throw out the Senate filibuster to ease the passage of legislation. Critics suggest expanding the size of the Supreme Court to dilute its power and have launched an attack on the ethics of the justices to undermine their independence. Some want the federal government to exercise such broad powers over the economy and society while others want

to expand their favored right, whether it be abortion, guns or religion.

These proposals draw upon recent, fundamental criticism of the Founders’ work. At its very birth, say its critics, the Constitution accepted the evil of slavery.

Abolitionists famously attacked our founding document as “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” for blessing slavery. Even though 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War, all three branches of government would permit racial segregation for another century. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall marked the bicentennial of the Constitution by declaring it “defective from the start.” Only “several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation” allowed the United States “to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights.”

Today’s scholars have updated this criticism through the lens of racial and gender identity. They hold no love for a document that originally excluded racial minorities and women from the franchise, vests great power in a Senate that ignores population, and creates a presidency that they believe can verge on dictatorship. In its “1619 Project,” The New York Times put a capstone on this critique by claiming that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” Instead of 1776 or 1789, according to this account, America’s true

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founding occurred in 1619 (with the arrival of the first African American slaves), and launched a nation that has oppressed racial minorities for more than four centuries.

These criticisms attack the Constitution’s defense of liberty, its support for civil society, and its check on misguided government. While our Constitution may well have allowed discrimination against minorities and women, it also established the principles and tools to overcome it. The United States began with the Declaration of Independence, which announced that 13 British colonies would separate from the mother country to form their own nation. But unlike European and Asian states, America did not share an ethnicity. Instead, Americans founded their nation on a set of principles. The declaration announces: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Because all men are equal, no one has a right to rule another — instead, all government comes from consent. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

While the declaration made the promise, the Constitution created the means for its fulfillment. As Abraham Lincoln wrote (drawing from a passage in Proverbs), the declaration’s principle of liberty is the “apple of gold,” while the Union and Constitution are “the picture of silver subsequently framed around it.” Lincoln observed that “the picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple, but to adorn and preserve it.

The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture.” The Constitution creates the institutions of governance that are to protect and advance the principles of the declaration. Beset by the original sin of slavery and tested by a terrible Civil War, the Constitution nevertheless made possible freedom’s rise. The national government used its powers to end slavery, guarantee individual rights, extend the vote to all adults, and expand civil rights in schools, the workplace and the public square.

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THE FOUNDERS UNDERSTOOD a Constitution

to protect liberty by placing certain rights beyond the reach of government. Although the original Constitution contained no Bill of Rights, the Federalists who urged ratification agreed to the demand of their opponents, the Anti-Federalists, that the new government make it its first order of business to devise one. Proposed by the first Congress in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791, the First Amendment safeguards the rights of religion, speech, press and assembly from the federal government. The Second Amendment guarantees the right “to keep and bear arms.” The Fifth Amendment protects the right to due process against government action and the right to property. Other amendments secure

BY ENSHRINING THEM IN A WRITTEN, GOVERNING DOCUMENT, THE FOUNDERS MADE THESE RIGHTS MORE THAN JUST HOPES AND PROMISES — AS IS OFTEN THE CASE WITH THE CONSTITUTIONS OF OTHER NATIONS.

the rights of the people to their “persons, houses, papers, and effects” against searches and seizures, and of criminal defendants to a fair trial. After the Civil War, the nation adopted the Reconstruction Amendments, which ended slavery, extended the Constitution’s protections for individual rights against the states and established the right to vote regardless of race.

These guarantees continue to protect our rights today. By enshrining them in a written, governing document, the Founders made these rights more than just hopes and promises — as is often the case with the constitutions of other nations. Instead, the Constitution obliges all government officials, through their oath of office, to protect them, and as written law, allows courts to enforce them. If the government prevents a protester from speaking, he or she can go to

federal court for an order blocking official action. If an official seizes private property without just compensation, the owner can ask the courts to require just compensation. Courts will not allow prosecutors to arrest or try suspects without proper search warrants, access to legal counsel, confrontation of witnesses and the introduction of evidence, and the right to a jury.

But the original Constitution did not rely exclusively on the courts to protect liberty. Rather, the Framers designed the government itself to prevent tyranny. They wrote the Bill of Rights itself as negative restrictions on the federal government, for example, rather than as positive definitions of individual liberty. Only upon the ratification of the 14th Amendment in the wake of the Civil War did the Bill of Rights become individual liberties applicable to the federal and state governments too. The Bill of Rights sought to preserve mediating institutions just as much as it protected individual rights. The First Amendment does not itself define a freedom of speech and religion but instead says that “Congress shall make no law respecting” speech and religion. The Free Exercise and Establishment clauses shield religious groups, which themselves can check government.

The rights to speech, press and assembly prevent government from interfering with private groups, such as political parties, the media or associations. The Second Amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” not just the right of an individual to own a firearm. It protects the existence of the state militia, another institution of 18th-century self-governance.

The Sixth and Seventh amendments preserve juries, which could check overzealous law enforcement.

The Constitution erects a second fundamental protection for liberty by creating institutions and processes of public power that restrain mob democracy while also empowering self-government. While ever advancing toward “a more perfect Union,” the Constitution fundamentally rejects pure majority rule. “Why has government been instituted at all?” Alexander

Hamilton asked in Federalist 15. “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” To help reason control passion, the Constitution creates a separation of powers that divides the power to make law from the power to enforce it. It requires a popular House to agree on the laws with a state-representing Senate, while vesting the executive power in an independent president. A lifetime judiciary remains free of the control of either. The Constitution grants the federal government only limited, enumerated powers, while reserving most authority over the matters of everyday life — property, family, education, public safety — in the states.

The Constitution’s creation of multiple centers of power ensures that a people unbalanced by passion — or deceived by interest groups — cannot rush into disaster. In a parliamentary system, a single majority controls all levers of government and can make new laws at a whim. By contrast, the Constitution creates different levels and branches of government that have the incentive to compete and even conflict. In that collision, the Founders assumed, only policy truly in the public interest would emerge. “In the compound republic of America,” James Madison explained in Federalist 51, “the power surrendered by the people, is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments.” From this combination of federalism and the separation of powers, “a double security arises to the rights of the people.” Madison explained: “The different governments will control each other; at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.”

WHILE IT MAY slow change, the Constitu-

tion has endured while our Western and Asian peers have lived under monarchies, revolutionary regimes, socialism, fascism and authoritarian dictatorships that have killed tens of millions in just the last century alone. While the Old World struggled through the worst of the two world wars, the

Great Depression and the socialist disasters that followed, the United States avoided the massive death and destruction of these crises and survived with its economic and political orders relatively intact. Admittedly, the federal government greatly expanded its size and reach during the New Deal and the Great Society. The United States, however, never experienced a competitive socialist political party or the widespread nationalization of industry. The size of the federal government in the number of employees or as a percentage of the economy still pales in comparison to that of European governments. The United States enjoys a significant decentralization among federal, state and local governments, which are further cabined by the strong institutions of priWHILE IT MAY SLOW CHANGE, THE CONSTITUTION HAS ENDURED WHILE OUR PEERS HAVE LIVED UNDER MONARCHIES, REVOLUTIONARY REGIMES, SOCIALISM, FASCISM AND AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORSHIPS THAT HAVE KILLED TENS OF MILLIONS IN JUST THE LAST CENTURY ALONE.

vate civil society (such as schools, churches, charities and civic groups), compared to our advanced industrial peers.

While the Constitution places its protections for individual rights and its structuring of power beyond the reach of regular politics, it does not answer today’s radical challenge against constitutional governance altogether. If we live under a principle of majority rule, today’s critics suggest, then we are under no duty to respect the choices made at the founding. The dead hand of the past should not reach beyond the grave to control us, the living. Thomas Jefferson leveled a similar charge at the Constitution during the ratification. Jefferson objected to the idea that “one generation of men has the right to bind another.” As he wrote just

after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Earth belongs always to the living generation, and that “one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.” Because the dead hand of the past should not control the living, Jefferson believed, “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.” In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson recommended that a Constitution create a simple process to call for a new convention to create a new founding charter.

Madison defended the idea of a fixed constitution against the attacks of his political mentor. A permanent constitution bore important gifts — stability chief among them. Frequent changes to the Constitution, he worried, “deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest government would not possess the requisite stability.” Madison observed that “ancient, as well as numerous” traditions and institutions would fortify “a reverence for the laws.” Without that respect for the past, Madison argued, “the public passions” might disorder “the constitutional equilibrium of the government” and vest vast authority in the wrong hands.

Madison’s rejoinder to Jefferson provides a last, and perhaps most important, virtue of our Constitution. As the Constitution ages, it establishes government institutions and national traditions that foster political and social stability. It sets the rules of the political game that allow Americans to pursue their political futures without suffering periodic disorder or even revolution. It gives the American people the means to rule themselves and remind us that we engage in self-government to advance, not regulate, our natural rights. Most importantly, the Constitution reminds the American people that rights do not come from government, but from “their Creator.”

In this, the American Constitution may be the most exceptional of all.

J O H N YO O I S T H E E M A N U E L S . H E L L E R P RO F E S S O R O F L AW AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , B E R K E L E Y A N D T H E C O -AU T H O R O F “ T H E P O L I T I C A L LY I N C O R R E C T G U I D E T O T H E SU P R E M E C O U R T,” W H I C H PU B L I S H E S T H I S M O N T H .

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THE ENDURING PROMISE TWO CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLARS — FROM THE LEFT AND RIGHT — ON THE PROMISE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

BY PAU L E DWA R DS

F

or well over half a century, William B. Allen has been a fixture in American political thought. His academic work has explored the moral and prudential foundations of the American constitutional order. His writings probe the deliberative thought of our Founders, the words of our founding documents, and the evolution of our national character. Allen is emeritus professor of political philosophy at Michigan State University, where he also served as dean of the James Madison College. He has served as a member of the National Council of the Humanities, as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and as the executive director of Virginia’s State Council of Higher Education.

Danielle Allen (Bill Allen’s daughter) has established herself as one of America’s preeminent political theorists and public intellectuals. She is the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard University, where she also directs the Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for Ethics. In addition to her notable scholarly contributions on democratic theory, including her influential book “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality,” Danielle Allen has engaged directly with the most challenging issues of the day as a leader in the nonprofit sector and a celebrated Washington Post columnist.

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What follows is a wide-ranging conversation with Bill and Danielle Allen moderated

by Paul Edwards, director of the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

“WE BOTH FOUND, AFTER SPENDING A GREAT DEAL OF TIME PORING OVER THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, AN INNER CORE OF MORAL EQUALITY AS THE DISCRIMINATING CONCEPT THAT MAKES SENSE AND INTEGRATES THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT.”

PAUL EDWARDS: Danielle, on more than one

occasion in your writing you talk about family dinner table conversations. I’m curious what was your family dinner table like, and were there rituals or traditions within the Allen home as you were growing up?

BILL ALLEN: There was only one ritual we

had and that was the systematic reading of the Bible: two chapters from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament every single night. That was the only ritual,

the rest was totally spontaneous. I’m sure Danielle’s recollection is better than mine about that.

It’s true we did that. We read our way through the Bible twice, the whole text. I think what we’re also talking about is that my dad, a professor, had an incredible community of graduate students and this community of graduate students were all deeply engaged in questions about the American founding, Constitutionalism, and the prospects for this country. I was a little kid in the middle of all of that and I soaked it up. I loved those conversations.

And then there were also the conversations where our extended family came together, holidays and the like. People always want to know: how do kids become committed to civic engagement? How do we get that motivation to take responsibility for our civic life? And I think part of the answer is family.

I came from a family with deep traditions of civic engagement. My dad’s dad helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida, which was exceptionally dangerous work. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather fought for women’s right to vote. My great-grandmother was president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 1930s. There was that sort of deep engagement.

DANIELLE ALLEN:

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PAUL: This was modeled in an extraordinary way in your family. Danielle, were you aware of, for example, your grandfather’s engagement with the NAACP in Florida? Was that part of family lore?

DANIELLE: I mean, in some sense — not

those organizational specifics — but I certainly knew my grandfather. He was a Baptist preacher in the final phase of his career in southern Georgia, and he was a powerful preacher, powerful in the pulpit. He was a proud man, always ramrod straight, and communicated a great sense of commitment to his own community, but also clarity about his own purpose and the responsibility he wanted to take for his world.

Chicago. And that was a puzzle because lots of these night students didn’t have a high school degree and they were working two jobs. My day students, they came with the best pedigrees ever, so how are we going to provide the same quality of education? And the solution was to compromise not at all on the quality of what we were teaching, the quality of the text, but to go ahead and use short texts.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, the Declaration of Independence is only 1,337 words. I was like, it’s a short text, that’s what I’m going to use! I started teaching it over and over again in history and philosophy courses and writing courses. And it just came alive, and my students came alive with a text.

BILL: I’m glad you mentioned purpose,

Danielle, because I want to clarify something. Paul’s questions seem to be leading to an inquiry into the degree of intentionality that lay at the bottom of development within our family. That, from my perspective, would be a mistaken line or approach to take. It wasn’t a question of intending to form this or that kind of family or intending to engage with this or that kind of activity.

It was nothing other than the expression of an acquired and cultivated sense of responsibility and the exploitation of opportunities as they arose.

A lot of this was quite spontaneous, some of it was a response to need. My father’s founding of the NAACP chapter was a response to a need at a certain time, when I was just a wee lad, only three or four years old. So, these are not things that developed as a specific program or agenda set out for the purposes of development in the family at large, they were the things the family fed on as they arose incidentally.

PAUL: How did you both come to work on the Declaration of Independence?

DANIELLE: I was teaching a night program

for low-income adults in Chicago. Our goal was to make sure they got the same quality of education as kids in the day program.

At that time I taught at the University of 68

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“THE MAGIC OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IS SO POWERFUL. IT’S A STORY ABOUT A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO LOOK AROUND AND CONSIDER THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES NOT FIT FOR WHAT THEY DESERVE IN THEIR CORE HUMAN DIGNITY AND THEN SEEK TO DO SOMETHING

PAUL: Now, say more, if you would, about the students that you were teaching in the evening program — their profile, their demographics — tell us about that.

DANIELLE: We started out with one pro-

gram but ended up with three around the city. So, by the time we had three, they sort of captured the full demography of the city. The South Side course was mostly African American students, West Side more Hispanic students, North Side more of a mixed group; all folks who were a certain percentage barely above the poverty line. Some of them were working people, just barely scraping by, some of them were on disability, others were just between jobs and trying to find their way

back into a course of self-development, of growth.

Every single one of them was there because they had looked around at their circumstances and decided they wanted something different. They had their own personal clarity. Purpose is a response to need, and what they needed was education and they needed a mind-growing education, and not just more skills. Skills, yes, they needed that. But they also wanted to be a full people. They wanted to be civic people and civic participants, that was what led them to our program. That is why the magic of the Declaration of Independence was so powerful; because “Our Declaration” is a story about a group of people who look around and consider their circumstances not fit for what they deserve in their core human dignity and then seek to do something about it.

PAUL: There are some today who would say

that what came out of the Declaration and what followed created a system of systemic exploitation and racism; but you see it as a liberating document.

BILL: We both found, after spending a great

deal of time poring over the Declaration of Independence entirely independently of one another, an inner core of moral equality as the discriminating concept that makes sense and integrates the entire document. Now, discovering that had to take place against the backdrop of an orthodox interpretation about exclusion, to which you are now referring. So, knowing that orthodox backdrop as we did and still being able to find that inner concept that integrates meant that the document, the text, responded to thought. And the important dimension here is the thinking dimension.

PAUL: What do you think about the fact that

many of the men involved in the creation of the Declaration were slave owners?

DANIELLE: There’s so much to say on this subject. The Declaration of Independence was a joint effort, it was a collaboration.

It was North and South coming together on the committee that was writing the Declaration. John Adams, a man of Massachusetts, was as much an author of the Declaration of Independence as Thomas Jefferson. John Adams never held slaves, never thought that enslavement was acceptable. The language of the Declaration was used by Adams in the Massachusetts Constitution, which was used in Massachusetts before the end of the Revolutionary War to abolish slavery in Massachusetts. So, the Declaration comes as much out of an abolition tradition as it comes out of a Jeffersonian tradition and that is what I meant when I said briefly that this country has always had two voices, at least two. It’s always had a multitude of contesting voices fighting, but that voice of liberty and equality has been there from the beginning.

BILL: What is important to understand is

that people who are working in this collaborative environment were indeed navigating multiple differences, diverse interests, and pathways. It is an abolitionist environment as well as an affirming environment on the part of some slave holding. But slave holding was not the engine driving that process.

From the beginning it was mixed, it was not set in any linear fashion.

DANIELLE: It speaks to the importance of

choice. Often we wrestle with the question of history and should we or should we not be judging people in the past? And certainly, it’s not ours to judge, that’s for a higher power to do, but nonetheless it’s clear that there have always been moral choices in front of people. Even in the 18th century, it was possible to choose abolition, not enslavement, and that we need to say clearly as much as anything else.

BILL: And I would say even more clearly,

because the affirmation of the good and the right is more important to repeat than the evidence of the evil.

PAUL: In looking at the ideas animating the

Declaration, how do they speak to us today and to our democratic situation? What can you tell us about Americans’ confidence right now in our system and how the Declaration might speak to that?

DANIELLE: Your question comes from a

place we all recognize of how much anxiety and pain we all feel right now as we watch our politics. One of the most important things, that is a challenge for us, is a generational divide. It’s just very painful to me, honestly, that for those on college campuses now, the only world you’ve known is one in which we are fighting so bitterly with each other. I know that when people from my generation say things like, “Wow, we did actually used to know how to compromise,” it rings false. How “THERE HAS BEEN QUITE ENOUGH TIME SINCE THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE TO HAVE ESTABLISHED THE REALITY OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE PRINCIPLES UPON WHICH IT WAS FOUNDED. THEY MAY HAVE CONSIDERED IT AN EXPERIMENT AT THE TIME; WE DO NOT HAVE THAT LUXURY. WE HAVE, IN FACT, THE BURDEN OF KNOWING THAT IF IT DOES FAIL, IT WON’T FAIL BECAUSE THE EXPERIMENT FAILED, BUT BECAUSE WE FAILED.”

could such a thing have existed? It sounds nostalgic. It’s important for us to set our faces to the future and figure out how we secure a healthy democracy for the 21st century on 21st century terms.

But I want to just give you a little piece of the Declaration because I think it can animate that work and that thinking. But I have to give you the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence and invite you to carry it around with you and just spend

time thinking about it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

How many of us remembered that that sentence was that long? It is that long. It doesn’t stop after “pursuit of happiness.”

The whole sentence leads to our responsibilities for what we do together for our safety and happiness and responsibility. It puts them on our shoulders to diagnose whether we are building together instruments of shared decision making that can deliver in that way for us. It’s an invitation to thought. And I believe that invitation is how the Declaration can animate the work we need to do for our democracy now.

BILL: As you’ve spoken to them, may I

speak to their elders? I want to reassure the elders who may be the ones most anxious about the survival of the experiment that they needn’t spend much time reflecting on that. For it is not an experiment, it is a fact. There has been quite enough time and quite enough accomplished since the Declaration of Independence to have established the reality of the United States and the principles upon which it was founded.

They may have considered it an experiment at the time; we do not have that luxury. We have, in fact, the burden of knowing that if it does fail, it won’t fail because the experiment failed, but because we failed.

A D A P T E D F RO M A F O R U M AT T H E W H E AT L E Y I N S T I T U T E AT B R I G H A M YO U N G U N I V E R S I T Y I N DECEMBER 2022.

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PRAY FOR THE COURT THE SUPREME COURT’S ‘NEUTRAL’ STANCE ON RELIGION CREATES MORE CHAOS THAN CLARITY

BY STE V E N S MI TH

A

prayer can be more than a prayer; it can be a manifestation of a person’s, or a people’s, overall orientation to life and the world. And a public school can be more than a school; as the institution primarily entrusted with imparting the essential values of the republic to future generations, it can be a site and symbol of the nation’s constitutive principles and aspirations.

So it should not be surprising that cases involving prayer in the public schools can provoke passionate reactions. When the Supreme Court invalidated the traditional practice of classroom prayer in the public schools in the early 1960s, the public reacted with outrage. Historian Bruce Dierenfield reports that the 1962 prayer ruling in Engel v. Vitale provoked “the greatest outcry against a Supreme Court decision in a century.” At a Conference of State Governors, every governor except one denounced Engel and urged enactment of a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.

No comparable public reaction occurred last year when, in Kennedy v. Bremerton 70

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School District, the court ruled, 6-3, in favor of a high school football coach who insisted on kneeling after games in a brief prayer at the 50-yard line (and was sometimes joined by players, of both teams). But the decision

THE CASES ARE NOT JUST ABOUT PRAYER. THEY ARE ABOUT THE MEANING OF AMERICA — ABOUT THE KIND OF REPUBLIC THAT WE IMAGINE OURSELVES TO BE, OR ASPIRE TO BE.

provoked fierce denunciations from critics.

Prominent church-state scholars Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle called the decision “stunning.” Yale professor Justin Driver contended in the Harvard Law Review that Kennedy “represents a brazen, radical break with the Supreme Court’s long-standing tradition.”

Maybe; maybe not. The court did not actually overrule its past prayer decisions.

But it declined to follow doctrines that it had previously used in church-state cases, including the “no endorsement” doctrine, which says governments cannot do or say things that send messages endorsing religion. The disavowal of long-standing doctrine seems potentially momentous.

Even so, a detached observer might find the vehement reactions, then and now, puzzling. The so-called Regents’ Prayer invalidated in Engel (“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country”) consisted of a single sentence with minimal theological content. It seems unlikely that the prayer did much to instill genuine piety; conversely, how burdensome could it have been, seriously, even for nonbelievers to sit through a few seconds of such pieties? And considering all of the controversial, occasionally eccentric, sometimes offensive expressions that teachers and coaches utter and that students have to endure on matters political, cultural, philosophical and religious, is it really such an outrage if a

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football coach wants to kneel for a moment of publicly visible reverence?

But these dismissive reactions miss the real significance of the matter. The cases are not just about prayer. They are about the meaning of America — about the kind of republic that we imagine ourselves to be, or aspire to be.

More specifically, the school prayer cases present a conflict between two competing conceptions of the republic that we might call the “providentialist” and the “secular neutrality” conceptions. And the potentially path-opening Kennedy decision creates an opportune moment to pause and reflect on these conflicting conceptions.

national providentialism prescribed that Americans should acknowledge and supplicate God not merely as private individuals but as a people, or as a nation.

Indeed, the American republic officially began with just such a supplication. In what we could call the inaugural inaugural presidential address, the man elected to lead the new nation began by thanking his fellow citizens for their trust in him and confessing his inadequacy to the great task. How could any mere mortal have the wisdom requisite for such a daunting challenge?

President George Washington then simultaneously answered his own question and discharged an obligation: He declared that “it would be peculiarly improper to omit in

START AT THE beginning, with the providen-

tialist conception. In his book “Providence and the Invention of the United States,” historian Nicholas Guyatt shows how providentialism, or “the belief that God controls everything that happens on earth,” was central to the way Americans understood themselves and their republic in the founding period and thereafter.

Guyatt distinguishes between “personal providentialism,” or the belief that God guides the lives of individuals, and “national providentialism,” which holds that God shapes the destinies of nations. In the colonial and founding periods, Guyatt observes, “many Britons and Americans came to regard personal providentialism as superstitious and backward even as they continued to believe that God directed the fates of nations.”

Nor was providentialism merely a peripheral feature of American life. On the contrary, it was central to “the invention of the United States” — and to the nation’s ongoing self-conception. Providentialist premises shaped public discourse, inspired hope and resolve in desperate times, and conferred on Americans a sense that their nation was not merely an association formed for mutual self-interest but rather a divinely-ordained entity with a providential destiny in the history of the world. And 72

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THE SUPREME COURT DECLARED NOT THAT WE ARE A “CHRISTIAN NATION,” BUT THAT “WE ARE A RELIGIOUS PEOPLE WHOSE INSTITUTIONS PRESUPPOSE A SUPREME BEING.”

this first official act (note that Washington was speaking officially, not just as a private individual who incidentally happened to be president) my fervent supplications to that Almighty being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States, a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes.”

Washington elaborated on the nation’s duty of gratitude to the Almighty. Speaking as the man who had held together the hungry, tattered troops at Valley Forge and who had later presided over a contentious constitutional convention, he was convinced that “(n)o people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand, which conducts the affairs of men more than the

people of the United States.” By any human calculation, after all, a happy outcome could hardly have been anticipated in the war against Britain, or in the constitutional convention. And yet these developments had been blessed by a “providential agency” that had secured their success.

As Washington suggested, prayer was central as both a practical and symbolic measure to the providentialist understanding. Which is hardly surprising: It is in prayer that a person, or a “People,” acknowledges God’s sovereignty and seeks God’s assistance. Thus, one of the first acts of both the Senate and the House of Representatives was to appoint chaplains to begin sessions with prayer. Congress authorized and presidents declared national days of thanksgiving and prayer. Prayers and reverent meditations have appeared in presidential inaugural addresses from Washington’s to Lincoln’s to Kennedy’s to Biden’s. Indeed, Lincoln’s magisterial Second Inaugural, now inscribed on the Lincoln Memorial, was, as Elton Trueblood explains, a “theological classic, containing within its twenty-five sentences fourteen references to God, many scriptural allusions, and four direct quotations from the Bible.”

The providentialist conception has been dynamically inclusive. As the religious composition of the country changed, the specific content of providentialist thinking changed, as well. Nineteenth-century American providentialism was predominantly a Protestant affair. As immigration brought more Catholics and Jews to the country, the Protestant quasi-monopoly would evolve into a more ecumenical faith.

This new situation was captured in Will Herberg’s classic “Protestant-Catholic-Jew.” Herberg described an America constituted by a “conception of the three ‘communions’ — Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism — as three diverse, but equally legitimate, equally American, expressions of an overall American religion.” And as the Supreme Court’s Vietnam-era conscientious objection decisions would demonstrate, the

idea of a “Supreme Being” could even be stretched to cover agnostics.

As Herberg perceived, religious pluralism did not mean the end of providentialism. Indeed, national providentialism may have reached its culmination in the 1950s, the era of “piety on the Potomac.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower repeatedly endorsed the importance of religion to the American way of life. Congress, borrowing from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance; ratifying a statement in the national anthem, Congress officially adopted “In God We Trust” as the national motto.

The Supreme Court declared not that we are a “Christian nation,” as the court had said in 1892, but rather and more ecumenically that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

AND THEN, IN the early 1960s in the school

prayer decisions, the providentialist conception was officially displaced by a new constitutional paradigm — by the “secular neutrality” conception. The key ideas now were that governments are constitutionally required to be “neutral” toward religion and confined, both in their purposes and (in a later elaboration) in their expressions, to the realm of the “secular.” Thomas Jefferson’s legendary “wall of separation between church and state,” in itself a laudable protection of the independence of religious institutions, was now reconstructed to be a wall of separation between government and religion.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that this new paradigm was in direct conflict not only with the American political tradition, but also with itself. Indeed, the very declaration that government must be secular and neutral toward religion itself contradicts the religious views of many Americans — views that teach in accordance with the providentialist tradition that government, while respecting freedom of conscience and refraining from religious coercion, is not supposed to be strictly

secular and religiously neutral. It is paradoxical, perhaps, but true: A “religiously neutral” government is not religiously neutral.

The internal conflicts within the new doctrine were perhaps most starkly conspicuous in the court’s decisions concerning the teaching of evolution in public schools, which ruled that a state can neither prohibit the teaching of evolution nor prescribe a “balanced treatment” of evolution and creationism. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the court insisted that “the state may not adopt programs or practices in its public schools or colleges which ‘aid or oppose’ any religion. This prohibition is absolute.”

Arkansas had prohibited the teaching of IT IS PARADOXICAL, PERHAPS, BUT TRUE: A “RELIGIOUSLY NEUTRAL” GOVERNMENT IS NOT RELIGIOUSLY NEUTRAL.

evolution, the court surmised, because evolution was contradictory to religious teachings. In passing that prohibition, therefore, the state had acted to protect religion, thereby violating the constitutional requirement of religious neutrality.

As Justice Hugo Black pointed out in a concurring opinion, however, the court’s reasoning contradicted itself. If the schools are absolutely prohibited from either “aid(ing) or oppos(ing) any religion” (as the court said they are), and if evolution contradicts some people’s religious beliefs (as the court said it did), the more logical conclusion would be that the schools are constitutionally and absolutely forbidden to teach evolution.

Perhaps the “evolution only” curriculum is indeed the best approach as a pedagogical matter, or even as a constitutional matter.

But not based on the self-contradictory explanation given by the court.

The underlying premise informing the secular neutrality paradigm — one repeatedly asserted by the court — is that religion is a purely private matter. If that premise were correct, then perhaps government could remain neutral with respect to religion by staying within the domain of the secular, while leaving religion alone in the private sphere. Just as an empirical and historical matter, unfortunately, the premise that religion is purely or inherently private in character seems demonstrably wrong.

Indeed, the myriad public manifestations of American providentialism should have proven that religion is far from being a purely private concern.

Still, one can understand why the “private religion” notion might have been enticing to someone like Justice William Brennan, who more than any other jurist was the architect of the “secular neutrality” paradigm. For Brennan, it seems, religion was — and needed to be — a private concern: after all, he had mostly gone to schools and later worked in secular or WASPish settings where he had needed to quarantine his Catholic faith to his private life. In ruling that the Constitution confines religion to the private sphere, Brennan was merely imposing a constraint on his fellow Americans that he had already instinctively adopted for himself.

Moreover, Brennan and his judicial brethren were understandably concerned about the perennial challenge of religious pluralism. In a religiously diverse nation, how is government supposed to respect and to retain the allegiance of a spectrum of citizens?

Treating religion as a purely private matter was far from being a perfect solution to that problem, and in officially preferring one kind of religion (i.e., the purely private kind) over others, the approach itself violated its own ostensible commitment to religious neutrality. Even so, this was — and for many, remains — a tempting response to a genuinely perplexing challenge. It is a sort of “if only” response. If only everyone JULY/AUGUST 2023

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could treat their religion as a purely private affair … (Of course, the adherents of any other position may think much the same thing: If only everyone could just see things the way I do, we could all get along nicely.)

FOR OVER A half-century, the secular neu-

THE MUCH-DECRIED KENNEDY DECISION COULD PROVIDE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR MORE SERIOUS AND LESS PURELY REACTIONARY REFLECTION ON OUR SITUATION AND PROSPECTS.

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trality conception has expressed the official constitutional position. But given its internal instability and its incompatibility with much in the American political tradition, we should not be surprised that the conception has never been rigorously implemented or enforced.

The conception has had far-reaching consequences. Religious-sounding justifications, once a familiar part of public and even lawyerly discourse, have largely been eliminated from the rationales that lawyers and officials give when defending challenged laws. (The marriage cases culminating in the Supreme Court’s constitutional legalization of same-sex marriage are an important case in point.) Until last year, public school prayer was consistently invalidated in its various forms — in the classroom, at graduation ceremonies, before football games, even in an officially prescribed moment of silence “for meditation or voluntary prayer.” Public crosses and religious displays and Ten Commandments plaques have sometimes been declared unconstitutional.

But sometimes not. And despite the efforts of Michael Newdow and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, “In God We Trust” is still inscribed on every dollar bill, and the Pledge of Allegiance persists in describing ours as a nation “under God.” Legislative prayers continue to be offered.

Presidential inaugurations are still rife with religious imagery and expressions.

Officially, these vestiges of providentialism are permissible because they have over time lost their religious significance and now serve mostly to “solemniz(e) public occasions, express confidence in the future, and encourag(e) the recognition of what is worthy of appreciation in society,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor contended. Critics

find these official rationalizations disingenuous. Proponents may be equally disgruntled: Some public religious expressions persist, yes, but only under a sort of hypocritical fog of denial. And among a motley family of constitutional doctrines, many of which are obscure and unevenly applied, the jurisprudence of the First Amendment’s establishment clause has gained the dubious honor of being widely perceived as distinctively erratic or incoherent.

From either a secular or a providentialist perspective, this situation should come as no surprise. A secular observer might predict that the judicial effort to impose on the country a paradigm that is incompatible with much in the country’s traditions was bound to culminate in jurisprudential chaos. A providentialist might see our predicament as vindicating what providentialists have said all along — that, as Benjamin Franklin put it in a plea to the constitutional convention, “(w)e have been assured … in the sacred writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House they labour in vain that build it,’” and that “without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel.”

The much-decried Kennedy decision could provide an opportunity for more serious and less purely reactionary reflection on our situation and prospects. It was to be expected that devotees of the “secular neutrality” paradigm would be traumatized by the decision.

But that paradigm, implicitly flawed from the beginning, has been visibly faltering for some time now. So we might at least try to imagine some better response to the genuinely formidable challenge of religious pluralism — some response other than pretending to a transparently spurious “neutrality.”

Indeed, given the difficulty of the challenge, and considering the fraught condition of American society and politics today, we might even consider other more desperate expedients. Like … prayer, perhaps?

STEVEN SMITH IS CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE I N S T I T U T E F O R L AW & R E L I G I O N A N D T H E I N S T I T U T E F O R L AW & P H I L O S O P H Y AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F S A N D I E G O.

Thank you for 70 years!

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SOLD-OUT SHOW CAN THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER SAVE MOVIE THEATERS?

BY N ATA L I A G A L I C Z A

T

here was something comforting in the way the megaplex never changed. Every time we stepped inside the glass doors of the South Florida Cinemark in Boca Raton, we’d find the same sticky sweet sensations. Bright lights and a dusting of disintegrated popcorn across a carpeted floor. The smell of synthetic butter, the kind employees would squirt over giant buckets of popcorn, golden but disturbing.

Soda dispensers gushing and clicking amid the hum of muffled conversations between elderly couples, teens on first dates, parents and their kids, me and my grandfather.

We fancied ourselves a couple of film buffs, though I was just in middle school.

Every couple weeks, he’d pick me up in his sun-baked black Mercedes-Benz and we’d choose a show during the short drive to the theater. He fell asleep half the time, so he didn’t usually pick, but today he was excited for a rare screening of “The Godfather,” the 1972 mafia classic and one of his favorites.

He saw himself in the cast of mostly Italian men with bushy eyebrows. So I followed his diminutive silhouette into the darkened auditorium, with a frozen Coca-Cola Icee in hand.

A lonely trumpet played in the dark, then a man’s voice spoke with a marked accent, saying “I believe in America.” I saw several 76

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scalps peeking over the backs of red velvet seats, backlit by the screen, and wondered who they belonged to, what they were thinking, whether they’d seen this before. I felt a certain kinship with them because we’d chosen the same movie, forgoing whatever new Marvel installments were playing a few screens over. I didn’t know their names but we were temporarily bound by a shared interest and neighboring seats.

ANOTHER PANDEMIC WAS RAGING IN 1918 WHEN A VAUDEVILLE IMPRESARIO STARTED BUILDING THE PANTAGES THEATER IN DOWNTOWN SALT LAKE CITY, A MARVEL OF ECLECTIC ARCHITECTURE.

I didn’t know then that I was living a quintessential American experience. For more than a century, we’ve gathered to watch films as neighbors and strangers, in small towns and big cities, at strip mall theaters and drive-ins, movie palaces and megaplexes. The cinema was a technical wonder that brought the dramatic arts within reach of the masses, geographically and

financially, and that brought us closer to each other. The silver screen became a symbol of prosperity and culture, but pull back the camera and the audience comes into the picture, laughing, crying, mourning, frightened but daring to hope — together.

Today, that all feels like a distant memory, even at the height of summer blockbuster season, with “Indiana Jones” and “Barbie” on what is now a proverbial marquee. Outside a few brand-name movies, theaters are struggling to rally from three years of social distancing and isolation, and decades of growing competition for our shrinking attention spans. Even before screens went dark in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans were choosing to watch at home — if at all. Streaming is convenient, and sophisticated home theater systems are common, but the cinema also seems to occupy a different place in a society that has largely lost interest in the shared experience. I can’t help wondering if we’re losing more than a big screen.

D O N ’ T W O R R Y , T H E R E are plenty of super-sized movies to watch this summer. Besides Indy, “Mission Impossible,” “Spider-Man” and the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” are back, packed with zingers and special effects. Margot Robbie and

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Ryan Gosling bring the Barbie and Ken dolls to life, though “Barbie” may not be as wholesome as the concept sounds. Serious viewers might prefer historic biopics by big-shot directors, like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” or Martin Scorsese’s “Roosevelt.” Their budgets don’t seem don’t seem to indicate an industry in crisis.

Still, there are signs of trouble. Around 3,000 screens closed down between 2019 and February 2023, when Regal Cinemas, the country’s second largest theater chain, shuttered 39 locations after its parent company filed for bankruptcy. Analysts have blamed lost revenue due to pandemic-era limits on social gathering, along with a 30-percent increase in leasing costs nationally. Meanwhile, the Writers Guild of America went on strike this May for the first time since 2007, saying the industry’s changing economic models have made their jobs untenable.

Even as pandemic aftershocks seem to be wearing off in other industries, box-office numbers fell short in the first quarter of 2023 after totaling just $7.4 billion in 2022, about 25 percent below projections. That’s down a third from $11.3 billion in 2019.

Theater chains are trying new tactics to lure audiences, from direct marketing and loyalty programs to live-streaming events and AMC’s first-ever advertising campaign, a $25 million project starring actress Nicole Kidman. Still, about half as many people went to the movies in 2022 as in 2018, and that could be the most salient figure here.

Attendance numbers portend a longer, more ominous trend. The number of Americans who go to movie theaters actually peaked back in 2002, when an average of $5.81 bought a ticket to franchise films like “The Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter,” “Spider-Man” and “Star Wars.” According to industry observer Nash Information Services, attendance fell 22 percent by 2019, a creeping decline largely obscured by rising ticket prices that kept revenues fairly steady when adjusted for inflation. Today, the average ticket costs about $11. Premium screenings, which accounted for 15 percent of domestic tickets in 2022, average $15.92.

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Imagine taking a family of four or five.

For comparison, basic Netflix costs $10 a month. The streaming service has approximately 74 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. Others like Disney Plus, Hulu, Prime Video, Max, MGM Plus and Paramount Plus are also jockeying for our attention. They compete, in part, with original shows and movies, luxuriously produced, with excellent writing, acting and visual effects. So when “Top Gun: Maverick” was released last year, the blockbuster rehash wasn’t just competing with megaplex neighbors like “Doctor Strange” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Viewers could also stay home and watch the premiere of Star Wars offshoot series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” or binge a new season of “Stranger Things,” without spending another dollar.

THE ANCIENT GREEKS CALLED THIS CATHARSIS, PURGING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS THROUGH VICARIOUS RELEASE. CRYING OVER THE DEATH OF A CHARACTER CAN HELP US TO PROCESS GRIEF.

This is not about who’s winning. You might argue that we all are, as we’ve never had access to such a vast library of video entertainment. The economics of streaming even seem to be boosting the profile of niche audiences who were historically underrepresented in Hollywood, like ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ community, as represented by the projects that reach the screen. But that market fragmentation also reflects our growing isolation from one another, as we each hole up on the couch to watch movies that cater to our own demographic. You might argue that we’re all losing something, too.

A N OT H E R PA N D E M I C WAS raging in 1918

when a vaudeville impresario started building a lavish new theater in downtown Salt Lake City, even as Americans argued about

masking up against the Spanish flu and waited for an end to the Great War. Part of a growing national chain, the Pantages Theater was a marvel of eclectic architecture, incorporating styles from Greek revival to art nouveau. It featured marble floors, opera-style seating, mahogany furnishings and gilded detailing under Tiffany skylights. Spaces like this one were designed to imbue traveling variety shows — from short plays and musical comedies to roller-skating bears — with a little grandeur. But the landscape was already changing and soon the Pantages chain would have to catch up.

From humble beginnings in nickelodeons, storefront theaters and pop-up “air domes,” the American movie house was getting an upgrade. The first-ever movie palace, designed to draw upper-class viewers and make average folks feel special, opened in Harlem in 1913. The idea took off, with more than 4,000 such establishments across the country within a decade, offering amenities like air conditioning, padded seats and child care. As economic infrastructure, movie palaces helped to usher in technical innovations like synchronized sound and technicolor, and epic productions like “Citizen Kane” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Americans loved going to the movies!

When vaudeville was snuffed out by the Great Depression in the 1930s, grand old theaters like the Pantages — then owned by RKO — were converted to full-time cinemas.

And they thrived. “Historically speaking, film was invented at a moment in which the value of public space was very strong,” says Francesco Casetti, the Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. Even with 1 in every 4 workers unemployed, impoverished people uncertain of a safe future still flooded theaters to escape together. By 1933, drive-in theaters brought that shared experience to rural corners that lacked brick-and-mortar alternatives.

Even during great crises like the Second World War, people loved to share a space and watch somebody else’s problems,

laughing or gasping together as fictitious characters navigated a break-up, a bank heist or the loss of a loved one. The ancient Greek philosophers might call this catharsis, a purging and cleansing of negative emotions through vicarious release.

Laughing at on-screen hijinks might offer an escape, as Plato argued, but crying over the death of a character could even help us to process our own grief. Aristotle taught that witnessing tragedy forces us to experience it, learn from it and use our emotions as a tool to navigate the difficulties of what it means to be human.

Science now tells us that both tragedy and comedy flood the brain with feel-good chemicals like oxytocin and endorphins.

And tragedy seems more important for our health, because those who restrain themselves from crying risk weak immune systems, cardiovascular disease or hypertension in the long term. In either case, being part of an audience can help us to access those feelings.

Perhaps this has something to do with mirror neurons, brain cells specialized in reacting to another’s observed behavior.

Some scientists believe these cells enable humans to empathize and cooperate. “It is as though this neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view,” explained neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran during a TED Talk. The UC San Diego researcher called mirror neurons the basis of our civilization and said the best way to activate them and their empathetic benefits is to sit back and watch.

By the 1950s, the Pantages had been renamed the Utah Theatre, with a neon sign to match. The downtown landmark had a Hollywood-style marquee announcing the latest shows and stars like Robert Mitchum and Kathrine Hepburn. The remodeled building now had two screens in stacked theaters, as Americans in that prosperous time had money to spend and time to kill.

Cars that were not yet classics lined Main Street. But even golden eras pass. demolished without ceremony one Tuesday morning last

T H E PA N TAG E S WA S

year. An engine growled and the head of a wrecking crane crashed through a wall of light-colored bricks, then did it again and again. A bearded activist watched from a half-block away, a year after he chained himself to the theater doors in protest. His legal effort to save the building had failed, so now he streamed its demise. And rather than joining him in person, many who backed his efforts watched their phones in horror, probably missing the irony. Today it’s just a hole in the ground.

Like any industry, the theater business rises and falls with societal trends and its ability to adapt. Vaudeville died in the 1930s; movies took its place. After World War II, the middle class moved to the sub-

HIS LEGAL EFFORT TO SAVE THE PANTAGES HAD FAILED, SO NOW HE STREAMED ITS DEMISE. MANY WHO BACKED HIS EFFORTS WATCHED THEIR PHONES IN HORROR, PROBABLY MISSING THE IRONY.

urbs and cinemas followed, expanding drive-ins and moving in next to grocery stores to show reassuring Westerns and patriotic war movies with stars like John Wayne. In the 1960s, counter-culture’s success accelerated the breakup of the old studio system as theaters became a front in the fight for desegregation. By the 1980s, when the rise of blockbusters with sequels like “Ghostbusters” and “Die Hard” called for over-the-top venues, megaplexes followed Americans to the mall.

In 2020, movies followed us home.

That’s when Nolan — who also directed “Inception,” “Interstellar” and “The Dark Knight” — promised a future for cinemas, in a piece for The Washington Post. “Much of this short-term loss is recoverable,” he wrote. “When this crisis passes, the need for collective human engagement, the need to live and love and laugh and cry together, will be more powerful than ever.”

But from another perspective, streaming to a phone, a laptop, or a home theater — picture a huge wall-mounted TV screen with a surround sound speaker system and a comfy sofa — could just be a new, convenient form of distribution. Maybe a living room is ideal for binging mega-franchises like Marvel and “Star Wars” with our families, cinematic universes that link dozens of films, TV series and cartoons into larger stories. Or maybe we’ll just watch memes. Our collective attention span has shrunk almost beyond repair since 2000, now ranging from eight to 12 seconds. That’s due to technology like smartphones, which, uncoincidentally, should be turned off in theaters.

Casetti calls the shift away from communal experience “a question of generations,” because “the primary experience for kids is the electronic screen.” In his book, he writes: “There is a persistence of cinema, but it faces deep transformations at every step of the way,” yet what remains unchanged is how “we are convinced that it is the permanence of this idea — the permanence of a form of experience — that guarantees the survival of cinema.”

There’s still hope. An S&P Global report found last year that the loyal moviegoers who typically attend screenings at least once a month were trickling back. And some blockbusters have bucked trends.

Last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick” — initially released in theaters only — passed $700 million in ticket sales to become the fifth highest grossing film in North American history. Still this year’s summer blockbusters will have to pull their weight to resuscitate theaters nationwide.

Either way, for the first time, we’ve come face to face with the reality of what the death of the movie theater could look like.

It’s a future with not only less connection, but fewer places to seek it out. I can’t point any fingers; I haven’t attended movies with any regularity since that summer with my grandpa. I was thrilled to see “The Godfather,” honored that he took me along. But mostly I remember stealing glances at him, gauging which parts resonated with him and why. That’s what resonated with me.

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THE LAST WORD

TARA L E I GH GROV E

TO DISAGREE IN GOOD FAITH A CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR REMINDS US TO CONSIDER OTHER POINTS OF VIEW

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

N

obody told Tara Leigh Grove she couldn’t get into Harvard Law School. She knew that’s what she wanted as a sixth grader in Kentucky, after she successfully defended the third Little Pig against a murder charge in a mock trial for killing the Big Bad Wolf. No one told her that her family wasn’t well-heeled or sophisticated enough to get her there, so she remained optimistic and determined, working her way to the Supreme Court chair of the Harvard Law Review before clerking for Judge Emilio Garza on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

But it was at Duke University, where she studied political science, that Grove found her specific path. At 19, she took a class in constitutional law and became obsessed with the topic. “That was almost all my side reading,” she says. “It’s embarrassing how little fiction I read.” She decided to be a constitutional law professor. Again, nobody told her that would be hard to achieve. So she did that, too, after a few years working at the Department of Justice.

She also studied French and Japanese as an undergraduate, because each new language offers “a different point of view 80

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about the world.” She credits that experience with helping her to appreciate different perspectives on the law, particularly when working in “interpretative theory.”

These days, as America ponders legal questions sprouting from political arguAFFECTIVE POLARIZATION IS ONE OF THE MOST WORRISOME DANGERS FOR PLURALISM, BECAUSE IT MAY BE DESCRIBING A COUNTRY THAT WE DON’T HAVE.

that various approaches are legitimate, even if I may have one that I strongly prefer. It’s recognizing that the way other people approach interpretation is OK. In the public sphere, there are also various ways that people can feel about our legal and political systems. Metapluralism assumes that different approaches are legitimate, even if there are some things that are totally illegitimate. For example, you can think that Nazism is completely illegitimate, and still be a metapluralist who understands that some people are Democrats and some are Republicans and that’s legitimate.

WHY IS PLURALISM IMPORTANT?

ments, Grove sometimes finds herself in the hot seat outside the classrooms at the University of Texas, called by national media to help explain legal controversies.

Deseret magazine asked her about those and more.

HOW DO YOU DEFINE ‘PLURALISM’?

In the academy, you hear about different approaches to interpreting the Constitution or a statute. Faith in pluralism, which I call metapluralism, is a belief

I think it is valuable in any society as diverse as ours on many levels. Society and our legal system can work better if there is a background assumption that most people are operating in good faith and from sincere belief, even if they hold beliefs that you don’t share. This idea will lead to compromise and mutual understanding.

I think many people in our society don’t think that’s a good thing. It’s about my side should win, your side should lose. I see this on both the left and the right. A

broader functioning society recognizes, let me be understanding toward one political faction knowing that I may not always win elections and I would like to be treated with some good faith and understanding when I lose.

IS PLURALISM UNDER THREAT?

Affective polarization is one of the biggest threats to our pluralism. This is a concept that even if people aren’t actually that divided, even if they do not have certain partisan beliefs, and even if individuals in each party aren’t actually as different as their representatives in Congress are, there is a view among many Democrats that Republicans believe X, Y and Z, which is inherently bad. And conversely, there is a belief among Republicans that Democrats must believe X, Y and Z, which is bad. It is an assumption we are polarized as a society, even if it may not be true. There’s a lot of evidence that Congress and state legislatures are polarized, but it’s not clear that people believe these very clear things. I’m sure you and I know people who have a variety of different views on issues that don’t fall neatly into a Democratic/Republican category. I think that’s why you see more people finding friends and church groups and people they work with that are ideologically aligned with them, because it’s more comfortable and you can trust those folks.

IS THAT AS PROBLEMATIC AS IT SOUNDS?

Affective polarization is one of the most worrisome dangers for pluralism, because it may be describing a country that we don’t have. Maybe there are a lot more people who are moderate and complex and pluralistic in their own views. I know people who have very mixed views on issues like abortion and guns and vaccines and government involvement in society — much more complex than one would think by reading news headlines about political parties. But if they don’t

trust that other people also have complex views, that makes it hard for them to have friends and trust those who belong to different registered political groups. For people who really do have set views about the world — typically on the far left or the far right — compromise is seen as failure.

The only goal is to win and defeat the other side. That’s terrible for our society.

SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT CALLS TO SCRAP THE CONSTITUTION?

This is a reflection of broader dissatisfaction with our current political culture.

Some of the angst and anger comes from the assumption that Supreme Court decisions really do equal the Constitution. I have never equated constitutional meaning with the latest Supreme Court decision. I’ve always believed that different parts of the government and members of the public have both a duty and a right to understand the Constitution in our own way. Nothing happening right now is written in stone. As I tell my students, if there’s something you’re dissatisfied with in our system, you can be the engines of change. The Constitution is so short, so lacking in detail. That’s one of the beauties of our system, that people can read this document and see it as doing very different things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan had very strong views about what the Constitution should mean.

And they were not the same at all.

IS SUPREME COURT REFORM LIKELY?

I served on President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court commission in 2021. The very existence of a commission studying reform is a sign that all is not well with the Supreme Court’s public reputation.

Norms change. One that developed over time was that federal officials and state and local officials had to comply with federal court orders. Another was that federal court judges cannot be removed except by impeachment. Both became norms by the mid-20th century. But the norm against court packing — or expansion, as

you call it if you’re in favor — is one of the strongest.

ROOSEVELT WANTED TO EXPAND THE COURT. IS THAT EXPERIENCE INSTRUCTIVE TO US NOW?

There was actually a good deal of support for FDR’s effort to expand the Supreme Court. A couple of things changed.

Sen. Joe Robinson, a leader in the fight to pack the court, died. And the Supreme Court modified its jurisprudence in the spring of 1937. People disagree as to why, but I argue that there was not a strong norm against court expansion at the time.

There were mixed views and with overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt could have gotten it through. The norm against court packing took shape starting in the 1950s. People on both sides of the political aisle began using the term as a political epithet.

Whenever anybody proposed court reform they’d say, oh, that’s court packing. When a president would nominate a judge or justice the other side didn’t like, that would be called court packing. Is the current administration going to propose expanding the Supreme Court? Almost certainly not. President Biden has shown very little appetite for that. Could a future president on either side do that? Yeah.

I see the appetite for that increasing. I think, for better or worse, there’s a decent chance that conversation will impact how the Supreme Court decides cases.

ANY LAST WORD?

Whenever people envision reform, whether of the Supreme Court or the Constitution writ broadly, I want them to ask themselves, what if somebody with whom you strongly disagreed with politically was the person advocating this reform? How would you feel about it then? We’ve always had different factions. But it’s valuable if people treat folks who disagree with them as having good faith and think hard about their own proposals as if someone else was doing it.

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PARTING SHOT

COTTAGE CHEESE SALAD

UTAH GREEN JELLO WITH CARROTS

RED HOT CINNAMON JELLO APPLE SALAD

CROWN JEWEL SALAD

SALAD PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL GEORGE

A visualization of salad creations from Latter-day Saint ward cookbooks from a series “exploring the interconnection of faith, food, community, culture, heritage and history.”

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On the way to Arlington National Cemetery, nursing students from Brigham Young University assist military veterans participating in the Honor Flight Program. As they care for those who sacrificed for freedom, they see firsthand how people need more than medicine to fully heal.

Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.

BYU.EDU/FORTHEWORLD

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