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M AG A Z I N E
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THE BIG SQUEEZE SKI TOWNS & THE DISAPPEARING MIDDLE CLASS BY HEATHER HANSMAN
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CAN MODERATES HOLD AMERICA’S CENTER?
APRIL
ON WHY BLACK HISTORY MATTERS
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OF PEACE BY TIM SCHULTZ
FINDING KYRSTEN SINEMA
What does the enigmatic senator from Arizona want? BY ETHAN BAUER
THE ENEMY WITHIN BY TOM NICHOLS
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34 “Her life and personality have given her the capacity not to be swayed by the crowd.”
FINDING KYRSTEN SINEMA WHAT DRIVES THE ARIZONA SENATOR WHO HAS CONFOUNDED HER PARTY AND STALLED JOE BIDEN’S AGENDA? by ethan bauer
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THE ENEMY WITHIN
PEAKED
GENUINE CIVIC SPIRIT DOESN’T STAND A CHANCE WHEN GOOD NEIGHBORS ARE BAD CITIZENS.
SKI-TOWN ECONOMICS PRESENT A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR AMERICA’S STRUGGLING MIDDLE CLASS. by heather hansman
by tom nichols
ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GALL
FEBRUARY 2022
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CONTENTS
MAGAZINE
“We’d never heard before of the specific stories some images depicted. Nor of the longhidden beauty and resilience of the people in them.”
COMMENTARY
THE POLITICS OF PEACE
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CULTURE
WHAT THE PICTURE MAN TOLD ME How images connect us to our family history — and the broader history of humanity. by berkley hudson
THE ART OF ‘YES’
by ethan bauer
BOOKS
WHY DEMOCRACY NEEDS RELIGION
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The surprising checks and balances religions provide for the U.S. democratic system.
70
by mya jaradat
THE WEST
by tim schultz
BEFORE THEY’RE GONE MODERN FAMILY
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THE LAST WORD
30
A FIREWALL OF FAITH
A range of efforts aim to preserve the iconic flora and fauna of the western U.S.
The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez wants to protect the right to worship or not worship.
by hannah seo
by lois collins
What to expect when we’re not expecting.
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66
by lois m. collins
A LOVE FOR THE AGES
74
A Sundance Institute exec on embracing new experiences and lifting up diverse voices.
How supposed adversaries can find unexpected common ground.
AMERICA THE CHILDLESS
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20
It turns out the rules of engagement aren’t that different for older vs. younger singles. by ethan bauer
MY DIVINE CAR LINE Finding the sublime in the mundane tasks of parenting. by mya jaradat
22
NATIONAL AFFAIRS
THE NEW CULTURE WAR 24 How the shifting debate on school curriculums could affect the coming midterm elections. by benoît morenne
IDEAS
TRUST Is the federal government getting away with using religious faith to spy on citizens? by asma t . uddin
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THE IMPORTANCE OF 64 BLACK HISTORY MONTH Reckoning with the past. by jelani cobb
HIGH-CALIBER INFLUENCE
66
What’s behind the NRA’s outsized sway over American politics? Hint: It’s not just money. by matthew j. lacombe
FEBRUARY 2022
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CONTRIBUTORS
ASMA T. UDDIN
JELANI COBB
TIM SCHULTZ
TOM NICHOLS
Asma T. Uddin is a research fellow at the Aspen Institute and a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum Institute. She’s the author of the book “When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom,” and her essays on religious freedom have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his writing on race, politics, history and culture. He has authored three books, including “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.” A professor of journalism at Columbia University, he was a PBS “Frontline” correspondent for two documentaries, “Policing the Police” and “Whose Vote Counts.”
Tim Schultz is the president of the 1st Amendment Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for religious freedom. He previously was the state legislative policy director for the American Religious Freedom Program in the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. He has testified before Congress and more than 15 state legislatures.
Tom Nichols is a U.S. Naval War College professor and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and the Harvard Extension School. A contributor to The Atlantic, he has written extensively about international affairs and published seven books, including “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy.”
HANNAH SEO
CHRIS GALL
RAÚL ARIAS
JING LI
Hannah Seo is a science journalist, essayist, podcast writer and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She has written about plastic pollution, oil and gas wells, illegal fishing and custom keyboards for Wired, Popular Science, Scientific American and the podcast “20 Thousand Hertz,” among others. She’s a graduate of New York University’s science, health and environmental reporting program.
Chris Gall is an awardwinning, internationally recognized illustrator and author. His artwork has appeared in Time, Newsweek, People, Fortune, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He’s a regular contributor to Arizona Highways magazine and has written and illustrated several children’s books, including the “Dinotrux” series. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Raúl Arias is an awardwinning graphic designer and illustrator from Madrid, Spain. After working in the field of audiovisual animation, he started illustrating “Bernardo and Plonk,” a comic series for the El País newspaper. His work for El Mundo has been recognized by the Society for News Design and the Society of Publication Designers.
Jing Li is a Beijing-based illustrator whose work has been featured in Smithsonian magazine, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Her clients include international brands Mercedez-Benz and BMW, and she has received numerous awards for her work, including from the Association of Illustrators and from Communication Arts.
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THE VIEW FROM HERE
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS
I
magine you’re invited to a mysterious retreat with two dozen people. You arrive at the location and begin to mingle with the other guests. The host then divides everyone into two groups before announcing they will compete in a series of games. How might this competition influence group dynamics? In the 1950s, a team of researchers conducted a study to answer that question. Known as the Robbers Cave experiment, boys from similar backgrounds were brought to a summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. There, over the course of three weeks, the boys were split into teams and pitted against each other in a series of camp games for prizes. Researchers found that this competitive group dynamic resulted in negative feelings and actions, including name-calling, taunting and pranks. During a two-day cooling off period, the counselors asked the boys to describe the rival group. They characterized their own team in positive terms while slandering the other. The Robbers Cave study, and other similar experiments, have found that group hostility and conflict arise when groups perceive another group as a threat or competitor for finite resources. It’s easy to see how this phenomenon might play out in politics. Opposing parties and interests treat one another as rivals in a zero-sum game for policy outcomes. But in a recent speech at the University of Virginia, President Dallin H. Oaks of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called on fellow “followers of Christ” to choose a rad-
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ically different path — a path toward harmony and peace in the face of political conflict. “Far from being a weakness,” President Oaks said, “reconciling adverse positions through respectful negotiation is a virtue. As Jesus taught, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’ ” This month’s issue of Deseret Magazine delves deeper into the mechanics of political peacemaking. Tim Schultz, president of the 1st Amendment Partnership, discusses how to apply the politics of peace in a pluralistic society bitterly divided over social issues; Tom Nichols, professor at the U.S. Naval War College, unpacks the virtues that make for more cohesive and cooperative local communities; and Deseret Magazine staff writer Ethan Bauer takes us behind the scenes to understand why Arizona’s Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is becoming controversial within her own political party for working with colleagues across the aisle. Many remember the Robbers Cave experiment for how it caused boys to feud, but one of the most intriguing parts of the study is what followed. Although the researchers found that face-to-face contact did little to quell hostilities, they discovered that when the groups worked together to solve a common problem tensions ceased. Whether fellow citizens in the United States can do the same is perhaps the nation’s most urgent political question entering the new year. —HAL BOYD
FEBRUARY 2022
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MAG AZINE
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Deseret Magazine, ISSN PP324 is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in December/January and July/August. The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret. com/subscribe. Copyright 2022 Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
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OPENING SHOT
FOOTPRINTS AND APPROACHING STORM NEAR SPRING BAY, AT THE NORTH END OF THE GREAT SALT LAKE
just below the surface of the Great Salt Lake, a thick salt crust allowed photographer Paul Adams to walk several hundred yards out into the lake. He treaded lightly on the surface and the water was only six inches deep. Any sudden moves would cause the delicate crust to break and he would be up to his hips in salt water and mud. This past July, the Great Salt Lake was sitting 10 feet below its average level, the lowest depth its ever been measured. Without a concerted effort to care for the lake, a delicate ecosystem could collapse, spurring toxic dust storms and forever changing this ethereal landscape. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL ADAMS
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FEBRUARY 2022
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COMMENTARY
THE POLITICS OF PEACE THOSE WILLING TO SET ASIDE SUSPICIONS ON BOTH SIDES CAN FIND UNEXPECTED COMMON GROUND BY TI M SCHULTZ
O
ur political age has come to mirror what’s called the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Two bank robbers await trial. If they remain silent, it might be hard for the prosecutor to prove their guilt. So separately the prosecutor presents each prisoner with an offer: a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against the other prisoner. Herein is the prisoner’s dilemma: Stay silent or take the deal? Thankfully, most people don’t face this kind of situation. But every day we make judgments about whether to trust or cooperate. Nowhere does this play out more acutely than in the political arena. Studies demonstrate our tribal differences over politics are deeper and more intense than at any point in 50 years. Having spent my career on public policy issues in Washington, D.C., and in more than 30 state capitals, the biggest change I’ve witnessed over a generation is that our politics have become devoid of the kind of trust rooted in personal relationships. As cable news and online platforms increasingly mediate political discourse, lawmakers are incentivized to promote their own brands, rather than work cooperatively to solve complex problems for constituents. But in my interactions with hundreds of lawmakers and activists from both parties, I’ve discovered a small yet determined minority that’s reimagining the prisoner’s dilemma and cultivating an approach that one religious leader recently called the “Politics of Peace.” These policymakers are cooperating with former ideological adversaries to find solutions. It’s underreported, but on some of our thorniest challenges — criminal justice, immigration, and the clash between LGBTQ rights and religious freedom — risky and unlikely friendships are leading to innovative policy ideas and outcomes.
And the process of working together to find these outcomes has created outposts of social peace. Relationships often start because of frustrating impasses. The renaissance in criminal justice reform over the last decade began when conservative intellectuals and many faith groups began asking questions about whether some aspects of our legal system were effective and consistent with their first principles. This led to fruitful partnerships with progressives with similar long-held concerns, but who were incapable of pressing reforms federally or in red states. For the last six years, I’ve worked alongside leaders from a diverse array of religious and LGBTQ groups seeking to duplicate the “Utah Compromise” nationally, in order to broadly protect LGBTQ rights and religious freedom. Many entered the conversations as their “Plan C.” Social conservatives realized that attempting to pass religious freedom protections like the First Amendment Defense Act failed even in red states. And they were skeptical that LGBTQ rights advocates would ever care about religious freedom, which some progressives had slandered as a “license to discriminate.” Those willing to set aside suspicions on both sides found unexpected common ground. Even when the process didn’t produce a clear legislative win, the process itself changed lives. Fighting for the rights of once-feared adversaries causes people to see the wisdom of C.S. Lewis’ observation that “When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him.” The results in Utah are remarkable. A decade ago, there was probably not another red state in which LGBTQ issues were more complicated. Today polls show that Utahns remain conservative on the definition of marriage, but 77 percent support LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections. In 2018, that was the second-highest rate in the nation. (At the time, only New Hampshire was higher.) The common denominator in all “Politics of Peace” success stories is years of building relationships of trust. There is also a kind of mindset among those who make the first move toward vulnerability and cooperation. Some scholars have suggested that life is less like a prisoner’s dilemma and more like a “snowdrift dilemma.” If a road is blocked by snow, you can hope someone else shovels it out of the way so you can sit in your warm car or house. But if you go outside with a shovel, that act will benefit you, and everyone else around you, regardless of whether others do the same. But more likely than not other shovels will soon arrive. We can take that first vulnerable step. We can refuse to argue with acquaintances about politics online; we can lean into friendships and conversations with people with asymmetrical views. As Eboo Patel, the president of the Interfaith Youth Core, observed, “We are much more cooperative with each other in real life than on cable news.” “Blessed are the peacemakers” is true about politics, too. And the more people try it and model it, the more our politics will change for the better. T I M S C H U LT Z I S T H E P R E S I D E N T O F 1 S T A M E N D M E N T PA RT N E R S H I P, A N O N P R O FI T O R G A N I Z AT I O N D E D I C AT E D T O P R O T E C T I N G R E L I G I O U S F R E E D O M FO R A M E RI C A N S O F A L L FA I T H S.
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MODERN FAMILY
AMERICA THE CHILDLESS A GROWING SHARE OF ADULTS DON’T WANT TO HAVE KIDS. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN WE’RE NOT EXPECTING BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S
H
aving children is not an expectation or desire for a growing share of childless American adults, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. And many who are already parents say they don’t plan to have more children. Pew’s findings come amid news that the U.S. birthrate, which already hit a record low before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, is continuing to fall. The decline in births worries many policymakers, demographers and others who say that a country needs children in order to secure a healthy future. In the survey, conducted in October, Pew found that about 44 percent of nonparents ages 18 to 49 deem it “not too likely” or “not at all likely” they’ll have kids, compared to 37 percent who said the same in 2018. And threefourths of adults younger than 50 who have children said they are not likely to have more. Childless men and women were about as likely to say they don’t plan on having any or more kids. However, younger adults were more likely than those in their 40s to see the possibility of children in their future, said the report’s author, Anna Brown, a research associate focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center. While reasons vary, the top response from those who don’t plan to ever be parents is “I just don’t want to.” That response was given by 56 percent of childless adults who say having kids is not likely. Other commonly named factors were medical reasons, money, not having a partner, age and the state of the world. 18
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Among those who gave other reasons, 5 percent listed the environment and climate change while 2 percent said their partner doesn’t want kids. Pew enabled each person to choose up to three different factors to explain why they probably wouldn’t have children. More than six in 10 parents who don’t plan to have more kids said that’s by choice. A DEMOGRAPHER FROM THE INSTITUTE FOR F AMILY S TUDIES SPOKE R ECENTLY OF “GRAVE C ONSEQUENCES FOR SOCIETY, FOR E CONOMIC GROWTH, FOR THE VIABILITY OF GENERATIONAL TRANSFERS.”
While men and women generally give pretty similar answers on why they may or may not have kids in the future, fathers were more likely than mothers to say they don’t want more kids. Mothers were more likely to cite medical reasons for not wanting more kids. WHI LE IT ’S NOT clear what the implications of these findings might be, a number of experts have drawn a stark picture of the impact on the U.S. economy if birthrates decline. With the U.S. birthrate already at the lowest point ever, Lyman Stone, demographer and Institute for Family Studies research fel-
low, spoke recently of “grave consequences for society, for economic growth, for the viability of generational transfers.” He noted, too, that women are not having the number of babies they say they’d like to have. Many social policies were expanded during the growing-family era of the ’50s and ’60s, including Social Security, a program that bolsters the finances of older adults when they retire. That era’s robust family growth was almost twice what it is today, and contributed to economic growth, entrepreneurship and bustling schools and universities. Family growth even helped older adults buy homes and accumulate wealth that would go to their children. Smaller generations are likely to mean smaller lifestyles. And working-age adults could find they’re the skinny end of an inverted pyramid, trying to support a larger generation that needs programs like Social Security and Medicare. Stone warned rich and poor could both feel the pinch of fewer births, since the stock market needs customers to buy products and services that boost the company’s value. And while many older Americans have wealth on paper in their home, that wealth doesn’t become real unless someone’s willing to buy it from them. The American Enterprise Institute has also noted that not only are people having fewer babies but the share of “never-marrieds” is rising. The institute’s report suggests those most likely to get married and have children are the rich, the religious and Republicans.
The analysis, based on two new YouGov surveys conducted for the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies, said that the desire to have children had nearly halved from what it was before the pandemic began, shrinking to 10 percent. “What I see as the most interesting finding is the decline of interest in having children among lower-income Americans,” said Wendy Wang, research director at the Institute for Family Studies. “Traditionally, people with lower incomes tend to have more children, but the gap in fertility between the rich and poor has been narrowing in recent years. In our survey, we see the desire for children fell by 11 percentage points among lower-income Americans since COVID-19 started, but stayed stable for higher-income Americans.” In “More Work, Fewer Babies: What Does Workism Have To Do With Falling Fertility?” — released earlier this year — Stone and Institute for Family Studies senior fellow Laurie DeRose, of The Catholic University of America, made the case that increasingly work- focused personal values “can also mean that many men and women find their preferred balance to be more work and less family.” They found that a “meaningful career” aspect of employment predicted lower fertility, while valuing work because it provides a good standard of living did not. Stone said existing popular theories haven’t addressed why a personal identity tied into family would be less important than a work-focused identity. The nationally representative 2021 American Family Survey, released in October by the Deseret News and BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, looked at whether policies that helped families could prompt couples to choose to be parents. “Asked about a child benefit from the government, 17 percent of those in what’s broadly considered prime childbearing years said it would increase their interest in having children,” the Deseret News reported at the time. Shawn Fremstad, a senior fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, described a policy that gives families a per-child benefit as “basically a GI Bill for parents. In addition to providing concrete supports that will ease the time and money burdens that nearly all potential parents face, it sends a powerful message that raising children is valuable and essential work. If it doesn’t raise the U.S. birthrate, it’s hard to imagine any other set of policies that will.” ILLU STR ATION BY C A R O LE H É N A FF
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MODERN FAMILY
A LOVE FOR THE AGES IT TURNS OUT THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AREN’T THAT DIFFERENT FOR OLDER VS. YOUNGER SINGLES BY E TH A N B AU E R
S
ometimes, before a date, Christina Thomas flutters like she’s at any age,” she says, “and you can be in love at any age.” Statistically headed to the prom. “You still cry over love songs, just like you speaking, though, older singles are less likely to date than their younger do when you’re 16,” she says. “It truly is almost like being 16.” Yes, like a counterparts. Data published by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found teenager, she’ll scour her closet for the perfect dress and slip on her treathat 50 percent of single Americans ages 50 to 64 aren’t looking for a resured ring, which features a pair of calla lilies bedazzled with diamonds. lationship or casual dates, while the same is true for 75 percent of single She might recurl her hair if she’s headed out after work or spritz on some Americans over 65. Yet for those who do continue to venture into the “Pretty,” by Elizabeth Arden — her longtime favorite perfume. romantic wilderness, the ecosystem they find is often similar to the one Tonight, however, is not such a night. inhabited by the young: a place where online dating dominates, where Tonight, it’s Monday, and she’s just finished a day’s work as an insurdesires are varied and multifaceted. Sure, some things — like what makes ance agent. She’s headed out, but it’s no big thing. She doesn’t change a person attractive — change, but many more stay the same. And older out of the flats, black slacks and silky royal-blue blouse she wore to the singles are less likely to get married, for a cornucopia of reasons — finanoffice, nor does she worry about the liner around her frost-blue eyes. cial, societal, familial. But, Fisher observes, “that doesn’t mean that older The 54-year-old puts on some lip gloss, runs a brush through her blond people don’t want to love and don’t want to be loved.” locks and heads into a St. George Cafe Sabor to meet her date for tacos. A great place to understand this dynamic is Utah’s own St. George She doesn’t think he’s her type, but he earned his shot by doing some— one of America’s best places to retire. That’s where I found 58-yearthing as rare among older singles as it is for 20-somethings on Tinder, old Tina Jasper, who’s been single for 26 years. She’s caught between Bumble and Hinge: Rather than text her with “Are you busy Friday?” or oscillating mental forces of wanting to meet someone but feeling the infamous “U up?” he called her. “I was wondering if you would like to like she isn’t “worthy.” Her experience has conditioned the latter atgo to dinner on Saturday night at 6 p.m.?” he asked. titude. One guy recently got her number and “Dude,” she thought to herself, “that’s the way you never called. “Guys just don’t seem like they’re do it!” She barely knew the guy — they’d chatted interested in me,” she says. “I’m not ugly! I’m five briefly on Facebook Messenger, and a quick apfoot three, I’m tiny, I’m super bubbly — guys like SOME THINGS, LIKE praisal of his profile told her they probably weren’t that, I thought.” But she holds onto hope because WHAT MAKES A a match, but, “Sure,” she told him, because such of her mother, who herself found a rejuvenating PERSON ATTRACTIVE, CHANGE. BUT bluntness is rare and appreciated. “Yes?” he said. romance later in life. “It was like she was 16 again,” MANY MORE STAY “No one ever says yes.” Jasper says, which is why she keeps herself open THE SAME. Thomas is a believer in love. She’s twice divorced, to aching and elation alike. “Love is always there. so she isn’t willing to rush into anything — not even Love will always be there.” for Valentine’s Day, which for her is just another day Like any large group, older singles are not a to be “loving and kind.” But this February and every monolith. James Rowe, an investment banker who February, she nevertheless refuses to stop looking. The “twitterpation,” goes by Jim, is 62 and has never been married. A devout Latter-day as she calls it, of new romance is just as intense as ever, despite one friend Saint, he actively looked for someone until his late 30s. He saw friends who tells her it’ll never be the same. “That’s r eally sad,” she tells me. “I rushing into ill-advised marriages as if running from a ticking clock, and believe that I can have a passionate love affair until the day I die. So I he resolved never to settle. “I’m better off alone than with somebody haven’t given up on that.” Which is why she sits down with an open mind and miserable,” he says. But he’s recently decided to start looking again. beside a man she already doubts will make it to a second date. The call of companionship, he admits, is a serious one. He’s still not Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and senior research fellow at going to settle, acknowledging that his life is wonderful and fulfilling Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute who doubles as the chief scientific already, and that even as he ages, he doesn’t fear dying alone. “You’d officer for Match.com, says such an attitude is very normal. An appetite be surprised how many people die alone,” he says. “(It’s) most people. I for companionship doesn’t have to diminish with age. “You can be scared have a great life. And if I found somebody that added to that, wonderat any age, you can be happy at any age, be fearful at any age, be angry ful! If not, I’m fine.” 20
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Now, let’s consider Brenda. She told me her maiden name, her first married name and her second married name, and said I could use them. But, “None of those names belong to me. The only name that belongs to me is Brenda.” Which is why she goes by Brenda and Brenda alone in her day-to-day life, and why (among other reasons) I choose to call her only Brenda in these pages. Brenda grew up as the oldest of seven children and was married at 17 to a man who had groomed her from the time she first babysat his kids as a 10-year-old. He was 20 years her senior, and she immediately became a teenage mother to five stepchildren. ILLU STR ATION BY H A N N A H D E C KE R
By 19, she’d added two children of her own. “I was exhausted,” she admits. Her first husband died from blood poisoning when she was 45. Therapy helped her unpack and acknowledge the trauma he’d caused, but she still wasn’t looking to date. Until she met Mike. “He just kind of came into my life and made me fall in love. I’d never fallen in love with anyone before,” she says. “He kind of — cherished me. And I never knew what that felt like.” They married in 2016, which wasn’t an easy decision. The government was sending her deceased husband’s Social Security payments to her — payments that would stop if she remar-
ried. She decided to do it anyway. “I really felt like I was supposed to marry him,” she says. “I grew to love him.” But Mike, it turned out, had some past demons Brenda didn’t know about. In 2018, he died by suicide. So now, at 56, Brenda is done looking — first and foremost because of simple, devastating correlation. “I feel like a black widow,” she says. “Like if I get married again, that person will die, too.” She knows, on some level, that such fear is irrational. But even when she employs a more rational approach, she still isn’t interested. “I have never been in a house with no children, even to this day,” she CONTI NUED ON PAGE 80 FEBRUARY 2022
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MODERN FAMILY
MY DIVINE CAR LINE FINDING THE SUBLIME IN THE MUNDANE TASKS OF PARENTING
BY M YA JA R A DAT
D
rawing near my daughter’s school in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, I cross a bridge — an overpass that takes me high above Interstate 95. Suspended in the air for a moment, I look down and see what’s ahead: a quarter-mile line of cars, all those red brake lights piling up. Car line. I prepare myself mentally: I turn off the radio and turn on DashPass, the app that lets the school know when I’ve arrived on campus and then lets me know when my daughter has been released from class. As I turn into campus, yellow signs advise: “School zone/No cellphone use.” And so I silence mine and tuck it into my purse. Quiet descends. Far from the interstate, car line at a standstill, the hum of traffic is gone. No one honks. Because there’s no point — car line is unmovable, unchangeable. We line up because there’s no choice. There’s nothing else we can do. As we edge forward, one by one, the PE coach holds up a number, stacking us into the first, second, third or fourth lane. It reminds me of filing into pews and I realize that, just as the act of entering the sanctuary focuses worshippers’ attention on the imminent service, this sorting focuses all of us in our cars toward the same goal: picking up our children. In this moment, we’re not Christians, Jews or Muslims; Democrats or Republicans; vaccinated or unvaccinated — we’re all just parents. We’re united by having conceived, carried and birthed a child, united by the fact that we care for our little human beings day in and day out. United by the act of picking them up from school. Although I’m completely alone in my car, thinking about our shared experience makes me feel connected to these people around me. I look at them in their cars — fiddling with the radio, fixing their hair, texting or talking or just gazing into space — and I think of how 22
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being next to them right now isn’t so different from being together in a synagogue or church or mosque. There, too, I can see the others around me but don’t know what they’re thinking. But I feel their presence. We’ve gathered in a shared time and space for the same purpose. It bridges the gaps between us. I worry, for a moment, that if car line is too slow today I’ll be late picking up my four-yearold, who attends a different school a few miles away. But then I realize that there is literally nothing I can do to change these circumstances. There is nothing to do but submit. And so I do. I surrender to car line. I accept the moment — there’s no past or future. Time is completely out of my control now that I’m here. I have to accept that I might have a 10-minute wait or I could be sitting here for 40 minutes. It I FEEL THE SEAT CRADLING ME AND THE SEAT BELT BRACING ME. I LISTEN TO THE ENGINE IDLING AND THE AIR CONDITIONER BLOWING. I BREATHE.
doesn’t matter if I have a meeting lined up or my daughter has ballet or if I’m not feeling well or if we need to get milk. No, there’s not even a point in thinking about any of these things. Maybe I’ll make my meeting or maybe not. Getting hopeful or upset or disappointed — having any expectations at all — or worrying doesn’t help. I have to submit to whatever the car line has in store for me. This submission can be sublime. As time and possibilities and opportunity and all the wants that come along with it — all the desires that cause suffering, according to
the Buddhist tradition — slip away, I put my car into park, take my foot off the brake and feel both my feet on the floor mat below me. I feel the seat cradling me and the seat belt bracing me. I listen to the engine idling and the air conditioner blowing. I breathe. I pick up a book and find — amid the quiet, amid the submission, amid the impossibility of using my cellphone — that I can concentrate in a way I can’t at home. I read without a child sleeping next to me, without dishes waiting for me downstairs or a pile of laundry awaiting me on the floor of the bedroom or my laptop full of unread emails and half-transcribed interviews and unwritten stories and student assignments to grade and so many other ands. As I read, the words penetrate me in a way that they don’t usually. I’m not moving through the pages — rather, the pages are moving me. It’s what the experience of reading should be: transformative. I pause my reading and look around at the other people again. I imagine us not in one chapel, though we are in a way, but each of us in our own little tiny chapels — each car a chapel. I see the curve of the windshield extending up, up, into steepled roofs pointing toward heaven and then I’m overcome by the same feeling of expansiveness I’ve had in houses of worship around the world. I imagine the roofs opening, nothing standing between us and the sky — all of us connected to the blue beyond. Suddenly the car line moves! I put my book down, shift into drive, edge forward, excited to get my five-year-old daughter. How was her day I wonder? What did she learn? How much has she grown in the hours since we have been apart? I picture the baby who slept on my chest and think about how fast it’s all going, how she’s just sort of passing through my home on the way to her own adult life, during which she’ll sit in a car line. And I’ll be old then and on my way out, so to speak.
I begin to think that Earth isn’t God’s waiting room — it’s God’s car line. But then I push the thoughts of mortality away. As I edge forward, a teacher reads the bright yellow placard I’ve taken out of the glove box and placed on the dashboard, on the passenger’s side. Speaking into a walkie-talkie, the teacher says my daughter’s name. Down the line, another teacher announces it into a bullhorn and then, moments later, there she is. My daughter. The reason I’m here. She steps out of the crowd, spots my car and striding toward it, she smiles. ILLU STR ATION BY J I N G LI
The world drops away a bit more and nothing exists for me outside of this moment. Our eyes lock as we see each other and we give each other a smile. This is what car line has prepared me for — my reunion with this girl who swears that, from heaven, she saw me and she chose me to be her mama and decided to join me here on earth. And now we’re joining each other again, my car sanctuary made more sacred by our reunion. She opens the door and enters. The sound of children streams in and she starts her first
sentence as she always does, “And Mama,” as though we were in the middle of a conversation that she had simply paused for the school day. As she tells me about her day — who was there today, who wasn’t, what she ate for lunch, every sentence starting with “And Mama” — I drive with one hand and reach into the back of the car with the other. I open my hand and she places her foot, still tiny — but getting bigger every day — into my palm. We drive away, merging into traffic with all the other families. FEBRUARY 2022
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THE NEW CULTURE WAR WILL DEBATES ABOUT WHAT’S TAUGHT IN THE CLASSROOM DEFINE THE MIDTERMS? BY B E N O Î T MO R E N N E
N
icole eidson has thought about running for the school board for a few months now. She’s fed up with what she sees as progressive politics seeping into schools, from race-related curriculums to sex education, from mask mandates to school closures. Now is the time to “get transparency back in the school district along with parental rights,” she says. Last fall, Eidson, a 50-year-old mother of two, took the leap and decided to run for the Chandler Unified school board, which oversees Arizona’s second-largest school district. She has no political experience, but she’s since received the blessing and mentorship of local Republicans. And as the leader of a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a GOP-backed nonprofit that fields candidates in school board races, she’s striving to persuade more to follow her lead. Eidson is one of a growing number of parents running in down-ballot races on a platform of “parental control,” from New Jersey to Virginia. “Education has always been important, particularly to suburban parents,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist. “But the pandemic has elevated their importance in our political life.” Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial race is seen as a proof of concept by the GOP that pushing for parental rights resonates with voters. His promise to “encourage critical thinking instead of critical race theory” appeared to play well with inde24
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pendents, as did his affable persona and bona fide corporate views. Democrats, on the other hand, have struggled to appear attuned to the needs of parents and scrambled to mount a counterstrategy, giving Republicans plenty of hope that expected wins in the midterm elections next year could turn into a red wave. ─
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UNTI L RE C E NT LY, Erica Frankenberg, a professor of education and demography at Penn State University and co-editor of “The Resegregation of Suburban Schools,” taught her students that education was largely a bipartisan issue. In the 1990s, Republican and
SCHOOL PRAYER, BIBLE READING, EVOLUTION AND SEX EDUCATION USED TO BE THE MAIN SUBJECTS OF CONTENTION. NOW, “HISTORY WARS” HAVE REPLACED “RELIGION WARS.”
Democratic leaders emphasized the need for testing and accountability in schools. In 2002, George W. Bush shook hands with Ted Kennedy after signing the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed by an 87-10 vote in the Senate. Parents of all stripes agreed
on once divisive issues like sex education: Ninety-six percent surveyed in 2014 agreed that discussing sexuality in high school classrooms was somewhat or very important. But in recent years, conversations revolving around education have soured. School board meetings, mirroring insult-laden brawls on the national stage, have turned into screaming matches over curriculums addressing issues of race and diversity, and, more recently, critical race theory, a complex academic framework used to analyze institutional racism. This isn’t a surprising development in an increasingly polarized society, says Frankenberg. Schools are “just part of the politicization of every major issue,” she says. This evolution has taken place against the backdrop of the country’s changing demographics. In 2017-18, white students made up for slightly less than half of students in public schools in the suburbs of the country’s 25 largest metro areas, down from 60 percent in 2006-07, according to the EdWeek Research Center. This reflects in part a surge in the share of the Black and immigrant population living in the suburbs of metro areas. Newcomers tend to be more racially diverse but also less affluent: The number of suburban residents living below the poverty line grew by 57 percent between 2000 and 2015. As a result, school districts have seen their resources strained, says Frankenberg, causing resistance among some white parents who conceive of public education as a private good
ILLU STR ATION BY R O BE RT N E U BE C K E R
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and a zero-sum game. “That just really raises the stakes of everything, including, you know, being worried about how your kid is being taught,” she says. That’s not the only thing that’s changed in schools. When it came to education, school prayer, Bible reading, evolution and sex education used to be the main subjects of contention, says Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania. But a decline in the number of Christians and the rise of homeschooling and Christian schools took the most devout believers out of the public school system and, with them, pressure off of school boards, he says. Now, “history wars” have replaced “religion wars,” he says. “Our ideas of the (history of the) nation and politics have become quasi-religious commitments in their own right,” he says. “And that’s what we’re arguing about in the schools.” ─
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the public school system goes back to 2008. That year, she accepted a job at a semiconductor company and moved her family from Texas to Arizona. They picked Chandler, a park-studded city southeast of Phoenix, for its high-performing p ublic schools. But a few weeks after her daughter started fourth grade in a gifted program, Eidson was dismayed to find she didn’t have any homework other than having to memorize her address. Later, she was picked on by schoolmates and took to spending recess in the library. “What was going on at the public school?” Eidson wondered. Her daughter now attends a charter school and her younger son is homeschooled, but Eidson says she’s worried about the area’s public schools all the same. Her concerns go beyond educational standards and discipline. She’s become a fixture of school board meetings, lambasting diversity related curriculums, quarantine rules and sex education. She also targets critical race theory, which Chandler Unified School District says it doesn’t teach but which Eidson argues informs curriculums. When delivering her broadsides, she sometimes wears a black “Moms for Liberty” T-shirt. Moms for Liberty, which was founded in Florida, is a grassroots movement but cultivates strong links to the Republican Party. Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders, is E I DS ON ’ S B E E F WITH
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married to the vice chairman of the Florida GOP and has received plaudits from Florida Gov. Ron D eSantis. Women wearing “Moms for Liberty” T-shirts stood alongside Randy Fine, a Florida congressman and Republican as he gave a press conference denouncing critical race theory last summer. That an organization focused on hyper local races would be backed by a national party might seem unusual, says Susan Roberts, a political scientist at Davidson College, but it’s not surprising. “If you can find the cause, and if there’s money behind certain individuals or school board races, then it will be spent there,” she says. Moms for Liberty says it doesn’t receive funding from the Republican Party. Eidson has received more overt support from the Republican Party. Republicans from District 17, which covers parts of Chandler, have encouraged her to run for school board. She’s also being chaperoned by an Arizona GOP official, she says. The party’s efforts to galvanize parents such as Eidson have also followed more traditional paths. Josh Hawley, Missouri’s junior senator, has introduced a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” Act which would allow parents to sue schools that don’t respect “rights” such as knowing “what their minor child is being taught in school.” More than two dozen Republican-led legislatures have introduced laws restricting discussions about race in the classroom, and, as of this writing, eight states have passed bills to that effect. ─
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has historically seen the party holding the White House suffer losses, and experts don’t expect 2022 will be any different. But whether Democrats lose a few seats in the House or control of the Senate could depend largely on issues surrounding public education. The GOP is hoping to replicate Youngkin’s upset victory in Virginia, a state Joe Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020. His pledge to improve standards in schools and kick critical race theory out of Virginia’s schools, even as multiple school districts denied ever having taught it, drew support from independent voters and helped him defeat his opponent, former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe. What makes this tactic especially formidable is that education has become a proxy for
THE M IDT E RM E L E C T ION
civil liberties, civil rights and race, but also for state rights and local government, says Davidson College’s Roberts. “This whole thing about parental rights can get you a lot of constituencies,” she says. “A strong message on education is the route to getting support from suburban parents, especially college- educated women,” says Ayres, the Republican strategist. To Democrats, the GOP’s messaging aims at firing up its base, not actually pushing for improvements to the public school system. They point out that critical race theory isn’t actually being taught in schools and that Republicans seem incapable of coming up with a definitive definition for what they mean by “critical race theory.” “These are tactics designed to enrage and engage base voters around problems that don’t exist,” says Jim Margolis, a top adviser to Democratic Party leaders. That said, Democrats have struggled to counter the GOP’s message, defaulting to criticizing their political adversaries for stoking fears. “If they only do that, and don’t talk about what we need to do to actually improve the education of our kids, they will pay at the polls,” Margolis says. This may explain in part why Youngkin managed to sway independent voters like Dana Jackson. Jackson, a resident of Fairfax County and mother of one, voted for Biden in 2020 but voted Republican this time. A private tutor, she struggled to balance her career and family life throughout the pandemic. Making her frustration worse, schools in the county remained closed long after students in Europe had returned to in-person learning. Youngkin, she says, “just listened to parents and acted like he cared.” On the other hand, McAuliffe, the Democratic incumbent, came across as tonedeaf, stating during a debate against Youngkin that he didn’t think “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Rebecca Katz, a veteran Democratic strategist, hopes that Democrats will learn from their defeat in Virginia and work to address the concerns of worried mothers and fathers. “As Youngkin has been a model of what to do for other Republicans, the McAuliffe campaign should serve as a model for Democrats of what not to do,” she says. “There’s no reason why Democrats can’t campaign with empathy and talk to people.”
NATIONAL AFFAIRS
TRUST WE SPIED ON SOME OF AMERICA’S MOST RELIGIOUS CITIZENS. WILL THERE BE A RECKONING? BY AS MA T. U D DI N
T
he narrative around religious liberty has, in recent years, been contentious. Scholars and commentators alike have alleged that recent Supreme Court opinions demonstrate a pro-religion bias and, even more controversially, favoritism of Christians over Muslims. A case currently before the court implicates those precise issues. Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga was first filed by Yassir Fazaga, an imam at a mosque in Orange County, California, over a decade ago. The plaintiffs accuse the FBI of infiltrating mosques in Southern California and targeting Muslims for surveillance solely because of their religion; they argue that this targeting violates their rights under the free exercise clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Specifically, the case challenges the FBI’s use of a paid informant, Craig Monteilh, who in 2006 and 2007 gathered information on Muslims as part of a post-September 11 counterterrorism investigation. Monteilh infiltrated mosques, religious events, community gatherings and even individuals’ homes, and gathered hundreds of video recordings and thousands of hours of audio recordings of conversations. The FBI also allegedly instructed Monteilh to focus on the more religiously devoted members of the community. In its estimation, the more devout a Muslim appeared, the more suspicious he or she was. The blanket targeting of religious exercise should be troubling for all Americans. The government invaded private spaces and branded religious devotion threatening. What is more, after the government’s plan unraveled and the undercover agent was discovered for who he was, members of the Southern California Muslim community no longer knew 28
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who to trust. In a poignant story reported by the radio program “This American Life,” one mosquegoer described it this way: “Really, what they did is they made everybody in the mosque not trust everybody. Nobody would talk about it, but nobody — you would see some weird looks, you know what I mean? People are looking at each other weird.” Yet, despite the egregious violations of religious rights, the case has largely been ignored in the national religious liberty conversation. THE INFORMANT INFILTRATED MOSQUES, RELIGIOUS EVENTS, COMMUNITY GATHERINGS AND EVEN INDIVIDUALS’ HOMES, GATHERING HUNDREDS OF VIDEOS AND THOUSANDS OF HOURS OF AUDIO RECORDINGS OF CONVERSATIONS.
This might be due in part to the complicated nature of the legal issues. The FBI asked the district court to dismiss the religious liberty claims because, it says, the information gathered by Monteilh cannot be disclosed without harming national security (it made this request under the so-called “state secrets privilege”). The appellate court rejected this argument and said that a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the judge to review the evidence privately without having to disclose it to the public. In other words, it is a win-win situation — the claimants can have their day in court and the government can keep its sensitive information private. The issue at the Supreme Court is whether that is,
in fact, the case, or whether the state secrets privilege requires that the case be dismissed. Equally plausible, the case hasn’t made headlines because most Americans might not consider the national security state a threat to their or their community’s religious rights. Many Muslims in the post-9/11 world have worried about overbroad government regulations of their religious exercise — and with good reason. In the two decades since the attacks, Muslim communities have been subject to sweeping violations of their rights, including invasive government surveillance. Members of some other religious minorities — for example Sikhs — have suffered at times, mostly because they were confused for Muslims. But America’s Christian majority has not been significantly affected. I have to wonder if this second reason could also be why most of the conservative justices who normally express profound concern about threats to religious freedom did not raise the issue at oral arguments. Justice Neil Gorsuch alone mused that “In a world in which the national security state is growing every day, that’s quite a power,” referencing the government’s request to dismiss a case based solely on its claim that it involved sensitive national security information. The popular narrative about the conservative justices is that they have been strongly pro-religion, but less so when Muslims’ rights are uniquely at issue. That tends to be the case when national security is at risk, since it’s mostly Muslims — not Christians — who see their rights limited in the name of security. We saw that most prominently in Trump v. Hawaii, where the court upheld the Trump administration’s ban on travel from multiple Muslim-majority states. Despite extensive
evidence that the ban was motivated by the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim bias, the justices chose to defer to the president because the case implicated national security. The reality, though, is that even if Christians have less reason to fear the national security state, ceding power to the government no matter the circumstance has the potential to hurt all religious groups. A group of constitutional law professors, including Elizabeth Clark of Brigham Young University, filed an amicus brief making that ILLU STR ATION BY N I C K O G O N OS KY
argument: “If it is given sanction by this Court, the government will have every opportunity and incentive to employ the same tactic in future cases involving the alleged targeting of religious individuals, be they Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Sikhs, Buddhists or otherwise. Law enforcement officials will know, when turning their sights on adherents of disfavored faiths, that they are functionally immune from suit no matter how clearly established the laws they are going to be violating, so long as they conduct their activities under the banner of
national security and a court accepts the government’s claim of secrecy.” The Fazaga case is likely going to be returned to the lower courts for further proceedings. As those judges consider the issues and more Americans (hopefully) hear about the case, they would do well to keep the religious liberty themes front and center. AS M A T. U D D I N I S A L AW Y E R A N D T H E AU T H O R OF “ WHEN ISLAM IS NOT A RELIGION” AND “THE P O L I T I C S O F V U L N E RA B I L I T Y.” S H E I S A LS O A C O N T R I B U T I N G W R I T E R T O T H E D E S E R E T N E W S.
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BEFORE THEY’RE GONE ICONIC CREATURES OF THE WEST ARE DISAPPEARING. CAN WE PRESERVE WHAT’S BEING LOST? BY H A N N A H S E O
A
western monarch butterfly weighs less than a dollar bill, its wings more fragile than a house of cards. Its life span is similarly delicate — averaging only two to five weeks. But these feeble six-legged jewels make the most of their short time during their migration into Utah from Arizona, California and Mexico. During their short stopover, monarchs hugely impact our ability to farm. Without them and other pollinators, we would no longer have chocolate, apples, coffee or many flowers. In fact, nearly 75 percent of the food crops worldwide depend on pollinators like monarchs. And currently, the Western monarch is facing an existential threat. Conservation and stewardship have long had broad support. In fact, the Endangered Species Act passed unanimously in the Senate in 1973, “with all the friction of a proclamation honoring the troops,” according to Kate Wall of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Even today, according to reporting from The New York Times, at least 80 percent of Americans, including 74 percent of self- identified conservatives, support the act. Hunters, farmers, anglers, private landowners, recreationalists and environmentalists rarely agree on much. And while we may disagree on how we ought to protect the creatures of the earth — as Wall puts it — “few of us believe that society shouldn’t protect animals at all.” But how we’re protecting them is changing. Historically, the bulk of North American conservation has been built on the paradigm 30
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that the best way to manage wildlife is to sustain things where they are, as they are. “But increasingly, we’re realizing that, in an era of changing climate and disturbance regimes, it’s not going to be possible to keep everything the way it was, where it was,” says Jonathan Coop, IT’S DIFFICULT TO KNOW WHETHER THESE LARGE INTERVENTIONS, LIKE TRANSFERRING TREE POPULATIONS TO DIFFERENT PLACES, ARE THE “RIGHT” THING TO DO.
a forest ecologist at Western Colorado University. So as our natural world changes, how are field scientists and conservationists changing their approach to save the species that have so long defined the West?
THE SO U T H WE ST E RN ponderosa pine — which has been romanticized in films, songs and minds across the West for decades — is an example of an iconic species under existential threat. With the growing frequency and intensity of forest fires, the trees are struggling to survive and reproduce. Their populations
will likely continue to struggle as their habitats grow drier and western pine beetles spread. And if we lose ponderosa pines, the savannas of pine trees in the mountains of the Southwest will lose their anchors. It will lead to a loss of grasses and shrubs that deer and elk feed on, as well as leading to erosion that will wipe out soil and the nutrients it holds. With that grim reality in mind, conservationists are thinking more about what ecosystems will probably look like in the future and are working with those longterm adjustments in mind. In terms of the ponderosas, it’s clear to Coop that, in a lot of places, “these forests just don’t really have much of a future where they now are.” But it’s difficult to think about the future without up-to-date records and research of sensitive species and their patterns from the past. “These are really big questions that we don’t even have the science to support,” Coop says. Experimental data is limited, so it’s difficult to know whether these large interventions, like transferring tree populations to different places, are the “right” thing to do. Here’s the only certainty: To leave the ponderosas as they are is to risk their existence. Gary Nabhan, a desert ecologist at the University of Arizona, faced that exact conundrum when working with chuckwallas. A group of these large lizards were living on islands off the Gulf of California — islands that the rising ocean was slowly but surely swallowing up. Chuckwallas are often culturally important to Indigenous communities, and
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BONNEVILLE CUTTHROAT TROUT
SAGE GROUSE CENTROCERCUS UROPHASIANUS
ONCORHYNCHUS CLARKII UTAH
GUNNISON’S PRAIRIE DOG CYNOMYS GUNNISONI
The state fish of Utah began its story in Lake Bonneville before the cataclysmic Bonneville Flood. At one point, Bonneville cutthroat trout were thought to be extinct. But in 1974 biologists discovered a remote population of the fish in the headwaters of Birch Creek — and healthy populations have existed since.
In March 2021, a report showed that sage grouse populations have declined 80 percent since 1965. This chubby, ornate bird is considered a keystone species for the entire sagebrush ecosystem, with 350 species of wildlife as well as the viability of the agricultural landscape relying on its presence.
Although their populations can vary widely from year to year, the general population of the Gunnison’s prairie dog is declining. A keystone species in Western grasslands, prairie dogs aren’t just giant rodents. In fact they have intricate dialogues, unique cultures within colonies and even greet one another with kisses.
so to save this threatened species Nabhan and his collaborators worked to move some of the population to rocky outcrops near the coast on mainland California. They chose the new habitat specifically for its similarities to the islands. Since then, chuckwallas have settled well into the rugged coastline. Helping species move to alternate habitats, called translocation or assisted migration, has been a concept in conservation for decades. Other contingency strategies include stocking seed banks, collecting DNA from plants and animals for future restoration possibilities, and breeding species in captivity to bulk up population numbers before releasing them back to the wild — a strategy that famously worked for the California condor. But all these methods, Nabhan says, should be last-ditch efforts. Zoos and seed banks cannot “save” a creature, he says, because “the genes are just part of the story, that’s not what the whole species is.” A big part of what makes a species, he adds, is how it interacts with the “whole landscape,” and the catalog of wildlife
around it. If those ecological relationships are lost for good, Nabhan says, those species become relics, and those species are almost as good as extinct. Take the sub-globose snake pyrg, a tiny aquatic snail that lives exclusively in the springs of Utah’s Snake Valley. Discovered only about 25 years ago, these teeny water mollusks are about the size of poppy seeds and act as important filters for spring water — they feed on algae and decaying plants and keep water oxygen levels in check. But groundwater pollution, wildfires and the influx of invasive fish species threaten the pyrgs’ populations. The pyrgs act like a proverbial canary in a coal mine for water quality in the springs. When biologists noticed a dip in their numbers in 2019, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the Bureau of Land Management decided to take active measures to remove nonnative fishes and monitor water quality. Since the species is found in just one location, the sub-globose snake pyrg is vulnerable, but worth saving in the eyes of the state of Utah.
For Gloria Tom, the director for the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife, the need to protect and restore habitats has always felt urgent. She’s held her current role since 1998, and says in Indigenous communities, there’s no space for climate pessimism. “The Navajo people live and breathe natural resources as part of their everyday life, and so we have to look at the changes in an optimistic fashion and always move and strive towards improving the landscape in spite of what’s happening.” The priority for them, adds Tom, is to fight to preserve the landscape as it is — whether that means limiting hunting permits, adding water-collection infrastructure to fight drought or sectioning off land from human use. The northern leopard frog, for example, is not listed as endangered on federal registries, but it is endangered by Navajo standards, meaning the prospects of this species’ survival on Navajo land is in jeopardy. Every year, the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife surveys the lakes, rivers and
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CHUCKWALLA
MONARCH BUTTERLY
BURROWING OWL
SAUROMALUS ATER
DANAUS PLEXIPPUS
ATHENE CUNICULARIA
The chuckwalla is a large, primarily herbivorous lizard found in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts and parts of California, Nevada and Utah. Its trademark antipredatory behavior is taking refuge in a narrow rock crevice and inflating so as to not be removed. Anthropogenic activities have damaged rock formations, causing populations to decline.
Monarch butterfly migration numbers are up significantly in 2021 compared to 2020. To complete their migration, these insects use an internal clock located in the antennae and a “sun compass” in the brain to guide them. Cold temperatures paralyze monarchs, and often they can be spotted basking in the sun.
According to Josepha Sherman, the Hopi tribe called the burrowing owl Ko’ko, meaning “Watcher of the Dark.” They believe it to be associated with the protector of things underground, including germinating seeds. The Goshute tribe of Utah and Nevada see the owl as a protective spirit for brave warriors, and its feathers were worn on clothing.
etlands to count the number of frogs on w its land. Based on those dwindling numbers documented by Indigenous field scientists, the Navajo Nation has prohibited human disturbances and developments in proximity to those habitats. This is one of the cases when documentation in research and intervention are able to work together.
are willing to put in the time and money to make the best decisions that they can for the future, now. To accommodate the need for long-term planning, the National Park Service created the Resist-Accept-Direct framework to aid conservationists as they are “responding to ecosystems facing the potential for rapid, irreversible ecological change.” With the framework, NPS says that land managers can choose to either resist ecosystem change by restoring conditions where change has occurred, accept change by allowing ecosystems to drift into new and unprecedented conditions (often with uncertain consequences), or direct and facilitate ecosystem transformation toward desired conditions. Land managers can theoretically apply this framework to everything from individual species to whole landscapes. Using whatever data on sensitive species available, they can then decide how to best balance the resources they have with the likelihood of different outcomes. But different species and parcels of
land fall under the responsibilities of different bodies and agencies, resulting in a patchwork of initiatives and outcomes across the West. Decision-making will need to be “very deliberate,” Coop says. The imperative now is to conduct those experiments and collect ecological data for the conservationists of the future. The more data scientists can collect on species’ resilience to different environmental conditions, how they rely on each other and how those relationships change climate variation, the more precise and deliberate conservationists can be in their future decision-making. Additionally, bringing communities together with as much information as possible sets us up for the best chances of success, says Coop. After all, he says, conservation science is about “involving people to answer meaningful questions that help us have good lives and be good inhabitants of this planet.” But the answers to those questions will continue to lie in research, action and preservation of the creatures of the West, before they’re gone.
AS O F R IGHT now, no one seems to have an answer for how to save certain species. “A lot of times, the only way we can really learn what’s going to work is by trying it out,” says Coop — a somewhat troubling reality given that “the decisions that we’re making now are going to have implications for hundreds, if not thousands of years.” That could mean trying to save the ponderosa pines and still losing them, or the iconic Western monarch migration dwindling to nothing more than folklore. But scientists, as well as government agencies,
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FINDING KYRSTEN SINEMA
BY ETHAN BAUER
ILLUSTRATION BY NIGEL BUCHANAN
CAN THE RIDDLE OF THE ENIGMATIC, DISRUPTIVE ARIZONA SENATOR BE SOLVED BY LOOKING DEEP INTO HER PAST?
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IN
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A DUSTY BASEMENT of Brigham Young
University’s Harold B. Lee Library, on a shelf of blue books with gilded trim, between a tract on the history of cosmetic surgery and a study of mystical metaphors in medieval poetry, rests the 1995 honors thesis of one Kyrsten Sinema. “Career Aspirations and Humanitarianism Among Gifted College Students” is a forgotten memento from the Arizona senator’s two years of undergraduate studies at BYU. Long before she became the most confounding actor in the drama of the Biden era, she was an Ezra Taft Benson scholar who completed her bachelor’s degree at 18. A child prodigy who, her thesis suggests, was very concerned with people like herself. “It is ironic that part of our society suffers from a lack of resources,” the teenage S inema writes, “yet we have within ourselves an often unrecognized, highly useful minority — the gifted.” A couple years earlier, at 16, she had graduated from high school as co-valedictorian. That is, she was gifted. In the past year, practically every national media outlet in America has dedicated thousands of words to grapple with what, exactly, motivates Kyrsten Sinema. The New Yorker asked, “What does Kyrsten Sinema really want?” CNN had a nearly identical question on its mind: “Unsolved mystery: What does Kyrsten Sinema want?” Even “Saturday Night Live” got in on the action, with Cecily Strong donning a bright red dress, blue pearls and thick glasses to ask, “What do I want from this bill? I’ll never tell. Because I didn’t come to Congress to make friends — and so far, mission accomplished.” No one can fully discern why Sinema has positioned herself as one of two Democratic senators opposing the party-approved social spending agenda, least of all her left-wing constituents, some of whom feel betrayed and plan to launch a primary challenger when she’s up for reelection in 2024. She hasn’t done much to ingratiate herself, with her obnoxious thumbs-down vote on a federal minimum wage increase, her lackadaisical approach to issues like immigration reform and voting rights, and her much-maligned defense of the
filibuster, causing protests outside her Phoenix office, at a wedding and, most notoriously, inside a bathroom on Arizona State’s campus. Yet the Biden administration needs Sinema’s vote to accomplish much of anything in the Senate, where the one-vote Democratic majority will get no support from Republicans on controversial legislation. Unlocking the Sinema puzzle could hold the key to the president’s success or failure. Though Sinema doesn’t seem too worried about his fate. Her college thesis and the story she has told herself and others suggest, rather, that she’s long believed she was destined to be an answer to the country’s woes — a humanitarian concerned with helping people less fortunate, the rare leader who can deliver our nation from partisan squabbles and enact meaningful, lasting change. If only others could see it. As she inquired in her thesis, “How do we find the gifted?” Or, How do we find someone like Kyrsten Sinema? Late last year, I traveled to Florida and Arizona to try to figure that out. ─
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H E RE ’S T H E STORY Sinema tells about herself. Once, in Tucson, a girl enjoyed a middle-class existence until, one day, her father lost his law license. Her parents divorced. Her mother married a man named Andy Howard, who moved the girl, her mother and two siblings to Florida, to his hometown, in search of work and opportunity. But the work was nowhere to be found. The girl, now eight, and her family were forced to live in an abandoned gas station, owned by Howard’s parents. The building didn’t have water or electricity or a reliable place to cook. In their time of need, the family turned to the local ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for food and clothing. By the time the girl turned 11, though, the family’s situation improved. Howard found work and the family moved into a proper house. The girl excelled in school; she even skipped her junior year at Walton High School and graduated as co-valedictorian at 16. She
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SHE’S A WOMAN WHO IS UNAFRAID TO BUSHWHACK HER OWN PATH — STARTING FIRST AND FOREMOST WITH AN ETHOS OF “GETTING THINGS DONE” IN A GRIDLOCKED POLITICAL SYSTEM. SHE’S NEVER BEEN A FAN OF THE SOCALLED “IDENTITY POLITICS” THAT HAVE TAKEN ROOT IN BOTH PARTIES.
KYRSTEN SINEMA, NOW A SENATOR, WAS FIRST SWORN IN AS A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE BY THEN-HOUSE SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER IN JANUARY 2013.
used her academic gifts to earn a BYU scholarship and pursue higher education. She wanted to give back to people who had struggled, as she had, so she studied social work. After a master’s degree from Arizona State in 1999 she got involved in local politics, first as a Green Party activist who fiercely opposed the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She ran for a seat on the Phoenix City Council in 2001 and lost. She lost again a year later, running as an independent for the Arizona state House. But Kyrsten Sinema was no quitter. In 2004, the same year she graduated from law school, she ran as a Democrat and finally won a seat in the state House. Early on, she struggled. Sinema tells us so in her 2009 autobiographical treatise, “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last.” She was a “bomb thrower” — someone who makes fiery, indignant speeches that accomplish nothing. So she reinvented herself. The new Sinema was a deal-maker unafraid to work with anyone on anything she saw as productive. Her strategy helped pass more legislation — and also boosted her political career. After six years in the House, she jumped to the Arizona Senate for two years, then to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012. And when Jeff Flake vacated his Senate seat in 2018, she jumped on it, too. She’s always been upfront about who she is, and that starts with being different. She wears colorful wigs and sleeveless shirts on
the Senate floor, in part to express this core component of her identity. She’s America’s first openly bisexual senator; a woman who is unafraid to bushwhack her own path — starting first and foremost with an ethos of “getting things done” in a gridlocked political system. She’s never been a fan of the so-called “identity politics” that have taken root in both parties. Her book dedicates an entire chapter to “Shedding the Heavy Mantle of Victimhood,” which concludes by railing against political tribalism. She sees herself as a fearless, thoughtful leader who’s more concerned with crafting quality legislation than engaging in partisan blood sport. More in touch with real America, not the swamp. And her upbringing, she tells us, is a big part of that. “There’s really no other country in the world,” she once told a crowd in Phoenix, “where a little girl who grew up homeless living in a gas station could ever dream of serving in the United States Congress and run for the United States Senate.” ─
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The building from the stories. White and blocky, with a triangular roof and rusted light fixtures atop a weathered metal pole — the converted gas station where Kyrsten Sinema grew up. The woman who would eventually become a U.S. senator lived
T H E RE IT IS .
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DID SINEMA AND HER FAMILY HAVE POWER AND WATER? “OH, YEAH,” JOHN HOWARD SAYS. HE’S NOT ALONE IN DISPUTING HER STORY.
ABOVE: THE BUILDING IN DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, FLORIDA, WHERE SINEMA SAYS SHE WAS RAISED WITHOUT RUNNING WATER. RIGHT: SINEMA WITH REPUBLICAN SENATORS AFTER VOTING ON A NEARLY $1 TRILLION BIPARTISAN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT.
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a cinder block existence here off a county highway near DeFuniak Springs, a Florida panhandle town of about 6,000. And beside the old shack, across from a bristling cotton field, John Howard stands beside his red pickup truck. John is a relative of Sinema’s stepfather, Andy. He’s lived in or around D eFuniak Springs his whole life, including when Sinema’s family lived in what’s now his personal workshop. “We’re all Republicans,” he tells me. “I’m 73, and the last Democrat I voted for was Jimmy Carter.” Sinema usually leaves that part out when she talks about this place, and she talks about it plenty. This, after all, is the cornerstone of the story she presents to the world about her humble beginnings. John offers me a look inside. “This was the livin’ room,” he says, pointing at the corner to the left, nearest the door. “They had a wood-burnin’ stove over here.” It’s hard to glean much, he admits, because he’s remade the space. It’s now just one big room, which wasn’t the case when Sinema lived here. In the other front corner, he says, was Sinema’s brother’s room. Beside that, she and her sister shared a room. John says the
next spot over was the kitchen. Some of the beige, diamond-patterned tile still remains, chopped irregularly at the edges and speckled with either white paint or drops of plaster. And in the far right corner, opposite from Sinema’s parents’ room, is where a bathroom once stood. The remnants are all there: A crack in the concrete foundation where the tub once rested; paint-spattered pipes jutting from the walls; a concrete-filled hole for the “commode,” as John calls it; and the dusty, fraying remains of a dark-brown floor made of little six-sided tiles. Seeing the fossilized pipes and remembering Sinema’s claims, I put the question to John Howard: Did Sinema and her family have power and water? “Oh, yeah,” he says, nodding his head and smirking. He’s not alone in disputing her story. New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin called her account into question when he discovered records showing her parents paid utility bills while they lived there. Sinema has proven extremely sensitive and defensive about the facts in question. Her website features testimony from her mother, stepfather, aunt and childhood friend, all backing up her version. But maybe the precise
AP PHOTO/J. SCOT T APPLEWHIT E
details don’t matter much in this instance, as Martin observed. “What is not in doubt,” he wrote, “is that Ms. Sinema and her family were living in deeply trying circumstances, relying on assistance from the local Mormon church to which they belonged.” John doesn’t dispute that, though he does seem as puzzled by his stepniece as just about everyone else. He offers this parting thought: “I keep hoping,” he says, “she changes to an independent or a Republican.” Down the road at Walton High School, old yearbooks tell of someone intelligent and ambitious. In her three years at Walton, Sinema participated in the French club, the math club, color guard and a service organization called the Anchor Club. She was the vice president of her sophomore class and signed her name with an asterisk over the i. She was the co-valedictorian in 1993. But no one around town seems to remember her, save for at one secluded spot. At the DeFuniak Springs ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the ward where Sinema grew up — the congregation is in the middle of a funeral lunch, but an older man with a powder-white
beard and a pinstriped gray suit still has plenty to say. He introduces himself as Sandy Jack Brown, “the nicest guy in town.” He was Sinema’s Sunday School teacher, and he promptly corrects me when I call her Kursten. “It’s KEER-sten,” he says. “She’s one of the smartest gals I’ve ever had (in class).” From there, darn near everyone at the table wants to chime in, though always with the preface that they knew her long ago and don’t remember many details now. From across the table, Wendell Mitchell points toward the far side of the room. “I remember her dad coming and baptizing her, right down the hallway there.” Patricia Pollard recalls her being a very lively kid, always running around with the others. “And you knew she was gonna be smart,” she adds. “No doubt about it.” The women at the table seem very impressed with Sinema, regardless of her political affiliation. “She was just vibrant, and she always cared about other people,” Meta Ambrose recalls, adding how proud she is whenever she sees Sinema on TV. “To see how she grew up — she became what she is. She didn’t just talk about it; she actually did it.” But as a bearded fellow with a ball cap proclaiming
“I love my country but I fear my government” looks on, Mitchell pipes up from across the table to echo John Howard. “We’re really rootin’ for her to stick to her guns,” he says.
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INE MA T H A N K E D a handful of teachers and mentors in the acknowledgments of her BYU thesis. One was Karen Gerdes, a social work professor. Gerdes eventually left BYU for Arizona State, where Sinema earned her four graduate degrees. “Kyrsten is wicked smart and very charismatic,” Gerdes says via email. “I experienced her as a hardworking and dedicated student and later the same as a colleague.” Sinema’s early associates from her time in Arizona agree. They have their criticisms of her recent decisions, but they have no doubt that she’s very intelligent and very driven. David Wells met her shortly after joining the faculty at ASU in 1998. He was aiding the formation of a group called the Arizona Advocacy Network, whose goal at the time
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don’t remember her speeches as particularly radical. “The role that she played there was much more than simply bomb throwing,” says Martin Quezada, an Arizona state senator who was a legislative staffer when Sinema was first elected. He admits that some people make a loud, obnoxious point for its own sake, but Sinema never did. “All of her big, impassioned speeches were on point.” But where Quezada and others saw an important contribution to the state’s political atmosphere, Sinema saw failure, and her activist friends noticed a new attitude taking shape. “Her approach to power sort of changed along the way,” says Venable. “She started out as a Green Party candidate, which is hardly an approach leaning toward power. … I feel like that’s changed a lot.” Looking at her now, Gerdes can’t help but think back to that lecture about succeeding in a given setting. “My guess is Kyrsten understands better than any of us the environment she is in,” she says. “Not the national one or even the Arizona one, but the one in D.C., amongst the senators. (She knows) how to work within that particular system of people to be effective and productive.” It’s precisely this inclination that’s allowed her to win every election since 2004 and the respect of some Republican colleagues — while also shrouding her political future in uncertainty.
LEFT: SINEMA BEFORE AN ARIZONA STATE AND UNIVERSITY OF UTAH GAME, NOVEMBER 2018. RIGHT: SINEMA SWORN IN AS A U.S. SENATOR, JANUARY 2019.
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was to bring progressive groups together for better dialogue and better results. Sinema, Wells recalls, wasn’t a part of any particular group, but she was energetic, passionate and smart. Back then, while running her first campaign for elected office, she was the sort who likened taking donations of any kind to “bribery.” She and Wells became leaders in the Alliance for Peaceful Justice, which opposed the George W. Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s how she met Elizabeth Venable, a fellow left-wing activist who would eventually volunteer for Sinema. “She’s intensely smart. She seemed very compassionate — especially with the social work background,” Venable says. “She seemed to be very principled.” During those early activist years, Gerdes asked Sinema to speak to her community practice class. It was 2003, and Sinema had just lost her second election. Gerdes remembers she brought an interesting perspective to the class — which was about creating positive change in communities — because of her electoral failure. “The students loved it!” she says. The lecture focused on what it takes to succeed within a particular environment, and how to change course when necessary — a common topic in the social work world. That lecture became practical for Sinema following her “bomb thrower” phase — though some of her fellow legislators
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SINEMA OFTEN CITES JOHN MCCAIN AS A ROLE MODEL WHO WAS UNAFRAID TO BUCK HIS PARTY FOR THE SAKE OF THE COUNTRY, BUT ONE POLITICAL CONSULTANT CITES ANOTHER PAIR AMONG THE GHOSTS OF ARIZONA SENATORS PAST: CARL HAYDEN AND BARRY GOLDWATER.
HE N MI TT ROMNEY became a senator in 2019, he didn’t know anything about Kyrsten Sinema. But since she was a fellow BYU grad and a fellow first-time senator from a neighboring state, he inquired with his friend Paul Ryan. The former Republican House Speaker served alongside Sinema throughout her three terms in the House of Representatives, and the way Romney remembers it, Ryan was a fan. He told Romney he had a lot of respect for her as someone who didn’t much care about partisan identity and focused instead on finding common ground. Romney has since seen it himself, along with the dazzling intellect that even her friends-turnedcritics still find impressive. “She obviously is a lot smarter than me because she graduated a lot faster than I did,” Romney says. “I mean, one of the smartest people in the building. And I don’t know that people recognize that, but she is a brilliant individual. ... As we negotiate on various topics, she digs down deeper and gets an understanding of the details in a far more comprehensive way than most of the other people in the negotiations,” he adds. “She can advance the project we’re working on in part because she understands it better than most people.” Sinema often cites John McCain as a role model who was unafraid to buck his party for the sake of the country, but Arizona-based Democratic political consultant Adam Kinsey cites another pair of role models among the ghosts of Arizona senators past: Carl Hayden and Barry Goldwater. Hayden was a Democrat, Republican Goldwater the godfather of modern conservatism. In the 1960s, the two teamed up to deliver Arizona the water infrastructure that makes the state habitable today. If there’s any cohesion to Sinema’s political philosophy,
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MITT ROMNEY AND SINEMA DURING A SENATE HEARING ON COVID-19, MARCH 2020.
as backed up by her decisions, it’s informed by situations like that: Renewing a spirit of cooperation that’s been largely dead since the mid-’90s. “I think she loves the idea of building bridges and bringing back the old way the Senate used to do things,” Kinsey says, “where there was a little more working across the aisle.” Her willingness to work with senate Republicans has courted both admiration and skepticism. Cameron Adams, president of the ASU Young Democrats, was a fan when Sinema was elected in 2018. The then-freshman even campaigned for her. But now a senior, Adams is tired of Sinema’s posturing. Adams wants to see results — not just compromise for its own sake. “Even the more moderate members of our group are kind of done with her now,” she says. “She talked a lot on her campaign about working for everyone to get things done. … But she’s talking a lot and not
getting anything done. There’s nothing, no results to justify her actions anymore.” And even when her approach succeeds, it isn’t hard to find examples of its shortcomings. The $1 trillion infrastructure bill she championed passed the Senate with 69 yeas, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But in the House, only eight Republicans signed on, and 26-year-old Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn, dubbed by the New Republic as the “future of the Republican Party,” promised to “primary the hell out of ” any Republicans who supported it. Cawthorn’s approach fits the zeitgeist of the moment better than S inema’s, both within the Republican Party and American politics. “If one could really poke a hole in (Sinema’s) whole argument about trying to move on to a post-partisan, bipartisan new era in the Senate, I think that’s it,” Kinsey, the Arizona political consultant, says. FEBRUARY 2022
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WITHIN THE NEXT TWO YEARS, SINEMA WILL HAVE TO CONVINCE VOTERS THAT BIPARTISANSHIP IS A GOAL MORE ESSENTIAL THAN NEARLY EVERY OTHER POLITICAL PURSUIT.
In an era where politicians are more cultural warriors than diplomats, bipartisanship, the thinking goes, can only accomplish so much. “(Bipartisanship) sounds nice. It’s a nice kind of sales pitch,” Quezada says of S inema’s approach. “But it is definitely ignoring the reality.” Still, as a long-professed champion of a living wage for all citizens — despite voting down a Democrat-endorsed provision in a COVID-19 relief bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour — Sinema has been working with Romney on a bipartisan proposal that would increase the federal minimum to $11 per hour. The fact that she and Romney share a cultural heritage makes cooperation especially easy. When a recent measure was brought to the Senate floor, Romney observed, “I think they’re kicking against the pricks,” a Biblical phrase familiar to Latter-day Saints. “Absolutely,” Sinema agreed. No one around them had any idea what they were talking about. “She knows the church hymns. She knows the church culture. She knows church doctrine. And so we have spoken about those common experiences,” Romney says. Their friendship even resulted in a joint Halloween costume where he dressed up as Apple TV+ icon Ted Lasso and Sinema dressed up as his shady boss, Rebecca Welton — an idea, Romney says, that came from his staff and that Sinema agreed to. Her strategy makes tense negotiations easier, which is how 42
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she and Romney were able to propose their federal minimum wage increase bill and work together on the infrastructure bill. “She is very much driven by what she wants to accomplish for her state and for the country, regardless of the source,” Romney adds. “Whether it’s from a Republican or Democrat is less important to her than whether it’s right.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who worked with Sinema on a parental leave plan, admires her bipartisanship as a value in and of itself. She’s willing to put aside large chunks of what she wants in favor of the even larger chunk that she and her Republican colleagues have in common, which Cassidy says is a rare feat in today’s Washington. She always searches out the positive, even in negative situations, and is a “gifted” listener whose greatest virtue is finding common ground. “Normally, we pay those people and call them arbiters,” he says. “She does it for free.” Ironically, Sinema has also garnered a reputation for silence and noncooperation. Many grassroots organizations in Arizona that used to work well with her now say they can’t get an audience. Sinema disputes that characterization, but there’s no doubt that that’s the perception. “She sort of has spurned the activists who helped get her into office,” says Wells. Early in 2021, Quezada and the Democratic leadership in the Arizona Senate requested a private meeting with Sinema. At first,
Quezada says, her team said no. Then they agreed, but only virtually, and they required all the questions in advance. “So it wasn’t a conversation,” Quezada says. “It was more like an interview where she knew all of the questions first.” And it’s not just about specific policy positions; the questions about what she believes are bigger, Wells says. “I’m not sure what her core values are anymore.”
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N A WE DN E S DAY last fall, Fred Hernandez sat in a pavilion at the entrance to the Apache Wash Trail, which Sinema ranked as her favorite Arizona trail in 2018. An Arizona Cardinals lanyard dangled from his pocket. Binoculars hung from his neck. He comes here darn near every day, he told me, to listen to music and take in the landscape. With gray hair and a matching mustache and goatee, he looks good for a 79-year-old man who once worked in the mining and drilling industries. But his body is betraying him. He only has one kidney, and he takes a prescription called Rayaldee to combat the effects. He pays about $400 per month for it. He voted for Sinema in part because of her
“HER LIFE AND PERSONALITY HAVE GIVEN HER THE CAPACITY NOT TO BE SWAYED BY THE CROWD. SHE GREW UP IN A RELIGION THAT WAS A MINORITY. HER STYLE IS DIFFERENT THAN THE STANDARD IN THE SENATE. SHE’S COMFORTABLE WITH WALKING HER OWN PATH.” —SEN. MITT ROMNEY
Stephenson offers a compelling case for raw ambition as the fuel for Sinema’s confounding positions. And many — perhaps most formidably Ryan Grim at The Intercept — have made the case that she’s simply a sellout to corporate cash. Yet for all the confusion and questions about what she wants, Sinema tries to make it clear — especially to her colleagues. “She definitely cuts a different profile,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said in an interview with Politico. “But in dealing with her colleagues she’s not the enigma that the punditry wants to make her out to be.” Romney agrees. “I think her life and personality have given her the capacity not to be swayed
by the crowd,” he says. “She grew up in a religion that was a minority. Her sexuality is a minority. Her gender is a minority in the Senate. Her style is different than the standard in the Senate. And she’s comfortable with walking her own path. … You know, we call that backbone, but I think it’s a degree of confidence in herself that is unusual and admirable.” In short, her critics and some of her colleagues may not appreciate it, but Kyrsten Sinema trusts herself to do what’s best for everyone. That’s been clear for years, maybe all the way back to her BYU honors thesis, where the child prodigy observed, “Gifted individuals are a resource our society has only begun to tap.”
SINEMA AND OTHER SENATORS GATHER TO DISCUSS AN INFRASTRUCTURE BILL WITH PRESIDENT BIDEN, JUNE 2021.
AP PHOTO/JACQU E LYN MA RTI N
promise to reduce prescription drug prices. When I spoke to him, that promise had gone unfulfilled. “I’m having second thoughts,” he says. “She promised she was gonna do something about that, but she hasn’t yet, and I don’t think she’s going to.” Folks like Hernandez — the voters whose daily lives are impacted most by Sinema’s decisions in Washington — will decide her political future. “I’m gonna have to really think before I vote for her again,” Hernandez told me. As pretty much every political observer will tell you, that could change in the two and a half years before she’s up for reelection. It could change plenty in three months or even three days, too. But for that to happen, Sinema will have to convince voters that her commitment to bipartisanship above any particular policy goals is a worthwhile pursuit — and that’s a hard, high-minded sell. Pretty much right after I spoke with Hernandez, though, the wins for Sinema started piling up. Aside from the infrastructure bill, she also threw her support behind instituting a corporate minimum tax and lowering prescription drug prices after months of stalling. But her drug pricing proposal is classic Sinema: Rather than the $450 billion House Democrats hoped to save on prescription drug prices, her preferred plan will save $200 billion. Why did Sinema fight to seemingly do less? Is she committed to moderation for moderation’s sake? She’ll have to answer those questions for people like Hernandez, who accuse her of being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical lobby. Everyone has offered hypotheses to explain the cognitive dissonance. Branko Marcetic, writing in Jacobin magazine, charges that she’s chosen to “abandon everything she ever believed in and do the bidding of the country’s rich and powerful.” Politico Magazine’s Hank
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failings, and I have done any number of things, including ballots I have cast, that I regret. (No, I’m not going to list them. I’m glad that the voting booth keeps our secrets.) Who are any of us to turn to the next person and blame them for the decline of our system of government? Worse, such recriminations tend to result in platitudes that only sound like so much moral hectoring: “Be a conscientious voter. Show up for elections. Think about the future.” If any of us were that easily advised to become paragons of civic rectitude, we wouldn’t need democratic institutions, including the myriad social and political organizations whose aim is to encourage us to be better people in the first place. This is the kind of advice that ends up being something like a lesson with a golf pro who keeps telling you to keep your arm straight and your head down — if you could do that, you wouldn’t be paying a coach. This discomfort is one reason why it comes more naturally to all of us to blame “the system.” When we feel like things are going wrong and our institutions seem to be failing us, the last thing anyone wants to hear about is their own part in it all and how they could have served those institutions better.
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EMOCR ACY, IN ITS RAW F ORM, is about counting votes. Liberal democracy is about much more than that. Choices made at the ballot box reflect the values and beliefs of the people casting those votes, which is why Election Day itself is often less important than what took place on all the other days before it. If citizens approach voting with a purely mercenary sense of self-interest and devoid of any sense of civic responsibility, liberal democracy cannot last long. There might still be elections, but they will be a collection of shams and illiberal plebiscites, and the history of such exercises in other nations shows that this kind of voting does not mean very much. No society can maintain a good democracy — one that respects human rights and puts the needs of the individual over the interests of the state — if it must rely on a population of bad citizens. What does it mean to think of our neighbors as bad citizens? Even to ask the question feels wrong. “Good citizenship” awards are for children; adults do the best they can while balancing busy lives. To judge the civic behavior of our neighbors feels, well, judgmental. It certainly feels that way to me: I am an ordinary man with manifest personal and political
But there is such a thing as being a bad citizen, even among people we might otherwise think of as good neighbors. When we disengage from society and ignore our civic obligations, we are bad citizens. When we listen only to those with whom we already agree and believe anyone else is wrong as a matter of first principles, we are bad citizens. When we insist on one standard of treatment from the government and the law for ourselves and for people whom we happen to like, and a different standard for others, we are bad citizens. When we continually blame the world around us for our nation’s troubles while refusing to consider whether we’ve had any part in them, we are bad citizens. And when we only do what’s best for ourselves, we are not citizens at all, but rather we become mercenaries, loose in the ship of state and plundering the hold, with no interest in our direction and no regard for our eventual survival. Genuine civic spirit is not the same thing as mere sociability. It’s easy for most of us to be pleasant and sociable. We wave cheerfully at our neighbors from our driveways or nod politely to each other in our shared elevators and hallways. When we move into the public arena, however, we might find that we are
RECRIMINATIONS TEND TO RESULT IN PLATITUDES THAT ONLY SOUND LIKE SO MUCH M ORAL HECTORING: WHEN WE FEEL LIKE THINGS ARE G OING WRONG AND OUR INSTITUTIONS SEEM TO BE FAILING US, THE LAST THING ANYONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT IS THEIR OWN PART IN IT. only neighbors. Suddenly, we are aware that our disagreements are over more than taxes or potholes. We may find that we do not agree on things that are far more important to us. It might be immigration, or abortion, or minority rights, or civil liberties. It might be over how to defend ourselves against a foreign threat or measures to protect the health of the public. Our political differences, at that moment, become differences over basic values. The people with whom we thought we had so much in common turn out to be the nicest people we’ve ever disliked. The temptation at such moments is to withdraw into ourselves and to take part in the political process purely as a matter of self-interest or even self-defense. We seek our own good and then retreat to our sanctum with our families. But as Hannah Arendt long
ago reminded us, the Greek root of the word “idiot” comes from the word “idion,” meaning things pertaining only to oneself as opposed to the common good. Even in the city-states of ancient Greece, those who cared only about themselves and were unwilling to contribute to the efforts of the community were judged to be bad citizens, insofar as one could think of them as “citizens” at all. The city was more than a collection of households, it was a living thing in itself, one that had to be tended by the public or lost. To be unable or unwilling to understand this was, literally, to be an idiot. Readers who love their families (and who might not care very much about their neighbors) could well stop here and say: What’s wrong with that? After all, who puts the welfare of strangers over their own family? What would it even look like not to act this way? We don’t have to imagine what a society plagued by daily mistrust and the absence of a commitment to liberal democratic values might look like. There are plenty of examples around the world, from Russia to Colombia to Nigeria. There are any number of permutations in which societies are run by informal arrangements, corruption, kinship, tribal loyalty, or other arrangements that fill the vacuum left by the absence of shared norms, the rule of law, and civic commitment. But one example in particular provides a warning for the citizens of the democracies, including the United States. It is a small Italian village nestled in the hills just above the ankle of Italy’s boot, and in the 1950s it was full of warm and charming people who were wonderful company. But they did not care very much about democracy and could not for the life of them make their town work, economically or politically. They cared very deeply about their own children, but almost not at all about those of other people. They were more willing to rent a mule for farmwork than to hire their fellow townspeople for the same price. Their experience was long ago and far away, and yet life in their village should sound familiar — and worrying — to Americans, as well as to the citizens of the other liberal democracies. FEBRUARY 2022
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NO ONE INTERESTS HIMSELF IN THE GENERAL WELFARE
a young man named Edward Banfield switched careers after a stint in government. Initially an optimist about the role of government and planning, his work with the Farm Security Administration during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave him second thoughts, and he headed for the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation about farmers in a U.S. government program in Casa Grande, Arizona. More specifically, he wrote about how the inability of the farmers to cooperate with each other undermined the project. He then did a similar examination of farmers in Gunlock, Utah, but he still was puzzled not only by the question of why people who had every reason to work together refused to do so, but also why this problem N T H E L AT E 1 9 40 S ,
SA LVATORE CA NT ISAN O
EDWARD BANFIELD FELT A LACK OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN “MONTEGRANO,” ITALY.
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seemed mostly impervious to government intervention. Banfield decided to look abroad for more answers. In 1956, he and his family headed for Italy and settled for several months in the village of Chiaromonte — a place, as he described it, of such “extreme poverty and backwardness” that Banfield chose to protect the town’s identity with a pseudonym: “Montegrano.” Banfield arrived in Montegrano only a decade after the end of World War II, 11 years after Benito Mussolini had been hung by his heels and 10 years after Italy’s last king, Umberto, was told far more gently that his services were no longer needed. Montegrano was part of a republic, a nation stitched together from Italy’s fractious regions, and hardly a perfect democracy. But Italy was also a founding member of NATO and one of the first members of the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union. It was a country in which the citizens had the right to express their views freely — as if anyone could prevent Italians from doing otherwise — along with the other basic guarantees of a democratic nation. There was even an active and sizable Communist
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WHEN WE LISTEN ONLY TO THOSE WITH WHOM WE ALREADY AGREE AND BELIEVE ANYONE ELSE IS WRONG AS A MATTER OF FIRST PRINCIPLES, WE ARE BAD CITIZENS. There are no organized voluntary charities in Montegrano. An order of nuns struggles to maintain an orphanage for little girls in the remains of an ancient monastery, but this is not a local undertaking. The people of Montegrano contribute nothing to the support of it, although the children come from local families. ... There is not enough food for the children, but no peasant or landed proprietor has ever given a young pig to the orphanage. There are two churches in town. ... The churches do not carry on charitable or welfare activities, and they play no part at all in the secular life of the community. ... The doctor, although he has called upon the government to provide a hospital, has not arranged an emergency room or even equipped his own office. The pharmacist, a government-licensed monopolist, gives an absolute minimum of service at extremely high prices. ... Most people, however, say that no one in Montegrano is particularly public spirited, and some find the idea of public spiritedness unintelligible. The local teacher was even more blunt and despairing when asked about civic involve-
ment. Many people positively want to prevent others from getting ahead, the young educator told Banfield. “Truly, I have found no one who interests himself in the general welfare. On the contrary, I know there is tremendous envy of either money or intelligence.” Banfield created a term for this kind of civic disengagement, an academic mouthful that we will note in passing and then leave aside: “amoral familism.” Basically, it means a society in which people act in their own interest without regard to any moral code other than what they believe is best for them and their families. Civic involvement in such a society is a waste of time, a snare for suckers. In a place like Montegrano, Banfield observed, values greater than the self and the family are mostly irrelevant, because there is “no connection between abstract political principle,” on the one hand, and “concrete behavior in the ordinary relationships” among the townspeople, on the other. It is a society in which people think that what’s good for the family is the only real rule of politics, and ideas like “democracy” or “socialism” or “communism” are mostly just so much noise.
AP PHOTO/E VAN V UCC I
arty, although during the early period of the P Cold War, the Communists were kept from power by various coalitions led by the Christian Democrats — along with some secret infusions of cash to anti-communist politicians from the American intelligence agencies. Both the United States and Italy in the 1950s were free nations, at least to judge from the constitutional guarantees of civil and human rights, and the noisy and active public spaces in both countries. Despite the formal similarities between two Western democracies, however, Banfield could see immediately that something was amiss in this little corner of Italy. “Democracy” in Italy did not mean what it did in America, a nation at that time full of active civic, religious and social organizations. All of these associations seemed to be missing in places like Montegrano. Banfield had seen the effects of the lack of trust and cooperation among the farmers of Arizona and Utah, but these problems were even worse in Italy. The townspeople were poor and mistrustful, and they were destined, it seemed, to stay that way. Things were so bad in Montegrano that when Banfield wrote a book about the village, he titled the work “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.” (You can see why he was kind enough to change the name of the village.) In effect, Banfield said that development was blocked in Montegrano and other backward places not because of the government, or capitalism or socialism or any other “ism,” but by the people who lived there. Democracy in such places was just a word; the townspeople were free, of course, but they lacked the fundamental moral qualities that make democracy work and allow citizens to cooperate, to respect each other’s rights and to regard each other as members of a community, rather than to act like brutish children playing a game of musical chairs. Scholars now refer to these horizontal relationships among people as “social capital,” the reservoir of trust and goodwill that allows citizens not only to advance together but also to endure the inevitable bad times without turning on each other, and towns like Banfield’s Montegrano had precious little of it. When Americans think of a small commune in Italy, they probably think of a town much as Montegrano looked to Banfield at the time, with Mediterranean sunlight shining down on artisans and farmers, and the gentle southern Italian mountains holding lovely white stone homes in a reassuring embrace. The reality was far less appealing, as Banfield wrote:
IN THE 2016 ELECTION, SOME VOTERS SAW DONALD TRUMP AND HILLARY CLINTON AS DIFFERENT WINGS OF THE SAME ESTABLISHMENT.
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UTAH STATE H ISTOR ICAL S OCIE TY
BANFIELD CONTRASTED MONTEGRANO WITH ST. GEORGE, UTAH, WHERE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT WAS THE ORDER OF THE DAY.
Montegrano was in southern Italy, and it is no accident that the most extreme version of this kind of thinking is at the root of the Italian Mafia mentality, in which the clan is more important than anything else. To see an excellent depiction of “amoral familism,” think of the final scene of the 1974 movie “The Godfather Part II,” written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, both Italian Americans from immigrant families. Set in 1941, the youngest son of the Corleone crime family, Michael, is talking to his older brother Sonny about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sonny — who is no coward and often exhibits great physical bravery — nonetheless thinks the men now crowding the military recruitment stations are “saps.” Michael, born and raised in the United States, asks Sonny why he thinks this way. “They’re saps because they risk their lives for strangers,” Sonny answers. When Michael says they’re risking their lives for their country, Sonny says: “Your country ain’t your blood. You remember that.” When Michael reveals he has dropped out of Dartmouth and enlisted in the Marines, Sonny is so enraged that he attacks him. In Montegrano, Banfield found that civic life reflected a basic rule expressed in one form or another by all of the villagers: “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.” These Italians lived by a purely transactional code, according to which every man used “his ballot to secure the greatest 50
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material gain in the short run.” Nothing else was remotely as important. “Although he may have decided views as to his long-run interest, his class interest, or the public interest,” Banfield wrote, “these will not affect his vote if the family’s short run, material advantage is in any way involved.” It is difficult to govern a town like Montegrano, insofar as it can be “governed” at all. There are elected offices, but no one trusts anyone else to hold them. This is just as well, since being a local official was hardly an honor and certainly not a vehicle for improving the life of the town. Mostly, democratic politics produced misery for everyone involved. nearby towns an official is hardly elected before the voters turn violently against him, Banfield wrote. As soon as he gets into office, his supporters say — often with much justice — he becomes arrogant, self-serving and corrupt. At the next election, or sooner if possible, they will see that he gets what is coming to him. In Montegrano there is no better way to lose friends than to be elected to office. This is not an environment that encourages talented or virtuous people to engage in public service, even if there were people who understood such positions to be a matter of public service in the first place. The voters projected their own self-centeredness onto their elected officials, because the townspeople knew what they would do with political power, and they assumed that everyone else would do the same.
I N MO NT E GRANO AND
The goal in every election was not to return political leaders to office for the public good, but to squeeze out whatever benefits could be gotten in the immediate circumstances. If this sounds suspiciously like the modern United States or some of the wobblier democracies in Europe, it should. In his time, however, Banfield saw far fewer similarities with the United States. Instead, he contrasted Montegrano with St. George, a community he saw while living in Utah where civic interaction was the order of the day, from the Red Cross to the local farm bureau. Banfield was being a bit too clever here, since St. George was a Latter-day Saint community and was, for religious and cultural reasons, likely to exhibit more civic engagement than most places even by the standards of the United States in the 1950s. The contrast was nonetheless striking, and most of the associations and their goings-on in St. George would be familiar to anyone today who grew up in almost any American community of the mid- to late-20th century, including fraternal organizations, trade associations, school committees and chambers of commerce. Montegrano, by comparison, had none of these. Even the church and its services in this nominally Catholic town were mostly ignored, except for a small group of village women and some of the men who “remain standing near the door as if to signify that they are not unduly devout.” There were no local newspapers; the major dailies from Rome and elsewhere in the region were delivered by bus to the commune, but there was nothing in them of local affairs, and they were thus read by few villagers. And as for civic engagement, Banfield found about 25 “upper class men” in a town of over 3,000 who “maintain a clubroom where members play cards and chat. Theirs is the only association.” Again, this sounds terrible and yet familiar. The collapse of trust in institutions and politics is a well-known story in the United States. The American public, whose generally low participation in elections is itself a departure from most other democracies, not only has ceased to trust government institutions, but many Americans have come to believe that these institutions and the elites who inhabit them are actively hostile to ordinary citizens. America’s many civic and fraternal associations, the intermediate institutions that provide the social foundations for d emocratic government, are declining in numbers and activity. Levels of trust in everything and everybody but the military (which should be a warning sign in a democracy) have fallen to
WITHOUT SOME BASIC BELIEF THAT THE GOOD OF THE FAMILY AND THE GOOD OF SOCIETY ARE INTERTWINED AND MUTUALLY REINFORCING, DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS BECOME LITTLE MORE THAN TEMPORARY CONVENIENCES, AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES BECOME ANNOYANCES.
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historic lows. To run for office in America in the 2020s is to invite the same kind of instant disrepute it garnered in Italy in the 1950s. Americans always have plenty of excuses for their cynicism. It’s too hard to vote; the rich just get richer; nothing matters anyway. The Italians had all of the same excuses, as did observers who objected to Banfield’s account and who applied what they saw as obvious answers of their own to the village’s political and economic dysfunction. Of course poor people loathed the authorities; those are the elites who kept them poor. Of course the village distrusted the Catholic Church; those clerics and bureaucrats concentrated land and wealth and power in their own hands for centuries. And of course the commune wanted nothing to do with politics; those Fascist pretenders joined an insane war and devastated their country within recent memory. Banfield thought of those explanations, too, and found that they did not explain very much. Perhaps the villagers were selfish and disengaged because they were poor. That’s a popular excuse, but, as it turned out, not one that held much water. When it came to attending church services in this small Catholic town, for example, Banfield wryly noted that the typical villager “uses his poverty as an excuse for not doing what he would not do anyway: He does not go to Mass on Sunday, he explains sadly, because he must be off to his field at dawn. But his field is a tiny patch of wheat on which, except for three weeks a year, he can do almost nothing.” More to the point, that same villager does nothing else for the town, even for the orphanage whose walls were falling down around the ears of the little girls housed there. “None of the many half-employed stone masons has ever given a day’s work to its repair,” Banfield observed, despite the fact that “there is hardly a man in Montegrano who could not contribute a third of his time to some community project without a loss of income.” Banfield plowed through several other explanations, including ignorance, class hatred and the attachment of peasants only to their own plot of land. None of them seemed to capture the problem. The best Banfield could do was to note that many of the villagers themselves had been orphans or desperately poor children — not that this increased their empathy toward others in the same situation — and so they feared the kind of poverty and premature deaths that would relegate their own children to a life of similar misery. Rather than cooperate and endure any longer-term risk to 52
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their families, Banfield surmised, the villagers took what they could get in the near term and let the future be someone else’s problem. In the end, Banfield found no solution. His remedies, as sensible as they were, amounted to little more than recommendations that encouraged people to be better citizens. “The individual must define self or family interest less narrowly than material, short-run advantage,” he wrote. “He need not cease to be family minded or even selfish, but — some of the time, at least — he must pursue a ‘larger’ self-interest.” And who will do this? Well, Banfield hoped (for that is all he could do) that “a few persons, at least, must have the moral capacity to act as leaders. These need not act altruistically either; they may lead because they are paid to do so. But whether they give leadership or sell it, they must be able to act responsibly in organizational roles and to create and inspire morale in organization.” And if all that can be done, somehow, then the citizens must be sure not to throw it all away: “Voters and others must not destroy organizations gratuitously or out of spite or envy.” Banfield, even after his disillusionment with the New Deal, still had the instincts of a social planner, and he wanted to be able to translate his findings into some kind of policy. All the more desolating, then, that he admits at the end that planners who want to defeat these cultural land mines would have to identify the “key elements” that created them in the first place, “something which may be impossible.” Banfield died in 1999. His book, for a time, became an academic classic and for years was part of the education of future social scientists, back when such books were readable both by scholars and the general public. Eventually Banfield ran afoul of the prevailing views of the academy in his day, which returned to a faith in government solutions and rejected his emphasis on culture and human agency when trying to explain persistent poverty. He is also somewhat less read these days because his case study has been overtaken by newer and better works, not only on Italy, but on democracy in general. A landmark study in 1993 by Harvard professor Robert Putnam, for example, found — as Banfield might have expected — that when Italy attempted to impose similar institutional reforms in the north and south of the country in the 1970s, the same set of arrangements performed differently depending on where they were, an outcome explained primarily by social context and history rather than by institutional design.
Comparisons between Italy in the 1950s and America in the 2020s are naturally limited, especially when Banfield loaded the dice by comparing impoverished villagers who had just survived a war to relatively prosperous Latter-day Saints in Utah. There are fundamental economic and political differences that matter as much now as they did then, including the important differences in voter behavior when faced with the Italian proportional representation system and the American system of separated powers and fixed terms. And an agrarian society in an underdeveloped region of a defeated nation is not a good comparison to a thriving town in an emerging superpower. But even within Italy itself, the flaw at the heart of the villages like Montegrano has bedeviled Italian politics over the many years since Banfield lived among its residents. Italian democracy has survived and Italy has become a major political and economic power, and yet the attitude of the self-centered villager is still a part of the political culture. As the Italian scholar Maurizio Viroli notes, Italy is still a free country, if “free” means that “neither other individuals nor the state can prevent us from doing as we choose.” But Viroli calls this the “liberty of servants,” rather than the liberty of citizens. It is the liberty of human beings who are subjects in a new kind of democracy that is really just the “court of a signore surrounded by a plethora of courtiers, who are in turn admired and envied by a multitude of individuals with servile souls.” The signore to whom Viroli refers was Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul and gleeful sybarite who led Italy for nearly a decade. Berlusconi was like one of Banfield’s villagers — if those villagers were plutocratically rich and given control of an entire country. He entered politics to protect himself and his interests, he methodically enriched himself and his friends, and he had no real attachment to any governing concept other than what was best for Silvio Berlusconi. Like all demagogues, his antics and promises finally exhausted the public, and he resigned in 2011. Viroli, for his part, rejects the idea that Berlusconi and the regime he produced was some kind of accident. When he reflected in 2010 on how his country had come to such an unfortunate state, Viroli did not hesitate to speak of what he describes as “Italy’s longtime moral weakness,” and despite the “examples of greatness that have honored our past and our present,” he did not spare the voters from their own responsibility:
WE’RE ALL VILLAGERS NOW was all just a story about Italy. Maybe this kind of selfishness and delusion, as Viroli wrote, is just a recessive gene in Italy’s political DNA, reasserting itself every few generations as a reminder of some sort of flaw or original sin that dates from the first time Romulus and Remus set their eyes on the Seven Hills. Maybe Americans and others can reassure themselves that this is “just how Italians are.” Unfortunately, the story of Montegrano matters today because the democracies — and even the United States, which once seemed so much healthier than Italy — are looking more and more like that long-ago village. The story of Montegrano is a cautionary tale precisely because it could be the American future. Consider, for example, how many Americans think that the major defect in the U.S. political system is a combination of both their own incompetence as voters and the moral failings of the group of politicians for whom they themselves have voted. A national study done some 20 years ago by two University of Nebraska professors found that nearly half the respondents from national focus groups “believed that the country would be better off if politicians and not the American people decided political issues.” Banfield wrote, We were taken aback by the extent to which focus group participants believe that the American people generally do not have the time, motivation, orientation, knowledge and even intelligence it takes to get up to speed on the political issues of the day, unless those issues might be of vital interest to the person. ... And it was an extremely rare voice that said the American people were willing to shoulder the responsibility of deciding tough political issues. B UT M AY B E THIS
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By moral weakness I mean the quality that so many political writers have explicated, that is to say, a lack of self-esteem that in some cases masks itself with arrogance, and which makes men willing to become dependent on other men. If I believe that I am not worth much, why should I not serve the powerful, if I profit considerably thereby? “To put it concisely,” Viroli adds, “if we are subjected to the arbitrary and enormous power of a man, we may well be free to do more or less what we want, but we are still servants.”
MILLIONS OF SUPPOSED BERNIE SANDERS VOTERS VOTED FOR DONALD TRUMP IN 2016.
And yet among that same group, anywhere from a quarter to some 40 percent of Americans believe that “obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking,” and that the main reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that “politicians are corrupt, or self-interested or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding.” No Italian peasant could have set up this nowin situation more elegantly. The voters hold out hopes that somehow better decisions could be made by “leaders who will step forward, cast aside cowardly politicians and venal special interests, and implement long overdue solutions,” but why these citizens never manage to find such unicorns is left unexamined. Worse, as the writer Jonathan Rauch noted later, it is deeply worrisome to realize that for the voters in this study, “whether the process is democratic is not particularly important.” Generations of Americans were raised with Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting of a man speaking his mind at a New Hampshire town meeting, one of the representations of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” Rockwell produced during World War II. They will bristle at reimagining this sturdy and civic man, whose face Rockwell lovingly depicted as having weathered a lot of tough New England winters, as just another lazy Mediterranean farmer lolling about in a half-tended grain field, complaining about others. Americans are doers, volunteers, self-made and motivated. Americans don’t begrudge success, we emulate it. We believe in merit and talent and we encourage everyone to be their best. We are not Italian villagers, scheming and nursing grudges against each other. And yet it is important to remember that
Rockwell’s image of the common man having his say, politely and with the obvious attention of his fellow citizens, was both an idealized reality and an aspiration. Even as a romantic memory, it is a portrait from a bygone era. For decades, television-addled voters in the United States have been looking for celebrity gladiators, not governors. Most voters, especially in the United States, would resent the implication that their beliefs are flexible or that their political leanings are not based on some sort of principle. As party identification has grown more rigid over the years, they would reject the idea that they are capable of careening about between political ideologies, embracing socialism one moment and royalism the next, like the villagers of Montegrano. And yet political scientists for decades have noted the political incoherence of the American voter. As far back as the early 1960s, the political scientist Phillip Converse showed that most voters do not have particularly stable ideological views. The voters lack the information — or the interest — to develop a coherent view of politics beyond a general party identification, and this reality plays itself out regularly in U.S. elections. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, there were stark differences between the major party nominees. More consistent but nonetheless jaundiced and bitter voters could look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — historically, two of the most unpopular people ever to face off against each other for the presidency — and see nothing but two New York-based plutocrats, aging baby boomers who hated each other but traveled for decades in the same circles. (A famous picture of the Clintons at one of Trump’s CONTI NUED ON PAGE 80 FEBRUARY 2022
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HOW SKI TOWN ECONOMICS ARE A HA RBINGER FOR AMERICA’S STRUGGLING MIDDLE CLASS
BY H E ATH E R H A N S MA N IL LU STR ATI O N BY C H R I S G A L L P H OTO G R A P H Y BY T Y L E R W I L KI N S O N - R AY ( AS P E N ) & S P E N S E R H E A P S ( PA R K C I TY )
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ON
A SN OWY, WI NTRY afternoon in December, around 4:30, I was sitting in the Aspen Highlands Ski Patrol locker room. While trying to ignore the smell of dank, sweaty boots, I eavesdropped on a conversation between an old-time ski patroller and a young lift operator. The liftie was lamenting his current situation: living in his truck, washing up at the rec center, occasionally catching warm nights and hot showers at a new girlfriend’s place. There’s nowhere available or affordable to live. The older guy empathized. He’d squeezed into affordable housing back in the ’80s and was still under the same roof. Skating on the margins of the town where he’d pegged his career. “It was hard when I started, and I think it’s much harder now,” he said, checking his watch to see when he’d have to catch his bus down the valley. That struggle is backed up by math. There’s a metric called the Gini coefficient that measures inequality by plotting dispersion of income. A Gini coefficient of 0 indicates perfect equality while 1 means total inequality. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey, the national Gini coefficient is .48. Aspen’s is .56. Megan Lawson, an economist at the Headwaters institute based in Bozeman, Montana, who studies community development in the American West, says it’s an indicator for how far apart the haves and have-nots are. She uses it to try to capture the experience of people working in communities like Aspen, and to quantify why it’s hard for them to keep pace when expenses like housing and health care keep rising.
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AF F LU E NT V ISTORS TO AS P E N OF F E R A STARK CONT RAST TO LOC AL WORK E RS , WH O ST RU GGL E TO ME E T B AS IC NE E DS .
Those disparities are wide and getting wider across the West. According to the Colorado Center on Law and Policy’s self- sufficiency standard published in 2018, in Aspen’s Pitkin County, a family of two (an adult and a preschooler) needs an annual income of $71,274 to make ends meet. That’s way above the 2021 federal poverty benchmark of $17,420 for a family of two, and the highest standard in the state. The Pitkin county manager has found that a quarter of households fall under the standard. In a picture-perfect utopia, one in four families is struggling to pay their bills. Maybe it sounds like what’s happening in your local community. Because
it’s not just the dirtbag ski patrollers who are having a hard time. And it’s definitely not just happening in A spen. I was in that locker room because I spent the past few winters on the road, writing a book about the appeal of skiing, and the reality of living in mountain towns. And when I was there, I found a lot of darkness. The book, which started as a love letter to a sport that has shaped my life, quickly evolved into an investigation of the inequality I found, and the way it’s winnowing down any kind of middle class and making it harder to thrive if you’re not at the top of the income pyramid in the West — and more broadly, in America.
Places like Aspen — and other resort towns like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Park City, Utah — might seem like rarefied dreamlands where the standard of living is unrealistically high. But the growing gap between wages and wealth is a national trend, and what’s happening to the locals in ski towns is also what’s hollowing out the middle class across America: flat wages, consolidated wealth, governmental austerity and an increased cost of living. According to data from Pew Research Center and others, inequality is real and getting worse across the country. Ski towns, with their skewed baseline of desirability and reliance on service workers, provide an interesting lens into the high highs and low lows of that inequality. They’re the canary in the coal mine for how a top-heavy economy can’t hold itself up, and how that imbalance trickles into everything from mortgage rates to mental health. It can feel grim, but the bright side is that those towns are also trying to address some of those issues fast — because they have to. So in the face of that, maybe there are some lessons for the lowlands, too.
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1 89 4, LOCAL MI NERS pulled a 2,340-pound silver nugget out of Aspen’s Smuggler Mine, the area’s final foray into a high-dollar heyday. Back then it was an industry town, booming and bustling. But extraction bottomed out before the economy turned to skiing. In the beginning of the 20th century, when the mines tapped out, the town’s population shrank from 10,000 to 750. Aspen was dead quiet until the late ’30s and early ’40s, when skiers started poking around the mountains and running a rope tow up the face of Roch Run, on what’s now Aspen Mountain, in the middle of town. Chicago socialite Elizabeth Paepcke showed up in the first wave of skiers. She came in 1938, hitched a ride up the back of the mountain, skied down the face, and became enamored of the place and its potential as a ski area. In 1945, she convinced her businessman husband, W alter, who had become wealthy manufacturing cardboard containers, to move to Aspen and invest in the nascent ski operation and the idea of Aspen as a destination.
SCOTT BEAVERS, 49, HAS BEEN IN ASPEN FOR 35 YEARS AND CO-OWNS A BUSINESS WITH 20 EMPLOYEES. HE RENTS A SMALL CABIN OUTSIDE OF TOWN AND SAYS BUYING A HOUSE IS JUST IMPLAUSIBLE.
They connected with a wave of recently returned war veterans who had seen the ski towns of the Alps and wanted to create something similar. Walter worked with former 10th Mountain Division soldier Friedl Pfeifer to plan the first ski lift in town. In 1946, they founded the Aspen Skiing Corp. with two other 10th Mountain veterans, Johnny Litchfield and Percy Rideout. Walter built the airport and started laying down groundwork for Aspen’s growth, spinning it out into a Promised Land, trying to envision what it would look like when outsiders like him started, hopefully, flooding in. It was a version of the lauded American dream: If you build it, they will come. They did, and the same was true of the rash of other ski areas springing up across the U.S., many of them started by other 10th Mountain Division soldiers. As the ski industry, and really the tourism industry in general, grew in the middle of the last century it bolstered a new kind of economy, based on leisure time, exploration and recreation. In the ’60s and ’70s, as thousands of local ski hills sprung up in cold, mountainous towns, skiing became a way for middle-class families to get outside in the depths of winter. It was accessible and wide
ranging. But toward the end of the century, as ownership consolidated, and mountainside real estate became more desirable and valuable, the sport — and the towns became more exclusive and expensive. Aspen, as a ski town, was supposed to be paradise. The Paepckes and the other people who turned Aspen into a tourist destination conceived it as a place where people could get away from their everyday lives to consider higher truths. But any kind of utopia is inherently exclusive. If you have something desirable and limited, like a crystalline valley in the Rockies, capitalism doesn’t do much to keep it untouched and gorgeous. Demand quickly outguns supply, tipping the scales toward excess. When you put bounds around a place to keep it pristine, you’re pushing certain things, and certain people, out of town. If you’re visiting a ski town, you might not think about the embedded economics — I don’t often think about these things on vacation — but the outdoor industry is an $887 billion economy in the U.S., and it’s growing. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in Colorado, it’s 2.5 percent of the state’s GDP. In Utah, outdoor recreation contributes more than $4.9 billion in GDP and FEBRUARY 2022
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ELLIOT WILKINSON-RAY, 36, OWNS A SMALL APPAREL COMPANY WITH FOUR EMPLOYEES. THE WELL-KNOWN “SKIERS CHALET” WHERE ELLIOT LIVES IS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SITUATION MANY PEOPLE IN ASPEN FACE WHEN HOLDING ON TO LIVING IN TOWN: HIS RUN-DOWN STUDIO HAS NO KITCHEN, AND HIS LEASE IS MONTH TO MONTH, AS THE BUILDING IS SLATED TO BE RAZED.
61,890 jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Recreation has long been lauded as a way to help wean Western towns away from extraction and a new way to use natural capital, but it can become a chicken- and-egg cycle. You need the buzz of a resort (or many) to pull people in and keep the engine of recreation going. That can be a good thing: There wouldn’t be many jobs in a valley like Aspen without the resort, and nearby towns like Somerset, which never embraced tourism after the mines closed, struggle with retaining jobs and residents. But it’s an industry that caters to outsiders, and that single-sided, wealth-based economy can crush the culture that it feeds 58
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from. And that’s true of industries far beyond skiing, from manufacturing to education. In her research, Lawson has found that across the West people are moving to counties with recreation opportunities more quickly than to other places — and there’s faster job growth in those towns. But if you pull apart the numbers there is darkness there. Abundant growth doesn’t always lead to equitable growth. The Aspen area is a good example of that. According to Pitkin County, in 2021, the average income was $49,460, while the state average was just over $63,026. In Pitkin, wages for accommodation and food services, the sector that encompasses essentially any kind of
tourism job as well as many service jobs, were $49,460. “Tourism has the most jobs, but they pay the least,” says R achel Lunney, director of Northwest Colorado Council of Governments Economic Development District. She says those discrepancies cascade out in all sorts of complicated, deceiving ways. For instance, unemployment rates are low, which is often a sign of economic vitality, but in A spen, it’s a false signal of stability. Because the basis of the economy is lower-paying service sector jobs, to make ends meet, people tend to work more than one job — a statistic that isn’t usually tracked. They might be employed, maybe even more than full time, but they’re struggling to earn enough to get by, and that’s true among
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S K I TOWN S, W ITH THE IR SKEWED BASELI NE OF D ES I R AB ILITY A N D R E L I ANCE ON SERVI CE WOR K E RS, P R OVIDE A N INTERESTI NG LENS I N TO T H E HIG H HIGHS A ND LOW LOWS OF I N E QUA L I T Y IN A M E R IC A . TH EY’RE THE CANARY I N T H E COA L MIN E FO R TH E MI DDLE CLASS.
T H E M E DIA N IN CO ME FOR I NDI VI DUALS I N PARK CI TY H AS DE C L INE D S INC E 2 01 6 , WH IL E T H E COST O F L IVIN G HAS CONTI NUED TO I NCREASE. LOCAL B U S INE SS E S ST RU GGL E TO F IND LOC AL S TO STA F F THE IR E STABLI SHMENTS, AS MOST CAN’T AFF ORD TO L IV E WH E RE T H E JOB S ARE .
service workers across the country, from big cities to isolated rural towns. Wage growth has been sluggish in the U.S. for the past 40 years, and Lunney says that local wages haven’t changed much either. They’re barely keeping pace with inflation, and while wages have stagnated, other sources of income have surged into the county. In the past decade, remote work options have skyrocketed, increasing 400 percent since the pandemic. And in the face of COVID-19, knowledge workers flooded out of cities in droves. People who are making money in, say, Silicon Valley, can move to Aspen without directly needing to derive money from the local economy, which has accelerated economic disparity. 60
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It was already bad before it got worse. Former Pitkin County Mayor Mick Ireland did a study a few years ago and found that from 1970 to 2017, while average earnings per job grew 30 percent, per capita income grew 301 percent. In November 2021, Pitkin’s per capita income was $155,067 — more than three times the average wage, which means that most of the earnings in the county weren’t coming from wages or the local economy. Instead, Lunney says they’re likely coming from things like investment income, dividends and retirement income, and other accruals of outside wealth, especially after COVID-19 hit and more remote workers moved in. “It’s really hard to track people who are making money in other places but spending it here, and liv-
ing here,” Lunney says. And those people who make money elsewhere fundamentally change how goods and services are valued, and how the local economy is stacked up. For instance, that average wage of $49,460 won’t get you too far in a town where the typical home value is $2.5 million, which it was this year in Aspen — up 19.4 percent over the past year, according to Zillow. Almost everything else in town, from health care to taxes to groceries at one of the town’s two markets, is more expensive than the rest of the state, according to the county. Again, it’s not just Aspen. This spreading disparity is happening across the country, and it’s getting worse. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, as the cost of living has gone up and wages have stayed flat, it’s harder for everyone (besides the wealthiest) to get by. Jackson Hole, which has the nation’s highest per-capita income from assets according to a study by the Economic Innovation Group, is a clear case. Because Wyoming doesn’t have personal or corporate income taxes, Jackson Hole has become a tax haven for the wealthy. When they set up residency there, they get the double benefit of a ski house (which they can often cover with tax write-off money), and a highly reduced tax burden. Jonathan Schechter, a Town Council member and economist who studies inequality in ski towns, says that means the county has some of the highest per-capita income in the country, and a massive wealth gap. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top 1 percent of earners in Teton County, Jackson Hole’s home, make 132 percent more than those in the bottom 99 percent — the highest income disparity in any county in the country. “Roughly 85 percent of income earned by Teton County is investment income, leaving 15 percent for wages, and that’s not much,” he says. He says that makes it hard for most locals to make ends meet, and that makes it hard for them to invest in the community, and their tax base can’t cover their local needs for things like school funding or social services, even when there is a lot of wealth in the area. Jackson is far out on the end of the spectrum, but what’s happening there is indicative of what’s happening in a lot of other places, from Steamboat Springs to Salt Lake City: It’s becoming harder for an average person or family to make a living. When wages aren’t high enough to support the cost of living and
ing a 15-year-old vehicle hours into town to get to work — all while bringing in a household income that could provide “normal” middle-class comforts were they in Illinois or Oklahoma. For growing young families — or any locals for that matter — there’s nowhere to grow up or move to.
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LUISA CANTON MANAGES THE BAR AT ONE OF ASPEN’S MOST EXPENSIVE HOTELS, WHERE ROOMS BEGIN AT ALMOST $2,500 A NIGHT DURING PEAK SEASON. SHE LOST HER HOUSING AND HAS BEEN STAYING WITH A FRIEND UNTIL SHE CAN FIND A NEW PLACE. IT’S BEEN FOUR MONTHS AND SHE HASN’T FOUND ANYTHING SHE CAN AFFORD.
there’s no one to work base level jobs it hollows a community out. The place where that erosion shows up most clearly is in housing. The standard logic of the free market is to let whoever is willing to pay the most set the value for a good. That logic fails, or at least becomes deeply unequal, in towns where real estate prices are driv-
en by imported funds and earning potential isn’t aligned with the cost. The market breaks down because the value of goods and services is distorted by both desire and ability to pay, and that means local workers can’t find places to live. Families of four are crammed into small, deed-restricted apartments or cramped single-bathroom houses — with parents driv-
real estate prices are sky high because much of the inventory is in sprawling second homes, corporately owned mega mansions and condos converted into Airbnb rentals. For many of the people who own those homes — like an increasing number of businesses, or those 50-plus billionaires who have places in Aspen — price is basically irrelevant. But their ability to snap up desirable real estate makes things nearly unlivable for people who don’t have that privilege and who are often the people keeping the town running. It’s why entry-level workers like the Highlands liftie can’t find a place to live. In Mammoth Lakes, California, only 2 percent of long-term rental houses are vacant, which means places to live are nearly impossible to come by. In Telluride it’s 1 percent. According to a local newspaper article published in July, 59 percent of Jackson Hole locals say they’re struggling because of the lack of housing. They live in their vehicles, or drive in from Idaho, braving the curves of Teton Pass on storm days. In Aspen, there was violence in a park-and-ride lot, where people were living in their cars, when one man threatened others with a hatchet. There’s underlying grimness in holding on to these picture-perfect towns, and this is part of a bigger story that’s playing out across the country when the working class can’t live where they work. There are other factors beyond just local wealth that make it hard, like global supply chain issues and the way climate change is pressuring viability via things like water supply. Even if you eliminate from the picture those buying a second home, there’s a geographic crush that makes growth expensive. Development costs are high, and, in places hemmed in by swaths of public lands across the West, there’s not much room to build. Housing is C ROSS MOU N TA I N TOW N S ,
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THE TYP IC A L PRI CE OF A HOME I N PARK CI TY TO P S $ 1 .8 MIL L ION T H E S E DAYS . LOC A L WO R K E R S “ARE NOT MOVI NG DOWN THE STREE T OR DOWN T H E B LOC K TO ANOT H E R CO N DO. THE Y ARE MOVI NG OUT OF TOWN OR B AC K … WIT H T H E IR PARE NTS ,” B E CC A GERBER, A PARK CI TY COUNCI L MEMB E R, SAID IN NOV E MB E R.
driven by supply and demand, and when it’s impossible to create supply, the demand escalates. Megan Lawson, the Headwaters researcher, found that 45 percent of Americans have had their housing prices skyrocket for reasons similar to what’s happening in Aspen. “Communities across the country, in every state, are grappling with housing prices increasing at a rate that has not been seen before, even during the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession,” her September 2021 report read. As the costs of basic needs like housing grow, the 62
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economics becomes untenable for many. People can’t survive on their wages, employers struggle to find workers and some very basic needs get neglected because there’s no one to fulfill them. “The impacts of record-setting rises in housing prices reverberate through a community and manifest as labor shortages, increased homelessness and dramatic increases in rental costs. Those who are priced out of homeownership today will struggle to build wealth for themselves and their children, exacerbating income inequality,” Lawson’s report says.
I’m an older millennial. Generationally speaking, our parents could generally do better than their parents. Now we only have a 50-50 shot to do as well as our folks. As my peers move into middle age — which historically comes with middle-class earnings — the majority of us are falling behind past generations. According to a recent Brookings Institution study about the future of the middle class, there are a bunch of factors that are making it tough. People my age and younger saw steep earning declines right when we were trying to get on the curve of building wealth. Stagnant income and falling wages mean that there is minimal upward intergenerational mobility — a factor that used to be consistent for 90 percent of Americans, regardless of social class. The cost of traditional tickets to financial stability, like higher education or buying a house, has been rising faster than wages. We are getting lost in the spread of inequality, and that has trickle- down effects. So local governments, town planners, major employers and more are trying to figure out creative ways to make their towns more livable. One of the most prominent, immediate ways this is happening in Aspen is through an increase in wages. Over the past few years, Aspen Skiing Co., the area’s biggest employer, has repeatedly increased its minimum wage. In November, the company bumped it to $17 an hour, by way of a $3 million payroll investment. Several other major ski world businesses, including Vail Resorts, have also increased minimums to $15. It’s an economic trend, driven by both inflation and necessity, that’s also happening in cities like Seattle, and in parts of the federal government. In 2022 the minimum wage for federal contractors will be $15, thanks to an April 2021 executive order. Employers of all sizes are realizing — especially in the face of the “Great Resignation,” where more than 34 million people quit their jobs in 2021 alone — that they have to invest in workers if they want to retain them and keep the wheels turning. To address the housing problem, towns are trying a range of tactics, from deed-restricted workforce housing to job-based housing taxes, to building boarding houses so they immediately house seasonal workers. They’re working to both create more options and make the current ones more affordable. It’s going to take all those tactics and more, because it’s a multifaceted social problem, not just a supply and demand issue.
T H E R E’ S UN D E R LYIN G G R I MNESS I N HOLDI NG ON TO THE SE P IC TUR E -PERFECT TOWNS, AN D T H I S IS PA RT O F A B IGGER STORY THAT’S P L AY IN G O UT AC R OSS THE COUNTRY W H E N THE WO R K IN G C LASS CAN’T LI VE W HE R E THE Y WORK.
In December, Aspen hit a wall and the City Council declared an emergency six-month moratorium on new residential land use permits and froze new Airbnb listings. Residents’ opinions were mixed, in part because development is a big part of the local economy, with contractors and construction workers depending on the work. But the council said that the “character of certain development activities in the city of Aspen is having a negative impact upon the health, peace, safety, and general well-being of the residents and visitors of Aspen” and that a freeze would let them figure out a way to adapt codes and regulate growth. “It’s just hitting a level of crisis sooner than I expected,” Tyler Wilkinson-Ray, a local filmmaker and photographer says. The crisis has reached a fever pitch because there weren’t regulatory preparations before it happened, and there are no easy solutions now. Locals are hoping it’s not a case of too little, too late. In her research on economics in the West, Megan Lawson found that the hurdles to adequate housing were the same barriers that prevented equity across the board: unequal wealth and decision-making, and lack of investment in community resources. “Tools we used previously — like inclusionary zoning and incentives for builders — weren’t keeping up before, and they certainly aren’t now. We need bigger, coordinated investments supported at the local, state and federal levels,” the Lawson report read. Those big, coordinated investments can come from hyperlocal solutions, like the free public transportation in Aspen, which makes more housing easily available, or from federal level changes, like the low-income housing credit in the “Build Back Better” legislation. But it can’t all come from top-down change. Community organizations, businesses and citizens have to engage as well, to outline and plan for the services and actions that they need. For instance, in Aspen, those Highlands patrollers are part of a union. They’re ahead of a trend of
collective bargaining for ski patrols. This year patrollers at Big Sky and Breckenridge voted to unionize. They joined newly formed unions at places like Stevens Pass and Park City that are advocating for fair pay and benefits, because the system currently isn’t working for them. By asking for things like increased minimum wages and year-round health insurance, they’re hoping that can trickle down to issues like housing and health care. And that’s happening at businesses and in industries far beyond the ski world, too. In the past year, workers at places from Amazon to the Audubon Society have voted to unionize because their workplaces and work culture can’t sustain them. Change will have to come from every direction, from tax policy to town planning. Rees says working toward equity and a high standard of living for the middle class and beyond is going to take a reframing of what we want our towns — and our societies — to look like. “We need zoning policy and density,” she says. “We can’t let nostalgia stop us from making a decent future.” One light in the canary-filled coal mine is that when towns do let go of their nostalgic ideals of what their town used to be and work collectively toward smart growth and equity, things can change. In 2007, Durango, Colorado, decided to cap the number of short-term rentals in town. Now, only 2 to 3 percent of housing there can be used for short-term rentals — leaving more than 95 percent of rentals in town available to local workers, and city planners say they’re constantly getting calls from other communities about how to implement similar programs. It remains to be seen how Aspen City Council’s Hail Mary could change the livability of the town, but they know they have to do something. And if those places can figure it out, their plans can be a blueprint for how towns across the country can adapt and change, to keep their communities — and future generations — healthy, housed and secure.
GRIDLOC K AT PE A K S E AS O N I N AS PE N
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RECKONING WITH OUR PAST THE IMPORTANCE OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH
BY JE L A N I CO B B
T
he month of february reliably brings with it Presidents Day sales, chocolate, roses and questions about why we still have an entire month dedicated to Black history. The sales and the sweets are salutary distractions from the doldrums of midwinter, but the questions go straight to the heart of how we think of ourselves as a nation, how we came to be and the gap between those two things. As someone who has taught and written about American history, specifically African American history, for more than two decades, I’m heartened to see the public reckoning with our past that we undertake each year even as I know it will invariably be construed, at least in some quarters, as a kind of racial entitlement and spawn the facile question, “Why is there no white history month?” The celebration of Black History Month owes its origins to the historian Carter G. Woodson, who was born in 1875 in Virginia to parents who had been enslaved. He did not start high school until age 20 but went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Berea College in Kentucky and a doctorate in history from Harvard University. Scarred by his experiences with racism, Woodson deployed his formidable intellect to confronting the lies and historical distortions upon which the edifice of segregation and racial subjugation rested. In 1926 he created “Negro History Week” to help promote this cause. He chose February in homage to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and to Abraham Lincoln, both of whom were born in that month. Woodson died in 1950, 64
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but his work continued under the auspices of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, an organization he founded. In 1976, to mark the 50th anniversary of Negro History Week, the group expanded the campaign to the entire month. The cause to which Woodson devoted his life has not yet been achieved. We still live in a society where race is correlated to disparities in health care, education, wages, home values and the criminal justice system. In May 2020 these realities became starkly apparent as the
WE STILL LIVE IN A SOCIETY WHERE RACE IS CORRELATED TO DISPARITIES IN HEALTH CARE, EDUCATION, WAGES, HOME VALUES AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.
nation watched in horror the excruciatingly long video of George Floyd’s death. As protests erupted in every state in the union, the question “How did we get here?” could be heard echoing in the chaotic streets. The fact is that, on some level, we have always been here. But because we have tended to treat history as a resume — that is, a recitation of our achievements and virtues — it can be difficult to recognize this fact. Consider two experiences I had that underscore this point.
Some years ago, I was invited to give a prestigious address at Bates College in Maine. As if to emphasize the fact that I was in New England in January, a storm blew in shortly after my arrival, blanketing the campus in a thick layer of snow. Despite the weather, people stopped me as I made my way across campus and told me how much they were looking forward to my talk, which was to be held in the college’s stunningly appointed chapel. Just before the event began, the school’s president introduced herself and then took me over to meet Sen. Angus King, who had come in despite the weather. My talk that day was about the weight of history in the present. Buoyed by the hospitality, I climbed to the pulpit, thanked the president for the invitation, acknowledged King and then looked out into the pews filled with students, faculty and guests and began my comments by bluntly telling my audience, “This place only exists because of racism.” There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before people registered the meaning of my statement. Maine came into the union in 1820 as part of the famed Missouri Compromise. In 1819 the Missouri Territory was on the verge of statehood. At the time the nation consisted of 22 states, evenly divided between those that allowed slavery and those that prohibited it. Admitting Missouri as a slave state would have upset this balance, giving slaveholding states two more seats in the United States Senate than free states had and increasing the number of slavery’s defenders in the House of
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epresentatives. The recognition of this fact R led to a yearlong stalemate that persisted until Speaker of the House Henry Clay negotiated a compromise allowing Missouri to enter the union as a slave state while establishing the 36th parallel as the northernmost line in which slavery could be permitted. The potential legislative imbalance was addressed by allowing Maine, a new free state, to be carved out of the northern portion of Massachusetts. Thus, the absence of slavery in Maine effectively underwrote the cruelty of bondage in Missouri. I left Maine and spoke at an event at Florida State University. I told the crowd about the comments I’d made in Maine and, as a murmur of commentary spread among them, I said, “But before you get too comfortable, let’s talk about how Florida got here.” The First Seminole War of 1817-18, in which Gen. Andrew Jackson seized and occupied a significant portion of the then-Spanish-controlled territory of Florida, were the culmination of longstanding conflicts with the Indigenous population there. But Jackson’s invasion also came at the behest of slaveholders in Georgia who complained that the Seminoles refused to return fugitive slaves who made it over the border into the territory. (The Seminole forces included African Americans who fought against Jackson’s army rather than be returned to slavery.) Jackson’s occupation of Pensacola eventually led to the administration of President James Monroe working out a hasty diplomatic solution with Spain, which agreed to cede the territory in 1821. I flew home to New York from Florida, but had I wanted to continue the theme I could have flown to California, whose admission to the union as a free state was leveraged against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which obliged the federal government to locate people who had escaped slavery and drag them back into bondage. Or Texas, which fought a war of independence in large measure to protect slavery from the Mexican government, which was largely hostile to the institution. (Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, 36 years before the United States did.) The Texans joined the United States in 1845 but seceded again just 16 years later and fought a second war, the American Civil War, for the protection of slavery. I could have flown to Philadelphia and talked about the clauses of the Constitution that protected slavery and stymied Black equality. There are more examples — many of them — but the point here is that not only is our history as a nation bound to the question of slavery, and therefore race, but our basic geography is as well. We can’t fully understand why the country looks the way it does without confronting these matters.
PI CKETER S CA LL FOR POLI CE I N TEGR ATI ON OU TSIDE THE GEOR GI A STATE CA PI TA L I N ATLA N TA , 1 9 4 6 .
MY COMME NTS IN Maine and Florida were given in the context of talks about Black history, but they were also pertinent to the fundamental story of how our states came to be. There is no white history month because there has never been a question in this country about white people belonging. But for Black people the struggle for full and equal inclusion remains pertinent to our everyday lives. The irony of Black History Month is that, despite the chronic questions about its relevance or whether it is
divisive, it is easily the most sustained engagement the American public has with any of its history during the year. Given the polarities of our politics, the threats to our democracy and the many crises confronting us, we need more engagement with our history, not less. February just happens to be our best starting place. J E L A N I C O B B I S T H E D I R E C T O R O F T H E I RA A . L I P M A N C E N T E R F O R J O U R NA L I S M A N D C I V I L A N D H U M A N R I G H TS AT C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y A N D A S TA F F W R I T E R AT T H E N E W YO R K E R .
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HIGH-CALIBER INFLUENCE YES, THE NRA HAS AN OUTSIZED SWAY OVER AMERICAN POLITICS. JUST NOT FOR THE REASONS YOU THINK IT DOES BY MATTH E W J. L ACO M B E
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n april 2015, the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association brought nearly 80,000 gun rights supporters to Nashville, Tennessee. The three-day conference offered seminars on topics ranging from home defense to doomsday survivalism planning to cooking with wild game, and a massive exhibit hall featured the latest firearms and firearms accessories (customized holsters, specialized apparel and so on), along with live product demonstrations and a chance to meet celebrities like controversial rock star — and NRA board member — Ted Nugent. There was a prayer breakfast, a family-friendly indoor shooting range and free country music concerts every afternoon. Yet the most prominent event of all was the Leadership Forum hosted by the nra’s Institute for Legislative Action, which since 1975 has served as the organization’s primary political advocacy and lobbying branch. The forum featured speeches by more than 10 Republican presidential hopefuls, including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Taking place long before the 2016 primaries began, the event was an important part of the gop’s so-called invisible primary — the very early, informal jockeying that occurs among each party’s presidential aspirants as they attempt to court elites, donors, activists and the party faithful. Accordingly, the speakers not only touted their pro-gun credentials, but also spoke to their broader conservative beliefs across a range of issues, harshly criticized the Obama
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administration, and warned of the specter of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Many took hawkish stances on terrorism and mocked President Barack Obama’s reluctance to use the term “radical Islam”; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, for example, said that he wanted “a commander in chief who will look the American people in the eye and say that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat and we’re going to do something about it.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, speaking in support of businesses that refused ser-
FINANCIALLY F OCUSED ARGUMENTS CANNOT FULLY E XPLAIN THE NRA’S INFLUENCE WITHIN AMERICAN POLITICS.
vice to same-sex couples on religious grounds, warned that if “Hollywood liberals and editorial columnists” could “conspire to crush the First Amendment, it won’t be long before they join forces again to come after the Second Amendment.” For future President Donald Trump, the appearance previewed not just the themes but the rhetorical style that would characterize his campaign. He made populist appeals against free trade and opined that Vladimir Putin and ISIS had no respect for Obama. He also
emphasized the threat posed by illegal immigration, calling the United States’ border with Mexico “a sieve” and saying that “it’s not what the country’s all about. … Millions of people coming in illegally. We’ve gotta stop it at the border and we have to stop it fast.” The 2015 meeting stood in stark contrast to the organization’s first annual membership convention. Held in 1948 — 77 years after the association was founded — the inaugural event brought around 700 NRA members to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., for what it described as a “four-day gunner’s get-together.” Gen. Jacob L. Devers from the U.S. Army kicked things off with a welcome address in which he emphasized the importance of rifle training for national defense and thanked the NRA for its assistance during World War II. In keeping with the association’s focus on marksmanship, subsequent sessions covered competitive shooting, management of local gun clubs and recruitment of “junior riflemen.” Politics were not absent from the event — NRA Executive Director C.B. Lister led a session on “The Legislative Picture” to explain what the organization was doing to combat gun control laws and to encourage attendees to write personalized pro-gun letters to politicians and newspaper editors. But no presidential aspirants made an appearance, and there was no mention of political parties. Barry Goldwater once famously said that politicians should “go hunting where the ducks are” while seeking votes. For Republican
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lobbying efforts — are the primary source of its influence. Others — focusing on financial resources in a different way — argue that the nra’s true purpose is to serve as a front for firearms manufacturers who are interested in weakening gun laws in order to boost sales; these arguments typically don’t specify how, exactly, the money of gun manufacturers is translated into policy change, but they imply that financial resources play a central role. In short, the NRA — which operates in a political system that many Americans believe is dominated by large corporations and wealthy elites — is seen by some as another example of the power of money. Yet these financially focused arguments C EN T R A L AS IT is to politics, power can be cannot fully — or even mostly — explain the difficult to pinpoint. We may have a general sense that certain groups are powerful because NRA’s influence within American politics. NRA the observed political or economic environmembers are mostly working-class individument seems to reflect their preferences and als, not financial elites. And although the NRA interests; weak gun regulations, for instance, does have an ongoing relationship with manusuggest that the NRA is powerful, just as high facturers, this relationship is neither a defining characteristic of the group nor a sufficient exlevels of economic inequality suggest that big planation of its political power. For one thing, businesses and wealthy individuals have power. the NRA’s incentives are not However, even when we have good reason to always aligned with those of ALTHOUGH THE suspect that particular gun manufacturers. Given NRA DOES HAVE groups are powerful, their interest in selling new AN O NGOING the ultimate source of firearms, manufacturers R ELATIONSHIP WITH M ANUFACTURERS, a group’s power isn’t have no reason to oppose THIS R ELATIONSHIP always easy to deter— and actually have good IS NEITHER mine. From where, exreason to support — laws A D EFINING actly, does a group like that make it more difficult C HARACTERISTIC the nra derive influfor individuals to sell exOF THE GROUP NOR A SUFFICIENT ence? Similarly, it can isting guns to one another. EXPLANATION OF ITS be challenging to idenThese sorts of laws, howevPOLITICAL POWER. tify the forms a group’s er, are strongly opposed by power takes. How, the NRA. Moreover, there is exactly, do business groups translate their evidence that the NRA can actually overpowresources into preferred political outcomes er manufacturers when disagreement exists. (such as the election of industry-friendly polFor example, when Smith & Wesson made an iticians and the adoption of industry-friendly agreement with the Clinton administration in regulations)? This difficulty is reflected in a 2000 to alter its products and sales processes lacuna in the field of political science, which to improve safety, the NRA initiated a cripacknowledges the importance of power but pling boycott against the company: Its prohas struggled to explain how groups can build duction declined by over 40 percent in just and use it over time. two years. So while manufacturers may (and The power of the NRA — although widely do) still contribute to the NRA, this suggests acknowledged by scholars and observers alike that the NRA controls the relationship and is — is no exception to this challenge. Some not a tool of the industry. politicians and commentators assert that fiMoreover, the NRA’s spending does not nancial resources — taking the form of outstand out: Groups that make comparable sized campaign contributions and expensive campaign contributions (e.g., environmental
candidates in the 21st century, the NRA — which reports having five million members — is unquestionably important hunting grounds. But, as the scene from its 1948 meeting suggests, this was not always the case. NRA supporters have participated in politics at unusually high rates for a long time, consistently — and typically successfully — opposing gun regulations since as early as the 1930s. Yet, despite this durable political engagement, it has taken the NRA a long time to cultivate the powerful conservative constituency that supports its agenda today.
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groups like the League of Conservation Voters and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union) do not appear to have influence comparable to the NRA’s, while groups that do appear to have comparable influence (e.g., business groups like the Chamber of Commerce) spend much more money than the NRA on lobbying. Further, despite periods when gun regulation advocates have outspent the NRA — including in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, when billionaire Michael Bloomberg put his full financial weight behind gun control — there have been no major shifts in federal gun policy (which remains far more lax than in any other similarly developed nation). And finally, the nra successfully persuaded policymakers on gun policy long before it began spending substantial sums on politics. Taken together, all this suggests that other factors besides money are in play.
F ROM E X IST ING ACCOU N TS of important gun control policy battles, we know that a crucial aspect of the NRA’s influence is its ability to translate the political intensity of its supporters into influence over policy. Gun rights supporters — especially NRA members and those whose status as gun owners is an important part of their personal identity — are very politically active, both generally and relative to individuals who support gun control: They’re more likely to write letters or donate money on behalf of their cause, more likely to participate in electoral campaigns and more likely to join advocacy organizations like the nra. Further, a remarkable 71 percent of individuals who favor less restrictive gun laws reported in 2014 that they are unwilling to ever vote for political candidates who support gun control; among those who favor stricter laws, only 34 percent said that they are unwilling to vote for candidates who do not share their gun preferences. There is compelling evidence that this engagement gap has had major effects on gun control policy. As early as the 1930s, the NRA helped thwart some of the first federal attempts at gun control by leading a letter writing campaign against proposed gun regulations. This became a favored strategy, and an effective one; another campaign in the mid-1960s against strong gun control proposals being debated in Congress generated such
A 2017 Pew poll found that 84 percent of Americans support mandatory background checks for private and gun show sales, 89 percent support laws to prevent the mentally ill from purchasing guns, 71 percent support a federal database to track gun sales, and 68 percent support a ban on “assault” weapons. These high levels of support for gun control are perhaps unsurprising given the state of gun violence in the United States. Horrific, high-profile mass shootings are unfortunately neither new nor rare phenomena. The Labor Day 1949 murder of 13 people in Camden, New Jersey, is considered the first mass shooting in U.S. history, and a shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 took the lives of 16 individuals. Although not new, mass shootings have become even more deadly in recent years; the 2016 shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando — in which 49 people were murdered and 53 injured — was a flood of mail that numerous policymakers the deadliest in U.S. history until the fall 2017 credited the letters with the bill’s defeat. PriLas Vegas concert shooting, which claimed the vately, politicians have acknowledged that lives of 58 victims and caused injuries to hunpressure from gun owning constituents has dreds of others. altered their behavior as policymakers (with Moreover, while mass shootings command one senator, for example, saying that he’d the greatest media attention, they are actual“rather be a deer in hunting season than a polly only a small part of the U.S. gun violence itician who has run afoul of the NRA crowd”); story. Between the beginning of 2001 — the these accounts are supported by quantitative year of the infamous September 11 terrorist analyses demonstrating how an “intense miattacks — and the end of 2016, guns were used nority” on gun control has caused elected ofto kill over 500,000 Americans. In that same ficials to vote against the will of an “apathetic timespan, terrorist attacks — which, unlike majority.” episodes of gun violence, almost always lead Indeed, part of what makes the NRA’s to swift government action — resulted in the success so striking is the extent to which the deaths of around 3,200. Guns are involved American public favors new gun regulations. in the deaths of more than 30,000 AmerAmericans have voiced support for gun conicans annually — a trol — both in the abstract number that rose to and in terms of specific polPART OF WHAT nearly 40,000 in 2017. icy measures — since the MAKES THE NRA’S As New York Times advent of public opinion SUCCESS SO STRIKING IS THE EXTENT TO columnist Nicholas polling. In what appears WHICH THE Kristof pointed out in to be the earliest polling AMERICAN PUBLIC 2015, more Americans data on guns, Gallup found FAVORS NEW GUN have died from guns in 1938 that 79 percent of REGULATIONS. since 1970 than in all Americans favored gun U.S. wars combined. control. Between that year Put in comparative perspective, the United and 1972, many polls were conducted by GalStates is an anomaly. It was the site of 31 perlup and Harris; not one found that less than cent of the world’s mass shootings between 66 percent of Americans favored gun control, 1966 and 2012, despite comprising only 5 perwith support peaking in 1969 at 84 percent. cent of the world’s population. Moreover, the More recent polling has continued to demonU.S. rate of gun-related deaths — at over 10 strate strong support for gun control policies:
per 100,000 people as of 2016 — is exceptional among advanced countries; nearby Canada, for example, had only 2.1 gun deaths per 100,000 in 2016, Japan had just 0.2, the United Kingdom had 0.3, Switzerland (which has a high rate of gun ownership) had 2.8, and France 2.7. Along with Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela, the United States is among six countries that accounted for slightly more than half of the world’s gun-related deaths in 2016. One factor that separates the United States from most other industrialized countries is the lack of strong legal restrictions on the ownership and use of guns. Mandatory, universal background checks — which the United States does not require — are very common throughout the world. Some countries outright ban the private ownership of handguns. Federal licensing is also common, with many countries requiring individuals to take a safety course to obtain a license. And not only does the United States lack restrictions on firearms that are popular around the world, it has also witnessed the proliferation of laws that have in various ways weakened prior regulations. In fact, contrary to the claims of gun rights advocates, the United States had strong state level gun regulations for most of its history — regulations that have been eroded in recent decades by laws explicitly protecting and expanding gun rights. Some form of “stand your ground” laws — which, with slight differences across jurisdictions, allow individuals to use deadly force to defend themselves with no duty to retreat — now exist in 34 states. Similarly, individuals are increasingly allowed to carry concealed firearms; in 21 states, gun owners are not even required to obtain a permit to do so, and in most other states, it is easy for anyone who legally owns a handgun to get a permit. These factors — broad public support for gun control, high rates of gun-related deaths and the relative weakness of existing U.S. laws — underscore the high stakes of the gun debate, make the NRA’s long-term political success all the more notable, and suggest that the U.S. policy landscape would be substantially different in a world without the NRA. E XC E R P T E D F R O M “ F I R E P OW E R : H OW T H E N RA T U R N E D G U N OW N E R S I N TO A P O L I T I C A L F O R C E” ( P R I N C ET O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S ) .
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WHAT THE PICTURE MAN TOLD ME HOW PHOTOGRAPHS CONNECT US TO OUR ANCESTORS — AND THE BROADER STORY OF HUMANITY BY B E R K L E Y H U DS O N
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n a tombigbee riverbank in Columbus, Mississippi, photographer O. N. Pruitt sets up his large-format camera atop a tripod. Before him, white and Black people — kids and grown-ups alike, in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes — gather for baptism. Some lift their voices in song. Two preachers, Bibles open in hand, prepare candidates — albeit separately and unequally — for the sacred ritual. As two men lift a young girl clad in all-white garments out of the water and the words “In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit” would have stilled in the air, Pruitt trips the shutter, and the photographic moment is forever. A half-century after those baptisms — and around the time I moved into the early stages of a professional career as a writer, editor and later professor — several boyhood friends and I discovered a treasure trove of Pruitt pictures. Covered in dust, mummified images resided in wooden crates and pasteboard boxes, smelling to high heaven as they deteriorated. These included the pictures Pruitt had made of me and my family at Thanksgiving and Christmas at my grandmother’s rambling Victorian house in 1954. He photographed my grandparents’ Sanitary Laundry and Dry Cleaners (their slogan was “When clothes are dirty, dial 630”) and my daddy’s Main Street Service Station (slogan: “Don’t Cuss. Call Russ.”).
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But in these boxes, there was so much more. It was our hometown’s photobiography. Throughout history, people have documented their lives and their families in letters and journals and albums — even digitally mapping their family trees by way of tech companies like Ancestry.com. But in the aftermath of finding those pasteboard boxes full of negatives, the value in reaching down
I LEARNED THAT IF YOU SHOW PICTURES TO YOUR RELATIVES, FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS OR LOCAL LIBRARIANS, YOU CAN MAKE AMAZING DISCOVERIES.
beyond the roots of our family tree to discover the stories of my community became unmistakable. Eventually, in 1987, these four friends and I acquired the collection to rescue it from history’s dustbin. Long before Google or Ancestry.com, we unearthed stories buried among family tree roots and forgotten memories. In some photos, we discovered everyday graces. In others, profane horrors of racial apartheid. We’d never heard before of the spe-
cific stories some images depicted. Nor of the long-hidden beauty and resilience of the people in them. Few pictures had captions, in the way you might find puzzling photos in a family album and not know who is pictured or why. But fueled by curiosity, I learned that if you show pictures to your relatives, friends, neighbors or local librarians, you can make amazing discoveries. The stories and images create a stunning American kaleidoscope of the early and mid20th century: studio portraits, picnics, floods of biblical proportions, carnivals, tornadoes, postmortem caskets, among the last public executions outside a courthouse, celebrities such as playwright Tennessee Williams and heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey, or an in-town celebrity such as world-renowned bird dog trainer and Westminster Cup winner Er Shelley. It took me 10 pre-Google years to figure out the name and story of the young Black man shown seated on a wooden barrel and holding a broom in one of Pruitt’s studio portraits. Although I can’t detail everything, I can say that a story unspooled after I found a tiny white woman over age 90, Hawley Knox Brown, who recognized Oscar West. He had cared for her children and worked as a janitor for her husband’s Brown Buick-Cadillac Co. She led me to West’s son, Oscar Lang. Lang told me how West helped a five-year-old boy named Floyd Brown Jr.
C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: C H U R C H G R O U P S O F B L A C K A N D W H I T E C O N G R E G A N T S G AT H E R E D A L O N G T H E T O M B I G B E E R I V E R S I D E O N S U N D A Y S I N A M E A S U R E O F C H R I S T I A N H A R M O N Y, S E R V I N G AS W I T N E S S E S F O R O N E A N O T H E R . O S C A R W E S T S I T S F O R A P O R T R A I T I N O. N . P R U I T T ’ S S T U D I O. O. N . P R U I T T ( F A R R I G H T ) , H I S S O N L A M B U T H ( F A R L E F T ) A N D P R O B A B L Y P R U I T T ’ S B R O T H E R J I M ( C E N T E R ) A L L W O R K E D A S P H O T O G R A P H E R S .
PHOTOGR AP H Y BY O. N . PR U I T T
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A B O V E : U TA H - R A I S E D B OX E R J A C K D E M P S E Y ( C E N T E R , N O H AT ) S TA N D S B E S I D E C A R N I V A L A C T O R M A D A M E F L O Z E L L A D U R I N G T H E G R E A T P A S H A’ S B U R I E D A L I V E A C T C I R C A 1 9 3 0 . O P P O S I T E : FA R M E R S Y LV E S T E R H A R R I S W I T H M U L E J E S S E O U TS I D E H I S H O M E I N P LU M G R O V E , 1 9 3 4 . G I R L W I T H C A N E B R A K E R AT T L E S N A K E , C I R C A 1 9 2 0 S .
As the story goes, West took two wooden milk crates and fashioned them into an airplane with a propeller. Then, spinning it, West said to the boy: “All right, now, you’re flying.” After Brown had retired as an administrator of the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, he told Lang: “The reason I’m sitting here now as a retired military colonel, as a flier, is (because of) your daddy.” In another photograph, Pruitt depicted the 1934 execution of James Keaton, a Black man on a gallows surrounded by white law enforcement officials outside of the Lowndes County Courthouse. For years as a young boy in the 1960s, I delivered the newspaper to Mrs. Hayslett, a widow. I never knew what had happened to 72
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her late husband, and I knew it wasn’t polite to ask. But as a kid, I always wondered. Now, with this photograph, I’d pieced together that it was James Keaton who was convicted for the murder of her husband. But when I asked another woman about the murder, she claimed that Keaton didn’t commit the crime, but she knew who did. It only added to the generationslong mystery that she wouldn’t disclose the name. While some photographs reveal my tightlipped home’s secrets, others unveil national ones. With his large-format camera in Novem ber 1930, Pruitt captured a convergence of personalities: former world heavyweight champion Dempsey (once a teenage boxing Latter-day Saint in Provo and Salt Lake City), the parents
of author Truman Capote and a “buried alive” carnival act known as The Great Pasha with his performing companion Madame Flozella. Dempsey and Capote’s mother — Lillie Mae Faulk Persons — were having an affair around the time of the photograph. Capote’s father, Arch Persons, managed The Great Pasha. And, likely with Lillie Mae’s assistance, Arch had secured Dempsey’s participation in a campaign to promote “Dollar Days” and “Dempsey Day” in Columbus, complete with Dempsey as a boxing match referee. Fifteen years later, Capote would write one of his earliest major short stories, “A Tree of Night.” It featured a “buried alive” carnival couple, riding on a train across the seat from a curious college woman.
Another image, a nitrate negative, captures a middle-aged Black man wearing worn overalls and grinning as his haltered mule stands beside him. After 10 years of talking to people all over town and in juke joints and combing through newspapers and magazines, I discovered his name: Sylvester Harris. And boy, does he have a story. A farmer, Harris was inspired by hearing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats — pep talks the president broadcast on the radio to give assurances to Americans made weary from the ravages of the Great Depression. So in February 1934, when Harris couldn’t make his mortgage payments, he drove his pickup truck into Columbus to call the president. He used a phone at the Western Supply store, and after 90 minutes he reached Roosevelt himself. Quickly, the president agreed to help Harris save the farm from foreclosure. In today’s parlance, Harris went viral — partly due to Pruitt’s taking a picture that was distributed nationally. Newsreels came to Harris’ farm to record this spunky Black farmer who became a hero of the Great Depression. But over the last three decades that I’ve spent uncovering the stories of the 88,000 negatives that Pruitt left behind from his postage stamp of soil, none have touched me
more than learning the real story behind that first baptism photo I dusted off. In the 1950s and 1960s, I grew up in a red-brick house four blocks from the Tombigbee riverside. I swam and skied there with its cottonmouths, alligator gar and catfish, but I’d never seen or heard anything about the Black and white baptisms Pruitt documented. There are many baptism photographs from the South, and although they may exist, I’ve yet to find others showing Black and white church groups together like this. When my mother neared age 90, at the turn of the millennium, I showed her the baptism images. A nonstop storyteller, she’d never told me that story. My mother had grown up three blocks from the river. She said she, her sister and her brothers, raised Baptist in a racially segregated church, often went to the river in the 1920s to watch the Black and white baptisms. University of Mississippi religion scholar Charles Reagan Wilson calls the biracial assemblage documented by Pruitt “remarkable.” I wish my mother had told me sooner because the pictures resonate to my core, enriching how I understand the confounding region where my family has lived for generations. The pictures give a new meaning to the song we sang at the First Baptist Church when we declared everyone is precious in Jesus’ sight.
And while I’ve discovered stories that deeply trouble me, I’ve also found stories such as these that provide substantial measures of comfort and inspiration. In the end, I believe that my persistent sojourn of discovery can serve as a compass, if you will, for navigating our cultural crossroads of today. I’ve learned from these photos left behind by Columbus’ picture man — and I believe that everyone might. Harvard photography expert Barbara Norfleet reminds us in “The Champion Pig” that photographs are excellent at raising questions and “can reveal what you do not understand, and also what you take for granted.” In 1941, a Pruitt studio advertisement in the local Commercial Dispatch stated: “Photographs Live Forever.” This notion of legacies prompts me to ask: What questions do our family and community photographs pose? How might we uncover answers? What might we all learn from these images that connect our pasts with our presents and futures? B E R K L E Y H U D S O N I S E M E R I T U S AS S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R O F M E D I A H I S T O RY AT T H E M I S S O U R I S C H O O L O F J O U R NA L I S M I N C O LU M B I A . H I S N E W B O O K , “ O. N. P RU I T T ’S P O S S U M T OW N: P H O T O G RA P H I N G TROUBLE AND RESILIENCE IN THE AMERICAN S O U T H ,” WAS P U B L I S H E D BY T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I NA P R E S S W I T H T H E C E N T E R F O R D O C U M E N TA RY S T U D I E S AT D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y.
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THE ART OF ‘YES’ THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE’S MANAGING DIRECTOR TALKS EMBRACING NEW EXPERIENCES AND LIFTING UP DIVERSE VOICES AS TO L D TO E TH A N B AU E R
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learned to say “yes” early in her career as a businesswoman, which led her to executive positions at companies like Citigroup, American Skiing Co., DSW and PetSmart. But after taking a job abroad, she learned another important key to success: inviting others to the table, giving them a voice and — most importantly — hearing what they have to say. Since then, Wallace has found a way to give more voices a place to share their stories: the Sundance Institute. As its managing director, she has succeeded in dovetailing her interest in business with her appetite for culture. Here, she shares what she’s learned with Deseret. etsy wallace
I have always been interested in business. I found it fascinating to understand how people came up with an idea and how they tried to develop it into something that somebody else may want to buy. How do you take that kernel of a thought and morph it into a business that has long-term stability? I found that question really interesting from the get-go. I had a lemonade stand when I was quite young and I thought it was great to earn 25 cents. So it all started there. Fast-forward to the middle of my career. After a few years of working in executive roles, my husband and I came to this point where he wanted to move overseas. And we ended up spending close to seven and a half years in Singapore, both of us working there. It was really a remarkable period of time for both of us. As an expat, you learn a lot about yourself and you learn a lot about your ability to interact with cultures that are very different from 74
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one another. You’re learning how to pivot and how to understand and appreciate the world. As an American, you tend to feel that others need to do something for you. But I quickly learned it’s quite the opposite. You want them to help you out, so how do you need to change? How do you quickly learn to read a room and hear what others have to say? I strongly recommend that, if you’ve never worked overseas, do it. It’s not always easy or HOW DO YOU QUICKLY LEARN TO READ A ROOM AND HEAR WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO SAY?
fun, but you can come away from it understanding what it is to be part of true diversity, and what it is to be part of something bigger. It changed me. When we moved back to the states, I made this giant pivot from being a CFO at a very large company to working at a startup. I really wanted to get back to that kernel of thought from my childhood: “How do you develop it?” That’s also what led me to Sundance. The transition from for-profit to nonprofit business was a little bumpy, but personally I was ready. I enjoy the challenge of adapting my thought processes. It didn’t take me long to really invest in the Sundance Institute’s mission, which revolves around two aspects: the development of artists so that different voices
can be heard and the development of audiences so that they can see the value of these different voices and why they are so special. Independent films are not like the Marvel series. They’re not big blockbusters. But they’re as valuable to watch, if not more. The Sundance Film Festival is often the first time these films are seen — and the first time these voices are heard. And it’s all taking place in the state of Utah. Fabulous! These voices are sometimes not the easiest to hear. But it allows for this dialogue, it allows for this discourse that you can participate in for a week, for a month, for a year or for years. My absolute joy is it starts here in Utah. I couldn’t be prouder. Attending a film festival adds to your day. When you walk into a film, you automatically have your own little community with the people you’re sitting with. You become either entertained or engaged together, or you become a new advocate for something. And then you talk with the filmmakers, and they inspire you, too. When you walk out, you feel like your knowledge vessel — that bowl of knowledge that we all have — is just getting fuller and fuller and fuller. And the diversity within that knowledge is just wonderful. It makes you a better person. I always come out happier. It’s really a remarkable process, and it’s true of arts and culture in general. We just happen to do film. I believe in helping people, and I want to help filmmakers around the world. It all circles back to what I learned while working in S ingapore: the importance of empathy, and of making sure many different voices can be heard.
B E T S Y W A L L A C E I N F R O N T O F T H E E G Y P T I A N T H E A T R E I N D O W N T O W N P A R K C I T Y, U T A H
PHOTOGR AP H Y BY J E R RY G A R N S
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WHY DEMOCRACY NEEDS RELIGION THE SURPRISING CHECKS AND BALANCES RELIGIONS PROVIDE FOR AMERICA’S DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM BY M YA JA R A DAT
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he simple, straightforward title of Robert Wuthnow’s latest book, “Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy,” is not only of-the-moment but particularly thought-provoking in the wake of January 6 — a moment when religion was being invoked to upend one of the cornerstones of our democracy: elections. Wuthnow, an emeritus professor of sociology at Princeton University, is the author of dozens of books and articles exploring the intersection of faith and the public square. Though he earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and, following a short stint at the University of Arizona, spent four decades at Princeton, the Kansas native has kept his finger on the pulse of rural and small-town America throughout his career. His book “The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America” digs into some of the 76
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most important questions and sociological issues of our time, including the urban-rural divide and why rural America, which was once reliably Democrat, became Trump country. Similarly, in “Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future,” Wuthnow draws from hundreds of interviews to bring readers a riveting portrait of oft-overlooked corners of the country. He might be considered the working man’s sociologist (a description that made him chuckle). His interests are rooted in his own childhood in rural Kansas, Wuthnow explained to the Deseret News. His father was a farmer who left school after the eighth grade. His mother was a schoolteacher, he said, adding, “and it took her a very long time to eventually get a college degree.” Married since 1968, Wuthnow and his wife have lived in northern Virginia since he re-
tired from Princeton. There, he said, they live close to two of their three children; four of their seven grandchildren live within walking distance. “A lot of my work has been concerned with the kind of America that my children and grandchildren are living in and are going to be living in the future,” he reflected. “This book grew out of a deep concern over the past few years about the strengths and weaknesses and the future of democracy in America.” IN LAYMAN’S TERMS CAN YOU EXPLAIN YOUR NEW BOOK, “WHY RELIGION IS GOOD FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY”?
The book is about religion’s contribution to democracy, thinking especially the state of democracy that we’re all worried about now. My argument is that religion encourages us to talk
about our values, and it gives us a language to talk about our values and it also gives us a platform from which to talk about our values. So, in my view, all of that is good for democracy, and that is especially the case because religion in America is pluralistic. When we talk about our values we’re not all talking in one voice. We don’t all agree. … That diversity enhances the give and take that democracy is set up to benefit from. IN OTHER WORDS, RELIGION ENERGIZES THE SYSTEM?
Absolutely. I UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR BOOK STARTS AROUND THE NEW DEAL ERA. SO HAS RELIGION BEEN A BOON TO DEMOCRACY IN RECENT DECADES MORE THAN IT WAS IN THE PAST? WHAT ABOUT IN THE EARLIEST DAYS, THE
PHOTO IL LU STR ATI O N BY M I C H E LLE BU D G E
FOUNDATION, HOW WAS RELIGION IMPORTANT BACK THEN?
One of the things that religion has done from the very beginning is to provide Americans with a language in which to discuss, “Should we be this kind of democracy or a different kind? Should we follow a certain denomination or should we not?” In those early years of the American republic, the nation was primarily Christian and so there was that broad framework, but within that broad framework there were certainly Catholics and Protestants and then there were a variety of Protestants, as well. So one of the reasons why we have religious freedom in the First Amendment is to guarantee — hopefully, to guarantee — that no one of those religions becomes an established religion. We have continued to have that diversity and that diversity (of religion and belief) has
even increased. We now have more Muslims than ever before, more Hindus and more Buddhists and various new denominations and nondenominational organizations. And an increasing proportion of Americans, especially younger Americans, do not claim an affiliation with any particular religious tradition. That doesn’t mean they are not interested in religion. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily without religion, but the composition has changed. And my argument is that part of the reason we continue to have these discussions about religion is precisely that change. We also have the continuing discussion of what the First Amendment means. It’s never set in stone, and that’s partly because we have different ideas within the judiciary, of course, but we also have different voices weighing in from the religious communities and those FEBRUARY 2022
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voices are one of the ways those religious communities, faith communities, express their values and participate in being part of the American citizenry. WHY WAS THE NEW DEAL ERA YOUR STARTING POINT?
I was interested in exploring an era in which many Americans were concerned about authoritarianism. By 1935, when some of the New Deal’s initial policies were declared unconstitutional, some Americans worried, especially when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court and then when he ran for a third term and then a fourth term. And that’s a story that many of us never learned in school. We learned — many of us at least — that the New Deal was wonderful. It saved us from the Great Depression. It brought us Social Security and many other good things. But at the time many people, even people who supported FDR and were part of the inner circle, were worried that this could get out of hand, that America might go authoritarian just like Germany had. And so what I trace in that part of the book is a very vigorous debate among religious leaders about authoritarianism. They said, “We are headed towards tyranny,” and some said, “No, no, this is wonderful. Capitalism didn’t work. We need a new world order.” Others said, “No, this is dangerous. This is curtailing our freedoms.” So what the religious communities did in that period was to add to that debate. They added questions about history, morality, their understandings of government, that animated the economic and policy discussions that were happening. And they didn’t do that only in the abstract. They did that in church basements. They did that in forums where clergy would get together with labor union leaders. And that was a very lively time of grassroots engagement. AS WHITE EVANGELICALS COALESCE AROUND FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, HAS IT FUELED SOME SORT OF MOVE TOWARD TOTALITARIANISM?
Yeah, absolutely. And once again I’m very glad that we have religious diversity in this country so that it isn’t evangelicals on the one hand arguing against people who are to78
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tally secular on the other hand. Instead, it is a lively conversation among religious leaders themselves. One concrete example: Think about June 1, 2020, when Donald Trump stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding up his Bible. Well, the lead story was evangelicals are really happy about that he’s making a statement of faith. The backstory is a mainline Black church and many of the Black churches were supporting the Black Lives Matter protests that were happening right at the moment. That’s another vivid example of the way which religious groups serve almost as checks and balances — there’s a protest and there’s a counterprotest. We can certainly be on one side or the other of those huge debates, but we also have to be very thankful that we have the kind of diversity we have. HOW IS THE IMPACT OF RELIGION ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY CHANGING TODAY AS THE RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE SHIFTS?
We have seen a great deal of political polarization in recent decades and that has also encouraged religious polarization between religious conservatives and religious liberals. And I do not regard that as healthy either for religion or democracy. IT REMINDS ME OF MICHELE MARGOLIS, WHO SAYS ULTIMATELY PEOPLE’S POLITICS DETERMINE THEIR RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION. I WONDER IF YOU’RE SAYING THAT THE POLITICAL POLARIZATION FUELS THE RELIGIOUS POLARIZATION AND NOT THE OPPOSITE?
Yes. And there are a number of reasons for that, some of which are obvious and some of which are counterintuitive. The political landscape does tend to shape religion. You know there’s a debate here about who’s the stronger party: religious leaders or political leaders. No question in my mind it’s the political leaders, and so you’ll see religious leaders currying favor with one kind of political leader or another, but they often don’t get what they want. But, on the religious side, this is maybe the counterintuitive part, a lot of people say, “Well, you know, American religion is so strong. It’s way stronger than anything in
Europe. More people attend church, even though that may be declining, than participate in any other voluntary organization. ... Religion is a trillion-dollar industry.” All of which is true. But a lot of the religious community isn’t terribly interested in debating political questions. They may be voting one way or another depending on what they heard in their religious community, but for them religion is about their kids and their family and going to services or helping out at the soup kitchen or whatever it might be. And so it’s more the organized religious advocacy groups that are in there debating issues, filing amicus briefs to the courts, organizing protests — that’s where we see religion contributing and it takes place within the framework of the political landscape. ARGUABLY, ON JANUARY 6, WE SAW RELIGION EXERTING A NEGATIVE INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. IS THAT SOMETHING YOU’RE CONCERNED ABOUT?
Absolutely. I’m concerned about that trend. What gives me some reason to be optimistic is that there are many other faith communities and faith leaders who are outspoken against that kind of Christian nationalist insurrection. WHAT ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE — SHOULD THEY CLAIM A RELIGION FOR DEMOCRACY’S SAKE? SHOULD THEY GET INVOLVED? AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE “NONES”?
My view is that young people should get involved in some civic organization for the sake of democracy. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a religious organization, and the reason for that is that many of the most effective advocacy groups and issues have been coalitions among religious and ostensibly nonreligious organizations. So, for example, the ACLU might be an organization that a young person would say, “You know, if I had an hour a week or $10 to give right now I think that’s going to be more influential than giving that to the local church.” That’s fine. The concern is for the folks who say, “I’m just giving up. There’s just no reason to get involved. Everything is fake news, everything is fraudulent, I should just stay at home and have a good time.” And that’s not helpful.
A rational rationale. IF YOU’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THE POLITICAL THEATER, LET’S TALK. GET DESERET MAGAZINE AT DESERET.COM/SUBSCRIBE
A LOVE FOR THE AGES
THE ENEMY WITHIN
CON TINU ED F R OM PAG E 2 1
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explains. Indeed, her 23-year-old son and 20-year-old daughter live with her. Though staying single means doing more chores by herself or paying bills by herself, she’s enjoying the inhibition. In the past few years, she spent a month in Texas with her sister, just because she could. She drove to Iowa to visit a friend, just because she wanted to. She’s a musician whose YouTube channel has grown to 450 subscribers, she’s proud to say, and she’s done all of it — for the first time in her life — without needing anyone’s permission. “I’m so grateful,” she says, “for this opportunity to have freedom.” David Foster Wallace once observed that “there are all different kinds of freedom,” and that “the kind that is most precious … involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” What is love if not exactly that? Just ask Christina Thomas. She wants nothing more than to care about someone. That someone is just hard to find. Her date goes wrong right away. He makes judgmental remarks about young people with tattoos, then invites her on an “adventure” that involves getting into his scuffed and dented ’89 Honda Civic, by Thomas’ estimation. She refuses but still follows him to a family fun center for an evening of hitting in the batting cages. “If you ever see anybody run into me and call me Red,” he tells her, “those are people I knew in prison.” And with that, she pretends to head to the bathroom and sneaks out to her car. She’s so scarred that she doesn’t date again for several months, though she eventually gives it another shot. She always gives it another shot. Because there’s nothing like the feeling of being 16 again, talking about what’s ahead rather than behind. Staying upbeat, she admits, remains a constant struggle. She cries frequently, believing that the chances of finding the right person are “pretty minimal.” The weight of that knowledge gnaws and pokes. But whether it’s Rowe refusing to settle, or Brenda realizing she’s settled enough already, attitudes about love later in life are all about finding the most meaningful path forward. And for Thomas, and others like her, that means hope. “What makes it worth it is making those connections and, hopefully, love comes out of it, even if it doesn’t last forever,” she says. “Love is a gift no matter what form it comes in, or how long it stays.”
weddings encapsulated the cozy similarities between people who claimed to be representing different groups.) If Clinton was the avatar of the Establishment, Trump was merely a different wing of the same oligarchy, another narcissist trying to buy himself an office. Many of these voters were attracted to the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. An oddball figure in U.S. politics for decades, Sanders was an unlikely presidential prospect — a tough-talking old man with a Brooklyn honk despite years of representing a rural New England state, and a self-proclaimed socialist in a country where “socialism” is mostly an epithet. Sanders presented himself as the real deal, a man who could turn the system on its head, and his campaign briefly caught fire when he won some important Democratic Party primary contests in 2016 and gave Clinton a run for her money. And then millions of supposed Sanders voters went ahead and voted for Trump anyway. This was not a handful of disaffected campus socialists. A significant number of Democratic primary voters — more than one in 10, as it turned out — crossed over and gave their vote to a man who, in theory, stood for everything they hated: nativism, hypercapitalism, sexism, authoritarianism. They ended up contributing to the margin of victory in the states Trump needed to pick the lock to an Electoral College win that both Democrats and Republicans until that moment had thought was out of reach. This outcome is only puzzling if we believe the voters have consistent — and civic — views. Insofar as policy does matter, the voters often create policy dilemmas that politicians cannot resolve other than by short-circuiting such debates and running on personality and fame. For years, the standard trope among observers of American politics has been that voters are consistent and moderate while politicians are opportunistic and extreme. Politicians might well be opportunists, but Americans are neither consistent nor moderate. Voters love to describe themselves as moderate and independent, but they are, to use President Joe Biden’s catchphrase, full of malarkey. As the scholar David Broockman and his colleagues showed in work from the early 2010s, voters are not all that moderate. Rather, “surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions.” Put another way, voters who have strong views on a few issues look like “moderates” if their views are averaged together. Such people — who might, say, want both universal health care because it is in their interest but also fa-
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vor discrimination against gays and lesbians because of their personal or religious beliefs — are actually difficult to categorize and are often more extreme on any one issue than the politicians who represent them. These voters want their hot-button issues served, even if these issues are almost impossible to accommodate within a coherent worldview. As the political analyst Lee Drutman noted in 2019, “if you’re a campaign trying to appeal to independents, moderates or undecided voters — or a concerned citizen trying to make sense of these groups in the context of an election — policy and ideology aren’t good frames of reference. There just isn’t much in terms of policy or ideology that unites these groups.” This becomes all the more disheartening when the politics of narrow self-interest are blended into a general cynicism and an emotional suspicion of politics. As Rauch argued at the time of the 2016 election: Like Trump, Bernie Sanders appealed to the antipolitical idea that the mere act of voting for him would prompt a “revolution” that would somehow clear up such knotty problems as health-care coverage, financial reform, and money in politics. Like Trump, he was a self-sufficient outsider without customary political debts or party loyalty. Like Trump, he neither acknowledged nor cared — because his supporters neither acknowledged nor cared — that his plans for governing were delusional. For voters in an advanced postindustrial democracy, this might seem like just another harsh rebuke from yet another intellectual. For the villagers of Montegrano, however, this would hardly be a rebuke; rather, they would see it as merely a description of the natural order of things. To the transactional and self-interested mindset, politicians are largely indistinguishable other than on the basis on their personalities, and the platforms they espouse are usually irrelevant. All that matters is getting the candidate to do things you want — or to prevent them from doing things other people might want. Consider two voters from Iowa, the emblematic American heartland state, in the run-up to the state 2020 Democratic caucus. A caucus is a far more personal involvement in choosing a nominee than merely casting a vote in a primary; caucusgoers must engage in bargaining with other party members to gain support for their candidates. One might expect greater levels of general consistency in such an environment, but one would be wrong to be so hopeful. Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce, for example, spoke to a woman who caucused for Sanders in 2016 and then voted for Trump. In
2020, she initially settled on Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as her choice. If Buttigieg didn’t win the nomination, however, she would move from the young, progressive, gay Buttigieg back to the elderly, right-wing, serially adulterous, thrice-married bigot Trump — a kaleidoscopic change in preferences that only makes sense as a search for a tailored set of narrow promises that would meet her personal satisfaction, rather than the selection of a candidate who must govern across a range of issues. Another Iowan told the media that she had voted both for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump, “just to shake up Washington, to be honest.” (This is sometimes called the “OOT” voter, the person who voted Obama-ObamaTrump in 2008, 2012 and 2016, respectively.) Had Trump not been available in 2016, she said, she might have gone for — of course — Bernie Sanders. “We’ve just been in a rut so long,” she sighed. This voter had for years run her own beauty salon in a county in Iowa that in 2016 had a 2.5 percent unemployment rate, had almost no immigrants (the county is 98 percent white) and boasted a crime rate far below the U.S. average. And yet, like many voters over the years, her perception was that American politics had become too static and needed some sort of disruption to make it more receptive to people like her. If that meant going from Barack Obama to a candidate who had originated the viciously racist “birther” campaign against Obama, so be it. One of my closest friends from high school came of political age when I did. Like me, 1980 was his first national election. Over the years, he cast two votes for Ronald Reagan, one for George H. W. Bush, two for Bill Clinton, two for George W. Bush, two for Barack Obama and then turned to Donald Trump. When I asked him in 2016 how this lifetime of voting made any sense, he said that he tended to prefer Republicans because he believed that they were generally better for the economy. Why, then, did he vote for the last two Democratic presidents? Because, he said, those Republicans, at the time, were just out to protect the rich. But what about Donald Trump, whose entire goal in life is being rich? My friend shook his head and gave up trying to explain it. “Nothing’s been good since Reagan,” he said, a statement we both knew was not true and might well have been more a reflection of the gloom of middle age than of any political preference. I do not know how he voted in 2020. There are plenty of people like my friend, and at first blush that might even seem reassuring.
People should change their minds if they think they’re being offered a better candidate or a better deal. But at some point, such voting goes beyond people merely changing their minds. To vote both for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump is beyond “flexibility.” Better candidates and better deals require an electorate capable of comprehending the contenders and what they offer, but such reflection becomes impossible when emotion, cynicism and self-interest congeal into tribal loyalty and “negative partisanship” — the idea that all parties are bad, but that yours is far worse than mine and so I therefore must vote against yours. This is the worst of all political worlds, in which the voters believe they are being true to a set of political ideas but are really acting out of contradictory emotions and conflicting rationalizations. It is not news that American voters often do not understand the ideologies they claim to support. As Rauch noted in 2019, people are sorting themselves into parties that are themselves mashups of contradictory ideas. “We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.” Insofar as people are loyal to parties, much of it is the result of traditional attachments or reflexive partisanship. Unaffiliated voters, meanwhile, often go shopping for deals and then retroactively apply partisan rationalizations to their choices. Self-interest is the normal engine of normal human day-to-day behavior, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Only the saintliest of us do things all day long purely out of the goodness of our hearts; the rest of us have bills to pay. Politics, in political scientist Harold Lasswell’s classic 1936 formulation, is always about “who gets what, when, and how,” but different cultures and societies solve that problem in different ways. And whenever someone gets something in that distribution, someone else will think it is unfair. When there is nothing else but raw self-interest, however, liberal democracy is impossible — especially if we define our “interest” as including the psychic gratification of defeating enemy tribes and dividing the spoils. Without some basic belief that the good of the family and the good of society are intertwined and mutually reinforcing, democratic institutions become little more than temporary conveniences, and democratic values become annoyances. And when we need those institutions and values — especially when our rights are threatened — we will find ourselves alone when facing whatever jackal pack has assembled against us. We will have no recourse
through the law or the ballot box, and we might end up relying on criminals, buccaneers or foreign powers to protect us in the ensuing scrum. In 2020, the onset of a pandemic forced Americans to confront the question of whether ordinary self-interest had curdled into dangerous selfishness. The answer, at least in the United States, was not pretty.
NO MORE EXCUSES arrives in a place like Montegrano, where people are poor and life is arduous, the odds are already stacked against success. Democracy, a system that relies on sustained cooperation, will always have a harder time gaining a foothold against the immediate imperatives of survival. In difficult circumstances, people will do what’s best for themselves, with little interest in high-minded abstractions about politics, even if doing so produces the paradoxical outcome that they remain poor. So it was in the Italian village. Banfield, it should be remembered, really wasn’t trying to explain democracy, he was trying to explain poverty. The revelations about how the lack of trust and cooperation undermines development came later. It’s one thing, however, for democracy to face trouble getting off the ground in a place like Montegrano, it’s another for it to wither once it is already established and has flourished for centuries among a prosperous and educated people. Americans are turning inward not because they are poor or worried that their children will end up in orphanages as wards of the state. Rather, Americans are devolving back toward the mentality of the village not because they are poor but because they are comfortable, materialistic and self-obsessed. They are inspired, at least in the public sphere, not by examples of virtue but by celebrity. They are motivated to compete with each other not because they are fighting over scraps but because they are entitled. They insist on their own rights not as a matter of principle but as a means of crowding out the rights of others. America is becoming Montegrano — but with better cars, cheap air conditioning, the internet and 200 cable channels. Maybe Montegrano never had a chance. But what excuses the rest of us?
WH E N DE MOC RACY F I R ST
E XC E R P T E D F R O M “ O U R OW N WO R ST E N E M Y: T H E AS S A U LT F R O M W I T H I N O N M O D E R N D E M O C RAC Y ” ( OX F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S ) . T O M N I C H O LS I S A U. S. NAVA L WA R C O L L E G E P R O F E S S O R A N D A C O N T R I B U T I N G W R I T E R F O R T H E AT L A N T I C M AG A Z I N E .
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T H E RE V. SAMU E L RODRI GU E Z
A FIREWALL OF FAITH ‘WE HAVE TO PROTECT OUR RIGHT TO WORSHIP OR NOT TO WORSHIP AT OUR DISCRETION’ BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S
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he rev. samuel rodriguez reportedly first preached when he was 16. Seven years later, he was ordained an Assemblies of God minister and now leads the New Season Church, a megachurch with campuses in Los Angeles and Sacramento, where he lives with his wife, Eva, and their three kids. “I’m a Christian,” he says. “I’m a husband. I’m a father. A movie producer — I call it a content provider. I prefer the term ‘cultural architect.’ A Yankees fan and Trekkie. That captures me. And definitely a green tea aficionado.” He omits the many “influential” lists he’s made or been nominated for — including Charisma magazine’s 40 leaders who changed the world, Time’s 100 most influential people in the world and the “Israel’s Top 50 Christian Allies” list.
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He doesn’t mention praying at both Republican and Democratic Inauguration Day events (Donald Trump and Barack Obama), though he points out he’s advised them, as well as George W. Bush. He’s a registered independent, he says. He’s known worldwide as a voice for Latino evangelical Christians. After all, he founded the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which includes 40,000-plus churches. He doesn’t brag that a movie he co-produced, “Breakthrough,” won a Dove Award and was nominated for an Oscar or that his books, including his 2021 “Persevere With Power,” have been bestsellers. Instead, he talks about immigration, religious freedom and the pro-life movement.
WHAT PRIORITIES SHOULD OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS AND CULTURAL LEADERS PAY ATTENTION TO RIGHT NOW?
There is a deconstructive ideology permeating every single sector, not just of American society, but I would argue globally. There are no such things as intellectual, philosophical, ideological borders. Ideas go global literally overnight. Right now, the ideology leading the world is deconstructionism, similar to what we would deem historically as the anarchist movement that paved the way for what we saw in Russia in 1917: communism, totalitarian, authoritarian regimes that led to fascism, to World War II. We’re going down the same slippery slope with this idea of deconstructing the historical institutions that have to a great degree ILLUST RAT ION BY R ANDY GLASS
sustained not just Western civilization, but civilization overall. It’s an ideology of anarchy, of chaos. There is no truth. It’s undergirded by moral relativism and cultural decadence, with no rails. It’s anti-science, anti-faith. How do we have a commonsense, coherent, reasonable form of governance — not just politically, but where it actually trickles down to culture in society? When we don’t have that, we have a man driven by racism going into a Christmas parade and mowing down kids and senior adults. We have looting in stores in California, with very low consequence. We’ve unfortunately been down this road before. But things are different now because we have a global pandemic. We have so much angst and tension and consternation. YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. CAN IT BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER?
Religious freedom stands as the quintessential firewall against secular totalitarianism. Not just freedom of speech, but speech driven by faith. This may very well be one of the very few opportunities where Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, Black, white, Asian, Latino, men and women can come together and say, “Yes, this is definitely something we agree on.” We have to protect our right to worship or not to worship at our discretion. We have to protect that right. There can’t be a lid on it. What took place during COVID with some of the most restrictive measures stood as a wake-up. I live in California, fortunately, unfortunately. I suffered unprecedented incursion as it pertains to my God-given right to worship. Not only did the governor deem churches not essential, but he issued an executive decree forbidding me from having a church service with my family in my home: You are hereby not permitted to in your own home with your family chant, sing, worship. You would expect this massive uprising. The majority of Californians — 63 percent, I believe, in the last study — self-identify as Christian, as following the teachings of Jesus. Yet it was a handful of pastors and leaders, primarily evangelical, a couple of Catholics that rose up. Of course, our Mormon brothers and sisters stood up and said, “No!” But it was a minority group.
We have to be vigilant. We understood quickly that a pandemic can serve as a justification whereby we lose our God-given right to worship. HOW DO YOU PROTECT AGAINST THE TENDENCY TO SAY I WANT MY FREEDOM TO WORSHIP, BUT I DON’T LIKE THE WAY YOU WORSHIP OR YOUR BELIEFS?
Some years ago, I was invited to keynote at Georgetown University for that very conversation on religious liberty. I got pushback from some people in my tribe. A key leader in the evangelical Protestant, charismatic circle, who I greatly admire, read what I said. I was very explicit: Religious liberty and religious pluralism serve as a firewall against secular totalitarians. They fought back: You’re basically giving equality for all religious beliefs. Isn’t that dangerous? Absolutely not. We’re not a theocracy. It was the intention of our Founding Fathers that we were to be totally committed to religious pluralism, not just a Christian belief system. I’m convinced we are founded on Judeo-Christian ethos, without a doubt. Nevertheless, it is religious pluralism — us providing space in this great marketplace of ideas. … Let’s compete. Put the Apple phone next to the Samsung, next to the Android, next to the new flip phone. Let’s see what happens. Let Amazon Prime compete with Sam’s Club and Costco. Let’s see what happens. That’s what makes us great. I pushed back on the idea that religious pluralism threatens advancement of the gospel. Quite the contrary, when we compare people see the reality and in my view as an evangelical, fully committed to biblical orthodoxy, where people really see Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. I have no qualms in advancing not just religious liberty, but religious pluralism. In a very secularized world, I’d rather have people talking about faith than marginalizing it to such a degree that the next generation emerges completely agnostic or atheistic.
IN A VERY SECULARIZED WORLD, I’D RATHER HAVE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT FAITH THAN MARGINALIZING IT TO SUCH A DEGREE THAT THE NEXT GENERATION EMERGES COMPLETELY AGNOSTIC OR ATHEISTIC.
HOW WOULD YOU HANDLE IMMIGRATION POLICY?
I offered a solution to President Biden that I’d offered President Trump. It’s definitely doable. It’s politically sustainable. I did my due diligence with Democrats and Republicans, including the Freedom Caucus, including the most conservative Republicans in the House. FEBRUARY 2022
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… It stops illegal immigration immediately. It does away with catch and release. It creates a system where we continue to welcome immigrants because immigrants are a beautiful blessing to our nation, without a doubt. We want them to come here legally. Then we look at those currently here undocumented and we provide a pathway for legalization, but not citizenship. We only grant citizenship to the “Dreamers,” whose parents brought them here as children and they had no choice. They shouldn’t have to pay for the sins of their parents. We should grant those individuals who are not engaged in nefarious activities and do not have a criminal record immediate citizenship. Immediate. That’s a group of approximately 1.82 million. The parents become permanent residents, but they will never become citizens because there’s a price to pay for coming here illegally. They’ll never be deported, as long as they’re not living off the government. They’re not going to get government entitlements. … That’s a solution I offered to the last couple presidents and leaders on both sides of the aisle. DOES A “MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS” STILL EXIST?
In reality, we live in an echo chamber of mutual approbation. We have our own silos. We’re not listening anymore, way before COVID. But during COVID — and I have great empathy for those who lost loved ones — not only did people pass away and die, we saw that a number of other things died: logic, common sense, reason. We’re not having conversations. We’re having confrontations. We have a myopic worldview and to a degree it’s myopia with narcissism. It’s self-absorbed selfie taking, looking at the mirror, rather than looking out through a window. … “If you’re not 100 percent in alignment with my orthodoxy, I can’t create room for you.” That’s unfortunate. I love having intellectually enriching debates. I do believe as people of faith we should be driving these conversations. CAN RELIGION BECOME TOO POLITICAL?
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overrun by a religious belief that may place a lid on the liberty of others. Hence, we have to ride this wonderful equilibrium. Does faith have a place in the political landscape? Absolutely. I would love for the appropriate application of Thomas Jefferson’s letter to that wonderful Baptist church really outlining what he said and his intention as explicitly stated in the letter. It wasn’t “We don’t want, in any way, form or shape, church to have influence on government.” It was “We don’t want, in any way, form or shape government to infringe upon the influence of faith in the public spheres.” Faith has an incredible role to play, especially in bringing groups together, in providing a reconciliatory prescription. Every single great shift in America’s political, cultural landscape derived from the impetus of faith. It was the FAITH PLAYS AN INCREDIBLE ROLE IN BRINGING GROUPS TOGETHER, IN PROVIDING A RECONCILIATORY PRESCRIPTION. EVERY SINGLE GREAT SHIFT IN AMERICA’S P OLITICAL, C ULTURAL LANDSCAPE DERIVED FROM THE IMPETUS OF FAITH.
“black-robe regiment” preaching from their pulpits that prompted the American Revolution. The abolitionist movement? Faith driven. It was faith groups talking about equality because of the verse from Paul in Galatians regarding men and women that led to voting rights for women. Martin Luther King Jr. understood that and did it again in the civil rights movement. Every great shift where America got closer to the light of truth and love and righteousness and justice took place because the church and people of faith stood as the catalysts. In the past two years, we’ve seen movements emerge that lack the impetus of faith. When movements lack faith, those movements die without measurable, long-term impact.
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE NEXT GREAT MOVEMENT OF FAITH WILL BE?
You’re about to see a movement of faith that is going to transcend political ideologies. Very reconciliatory, but well-defined, catalytic. It’s a movement of faith that understands truth must never be sacrificed on the altar of political or cultural or sexual expediency. I’m not preaching now, but there is this verse in Revelation 2:20, which undergirds this movement that’s already emerging. … The thing the spirit of the Lord had against his church was the fact they tolerated Jezebel. We’re about to see the movement that understands we are what we tolerate. There are things we tolerate because we’re afraid of criticism, of being unfollowed, of losing likes. When my hunger for righteousness is greater than my fear of criticism, nothing can stop me. That’s driving this movement of faith. ... We’re about to see a womb-to-tomb prolife movement. This is not the “My objective is to overturn Roe v. Wade” period. This is way beyond that, elevating the image of God and every single human being from the moment of conception to the moment you depart from this planet. It continues to advocate for the sanctity of life, but it also cares about what happens when the baby is born. It’s a movement that wants to empty out foster homes by having people of faith adopt, and every community of faith stands solidly behind the idea that if there is a pregnancy that was unexpected, we provide support for that beautiful young woman, and say, “Hey, if you don’t want the child, we’ll take care of the child. But you’re beautiful, and you’re created in the image of God. And God has great purpose for your life.” It is a pro-woman, pro-child, pro-life movement that is beautiful and transformational. The tenets are pro-life, pro-religious liberty, pro-biblical justice — and that biblical justice includes immigration reform. That’s this new movement. ANY LAST WORDS?
The American experiment is not over as long as we have people of faith. Period.
Neuropathy? Maybe not. If you think you have neuropathy…think again. Symptoms of PAD are almost identical to symptoms of neuropathy, and PAD can make your neuropathy feel worse.
IF YOU… YES
NO
YES
NO
Have pain, numbness, or cramping in your legs or feet.
YES
NO
Have been treated for neuropathy and are still experiencing symptoms…
Have difficulty walking without taking a break due to leg pain.
Contact our office today to set up a consultation with one of our providers. Most insurance and Medicare accepted.
(866) 668-8677
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Joel Rainwater, MD • Ryan G. O’Hara, MD • Michael Switzer, MD • Brian Evans, MD
PARTING SHOT
“We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.”
OUTSIDE AREA 51 AN INDUSTRIAL SITE NEAR ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO
P H OTO GRAP H Y BY PAUL ADAM S
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DESERET MAGAZINE
intrigued by the vast expanse of the American West, photographer Paul Adams often encounters mysterious locations while wandering about. Amused by conspiracy theories, tourist traps and vague industrial sites, Adams imagines the supernatural, juxtaposing it with raw, unexpected beauty found in the surrounding landscape. His work has been displayed at The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol, England, and is in the permanent collection of The Chicago Institute of Art.
CHINA BEFORE COMMUNISM Shen Yun’s Upcoming Performances
“Simply gorgeous stage magic. A must-see!” —Broadway World
Experience the beauty and wonder of traditional Chinese culture— free of communism.
Visit ShenYun.com to find show dates near you. Shen Yun Performing Arts is a New York-based nonprofit organization. Its mission is to revive 5,000 years of traditional Chinese culture. Shen Yun cannot be seen in China today.
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