“There are those who come to Washington to make noise, and there are those who come to Washington to make law.”
54
UNCAST BALLOTS
THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION MAY HINGE ON NONVOTERS IN ARIZONA.
by natalia galicza
LAST OF HER SPECIES
HOW LISA MURKOWSKI HAS SURVIVED AS ONE OF THE SENATE’S LAST MODERATES. by
michael j . mooney
THE VOICES THAT CRACKED STONE
HOW THE BERLIN WALL CRUMBLED UNDER THE IMMEASURABLE WEIGHT OF WORDS. by ethan
bauer
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BILL GIFFORD
Gifford is a Utah-based journalist whose work has appeared in Outside, Scientific American, Bloomberg Businessweek and other publications. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, “Spring Chicken” and “Outlive” (with Dr. Peter Attia). His article on a revival of statues and monuments is on page 72.
KASSONDRA CLOOS
Cloos is a travel writer from Rhode Island and now based in London. Her work focuses on trekking, sustainability and slow journeys, and it can be found in Adventure.com, Trails, Outside and Backpacker. Her essay on how moving to the United Kingdom revealed her Americanness is on page 22.
MONTSE ALVARADO
Alvarado is president and chief operating officer of EWTN News, the global news division of the Eternal Word Television Network. Previously, she was executive director of the nonprofit law firm Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Her commentary on “generational grace” is on page 13.
LAUREN GRABELLE
A photographer based in rural Montana, Grabelle has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review and High Country News, and her work exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. Her award-winning series “The Last Man” is on page 44.
MUSA AL-GHARBI
Al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. His essay on his recent book “We Have Never Been Woke” is on page 66.
C.F. PAYNE
Payne’s illustrations have been highlighting the pages of major publications such as Rolling Stone, Mad and Der Spiegel since 1980. He has received gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and is the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Illustration program at the University of Hartford. His work is featured on page 36.
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GET OUT THE VOTE
Here’s an often-overlooked quirk of presidential elections: They’re decided not just by those who cast votes but also by those who don’t.
Consider the 2000 election. It came down to Florida, and the margin was 537 ballots. One could argue they swung the election, but in reality, the election was decided by the 5 million people in Florida who were eligible to vote but didn’t.
For this month’s issue, we sent staff writer Natalia Galicza to Arizona to explore this phenomenon (“Uncast Ballots,” page 54). Her story opens with a man named David Haddon, an 86-year-old Air Force vet who has voted in every election since he was 18. But this year, he became so disillusioned by both parties he decided not to vote.
As Natalia writes, Haddon wasn’t alone. “His feeling of helplessness, his sense that democracy was imploding, and his suspicion that his vote didn’t matter — all had become more and more common across the country he loved.”
Haddon’s story hit close to home because, for the first time, two of my kids are old enough to vote. One of them isn’t sure he’s going to, though, for the same reasons Haddon lists. He also feels dissatisfied by both candidates, but there’s a bigger motivating factor: He fears our system is rigged.
I thought about the difference a president makes reading this month’s cover story, “The Voices That Cracked Stone,” by Ethan Bauer (page 26). It’s a riveting account of the days leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened 35 years ago next month. As a kid, this was one of the biggest historical milestones in my life, and yet I learned some new things reading Ethan’s account, namely that most of President Ronald Reagan’s advisers warned
him against making the speech, but he did anyway, highlighted by the iconic line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
I was struck by the difference a few words can make in shaping world history. There was of course much more to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union than that speech, but it served as a powerful accelerant. If nothing else, it showed the influence an American president can have in world events.
Those who study autocracies have been pointing out for years that what America’s enemies want most isn’t necessarily one candidate over the other, but to undermine our belief in democracy. And so they use tools of disinformation to sow seeds of doubt in the importance of voting. They want us to think our system is no different than theirs; that democracy is a sham, that our politics are broken and irredeemably corrupt.
I’ve been a little dumbstruck over the last eight years by how much these ideas have spread in the American electorate. It’s not just my son; I know an alarming number of people who are mulling whether to vote in this election — brothers, friends from college, neighbors.
When the topic comes up, I often think of a visit to Sen. Mitt Romney’s office a few years ago, and a large map he kept on his wall. It was a timeline of world history, and as Romney told me, “Democracy barely makes a blip.” Most of history has been ruled by tyrants, he pointed out. America’s experiment in self-rule seems to be fighting against human nature.
A government truly for the people that holds its elected representatives to account is a miracle in that context. But it only survives if we care enough to engage in the process, despite its flaws. I hope my son will vote this year, to build the political power of his generation. And no matter your age, I hope you will too. J ESSE HYDE
CAPITOL PEAK SUNSET, ELK MOUNTAINS IN COLORADO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN
It will get brighter.
THE TIES THAT BIND
WHAT OUR ANCESTORS TEACH US ABOUT FAITH AND LIBERTY
BY MONTSE ALVARADO
We’ve all heard of generational curses, or generational sin. But what about generational grace? The country each human being is born in is not a coincidence. Our families past and present are gifts that can lead to opportunity. Providence allows for siblings to be the best mirrors of each other, to offer constant occasion for growth. And family history, used often to consider medical health and country of origin, is often overlooked as a place to look for grace.
The Jewish people do this well. Their celebrations are collective acts of memory that recount a miraculous way in which God saved them, and who they are and are supposed to be, based on those accounts.
In his book, “Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times,” the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks discusses the difference between history and memory. “History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. … Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come.”
Each one of us was fashioned uniquely — our lives are an expression of love. Our physical bodies, the incarnate expression of our souls, are maps of that love: I have my great-great-grandmother’s nose. The miraculous meeting of a strong woman and a devout man, their marriage, eventual children, and continued legacy can be found on my face generations later.
Generational grace is the reason any individual with a history of persecution in their family feels the call to defend free speech, religious freedom, freedom of the press or any of the many freedoms we enjoy in the United States. My great-grandparents endured the persecution of religious freedom in Mexico.
“Viva Cristo Rey” (“Long Live Christ the King”) is the battle cry of a Jesuit priest, Father Miguel Agustin Pro, who was falsely accused of an assassination plot against the Mexican president nearly 100 years ago. He was in his 30s when the government turned on the Catholic foundations of the country and hanged priests on lampposts. At that time, the state perceived religious freedom as the greatest threat to government power.
The persecution against the church escalated around 1914, when Pro and his brother priests were told by their religious leaders to find their way to the United States. He went on to study in Spain, was sent on mission in Nicaragua, but returned to Mexico in 1926, where he was framed, charged and killed less than a year later amid the Cristero Rebellion.
How many times my great-grandparents must have prayed for the freedom to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their conscience — not in hiding, but in public, as a community, serving as a vigorous voice in civil society. Those prayers manifested themselves three generations later in a calling I could never have imagined, in a desire to defend freedoms that I often took for granted living in the United States.
The enemy my family prayed against — governments that put power and influence above the dignity of the human person — is the same enemy I confronted for 14 years at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and that I keep in check with the team I lead at EWTN, a global Catholic media company.
I remember sitting with my parents, asking about my ancestors in Mexico and what it was like for them during the rebellion. They told me of secret baptisms and secret weddings. I learned of the joyful gathering of family to celebrate a 25th or 50th wedding anniversary — the first public celebration of that sacrament many years after the underground blessing of that union took place.
The generational grace that came from my family enduring persecution and keeping the faith for those who would follow helps me appreciate the freedoms and rights I have in this country, and what is at stake every day as I exercise them. Especially as governments around the world veer toward autocracy, I thank God for my great-grandparents’ prayers and perseverance, and for the grace to keep fighting for these freedoms every day.
Let us reflect on what we can learn from the history of our family and country, the way we are, how to use and appreciate the freedom and prosperity of our present circumstances, and the duty to protect that for the next generation.
REST ASSURED
INSIDE THE MODERN SCIENCE OF SLEEP
EVERY HUMAN IS born knowing, instinctively, how to sleep. Yet only recently have scientists begun to understand our universal need for nightly rest. We now know that sleeping habits affect our judgment, perception, long-term memory, metabolism and quality of life. No wonder we try all sorts of remedies to sleep better. Healthy sleep patterns can improve our moods, buttress our minds and even extend our lives — but not always in the ways we assume. And losing sleep can have dire consequences. What do we really know about our need to doze? —ETHAN BAUER
11:59 P.M.
Zonking out before midnight can protect our “circadian rhythm,” or biological sleep cycle. Harvard researchers concluded that falling asleep between 10 and 11 p.m. may decrease our risk of heart disease, even though others found that “night owls” have better cognitive functioning. Men can add five years to their lives with consistent quality sleep, according to a 2023 study; women can add 2.5 years. Better sleep correlates with heart health, immunity, muscular resilience and memory.
1 IN 3 ADULTS
That’s how many Americans experience short-term insomnia. In the long run, up to 70 million suffer from this and other disorders like narcolepsy and sleep apnea, which correlate with high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. Snoring at any volume is a bigger risk factor for heart attack and stroke than smoking or high cholesterol, but one recent paper found that some people snore louder than others for unknown reasons.
2 POUNDS IN A WEEK
Sleep-deprived people gained weight that much faster in a recent study; another linked poor sleep habits with obesity. One study found that participants with irregular sleep patterns were 34 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. Another, published by University College London, found that subjects in their 50s and 60s who got six hours of sleep or less each night were 30 percent more likely to develop dementia later in life than those who got seven hours or more.
67 DEGREES
The National Sleep Foundation recommends an ambient sleep temperature of 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit, though we’re still allowed to use blankets. There is also such a thing as an ideal sleep surface, according to a 2021 study from Italy: a medium-firm mattress, which “promotes comfort, sleep quality” and alignment better than the alternatives.
$80 BILLION
Americans spend that much annually on sleep aids, from antihistamines to Ambien and melatonin gummies. That number is projected to nearly double by 2032, although sleeping pills don’t always lead to a good night’s rest and could shorten our lives by about five years. They also spend about $23 billion on sleep tech, from FitBit tracking devices to “smart beds” and enhanced blindfolds — a number projected to quintuple by 2033. But if you can’t fall asleep after 20 minutes in bed, the Mayo Clinic suggests getting up and doing something relaxing before trying again.
0.10 BAC
Going 24 hours without sleep impairs driving like a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10 — twice the legal limit in Utah. “Drowsy driving” causes 8,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. Harvard researchers note that sleeping six hours per night for nine days, rather than seven to nine, can result in a similar level of impairment on day 10.
94 PERCENT CAFFEINATED
Nearly all American adults consume caffeine every day via coffee, energy drinks and sodas. They experience insomnia, snoring and fatigue more often than those who avoid drinking caffeine. Alcohol is known to harm the quality of rest. Early findings also suggest that marijuana use may negatively impact sleep over time.
6
PERCENT MORE SUICIDES
“SLEEP IS THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE OF HEALTH. WHEN SLEEP IS DEFICIENT, THERE IS SICKNESS AND DISEASE.
AND WHEN SLEEP IS ABUNDANT, THERE IS VITALITY AND HEALTH.”
MATTHEW WALKER, UC-BERKELEY SLEEP RESEARCHER
A 2019 paper found this annual spike linked to daylight saving time, when clocks spring forward from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. There is a growing body of literature linking sleep disturbance and suicide, with one recent paper from researchers at the University of Arizona arguing that better sleep could be an effective strategy for suicide prevention.
400 HOURS
Parents lose that much sleep the year after having a baby. Meanwhile, jet lag costs about a day of recovery for each time zone crossed. And screen time has an inverse relationship with sleep duration. If our life choices make us tired enough, our bodies force us to rest through “microsleep,” when we lose conscious control of ourselves for 30 seconds or less, even if our eyes stay open.
19 DAYS
That’s the most any person has gone without sleeping. Guinness World Records stopped keeping track in 1996, citing the harmful effects of sleep deprivation. One early study suggests that impact may originate in our guts. Fruit flies deprived of sleep started producing cell-destroying molecules in their digestive tracts; when given antioxidants to neutralize these molecules, the flies never had to sleep again.
GOLDEN YEARS
IS IT TIME TO RAISE THE RETIREMENT AGE?
RETIREMENT AND OTHER benefits of Social Security are widely considered a “third rail” in American politics — topics so charged that most politicians avoid them altogether. It may be time to face up to the challenge. The good news is life expectancy is increasing, buoyed by advances in medical technology, access to health care and overall economic well-being. But it’s also changing the delicate ratio between the proportion of Americans working and paying into the program and those who are now living on its payouts. For more than four decades, workers retiring at age 67 have been eligible to receive full benefits, an average of about $1,800 a month. Is it time to raise the retirement age to protect Social Security? Or would that harm the very workers the program exists to protect?
NATALIA GALICZA
IT’S ONLY FAIR TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK
AMERICANS VALUE SOCIAL Security, and don’t want to mess with it. A Quinnipiac University national poll published last year found that 78 percent oppose raising the retirement age from 67 to 70. The idea is unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans. This is particularly true among lower-income or blue-collar workers, who would be less likely to enjoy any projected boons.
Raising the age threshold would reduce benefits across the board by about 20 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research institute. Under the current structure, most workers retire before 67, and as early as 62, accepting reduced benefits simply because they are not willing or able to continue working — often due to health concerns, injury or caregiving responsibilities. Raising the age would deepen those cuts, effectively punishing those who have no other choice. Further, the negative impacts of raising the retirement age would disproportionately fall upon lower-income workers and people of color — who are most likely to rely on Social Security. One reason is that income level drastically affects life expectancy. Studies show that the wealthiest men in America can live 15 years longer than their poor counterparts; the gap is 10 years among women. Similar differences arise along racial lines, meaning that American Indians and Alaska Native peoples as well as Black Americans typically have fewer years to enjoy the benefits they spent their working lives accruing.
There is a straightforward alternative to buttress retirement funding, which is to increase the amount of money that goes into the pot each year by raising the Social Security tax limit from its current ceiling of $168,600. Simply put, this would ask for more from higher-income taxpayers. “(Americans) want their government to strengthen (Social Security) and expand it — not to cut it, contract it or gut its customer service,” Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley said at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing in March. “For those who would advocate raising the age, I think we have to be mindful of people who do hard work their whole lives, and die sooner.”
SOCIAL SECURITY IS in crisis. The program responsible for providing retirees with their monthly payments is facing a deficit that may very soon come to a head. That means a sustainable approach to administering retirement benefits is needed now more than ever. Raising the age threshold would strengthen Social Security by conserving financial resources, ensuring the system can endure as the American population grows older.
The Social Security Administration’s Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program is fueled by payroll taxes. Employees and employers each contribute 6.2 percent of each paycheck, for a total of 12.4 percent. That money is then pooled among workers nationwide to fund benefits for all retired Americans. But the workforce is shrinking as the population ages — largely due to a declining birth rate and rising life expectancy. One in five Americans will reach retirement age by 2030. Three years after that, according to a May report by the administration’s board of trustees, the funds that pay for the national retirement program will run out.
A congressional caucus known as the Republican Study Committee released a budget proposal in March for fiscal year 2025 that advocated for raising the retirement age in order to avoid cutting benefits for future retirees. Their proposal doesn’t specify by how much, but accounting for life expectancy increases could bring the new age to around 70 years old. Perhaps that would be more grounded in reality. “No one should have to work longer than they want to,” writes Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, for The New York Times. “But I do think it’s a bit crazy that our anchor idea for the right retirement age … originates from the time of the Ottoman Empire.”
Apart from extending the availability of Social Security funds, raising the retirement age would boost the economy as a whole. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2016 found that the average American between ages 55 and 69 is capable of working at least an extra 2.5 years. Those additional years of work, for those who wish to use them, can add to the individual’s wealth and the average retirement income while shoring up the nation’s diminishing workforce.
CRY DADDY
YOU’VE HEARD IT BEFORE, BUT IT’S TRUE. IT’S OK TO CRY
BY JOE JACKSON
I’m a crier. A big one. And my six-year-old daughter, Josie, knows it. She’s had to endure watching me blubber through a thank you speech to a group of volunteers who helped a nonprofit I started get off the ground. I cried four times during one playdate when Josie and her best friend Zaza repeatedly sang the “I Think You Are Wonderful” song to strangers in a park. Once, I completely came undone during a parade at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum the day before my father-in-law’s funeral. I held Josie’s hand and the tears streamed out while we danced with an employee dressed up as a dinosaur.
I can see that it’s sometimes a little awkward for her to navigate my emotional outpouring. Her reactions have ranged from making jokes about it to outwardly asking me to stop crying in public. It can feel awkward for me, too. Honestly, it always has.
It wasn’t easy being a guy who cries a lot while growing up in the ’80s and ’90s. Picture this: my first date ever. Sitting in the movie theater, stressing about whether it was too forward to put my arm around my date while watching the coming-of-age comedy “Angus.” After vacillating between
not knowing what to do with my arm and the plot of the movie, something terrible happened. Long-suffering Angus’ dear friend Grandpa Ivan dies. I unsuccessfully tried to hide my leading performance of a cry session in the bathroom of the Mann’s Cinema 8 and didn’t get another date for three years. I sobbed through my brother’s high school graduation when I was a freshman surrounded by the uncomfortable members of my hardcore punk band.
I HAVE NEVER SEEN MY DAD CRY, AND I ONLY KNOW OF TWO ALLEGED INSTANCES OF HIM CRYING.
It is still hard, and discomforting, to accept my emotions being so outward. I created a 9-foot radius of no one taking seats around me in the Portland airport as I was choking back tears while writing another story that had me reflecting on how important family (chosen or otherwise) really is. Despite being self-conscious about the
social implications imbued by my innate ability to really just let the tears flow, I am happy Josie sees it. Seeing vulnerability in your parents is powerful. Research shows it. According to a study published by the National Library of Medicine, emotional regulation is socialized through processes, including how parents model emotional reactions in their parenting, marital relationship and in general around the house. In other words, a healthy emotional vibe in a child’s home life helps give them the tools to regulate their own emotions. This leads to better outcomes across their entire lives, allowing them to establish more stable personal relationships and work environments over time.
Kids model what their parents do more than what their parents say. The magic is in the modeling. I let her know it is OK to cry when she is overwhelmed by emotion. During my childhood, it was modeled for me that it is shameful to cry in front of others. I have never seen my dad cry. I knew of two alleged instances of him crying, but I never saw any tears in his eyes. Because of my fear of crying in my home life, I felt that I had no choice but to cry in public settings.
“BEING A STRONG DAD IS IMPORTANT. YOU CAN BE A STRONG DAD WHO CRIES.”
Then, I had nowhere to go with the shame that I felt when I did cry and was usually made fun of for it. I taught myself to humorously self-deprecate about it. That has morphed over time, and now I like to think it might even demonstrate strength to show to your vulnerability to the world.
Despite what our own family dynamics might have taught us earlier in life, crying is undeniably good for you, according to experts. “I wish more men could cry,” says New York Times bestselling author Dr. Judith Orloff, who penned “The Genius of Empathy” (the foreword was written by the Dalai Lama), when I spoke with her about my propensity for tears. “I am a big fan of crying as a psychiatrist. It is essential and it helps the healing process.” Tears themselves have health benefits and the act of crying reduces stress hormones and increases endorphins. “After crying, you enter a healthier state,” Orloff adds.
There are subtleties to it, however, and Orloff checked in on how I cried in front of Josie before signing off on its positive effects. Crying constantly in front of your kiddo and/or (knowingly or unknowingly) asking them to be your therapist can have negative effects, as it can make the child believe that their parents are out of control. The key, Orloff told me, is to let her know I am still solid and to create balance. “You can be an empathic, sensitive man and a strong man at the same time. Let her feel your strength. Hug her while you cry. Being a strong dad is important. You can be a strong dad who cries.” It turns out that striking that balance is what will help our family — and our daughter — be healthier and happier.
I think we’ve gotten there. But it is bittersweet.
Josie is the only kid in her kindergarten class who doesn’t have a sibling. She brings this up to us regularly, and always cries when she does. She wants a brother or sister, really bad. She plays with dolls almost exclusively as if they are siblings and I often sub in as “brother” during imaginative play sessions. We understand that her seeing
her friends and schoolmates have siblings, while she doesn’t, makes her feel lonely, other and sad. That makes Sarah and I sad. We tried to make that sibling happen. A series of increasingly more devastating pregnancy losses led us to the decision to stop trying to have another child. So the last time Josie brought up the fact that she wanted a sibling, I didn’t shy away from my own pain in the matter. I let her know that her mom and I are really sad that she doesn’t have a brother or sister, too. And then, with a big hug, we cried together.
It’s times like these that I’m encouraged by knowing that I can be a strong father who can show her both a solid base and can allow my tears to go free at times. A healthy relationship with your emotions means knowing what you feel and how to express it. Whether that means crying — or not — is OK. Josie is learning what this means for her. And I’m still learning what it means for me. “I think for your daughter it is important that she is true to herself,” Orloff says. “So, she has a father who cries. Let her choose if she wants to cry. That is her strength.”
I’m seeing that lesson play out in real time now.
When Josie’s elementary school asked us to stop walking our kindergarten-aged children to class to help them gain independence in preparation for moving on to first grade, Josie brought it up to Sarah and me very casually. “I’m fine with it,” she said. However, it became evident that I was not “fine with it” quite yet. On the first morning I had to say goodbye to her from the sidewalk, she asked, “Are you going to happy-cry?”
As we parked the car and I helped her out of the back seat, I was already overwhelmed with the thought of letting her walk in on her own. And then off she went. I ducked behind a storage container in the parking lot of the elementary school, peeking my head around the corner. I ugly-cried watching her walk through the playground with her head held high, strutting in her shiny pink parka. Josie didn’t look back.
HOME FROM HOME
MOVING TO LONDON OPENED MY EYES TO MY AMERICANNESS
BY KASSONDRA CLOOS
Every time someone from across the pond comes to visit me in the U.K., I ask them to bring me one thing: marshmallows.
I don’t really like s’mores, but when I moved from Colorado to London four years ago, I realized that my awareness of smashing marshmallows, chocolate and graham cracker together was tethered solely to an American upbringing. Slowly but surely, my disconnect from the culture that raised me began becoming apparent with the poking of tradition-sized holes in my heart, starting with s’mores. I tried to spackle the hole by hosting s’mores parties in my back garden, but unfortunately, British marshmallows just don’t roast and melt in quite the same way. Only the American variety will do.
Worldwide, relatively few people migrate to another country — just 3.6 percent of the
global population, according to the United Nations’ World Migration Report. The U.S. and U.K. are popular destinations, where foreign-born residents make up about 14 to
FIGURING OUT HOW TO ADOPT A NEW CULTURE WHILE HOLDING ONTO THE ONE THAT RAISED ME IS THE HARDEST THING I’VE EVER DONE.
16 percent of the population. When I consider the debates over immigration here in Europe, or in the United States over the
southern border, I realize I’ve had it extremely easy compared to many migrants. I’ve moved not because of violence or food insecurity, but by choice, and started my aspirational path toward dual citizenship in a country where my native language and the primary language are the same. I’ve also found a supportive group of other foreign transplants. And still? Figuring out how to adopt a new culture while holding onto the one that raised me is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
“It takes three generations to become fully assimilated,” Dr. Gerald Gems, a professor emeritus at North Central College in Illinois and third-generation Italian American, says. The first generation often sticks close to familiarity, he says — this is why we have so many ethnic enclaves, like Basque country in Nevada and Koreatown in LA — while the second generation
I UNDERSTOOD. FINALLY! I SPEAK ENGLISH ENGLISH NOW!
lives in two cultures. The third generation usually doesn’t speak the language of their grandparents’ birth country. As a woman trying to navigate a different set of norms within my own native language, I often feel like I’m navigating all of these phases myself at once.
ABOUT A YEAR after my move to London, I was riding my bike and attempted to cross a quiet intersection via a crosswalk instead of making a turn across a lane of traffic. It is indefensible, I know, but my excuse was that I was still getting used to cycling on the left side of the road, and right turns felt dangerous. I also didn’t think I would get caught. The crossing guard — or “lollipop lady,” as they call them in Britain, because of the stop signs they hold — spotted me from the other side of the road and was not pleased with my behavior.
“Will you dismount your bike! Please!” she shouted. It was not a request, and it startled me. When I did as ordered, she shouted, “THANK YOU.” An American English translation of this interaction probably would have been something like, “Get off your bike, you jerk! Idiot.” For the first time, I understood this. Finally! I thought. I speak English English now!
For most of the following two years, I spent hours every week scheming about how to officially move to this place permanently. In the absence of a right to abode, I settled for frequent visits, alternating a few months in the U.K. with extended visits back to the United States and elsewhere in the world. I read everything I could about immigration laws, contacted lawyers, and spent months assembling an application for a talent-based arts visa. I had years of experience writing for international publications, so I was told I should qualify. It was devastating when I was denied on the basis that my application was lacking literary merit.
So, I launched Plan B: grad school. In a panic about the state of my future in a country I had grown to love, I filed applications for master’s programs in London as
if my life depended on it. In a way, it did. I decided to go back to school to A) learn how to actually write with literary merit, and B) gain time to produce something suitable enough to return to Plan A.
At times, it felt like there was an immediate trade-off for everything I gained. I was living exactly how I pleased, but I was also living with tremendous uncertainty. What if I didn’t get into grad school, or if I did but it ended up failing to lead to a visa in the end and wasting all that money? What if I left to visit friends or family and wasn’t let back into the U.K.? I love the life I have built in London, but I feel far from my family, whom I also love.
I began feeling the constant pull between the two realities of my new home and my old one. Every element of daily life was exciting again — mailing letters in iconic red postboxes, shopping for groceries in stores with unfamiliar goods in beautiful packaging, going for a walk around the neighborhood and stumbling upon something not just old but ancient — but there was also culture shock, loneliness, anxiety and language fatigue.
These discomforts caught me off guard. At first, I thought I understood the conversations I was having because I recognized almost all of the vocabulary words. It took time to realize Americans and Brits often define these words differently. It was a year before I realized that when Brits say they “could do” something, what they are really saying is, “I recognize that this thing you have asked me to do is within the realm of possibility, but I would very much prefer not to do it. So, no.”
I mistook passive aggression for politeness, and on at least one occasion I was actually shouted at for the order in which I assembled a cup of tea (adding milk before you’ve removed the tea bag is on the order of a crime against the king).
Lots of little misunderstandings like this started to amount to a big challenge for me, so I resolved to see assimilation as a sport. I studied British history and read books, like Bill Bryson’s “Notes From a
Small Island” and “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour,” a study of Englishness by anthropologist Kate Fox. I visited castles and asked silly questions in museums. I spent weeks hiking along the English coastline, and I watched trash TV as a “culture study.” Receiving praise for “sounding British” became a game for me. I started taking conversations about the weather more seriously, and I perked up at every “well done!” imparted for jettisoning my Americanness. But I also wondered: Did I like this new version of myself?
Of course, there’s no requirement to assimilate into a new culture. I could very easily be friends with only other Americans and live in a little bubble of familiarity. But this can be isolating and also defeats the point of my desire to live in London. Opting out of fitting in only works for so long.
Assimilation is “most difficult” for first-generation immigrants because they are “basically losing their culture,” says Gems, who has also written at length about cultural identity and assimilation in sports. In “Sport and the Shaping of Italian American Identity,” he explains how Italians gained respect and assimilated into American culture by becoming really, really good at baseball.
Today, he explained, we share so much global media that it can be a little easier to fit in when you move to a new place. But there are lots of behaviors and cultural references we think are universal that aren’t. “The first time I gave a presentation in Norway, I was telling these baseball jokes, and nobody was laughing, and I’m just bombing,” he says. “And finally, the person who brought me over there said, ‘Well, you have to understand that we don’t know how to play baseball.’”
I have been fascinated by the ability to see American culture more clearly from afar than I ever understood it back home. There is a flip side to every characteristic I used to see as exclusively negative. Yes, we are loud, we can be overly familiar with
acquaintances, and we often ask strangers for such inexcusable favors as moving down a few seats so our whole group can sit together. But we are also, often, more comfortable assuming a level playing field because the very existence of our nation was founded on the notion of dismantling formal social, political and religious hierarchy.
I can’t speak for all of us, but when I see groups of Americans abroad I notice that we are often friendlier and more open at first meeting than many of our counterparts elsewhere in the world. We value genuineness, individualism and optimism. We are more likely to think we are capable of impossible tasks, and we are more willing to ask others to make space for us. I have examined what I perceive to be “rude,” and have gained empathy and admiration for people who are comfortable with themselves no matter where they are.
I STUDIED BRITISH HISTORY AND READ BOOKS. I VISITED CASTLES AND ASKED SILLY QUESTIONS IN MUSEUMS. RECEIVING PRAISE FOR “SOUNDING BRITISH” BECAME A GAME FOR ME.
“Americans grow up with the perception — well, most Americans, white Americans, certainly — that they can be anything they want to be,” Gems says. “We keep pushing this idea that anybody has an opportunity in America, that anybody can rise from whatever their station is in life, and become president or whatever.”
This entitlement to hope is not a universal character trait elsewhere. I used to worry that we were far too self-absorbed as a nation, and perhaps there is some truth to that. But now, I am also grateful for the way this aversion to giving up has probably been the very thing that has enabled me to keep going even when the logistics of immigration have felt insurmountable.
BEING STUCK BETWEEN two cultures has allowed me to live in a beautiful liminal space where I can adopt the elements of the new culture that I admire, and let go of the elements of my “Americanness” that no longer serve me. I now love sharing American traditions — like s’mores — with my friends abroad, perhaps more than I loved experiencing them for myself in the U.S., because when I share my traditions with people who haven’t experienced them before, it bestows an opportunity to examine and appreciate them in a new way. It also gives me the license to adapt them however I want.
Since moving to London, Thanksgiving has replaced Christmas as my all-time favorite holiday. Here, I have seen Thanksgiving for what it truly is, or should be: not a forced, reluctant gathering of people who are pretending to like each other, but an annual commitment to show our loved ones that they matter so much to us, we will prioritize basking in their insanity for a day. Not because we must, but because we genuinely love each other underneath all the tension.
The first time I hosted Thanksgiving in London, in 2022, I wanted to recreate an authentic American experience, knowing that almost none of our 18 guests had experienced the holiday before. My flatmates and I trekked to a historic poultry market at 2 a.m. to get the turkey and then realized we had no idea how to make one. We enlisted a chef friend to cook it for us, and he covered it in bacon, which we didn’t know was permissible under the Thanksgiving tradition code but has since become nonnegotiable for us (it’s delicious).
And when it came time to go around the table and say what we’re grateful for, there were plenty of awkward laughs from friends who thought this silly tradition was just a little too American and earnest for them. But it was delicious, warm, chaotic and hilarious. It felt just like home. Turns out, you can find patches to repair those tradition-shaped holes in your heart, no matter where you are.
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, THE BERLIN WALL CRUMBLED UNDER THE IMMEASURABLE WEIGHT OF WORDS — FROM RONALD REAGAN, FROM AN EAST GERMAN TEENAGER, AND FROM MILLIONS CAUGHT BETWEEN THEM
BY
ETHAN BAUER ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO
AYBE IT WAS 1986. Maybe ’87. It’s been so long now that Birgit Schlicke struggles to remember, but it must have been around then that her family packed into her father’s car, a boxy Lada, and drove some 60 miles north from their East German hamlet to the divided city of East Berlin. They arrived in search of groceries — the oranges and bell peppers unavailable in their town. By then, the teenage Schlicke had become well aware of the scarcity afflicting her homeland.
As a child, she didn’t notice much was amiss. Her family always had enough of the basics — bread and milk and butter. One time, they even found summer watermelons in town — an unheard-of delicacy, unfortunately small and limited to one per family. Plus plentiful alcohol, though her family didn’t drink much. She was surprised to learn later that East Germans were known to drink much more than West Germans. “Maybe to escape,” she speculates now, “from the misery of everyday life.”
Her family lived in a sought-after 10th-floor apartment in a public housing complex. Her father was an engineer in the glass industry, and her mother was a nurse. With those jobs came certain perks, which is how her father was able to acquire their Lada without waiting the standard 15 years. They used it to travel to other Eastern Bloc countries — Poland and Czechoslovakia, for instance, where they visited distant relatives. She knew they couldn’t go anywhere else, but she didn’t think too hard about it. She was a kid, and that was the way of things.
A prolific letter writer, with pen pals from
Norway to California to Japan, Schlicke learned about the wider world through words from people and places she wasn’t allowed to see. They told her stories and invited her to visit — then didn’t understand when she explained she couldn’t. They sent her real Levi’s jeans to wear and Tom Cruise posters to pin up in her room. A West German friend even passed along a Whitney Houston album, which became a mainstay on her family’s record player — right alongside nightly viewing of West German television, which her family was able to pick up thanks to a large antenna on their roof. She watched Hollywood films and soap operas — her favorite was “Dynasty” — as well as West German news. She sometimes had to watch the East German news instead because her school tested her knowledge of current events. Teachers asked questions about the German Democratic Republic’s booming economy and irrefutable philosophy — all of which Schlicke learned to recognize as lies. But she needed to get good grades to have any chance of a career, so she watched because she had to. Then she changed the channel.
Her parents had already applied to leave East Germany when they visited the city for their oranges and bell peppers. They made those trips often, and normally Schlicke didn’t think much about the wall separating East from West; it was a fact of existence for her entire life, and therefore forgettable. But on this particular trip, she stood 100 yards or so from the Brandenburg Gate, separated from the wall itself by a chain-link fence, snarling guard dogs and pristine patches
of gravel — a feature meant to discourage escape attempts by forcing on-duty guards to explain any footprints to their commanding officers.
Through the fence and across the divide, she saw a platform in West Germany. A handful of silhouettes stood there, staring down at her and her nation from atop the wall. She had no way of knowing whether the wall would come down. She had no idea that very soon, an American president would stand on the other side of that gate and call for the concrete lesion dividing East from West to be removed. She didn’t even notice the state security lingering nearby, watching her. No, on this day, with a plain cross necklace dangling from her neck, she only knew one thing for certain: “One day,” she told her younger sister, “we will be on that platform.”
THE BERLIN WALL crumbled 35 years ago next month, marking the beginning of the end for Soviet totalitarianism. Yet suddenly the wall’s relevance feels stronger now than at any point since it vanished. Tensions between the United States and Russia have reached a fever pitch not felt since the last kicks of the Cold War, when the wall became a global symbol in the ideological contest between capitalism and communism, democracy and autocracy. Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a KGB agent during the Cold War, seeks to rebuild the Russian glory of old, forging alliances with American foes in China and North Korea, and reopening divisions between East and West.
Long before the Berlin Wall was erected, the United States and the Soviet Union fought as allies against Nazism and fascism during World War II. In the war’s aftermath, however, the differences between the two sides became clear, abundant and irreconcilable. Both wanted to be seen as global powers, resulting in a conflict fought via proxies and ideas. The territories claimed by the Soviets during World War II became communist, and the areas claimed by the United States and other Allied forces did not. The dividing line between these
“blocs” became known as the Iron Curtain, most prominent in Germany.
During his presidential bid in 1980, Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, made his goal of eradicating the Soviet Union’s influence in the world a major part of his campaign. As president, he kept at it, declaring in 1982 that communism would find refuge only within “the ash heap of history.” Those remarks and others like them earned him a reputation as a swashbuckling speaker who had a gift for making complicated situations seem simple. He sold a vision of America, and American ideals, best summarized by his famed reelection ad campaign proclaiming, “It’s morning again in America.”
But his slogans paled compared to the six words that would become synonymous with his presidency and American destiny — six words that would nudge the arc of history, penned by a failed novelist-turned-speechwriter from New York. Peter Robinson had attended Dartmouth en route to Oxford, where he studied “PPE” — politics, philosophy and economics — for two years, then decided to stay for a third to write a novel. After he hit a dead end, he sent letters to every American contact he could think of in search of work.
Most of them ignored him, but conservative thought leader William F. Buckley recommended Robinson reach out to his son, Christopher, who was then a speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush. In the summer of 1982, Robinson flew from London to Washington and got lucky: Christopher told Robinson he was leaving his job, and his replacement had just fallen through. “I think I might recommend you as my successor,” Robinson remembers Christopher telling him, per an account from a recent episode of the “Charles C.W. Cooke Podcast.” The vice president’s office didn’t even ask Robinson whether he’d written a speech before. “Which was lucky for me,” Robinson told Cooke, “because I had not.” After a year and a half with the Bush team, he jumped at an opportunity to join Reagan’s office. Though older than
the Berlin Wall by four years, Robinson was much younger than the larger Cold War. He was inexperienced, in both speechwriting and in life, and therefore an unlikely ambassador for the goal of toppling the Soviet empire. But that’s what he became, dramatically, in the spring of 1987.
The president would be traveling to Europe for an economic summit in Venice. Since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was planning a trip to East Berlin two weeks before to celebrate the city’s 750th birthday, the government of West Germany was hoping Reagan would stop by, too. The speechwriting duties fell to Robinson, then just 29. He joined the president’s “advance team” — Secret Service and press officers in charge of staging for his arrival — for a trip to Berlin, where he saw the wall for the first time. He knew the speech would be important, at a time when the Iron Curtain still stood strong. But he also knew it came at a moment of change.
Gorbachev was touting policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika” — efforts at transparency and more progressive policy throughout Soviet Eastern Europe. It was a hopeful time for many, including Birgit Schlicke. She admired Gorbachev, who was not popular among East German political leaders. They were all older, devoted Stalinists, and they censored Russian magazines and books that featured him. They saw his ideas as too radical, too Western. They saw him as a threat. But he was popular with the public. When he visited, East Germans chanted his nickname — “Gorby! Gorby!” — in the streets, Schlicke remembers. Officials in the State Department lectured Robinson about this atmosphere extensively. They told him to avoid hardline criticism of the Soviets. West Berlin, after all, was still surrounded by East Germany. Subtlety was imperative. “Don’t make a big deal about the wall,” the officials added. “They’ve gotten used to it.”
Used to it? During his trip with the advance team, staring out over that wall, he didn’t believe anyone could ever get used to it. It just felt unnatural; on one side, people
ERECTED IN 1961, THE BERLIN WALL DIVIDED WEST BERLIN FROM EAST BERLIN FOR NEARLY 30 YEARS, OFTEN SEPARATING FAMILIES.
drove Mercedes-Benzes and wore designer clothes. Neon lights buzzed in the shopping district. “Then you get to that wall, and look over the wall,” Robinson recalled, “and there’s nothing.” Gray and brown buildings. No traffic and few pedestrians. Military guards and barbed wire. “You could feel a certain oppression almost in the literal sense of the word. You could almost feel as though something was pressing down on you,” he remembered. “You felt sort of — less alive.”
He knew he needed to write something equal in stature to that very weird, very profound nexus of competing ideas. “You put the president of the United States right there,” he thought. “What do you give him to say?” Robinson didn’t know the answer
until later that night, when he attended a dinner party at the invitation of an old acquaintance. The party was host to many West Berliners, and Robinson couldn’t help himself. “I was told that you’ve all gotten used to the wall,” he observed. “Is that true?” Silence.
Finally, one person he didn’t know slowly raised his arm and pointed. “My sister lives a couple of kilometers in that direction,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in 20 years. How do you think we feel about that wall?”
One by one, every single person in that room shared a similar story. “They had stopped talking about (the wall),” he realized, “but they hadn’t gotten used to it.” His host was the final one to chime in: “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk — glasnost, perestroika — he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall.” Had Reagan been in that room, Robinson thought, he would have felt those words. He knew right then what the speech needed to say.
SCHLICKE HAD HOPE as a kid, when she dreamed of becoming a pediatrician, but it’d been dashed when her family applied to leave for West Germany. She was about 15 then, and she knew their application came with some risks. The process was completely unpredictable, with some families waiting many years to hear anything at all. One day, they’d get a letter telling them they had a spot on a train leaving in a week, which was all the time they had to sell their possessions and pack. Some families did so preemptively. One in their building lived out of a suitcase while days turned to months turned to five years. Her parents didn’t want to do something so drastic. They also didn’t want to wait that long, so her father devised a plan. Their ticket to freedom would be determination. Annoyance. They would become a thorn in the government’s finger; eventually, the thinking went, the government would be eager to get them out.
The drawbacks to this plan were many, starting with Schlicke’s education. Rather
REAGAN’S SPEECH ALMOST NEVER REACHED SCHLICKE OR ANYONE. MANY IN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, FROM THE STATE DEPARTMENT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY APPARATUS TO THE GERMAN EMBASSY, WANTED TO SQUASH IT.
than medicine, she told her teachers she wanted to study foreign trade. “The idea was the moment they let me travel to a Western country,” she says, “I would not come back.” She eventually let that slip to the principal, who told Schlicke she would never qualify to study foreign trade. She hadn’t studied enough Russian, and she wasn’t involved enough with the Free German Youth, the national socialist youth movement. Not to mention she was Christian. East Germany was formally an atheist state, and while Schlicke attended a Catholic kindergarten, where she learned the Lord’s Prayer and other standards, that was as far as religious education was allowed. In elementary school and onward, her Christian teachings were replaced by lessons on Marx, Engels and Lenin, and blatant mockery of her beliefs. But Schlicke used the cross necklace she wore every day to brace herself against the insults.
She wrote to the government at every level, seeking clarification as to why the government was allowed to ignore the 1975 Helsinki Accords; East German leadership, after all, had signed that document guaranteeing a certain degree of freedom of movement and expression. Why, then, was her family’s petition being ignored? She sent letters to local officials. She sent letters to Gorbachev himself. And she and her father showed up at the local government office every Saturday to inquire about their status. Come back later, they were told again and again. Eventually, they joined with other families for a creative protest in the town square. Effectively, any gathering of more than three people in the town square without a permit was grounds for criminal prosecution. But her father came up with the
idea for a group called the “City Wanderers” — like-minded people who gathered on Saturdays to walk around the town square enjoying the trees. Their real purpose was to squeeze in conversations about strategies for making progress in their shared quest to leave the country. They kept the discussions brief and in groups of three or less to comply with legal boundaries. At the first meeting, nothing happened. At the second, again, nothing happened. At the third, they were swarmed by state security and whisked away to interrogations.
Everyone involved was told the City Wanderers needed to disband, or they would be arrested and imprisoned. State security, the “Stasi,” kept a much closer eye on Schlicke and her family after that. She could feel it, even if she couldn’t always see it. She was in 11th grade at the time, so her teachers learned about her family’s exit permit. One summoned Schlicke to her office and asked whether this rumor was true. Yes, Schlicke told her, it was. “Well,” the teacher proposed, “why don’t you stay behind all by yourself?” Schlicke was stunned. “You could separate from your family,” the teacher continued. “You can get an apartment. You can study whatever you want.” It was an unthinkable suggestion. A few months later, the principal summoned the then-17-year-old to make a similar offer. But this time, when she refused, there were consequences. “You can pack up your stuff and leave now,” the principal told her. Because she planned to exit the country, it no longer made sense for the government to spend money educating her. She was denied the opportunity to earn a high school diploma, which meant she wouldn’t be able to study at the university level. She
tried to apply for apprenticeships to learn some job skills but was always rejected — due to the intervention, she suspects, of the Stasi. And while some of her friends from school tried to visit her and help her learn what she’d missed, school officials eventually intimidated most of them into silence. They couldn’t be friends with her anymore, they told her; it was just too dangerous.
To make some money — and, more so, to relieve her boredom — she started working at the post office. She also got ahold of a typewriter and learned to use it. She practiced by typing up copies of her father’s handwritten letters, and they’d send both copies to government officials. In 1987, around the time Reagan visited West Berlin, they happened to watch a program on West German television that made a notable announcement. The leader of East Germany, the program said, was planning an official state visit to West Germany. A West German human rights organization was collecting petitions from East Germans looking to leave their country, and planned to present them to the East German leader during his visit. Schlicke’s father jotted down the address, and they reasoned it couldn’t hurt to write their own leader — something they’d done many times before, to no avail. Maybe this time, they thought, he would pay attention.
REAGAN’S SPEECH, AS Robinson wrote it, was intended precisely for someone like Birgit Schlicke. But it almost never reached her, or anyone. Many in the U.S. government, from the State Department to the national security apparatus to the German embassy, still wanted to squash it.
But because Reagan was preparing for a big trip to Europe, with many speeches scheduled, the normal review processes were delayed. Instead of disseminating drafts and having them sanitized by the rest of the White House, Reagan read an early version of Robinson’s speech. During a Monday meeting with speechwriters following his review, Reagan said he liked the draft, but guarded as usual, he didn’t say much else. Robinson pushed for more.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I learned on the advance trip that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany on the other side of the wall. And if the weather conditions are just right, I was told they could pick up the speech as far east as Moscow. Is there anything you’d like to say to the people living on the communist side of the wall?” Reagan, in view of multiple witnesses, highlighted the passage about removing the wall.
The rest of the U.S. diplomatic apparatus wasn’t so sure. They knew many Germans viewed Gorbachev’s reforms as hopeful, and thought this blunt call for taking down the partition was shortsighted. Robinson wrote, when recounting the experience in a 2007 issue of Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, that these offices submitted no fewer than seven drafts, all of which nixed the call to “tear down this wall.”
A Deseret Magazine review of documents provided by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library revealed that they often did so with extreme prejudice.
John C. Kornblum, American ambassador to Germany, devoted nearly five full pages to criticism of Robinson’s speech and promotion of his office’s alternative version. His first criticism was “tone,” noting that the speech came at a hopeful time for Germans. “In the current mood,” he wrote, “many Berliners will see the current White House draft as being confrontational and detrimental to the progress they so deeply desire.” Grant Green, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and executive secretary of the National Security Council, sent a memo on May 27 trying to
stop the president from seeing the speech at all. “In reviewing the revised draft,” he wrote, “it is clear that serious differences still remain. … We do not concur with the speech being forwarded to the President in its current form.” The National Security Council was concerned, like the ambassador, that the tone didn’t match the moment and risked feeling out of touch. Their revised draft, which included substantial handwritten revisions across the board, didn’t even offer a reason for cutting “tear down this wall” — it was just marked off with a black X.
Robinson’s frustration built as the speech approached. “I leave it to you to decide what to do about (one staffer’s) sixth re-write,” he wrote to his boss at one point. “For myself, I reject it completely.” Though inexperienced, Robinson did have strong opinions about writing. He understood that language had power, and that sanitizing that power was cowardly. One draft suggested by the American diplomat in Berlin, for example, swapped his signature line for, “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.” At first, it looks very similar to what he said — but it isn’t. It removes responsibility. “The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them,” Robinson wrote in 2007. “What State (Department) and the NSC were saying, in effect, was that the President could go ahead and issue a call for the destruction of the wall — but only if he employed language so vague and euphemistic that everybody could see right away he didn’t mean it.”
Robinson found that idea unthinkable — and figured Reagan would feel the same way. He knew the president understood the power of precise language, and assumed he wouldn’t respect the euphemisms running rampant in the suggested rewrites. “Their speeches were drab,” he recalled. “They were bureaucratic. They lacked conviction.” And that wasn’t his style, nor Reagan’s. Luckily, because multiple people had heard Reagan himself praise the part of the speech that called
for the wall’s destruction, Robinson and his team had leverage.
The secretary of state met with Reagan in person during his European trip to try, once more, to reframe the speech. But Robinson, who did not come along for the trip, did not know what the president’s response had been when he tuned in to watch from across the Atlantic.
PERCHED DIRECTLY IN front of the towering Brandenburg Gate, with its 12 Doric columns crowned by four magnificent bronze horses, Reagan stood at a lectern in a dark pinstripe suit and looked out at tens of thousands of waving German and American flags. Before he began speaking, they offered a rousing ovation that would only get louder as the speech progressed.
Robinson recognized the windup. “As long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open,” Reagan said just a few minutes in, “but the question of freedom for all mankind.” The crowd erupted with the loudest burst of cheers so far. Robinson suspected then, but didn’t know for certain, that his speech had remained intact. That line was meant as a warmup for the main attraction. Still, maybe the diplomats and advisers didn’t recognize that and cut it anyway. He wouldn’t have put it past them. He waited and wallowed in anxiety.
Eleven minutes in, the big moment arrived. Reagan was careful to frame the remark in the context of new hope for the Soviet Union. He wondered aloud whether Gorbachev’s reforms were genuine — or a smokescreen. To find out, he said, “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable.
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace — if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.” The crowd erupted, less clapping than full-blown screaming. Reagan had to pause for a full 25 seconds before he could continue. Finally, he said those six words. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Again, the crowd erupted. The speech continued for another 14 minutes, talking about arms control and international cooperation, but it never reached the same heights of enthusiasm. The signature moment was clear.
Watching from thousands of miles away, Robinson was elated. The message had been sent across the world — and he’d beaten the apparatus that tried to silence it. Watching from her family’s living room on West German television, 17-year-old Schlicke recalled her trip to their side of the Brandenburg gate with her sister. She remembered looking up and saying that one day, they’d be the ones looking down from the other side. “And it was so close,” she says, “and yet, not attainable at the time.” Reagan’s words made it seem even closer. “It was very powerful. I had goosebumps
and tears in my eyes,” she says. Even the direct challenge to Gorbachev felt entirely appropriate. The end of the wall was what she and many others wanted. If Gorbachev was really a hopeful figure, she thought, he should be challenged to deliver on that hope. “When he said open this gate, tear down this wall — that’s what everybody felt,” she says. “It told me that we were not forgotten by the free world.”
Schlicke remembers that feeling well, 37 years later. But in the moment, she couldn’t think about its implication too deeply. She had much more pressing concerns.
SCHLICKE’S LETTER TO West Germany was a particularly risky proposition, given that East German correspondence to Frankfurt was sure to be opened beforehand by state security. Their letters — hers
SCHLICKE WAS CHRISTIAN. EAST GERMANY WAS FORMALLY AN ATHEIST STATE. IN SCHOOL, THE LESSONS FOCUSED ON MARX, ENGELS AND LENIN, AND BLATANT MOCKERY OF HER BELIEFS.
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN’S “TEAR DOWN THIS WALL” SPEECH, DELIVERED IN WEST BERLIN ON JUNE 12, 1987, IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SPEECHES OF THE 20TH CENTURY.
typed, her father’s handwritten — would never arrive, they thought. They managed to smuggle them to an intermediary, who mailed them in Frankfurt on their behalf. Only much later did they learn that an East German spy in the human rights organization was monitoring the incoming letters. When word reached local authorities, state security finally came for them.
Schlicke’s father was supposed to go to the doctor for an hour. Ten minutes after he left, a neighbor knocked on Schlicke’s door, telling her they’d seen her father forced into a car by men in ties. She did the only thing she could think to do: locked the door and hid. Another 10 minutes passed before the doorbell rang again, this time over and over. Schlicke didn’t answer, but she heard what sounded like men’s voices in the hallway. Her mother eventually opened the door when she got home, with little choice but to let them inside. They ransacked the place and left with her typewriter, all the letters from her pen pals, and many books from her shelf.
Two days later, agents plucked her from her job at the post office. They drove her 45 minutes to a location far outside town, through an iron gate that closed behind her. The hope she’d felt, whether listening to Gorbachev’s talk of reform or Reagan’s call for freedom, turned to fear when she looked up at window after window sealed by iron bars.
She waited six months in an interrogation prison for a trial that lasted only three days. On the fourth day, she and her father were both found guilty of violating laws related to communicating with foreign organizations. Her father was deemed the ringleader, since he wrote the letter by hand, and sentenced to four years and six months. Schlicke was painted as more of an accomplice and sentenced to two years and six months in Hoheneck Fortress — the most notorious women’s prison in East Germany.
Schlicke had learned about it in a West German documentary. In her mind’s eye, she saw it as “an old, dark castle on a hill.” But the prison had a strange beauty to it, with red-brick walls and Flemish-inspired
stepped gables. Even a steeple. In a different context it might look like an old college dorm. It housed the country’s most dangerous female inmates. Many had murdered their own children. A few were Nazi war criminals. But in the eyes of the guards, they were all the same, including political prisoners like Schlicke.
A typical day at Hoheneck started with sliding into standard-issue uniforms. Schlicke remembers them as drab and cheap. Most of her time was spent sewing colorful bedsheets and pillows — items Schlicke knew must be for export, because nothing that vibrant was available in East Germany. They had daily quotas, and even though Schlicke didn’t know how to sew, she learned quickly. They ate mostly stews, soups and pastas — rarely anything fresh. Her hope rested in her lawyer’s counsel
THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY DEVOTED NEARLY FIVE FULL PAGES TO CRITICISM OF ROBINSON’S DRAFT OF THE SPEECH.
that she would more than likely not have to serve her full sentence; that West Germany would purchase her freedom, as it had for many in her situation. That hope sustained her, as did her faith. She insisted on attending Catholic Mass every Sunday even though she couldn’t get anywhere near the priest. Once, for Christmas, he was prevented from even gifting her an orange.
After about a year she learned, in late October 1989, that there was a coming amnesty for political prisoners. She would be released on Nov. 17. The Berlin Wall crumbled just before, on Nov. 9.
She didn’t hear anything about it until the following day, when some newspapers began to circulate with the details. Guards then asked all the inmates to gather in a large hall, where they all watched East
German TV together. “People were all over West Berlin, they were dancing in the street and partying,” Schlicke remembers.
She briefly returned to the same apartment she’d inhabited before her imprisonment, as did her father days later. Her hopes arrived all at once from there: Not only was she free from prison, but her family soon moved to West Germany, where she was able to attend university and even visit a pen pal in California. She attended an exchange program at Georgetown, in D.C., for a year. She even interned for a Republican congressman. “I always had this idealized picture of the United States,” she says, in part thanks to those resonant words of Ronald Reagan. She thought, then, that those words had triumphed. She thought they had won. That that would be the end of it.
FOR MUCH OF her life outside East Germany, Schlicke lived like the Berlin Wall and everything it stood for was something of the past. In addition to her travels, she built a career that included stints at American telecom giant WorldCom and an executive assistant role at power tool manufacturer Black & Decker. She still lives in West Germany, in the state of Hessen, near Frankfurt. But nowadays, Schlicke finds that past harder and harder to escape. Her father, for one, is 80 and still somewhat bitter about how things ended. How so few of their tormentors ever faced justice, and how, because he spent so many of his prime earning years in East Germany, he struggles to make ends meet on his small pension. Schlicke has also chosen to lean into her past; she published a book in 2009 about her time in Hoheneck and visits schools across Germany to serve as a “contemporary witness,” telling stories and sharing pictures about life behind the Iron Curtain. But her struggle to escape East Germany isn’t all about the past; mainly, it’s about the geopolitics of the present. “When the wall came down, to me and to a lot of people, it was the end of the Cold War. And we thought we would all live happily together,” she says. “And
what we have now is just — scary. It feels like Cold War 2.0.”
She calls Putin a “horrible dictator;” an “evil narcissist” seeking to turn back to an age with which she’s intimately familiar. And there are also new players. China threatens. And even within Germany and across much of the Western world, right-wing populism rises. Particularly in what used to be East Germany, she says, where many people seem lost and eager for a strong leader to make sense of the changing world for them. To withstand these threats will require unity, and looking at Germany’s allies, she doesn’t like what she sees. Especially from the United States. “It’s important that the Western
Allies stand together and support each other. But what’s happening in the U.S. is also kind of scary,” she says. “It’s very confusing, and it’s not where I had hoped we would be today.”
It’s a long way from the vision of Ronald Reagan, who Robinson remembers had a unique serenity to him. While the rest of the White House felt frantic and high-pressure all the time, Reagan himself brought a calming presence to every room. He had a way of putting people at ease with humor and perception. That, believes Robinson, who didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed for this story, is what made Reagan the “great communicator” — he had a superhuman sense of
what would resonate in a given moment and what wouldn’t. Yet whatever his superhuman instincts, when Robinson thinks of Reagan now, he remembers something else about him, too. Though he’d joined Reagan’s staff as a true believer and expected the Gipper to be “larger than life,” he instead found “he was just a man,” Robinson told Cooke. A man who, up close, had some gray hairs; who was shorter than his listed 6-foot-1; who looked older in person than on television.
Robinson wasn’t disappointed, but it taught him something about historical figures. Reagan, like every leader before him, was mortal. And over time, that made Robinson appreciate him even more. He wasn’t some demigod; he was better: a man who was willing to speak the truth as he saw it. That willingness is, ultimately, what made “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” so immortal and definitive in hindsight. “It didn’t achieve a place in history,” Robinson told Cooke, “until the wall came down” two years later. Because once that happened, Reagan speaking truth to the situation almost predicted the future. It spoke freedom into existence.
Schlicke often repeats a similar sentiment, one she attributes to German playwright Bertolt Brecht: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Most people, she can say from personal experience, don’t feel that way. Or, at least, they don’t act like it. It’s easier to seek stability within injustice, then ignore it. But she’s never been able to do that. The way she sees it, speaking up earned her freedom and brought down the Berlin Wall. Speaking up eventually led her to West Berlin — though not to the platform she saw as a teen, when her family visited in search of oranges and bell peppers. Thankfully, these days she doesn’t need to look down from there, from afar.
Instead, she can stand where Reagan stood all those years ago and feel the pulse of history at her feet.
Then, she can walk through to the other side.
THE BERLIN WALL STARTED TO COME DOWN, FINALLY, IN NOVEMBER 1989, ALLOWING UNRESTRICTED FLOW BETWEEN EAST AND WEST GERMANY — AND FORETELLING THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE USSR.
by Michael J. Mooney
Lisa Murkowski is one of the last moderates le in the Senate. How has she managed to survive — and thrive — where so many others have failed?
illustration by C.F. Payne
ife as a moderate at the highest levels of American politics can be simultaneously frenzied and monotonous.
PUNDITS
For example: One day in early June, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was one of several senators who questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray during a sparsely attended, two-hour meeting of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science. Wray was on Capitol Hill making the case that Congress should approve his requested budget of $11 billion for 2025, an expansion of $660 million — making this an opportune time for lawmakers to question the director on the federal law enforcement issues they care about most.
Several Democrats asked Wray about enhanced FBI background checks on gun purchasers and large-scale attacks on America’s infrastructure the FBI says it foiled over the last few years, both of which are touted accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration. Several Republicans asked about the threat of terrorism, the influence of Mexican drug cartels, and the integrity of the upcoming presidential election — all issues key to former President Donald Trump’s current campaign.
Murkowski, arguably America’s top-ranking moderate, went in a different direction. Wearing a pink cardigan over a black, flower-print dress, the 67-year-old Murkowski asked Wray about the disproportionate number of fentanyl-overdose deaths in her home state of Alaska and why overdose
death rates have dropped in other states but not in hers. Then she asked about the high number of murdered and missing Indigenous people.
“We’ve got one field office in Alaska for the FBI. We have two satellite offices,” Murkowski said. “Do you think that is sufficient resourcing to cover a state that you have acknowledged is one-fifth the size of the rest of the country?”
Wray said he understood the specific challenges of a state as vast as Alaska. “We clearly need more resources,” he told Murkowski.
When the director finished and it was another senator’s turn to ask questions, Murkowski quickly scooped up her papers and grabbed the heavy wooden nameplate at the front of her spot on the dais, then hustled out of the room and down the hall to another hearing happening at the same time. This was the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s meeting on reproductive health care — a packed proceeding focused on abortion access since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Lawmakers listened to testimony from both sides of the issue. When it was the senators’ turn to talk, it went — well, it went about like you’d expect, divided down party lines. Democrats talked about the consequences of closing women’s health care clinics. Republicans showed illustrations of
a fetus developing in the womb. Then it was Murkowski’s turn.
“A decision to terminate a pregnancy is deeply, deeply personal. It’s complicated,” she said. “I think the choice to have an abortion should ultimately be in the hands of the individual, not the government. I also believe it is reasonable not to require those who are firmly opposed to abortion to support it with their tax dollars.”
If you were watching these hearings and didn’t know each senator’s political affiliation, they wouldn’t be hard to figure out — except Lisa Murkowski. That’s because Murkowski’s views don’t fall into prefabricated political party-line boxes. She’s been a Republican her entire life, supporting defense spending, tight fiscal policies and Second Amendment freedoms. She voted to put Amy Coney Barrett on the U.S. Supreme Court knowing it could result in overturning Roe v. Wade.
But Murkowski is also pro abortion-rights. She’s a staunch defender of quality public education — and was once a PTA president. She voted in favor of keeping Obamacare. The Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for the controversial Project 2025 policy proposals, rates every senator every session. The average Senate Republican score for the current session is 78 percent. The group gave Murkowski a 32 percent.
Murkowski also regularly collaborates and socializes with colleagues across the political spectrum. But her most obvious defiance of party dogma has been her repeated criticism of Trump. She’s called him “spiteful” and “flawed to his core.” She said she wouldn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020 and has already said she won’t vote for him in 2024. She was one of only seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump during his 2021 impeachment trial, saying at the time that she’d seen “clear evidence that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election after losing it.” And she’s the only one of those seven who’s faced voters since then.
Trump has had plenty of high-profile Republican critics through the years,
including former Sen. Jeff Flake, former Sen. Rob Portman, former Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Mitt Romney. But over time, just about every critic on the Republican side of the aisle has either decided to leave politics or voters have decided that for them. Trump himself repeatedly promised to campaign against Murkowski in 2022, the same way he campaigned against Cheney. But unlike Cheney, Murkowski was reelected that November, with just under 54 percent of the vote.
So I wanted to know: What makes Murkowski so different?
The senator, who is famously resistant to national media coverage and seems to especially dislike questions related to Trump, declined my requests for an interview for this story. But after talking to more than two dozen people who’ve worked with her or covered her through her 22 years in the Senate, it’s clear the answer has something to do with both the unique space Lisa Murkowski occupies in the modern political landscape and the unique place she represents.
SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI HAS BEEN A REPUBLICAN HER ENTIRE LIFE AND USUALLY VOTES WITH HER PARTY. BUT SHE HAS BROKEN FROM PARTY ORTHODOXY ON SOME KEY ISSUES.
SAMUEL CORUM / GETTY IMAGES
IVAN MOORE GREW up with English parents and lived in both England and Singapore before meeting an Alaskan woman and moving to Anchorage in the mid-1980s. He’s lived in the state known as “The Last Frontier” ever since. In 1996, he started a market research company that does polling about all manner of political and nonpolitical topics. He’s tall, bald and gregarious, and after more than three decades in Alaska, he’s become the most prominent, trusted pollster in the state. (Alaskans mostly forgive his funny accent.)
When I asked him how Murkowski has managed to survive, even thrive, as a moderate, Trump-criticizing Republican, despite our intensely divided times, he offered some polling numbers from late July. Across the political spectrum, 49 percent of Alaskans have a positive view of Murkowski and 41 percent have a negative view.
But then Moore broke down the results by political ideology. Among self-described conservatives, a mere 27 percent have a positive view of Murkowski, and 69 percent have a negative view. Among moderates, 55 percent have a positive view. Among progressives? A whopping 72 percent positive and only 21 percent negative. So, while many Republicans might not vote for her, she more than makes up for it with independents and Democrats. Moore told me she’s almost certainly the only Republican officeholder in the country who’s more popular among progressives than conservatives.
I asked Moore if Murkowski would have any chance of winning a Republican primary.
“No, none,” he said. “It’s categorically zero.”
But Alaska is a special place. In the summer, the sun barely sets, and in the winter it barely rises. The state has more coastline than the rest of the country combined. It has more than 50 active volcanoes. And the official state sport is — you guessed it — dog mushing. Alaska also has a unique makeup of voters. While Republicans control the state, and Alaska
has gone red in every presidential election since 1964, the majority of Alaskan voters are actually independent. The state also has a different voting system. In the 2020 election, the state’s voters approved an initiative to become only the second state that employs ranked choice voting. (The other one is Maine.)
Instead of a primary, voters rank their favored candidates and the top four end up on the ballot in November. Murkowski’s main opposition came not from the Democrats, but from the Trump-endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka, who ended up with 46.3 percent of the vote in the November 2022 general election.
Trump
has had plenty of high-profile Republican critics through the years. But over time, just about every one of them has either decided to leave politics or voters have decided that for them.
This means Murkowski has survived by being truly bipartisan in her approach to both campaigning and governing — and that she’s had to deliver for the people of Alaska.
“There are those who come to Washington to make noise, and there are those who come to Washington to make law. Lisa Murkowski, without question, falls into the latter category,” Romney told me. “As our country was in the throes of Covid, Lisa invited a group of us over to her home for dinner and we left having come up with the framework for the bipartisan COVID-19 relief act of 2020 — breaking months of
congressional logjam to deliver emergency relief to Americans. Infrastructure modernization, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, Electoral Count Act reforms and more — Lisa has been a lynchpin of nearly every major bipartisan effort in Congress over these last few years.”
Jim Lottsfeldt, an Alaskan political consultant who’s worked with politicians of both parties, agrees. Lottsfeldt has known Murkowski and her family for 45 years.
“I don’t think you could take her to Alabama and make her a U.S. senator and have her vote the same way and have the same effect,” Lottsfeldt told me. “I think she gets to do this because it’s Alaska. … Back home we may be on some different teams, Republican versus Democrat versus undeclared. But when it comes to doing the job at the federal level, we’re just on Team Alaska.”
Moore, the pollster, pointed out that for her first 15 years in the Senate, Murkowski had a smooth bell curve of support in the state: She was popular with moderates of both parties. I asked when that changed. Moore looked at me, raised his hand, and gave me a thumbs down.
While Sen. John McCain was the most famous Republican to cross party lines in the 2017 vote to repeal Obamacare — flashing the thumbs down heard from coast to coast — Murkowski also voted to save the health care bill that day. In fact, plenty of people in Alaska believe Murkowski actually persuaded McCain to vote the way he did.
“Lisa convinced McCain to go with his conscience,” Lottsfeldt told me. “McCain gets all the credit for saving Obamacare, but it wouldn’t have happened without Lisa Murkowski.”
After that vote, the poll numbers in Alaska shifted.
“Republicans here never forgot,” Moore told me. “But neither did anyone else.”
EVERY DAY, LISA Murkowski wears a gold bangle bracelet on her left wrist. It bears the words “Fill it in. Write it in.” The bracelet was
a gift from her husband, a reminder of the 2010 election. That year, Murkowski, who’d been in the Senate for eight years at the time, lost her Republican primary race. It could have been the end of her political career.
The same thing had happened to Lisa’s father, Frank Murkowski, a few years before, when he lost the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary to an upstart conservative named Sarah Palin, a herald of the anti-intellectual era we’re living through now. From 1981 to 2002, Frank held the U.S. Senate seat Murkowski now holds. In 2002, Frank won a race for governor and immediately appointed his youngest daughter, Lisa, to fill his open Senate seat. She was 45 at the time, a former district attorney in Anchorage who served two terms in the Alaska House and had recently been elected the Republican majority leader.
“Above all, I felt the person I appoint to the remaining two years of my term should be someone who shares my basic philosophy, my values,’’ the newly elected governor told reporters at the time.
Less than two years later, in 2004, Lisa Murkowski ran to defend her seat against former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat. Though the term didn’t exist at the time, Murkowski was viewed as the state’s ultimate nepo baby. But she scraped by, winning reelection by three percentage points — heavily aided by the fact that it was a presidential election year and George W. Bush carried Alaska by 26 percentage points.
By Murkowski’s next time on the ballot, though, in 2010, Palin’s failed vice-presidential run had morphed into a wider movement known as the Tea Party. The Palin-endorsed Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller, defeated Murkowski in the Republican primary, but unlike her father, Lisa didn’t give up. Instead, she mounted the largest write-in campaign the country has ever seen. Murkowski crisscrossed the state, often traveling in small prop planes, talking to any group willing to listen. She created a coalition that included moderates, progressives, Native Alaskans, independent women and rural Alaskans who were grateful she’d
brought home so much federal money for highways. She needed to educate the public on not only why they should send her back to the Senate, but also how.
Murkowski voters had to fill in the circle for write-in and spell her name. Thanks to her time in office and her father’s long career, her name was familiar to the public — but it still isn’t exactly easy to spell. So the campaign handed out thousands of plastic wristbands, similar to the Livestrong wristbands that had been popular earlier that decade, each printed with Murkowski’s name along with instructions on how to cast a write-in vote: “Fill it in. Write it in.”
“It’s only nine letters,” she’d tell people. “You can do this.”
Election laws forbid voters from wearing campaign insignia into polling places, so Murkowski’s people encouraged supporters to turn the wristbands inside out, leaving nothing showing. Other voters wrote her name on their hands and arms or got temporary tattoos to ensure they’d spell it correctly when it mattered most.
Murkowski was only the second person in history elected to the U.S. Senate through a write-in campaign. (The other was Sen. Strom Thurmond, who ran as a segregationist in South Carolina after the primary winner died before the general election.)
After her victory, Murkowski’s husband, Verne Martell, had one of those plastic wristbands turned into a gold bangle, a constant reminder that she was able to do something nobody else in modern politics could. She says she’s worn it every day since.
MURKOWSKI DIDN’T ENDORSE Trump in 2016, even though she was also on the ballot. When the “Access Hollywood” tape came out that October, in which Trump was heard bragging about grabbing women, Murkowski tweeted: “I cannot and will not support Donald Trump for president. He has forfeited the right to be our party’s nominee.”
Murkowski won reelection that year — against Joe Miller again, this time running as a Libertarian — by more than 15
IN HER EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE, MURKOWSKI WAS POPULAR WITH MODERATE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS IN ALASKA. THE VOTE ON OBAMACARE CHANGED THAT.
SUSAN WALSH-POOL / GETTY IMAGES
percentage points. Trump won the state by about the same margin.
The age of Trump was different. And it wasn’t always contentious. With Republican control of the presidency and both houses, Murkowski achieved a decadeslong goal of pro-petroleum powers in Alaska. Murkowski quietly lobbied party leaders to open long-protected regions, specifically on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to drilling, something state legislators have called the “Holy Grail” for Alaskan politicians.
While the idea of drilling in an Arctic refuge is quite controversial in the lower 48, there are very few elected officials in Alaska who oppose it. Opening up drilling could add tens of thousands of well-paying jobs to the state.
At a celebration of the bill’s passing, Murkowski reportedly told Trump: “This is a bright day for America, so we thank you for that!” At one point, Murkowski also tweeted out a photograph of a Washington Post article Trump had sent her about a wilderness region where she hoped to build a road.
“Lisa,” Trump had written on the clip. “We will get it done.”
According to the political data site FiveThirtyEight, Murkowski voted in line with Trump’s positions roughly 73 percent of the time, among the very lowest Republicans, but far from a dissenter. Interestingly, if you search her name and the word pragmatic during this time, there are dozens of news stories and videos.
Murkowski has made it clear that she believes climate change is real and already affecting Alaska. (This year was one of the worst in memory for floods and mudslides.) Plenty of people would call this hypocrisy. But again, she doesn’t seem driven by fealty to any single ideology.
“Her motivation,” Romney told me, “has been the needs and well-being of Alaskans. With Lisa in Washington, Alaskans have a fierce advocate, a woman of high character and a tireless champion.”
But of course, Murkowski was also critical of Trump long after most of her
Republican colleagues quelled public dissidence. When Trump tweeted in 2017 that “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski had been at Mar-a-Lago and that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” Murkowski tweeted back: “Stop it! The Presidential platform should be used for more than bringing people down.”
A year after evoking the ire of MAGA-world for voting against the repeal of Obamacare, Murkowski lit the fires again during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Knowing Murkowski might be swayed, the American Civil Liberties Union paid for more than
“There are those who come to Washington to make noise, and there are those who come to Washington to make law. Lisa Murkowski, without question, falls into the latter category.”
100 Alaskan women to fly to Washington, D.C., and share their experiences of sexual assault with the senator.
Lottsfeldt, the campaign consultant and longtime friend of Murkowski’s, helped arrange the meetings. He says the women were divided into groups of roughly 20 to fit in the senator’s office.
“Lisa must have spent an hour and a half with each group of 20 women,” Lottsfeldt told me. He says he talked to the women afterward. “They all felt heard. They didn’t know how she was going to vote, but they all felt like she heard them.”
In the end, Murkowski effectively voted
“no” to Kavanaugh’s nomination, though ever the student of procedure, she technically voted “present,” taking advantage of an arcane Senate policy that paired with another Republican senator whose daughter was getting married the day of the vote.
In a statement from the Senate floor, Murkowski explained that the Kavanaugh vote had been the hardest of her career, but that she ultimately thought he was “not the right man for the court.”
People who’ve worked with her say that Murkowski has deep affection for procedure and decorum. She’s also something of a policy wonk, known to send her friends and family photos of paperwork and legislation she’s reading and considering.
State Rep. Zack Fields is one of a handful of Democrats in the state Legislature who endorsed Murkowski in her 2022 reelection campaign. “What surprises people who haven’t yet gotten to know Lisa Murkowski is her incredible depth of knowledge on a very wide range of public policies,” Fields told me. He recalled a meeting with Murkowski and a group of officials in Anchorage about how money from the Cares Act was being used to put people to work on public lands and public-use cabins and trails.
“Local officials were using money that was appropriated by Lisa Murkowski,” Fields told me. “But she knew the trail, the federal fund source, the local government decision that made the project happen. She knew how many unemployed people were being put to work during a period of high unemployment.”
The Trump years culminated in his second impeachment, when Murkowski voted to convict him — even though she knew there weren’t enough other Republicans willing to cross party lines and ban him from running for office again.
“His course of conduct amounts to incitement of insurrection,” she said in a statement at the time.
“When she had the courage to stand up for the integrity of our democratic system of government,” Fields told me, “that’s when I thought: I will always support this person because democracy itself is what’s at stake.”
The Republican Party in Alaska strongly disagreed. Republican officials there then voted to censure Murkowski. After she won reelection anyway in 2022, several Republicans have promised to overturn ranked choice voting and return to the old, divided primary system.
SO WHY IS Lisa Murkowski still a Republican? Over the last few years, two other senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have left the Democratic Party and officially become independents. So why hasn’t Murkowski done the same thing?
Our nation is obsessed with party affiliation, so of course she’s been asked if she’d consider leaving the Republican Party many, many times over the last few years. Usually she has a quick, smart quip, like when a CNN reporter asked earlier this year if she’d ever consider becoming an independent.
“Oh, I think I’m very independent minded,” Murkowski said. “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
James Brooks is a longtime political reporter in Alaska. He writes for the Alaska Beacon now, but also covered Murkowski for the Anchorage Daily News. A few days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, he flew to Washington to interview Murkowski — and her anger at Trump was palpable.
“He’s not going to appear at the inauguration,” Murkowski said of Trump. “He hasn’t been focused on what is going on with Covid. He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice president. He doesn’t want to stay there. He only wants to stay there for the title. He only wants to stay there for his ego. He needs to get out.”
Brooks asked her if she was considering leaving the Republican Party.
“Well, you know, there’s a lot of people who actually thought that I did that in 2010,” Murkowski told him. “I didn’t have any reason to leave my party in 2010. I was a Republican who ran a write-in campaign
and I was successful. But I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”
Right now, Murkowski believes that caucusing with Republicans best helps her achieve her goals, but she’s consistently left open the possibility that this won’t always be the case.
“She’s from a long-term political family and she’s pragmatic,” Brooks told me. “It’s state above party for her.”
She’s frequently talked about how much she enjoys the nights when all the women in the Senate get together for dinner.
“When she had the courage to stand up for the integrity of our democratic system of government, that’s when I thought: I will always support this person because democracy itself is what’s at stake.”
No staff, no agendas, no note-taking. Just talking and getting to know colleagues of all political stripes, including Kamala Harris.
Ivan Moore, the pollster, has his own completely unsubstantiated — but also totally reasonable — theory about why Murkowski maintains the capital R next to her name.
“As long as Daddy’s still alive, she ain’t switching,” Moore told me, referring to the 91-year-old Frank Murkowski, a lifelong Republican. “I think Daddy would be very disappointed.”
At the moment, it doesn’t matter too much which party she affiliates with.
She won’t be up for reelection again until 2028, another presidential election year. Murkowski will be 70 then, practically adolescent by the modern standards of the Senate. Still, it sounds like most people around her wouldn’t be surprised if she chooses to retire.
“She has a full life here in Alaska,” Brooks, the political reporter, told me.
So maybe she’ll hang it up. Or maybe she’ll run again as a Republican and win without much fight, something she’s done a few times throughout her career. Or maybe she’ll switch parties and get on the ballot as a Democrat, knowing she can draw enough votes from across party lines to win. Or maybe she’ll surprise us all yet again, with some new, utterly pragmatic decision.
The truth is nobody knows what Alaska will look like politically by then. Nobody knows what our country will look like. But moderacy like Murkowski’s is something our nation could do again. It’s something we’ve had, not so long ago. There was a time when politicians didn’t exclusively hold their party lines, when they didn’t constantly demonize the people across the aisle. There was a time when it seemed like politicians stood up to their own parties, when they were happy to work with people who weren’t in their party if it meant getting something done for the people back home.
Politics used to be about relationships, about knowing the people you represent and knowing the people you work with. That made it harder to publicly ridicule a colleague. It seems strange to think about now, but politicians used to negotiate and trade and argue for what they thought was best for a majority of their constituents, even when that meant accepting half a loaf and continuing a conversation.
It feels like that’s becoming more and more rare.
So maybe by electing Murkowski, Alaska is a throwback to a different time in America, a time when priorities were different. Maybe the entire state is a nod to a time that has all but passed us by.
Maybe Lisa Murkowski is, too.
HERE IS A version of the West perfect for Instagram.
And then there is the version where GoreTex and fleece don’t exactly qualify as sturdy outdoor gear.
“Those things will be shredded apart when you accidentally back into a barbed wire fence,” says the photographer Lauren Grabelle.
That’s what Grabelle learned when she moved to a ranch near Bigfork, Montana.
The outdoor skills Grabelle had accumulated sailing on the East Coast and hiking trails and camping in the Rockies didn’t apply. Out on the ranch, she needed a different skill set.
“When I told people I was on a ranch, they’d misinterpret that I was on some fancy ranch somewhere, and not doing the work,”
When Lauren moved to the ranch in 2020, it was the beginning of the pandemic. She worried the isolation would be difficult, but instead she leaned into the wild, strange place.
She saw grizzlies 40 feet from her porch. Almost every night, she could hear the cry of coyotes.
She set about documenting life on the ranch and titled the photos she took “The Last Man,” a nod to the idea that this gritty way of life may not be around much longer.
“To me, photography is like a portal for other people to see through my eyes — it’s my way of expressing myself, since I’m not very good with words,” she told the magazine LensCulture. “I also want to share this unique place with people, particularly in these
TO PROTECT HIS PRIVACY, GRABELLE HAS NEVER REVEALED THE NAME OF THE LAST MAN OR THE LOCATION OF HIS RANCH. HERE, HE STANDS IN FRONT OF THE ROOTS OF A LARGE TREE THAT HAD BLOWN OVER IN A STORM NOT FAR FROM THE RANCH, WHICH HAS BEEN IN HIS FAMILY FOR FOUR GENERATIONS.
A FELLOW PHOTOGRAPHER CALLED “LAST MAN” SERIES “HEART OF DARKNESS MONTANA.” GRABELLE SAYS SHE WANTED THE PHOTOS TO HAVE A DREAMLIKE, TIMELESS QUALITY.
“THE LAST MAN” SEEMED TO GRABELLE THE LAST OF A SPECIES: THE SORT OF MAN WHO HAS TO REPAIR HIS ROOF HIMSELF IF IT LEAKS, OR CHOP DOWN A TREE, OR BUILD A FENCE OR DOCTOR A SICK CALF. HERE THE LAST MAN IS REMOVING A BEAVER DAM THAT WOULD CAUSE HIS FIELDS TO FLOOD IF NOT REMOVED.
GRABELLE TITLED THIS PHOTO “PORCH READINGS.” SHE ALSO BROUGHT OLD WEST CLASSICS WITH HER TO THE RANCH.
A FRIEND WHO VISITED THE RANCH FEEDS RUSTY THE BULL.
THE LAST MAN ON A LAKE ON THE RANCH DUCK HUNTING IN HIS HOMEMADE GHILLIE SUIT.
THE LAST MAN AND HIS CAT, ASLAN, NAMED FOR THE LION IN “THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA.”
A CREEK THAT RUNS THROUGH A SWAMPY PART OF THE RANCH.
FOR THIS PHOTO GRABELLE USED PHOTOSHOP TO RE-CREATE A NIGHT WHEN A MASSIVE GRIZZLY CONFRONTED THE FAMILY’S DOG. SHE WANTED THE IMAGE TO LOOK LIKE A DREAM, WHICH IS THE SPIRIT BEHIND MANY OF THE PHOTOS IN THIS SERIES.
GRABELLE TITLED THIS PHOTO “DAY’S END.” IT DEPICTS THE LAST MAN COVERED IN DIRT AFTER A LONG HARD DAY ON THE RANCH.
SHEEP GRAZING NEAR THE SAWMILL WHERE SLABS ARE BURNING UNDERGROUND TO MAKE CHARCOAL FOR THE HAY FIELD.
UNCAST BALLOTS
WHAT KIND OF AMERICAN DENIES
THEMSELVES THE RIGHT TO VOTE?
IN ARIZONA, THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL
ELECTION MAY HINGE ON THEM
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GALL BY NATALIA GALICZA
DAVID HADDON TOOK VOTING MORE SERIOUSLY THAN MOST.
HIS FAMILY KNEW this to be true long before he got sick, before he holed up in a one-bedroom home in Tucson, Arizona. The 86-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran had voted in every election since he was 18 — local, state and national. Even after his brush with cancer, and the aneurysm that followed, Haddon insisted on staying informed. He sat for hours each day in a reclining chair, eyes fixed on the television playing network news. Around him, his temporary home was sparsely furnished. Undecorated apart from photos of his children and doodles gifted by grandkids. Family and politics: Haddon’s two priorities.
He lived about 15 steps away from his ex-wife’s house, who checked on Haddon several times a day. Jane Bloomfield brought him meals when he became homebound. Sometimes their adult children visited from out of state. On one visit this past April, Bloomfield cooked dinner for Haddon and their son, Abram. She sent Abram off to Haddon’s with two plates. Father and son chatted about the goings-on, about news and politics, and then, finally, about the ballot for a local election Haddon received in the mail earlier that day.
Abram soon returned to Bloomfield’s with two sets of dishes and a look of despair. “Dad told me to throw his ballot away,” he told her.
“What?”
Bloomfield immediately put on shoes and hurried over. She asked Haddon if it were true, and if so, why.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
From the trials to convict former President and current Republican candidate Donald Trump on felony charges, to the Supreme Court’s ongoing arguments over the January 6 rioters, Haddon felt powerless against the growing list of unprecedented events. Even President Joe Biden, who Haddon voted for, proved disappointing. The least popular president in decades had presided over a botched, bloody withdrawal from Afghanistan and an economy marked by high inflation. Yet Haddon’s outlook, even amid the messy politics and tumultuous national and international affairs, was initially optimistic. “I think this is going to be OK,” he’d say to Bloomfield while watching the news, “they’re going to take care of it.” Gradually, as the months wore on and the 2024 presidential election
turned ever more vitriolic, “this is going to be OK” turned to “our democracy is done.”
Haddon wasn’t alone. His feeling of helplessness, his sense that democracy was imploding, and his suspicion that his vote didn’t matter — all had become more and more common across the country he loved. Gallup has surveyed Americans on their view of national democracy nine times since 1984. In December 2023, the most recent version of this polling, only 28 percent of adults reported feeling satisfied with the state of democracy — a record low. No surprise then that anywhere from 35 to 60 percent of Americans choose not to vote in any given election. The last presidential race prompted the nation’s highest voter turnout in modern history, and still, about a third of eligible voters didn’t participate.
From those who have never cast a ballot, to those as devoutly democratic as Haddon had once been, the landscape of civic engagement is changing. For some, crossing into apathy becomes an irreversible choice.
Haddon died in May, less than one month after he became so disillusioned by the political climate that he decided he’d no longer cast a ballot.
“The fact that he took that ballot and he hung his head and he said, throw it away. That was so hard for me,” Bloomfield told me. “Here he was so sick, I’d seen him go through so much, but that’s one of the hardest things for me that I had seen him do. Because I knew how much it meant to him.”
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION has become even more chaotic since Haddon gave up on it. Biden’s abysmal debate performance in June and subsequent calls that he step down as the Democratic candidate. The attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Biden dropping out and the last-minute replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris. This is uncharted territory.
Voters are left to process new candidates and new stakes on a fraction of the traditional timeline. That hasn’t happened in
American politics since 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped his bid for reelection mid-race. Yet even then, the electorate had eight months to process the seismic shift and decide on a course of action. Today’s prospective voters have had only three. That’s a daunting task. For some, a deterrent.
Arizona, a historical Republican stronghold, is the newest electoral battleground in the country. The state swung Democratic in the 2020 presidential election by a margin of just 10,000 votes, a narrow 0.3 percent of ballots cast statewide. Now, as the 2024 presidential election nears its end, Arizona is again a toss-up in a race that has ceaselessly seesawed for months and is likely to end even closer than the last. And since uncast ballots shape elections just as much as votes do, it is the nonvoters — the undecided and unsatisfied — in the West’s most consequential swing state who will help determine the tone of the next four years.
The most popular reason given by nonvoters in 2020 as to why they chose not to participate in the presidential election was simply a lack of interest, closely followed by a dissatisfaction with either candidate. “The key to all of this, in many ways, is that voting is not a rational act. It’s an emotional act,” says Thomas Volgy, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona and a former Tucson mayor. “If you are emotionally attached, either to political parties or to politics, you turn out and vote. If you are not … you don’t turn out to vote very much at all.”
The same is true for the politically unaffiliated. A lack of satisfaction or attachment to either candidate more often disincentivizes independents from voting in presidential elections than Democrats or Republicans. And their numbers are rising in Arizona. Last year, independents outnumbered Republicans in the state for the first time in nearly a decade and took the title of majority party. The breakdown is split more evenly nationwide, though voters who identify as independent or otherwise unaffiliated still
THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL RACE PROMPTED THE NATION’S HIGHEST VOTER TURNOUT IN MODERN HISTORY, AND STILL, ABOUT A THIRD OF ELIGIBLE VOTERS DIDN’T PARTICIPATE.
lead those who identify as Democrats and Republicans by two and three percentage points, respectively. This all casts some doubt about turnout in November. A Gallup survey published in May found that while 84 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of Republicans admit to giving this election “a lot of thought,” only 61 percent of independents report feeling as engaged.
Yet affiliation is not the sole or even most important factor when considering why some Americans don’t vote. Even among diehard party loyalists, the majority agrees that polarization is both a direct cause and effect of a failing democracy. Some 86 percent of Americans believe both Republicans and Democrats are more focused on tearing the other party down than solving matters of policy. “Everywhere in the nation, but I think especially in Arizona, we become siloed into whoever we agree with, and we go into our own media echo chambers,” says Jane Andersen from the Arizona chapter of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, a
nonpartisan nonprofit group that promotes civic engagement among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Andersen, her chapter’s “protecting democracy specialist,” works to curb political violence and discourage polarizing rhetoric among Arizona’s elected officials. “Trying to get through the noise of everything that’s happening and figuring out what is this person going to look like when they lead — that’s what I feel like we have to focus on. But in our age of TikTok and 24-hour news, that is not what is focused on.”
Arizona is a uniquely scaled-down model of the nation’s foremost policy debates and partisan conflicts. The border state is a hub for immigration concerns. Abortion access is again slated for the state ballot. And in a region that just endured yet another record hot summer, climate change is an unavoidable topic. In other words, it’s a microcosm of how party allegiances are shifting nationwide. A hotbed for election conspiracies and doubts about democracy.
It’s a state where stalwart voters and the utterly uninterested alike have faced the same extenuating circumstances that’ve made this election so unpredictable.
they’ve seen. It weighs on me, but I don’t know what the right answer is,” she says. “I’m hopeful that this is just a blip. … I hope that the future doesn’t look more like this.”
“EVERYWHERE IN THE NATION, BUT I THINK ESPECIALLY IN ARIZONA, WE BECOME SILOED INTO WHOEVER WE AGREE WITH, AND WE GO INTO OUR OWN MEDIA ECHO CHAMBERS.”
SHE DOESN’T REMEMBER how the arguments started. What small slight or poorly worded phrase curdled an otherwise pleasant family gathering into a fight. All Alice can tell me is how frequent the fights have become. A 53-year-old tax accountant in a Phoenix suburb who requested she not be identified by her real name, lest she cause more rifts with family members, Alice told me how events meant to bring loved ones together now often end in outbursts of tears and anger and division. How the last few election cycles have made gatherings among her politically active, close-knit family unbearable. How some relatives haven’t spoken to each other in weeks. How she’s careful not to invite certain people to the same event.
Alice identifies as a moderate Republican. Her parents and most others in her social circle veer more to the right. And when it comes to the current presidential election, she told me, “I don’t feel represented at all.” The way she sees her present options: Vote for a candidate she dislikes, has already voted for and been disappointed by; vote for a candidate she dislikes that could cause more rifts between her and her loved ones; or not vote at all. “Maybe this is the year that I vote by withholding my vote,” she says. “That’s a hard place to get to when you love your country and care about it.”
She’s not alone. A New York Times poll from 2020 found that 1 in 5 voters say politics has damaged their familial relationships or friendships. “It has been really hard to see some of the inner changes that have happened within our family,” Alice says. “That is not the path that I want our country to go down on a national level, on a community level and on a family level.” Especially when her five children — most college aged — are witness to that discord. It’s already turned them off politics. “They have zero desire, due to the contention that
Young eligible voters ages 18 to 24 years old are generally less informed, less interested in politics and less likely to vote than older, habitual nonvoters. In Arizona that disconnection is even more pronounced. Four out of five Gen Z voters in Arizona don’t feel like either major political party represents them, and 49 percent are consequently registered as independent. Many find politicians corrupt or disingenuous, and voting confusing.
“I would probably be more independent just because I don’t really have a super strongly formed opinion, and I just feel like I don’t know enough to associate with one party or the other,” says a 20-year-old psychology student at Arizona State University in Tempe we’ll call Megan. (She, too, asked not to use her real last name out of fear of retribution.) The 2024 presidential election will be the first where Megan is old enough to vote. When the lifelong Phoenix resident turned 18 two years ago, she called it a milestone birthday for that reason — a marker of independence and maturity, something that she’d looked forward to for years. Now, she’s not so excited. She’s not even sure she’ll vote.
When Biden was still the Democratic candidate and debated Trump in June, Megan took stock of their immature jabs. She noticed the series of insults throughout — “sucker,” “loser” and “alley cat” among them — as well as back and forth arguments about each other’s golf swings. “If the two candidates that we have at the debate are talking about golf for a part of the time, it just doesn’t really feel like it’s something that I should be taking seriously,” she says. The same goes for the obvious youth outreach efforts that have become an essential part of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Harris has appeared in TikTok videos and changed her campaign’s X account bio to riff on a popular internet meme, a nod to “Brat,” a new dance pop album by British
artist Charli XCX that’s a hit among Gen Z listeners. These and other efforts have made her popular among some young voters, the chronically online in particular. But it’s also been a turnoff for prospective voters who desire a more moderate, more serious president. Like Megan. “Why am I watching a TikTok of the person who can maybe be my president? It just continues the trend of making it seem unserious and not something that I should pay attention to.”
TWO MONTHS BEFORE the January 6 ransack of the U.S. Capitol, a group of election deniers armed with flags, rifles and bulletproof vests gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. The protest was a predecessor to the riot that would take place in D.C. — complete with an appearance by Phoenix-based Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, who attended both protests in face paint and a horned fur hat.
Recounts and investigations have debunked the false claims of election fraud that led to both protests. Yet they persist four years later. Nearly one-third of adults nationwide still believe the results of the 2020 election are fraudulent. Arizona is ground zero for that fallout. According to PublicWise, a voting rights organization, 46 public officials in the state have participated in election denial activities. They represent a majority of the state’s constituents; 48 percent have introduced legislation for added barriers to voting, like the removal of unmonitored ballot boxes, and 84 percent have voted in favor of similar legislation. No other state has experienced more widespread closures of polling places, either. This not only makes it more logistically difficult to vote, it causes countless Americans to assume themselves powerless. A study published by The Knight Foundation in 2020 found nonvoters, regardless of party affiliation or background, often opt out because they’ve lost confidence in election security.
“Obviously, 2020 was what it was,” says Jason Tackett, a 38-year-old resident of Queen Creek, a town about an hour southeast of Phoenix. “I think it was a springboard for a lot of people into some distrust.” For Tackett, the suspicion swirling around that election led him deeper into what he calls his “deprogramming.” He became an avid believer of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which exalts Trump as a messiah of sorts, responsible for dismantling a corrupt government establishment. But then Tackett listened to so many other conspiratorial podcasts; he even began to question the original theory that led him down the rabbit hole in the first place. “There’s a surmounting amount of evidence that would say even the conservative savior, Donald Trump, is just part of a system that is designed to separate people,” he claims. “Politics is the precipice of division.”
Tackett doesn’t think of himself as a conspiracy theorist. He’s a devout evangelical and Harley Davidson enthusiast. He’s
PROTESTERS HELD “STOP THE STEAL” RALLIES AT THE ARIZONA STATE CAPITOL AND THE MARICOPA COUNTY OFFICES FOLLOWING THE 2020 ELECTION, SOWING DISTRUST IN ELECTIONS THAT CONTINUES TODAY.
MARIO
“MAYBE THIS IS THE YEAR THAT I VOTE BY WITHHOLDING MY VOTE. THAT’S A HARD PLACE TO GET TO WHEN YOU LOVE YOUR COUNTRY AND CARE ABOUT IT.”
carved out a quiet life for himself, his wife and their two young daughters, who the Tacketts homeschool. He grew up in Ohio with a set of conservative parents who were also unionized General Motors workers. Tackett never considered himself particularly political, but he’s still voted in nearly every election he’s been eligible for. Not this one. “I think there’s a growing trend, at least in my group of people, that just see it as pointless to vote in national politics,” he says. “Because whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen.”
Only 61 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew Research Center in August believe the 2024 presidential election will be conducted fairly. That number drops to 47 percent among Republicans — regardless of past voting history or state of residence. A movement that largely began in the Grand Canyon State sowed seeds of doubt and distrust across the rest of the country. That skepticism can reach anyone just as easily as it reached Tackett, who is now convinced the modern idea of American democracy is a farce.
I WENT TO Arizona to find nonvoters. People who feel lost in the shuffle. But I also found something else: a willingness to move forward, even if it means changing shape.
On a Tuesday evening in late July, dozens of relative strangers navigated the tangled suburb of Mesa, Arizona, just east of Phoenix, until they all reached the same quiet residential street. Earlier in the day the temperature had hovered near 110 degrees, and heat still rose off the sunbaked pavement as guests stepped out of their sedans and minivans. Maybe it was to escape the boil, or for fear of curious neighbors peeping at them from behind window blinds, but the guests wasted no time. One by one, they filed through the front door of a white house, cracked half open.
Beside framed photos of smiling kids and crude drawings of floral bouquets along the living room walls, leaned yard
signs that advertised some version of the same message: “Arizona Republicans for Harris.” The attendees ranged from judges, state representatives and mayors to teachers and small-business owners. Career politicians to caretakers. Most seemed eager for Election Day; they spoke in hushed tones about a renewed energy and optimism. Others appeared to swallow a fair deal of shame. “For a lot of people, it feels like a betrayal,” John Webster, treasurer for the “Arizona Republicans Who Believe in Treating Others with Respect” super PAC, told the room. Conservatives with kempt gray hair and ironed button downs mingled with Democrats in Converse Chuck Taylors and Kamala Harris T-shirts. The term “politically homeless” floated around the home. Many present were conflicted about crossing party lines in the upcoming presidential election. Others were just as unsure about sticking to them.
Here were Arizonans faced with the same uncertainties and moral dilemmas as any nonvoter. Most did not identify with either presidential candidate. All held similar fears about the future. But rather than abandon hope at the sight of a bruised democracy, they’ve chosen to vote because of it.
This is the turnaround Jane Bloomfield wanted for her late ex-husband David Haddon. She wished, before his passing, he could have regained even an ounce of faith in the country he spent a lifetime fighting for. If anyone could course correct for the sake of American democracy, Bloomfield thought it would have been him.
Yet Haddon’s lifelong passion did count for something. Its absence has spurred Bloomfield to greater purpose. Like that odd bunch of temporarily purple voters in the Mesa suburb home, she finds it more urgent to vote than ever. Because an uncast ballot can change the course of this election as much as a vote can, maybe especially in Arizona. She knows that she will be contributing to the outcome either way. Might as well take control of it.
DOLLARS AND SENSE
THE ECONOMY MAY DEFINE THE ELECTION. BUT WHICH CANDIDATE HAS THE BETTER PLAN?
BY BETH AKERS
Whether a local, state or national election, the economy is always an important issue for voters. And polling suggests that things will be no different for the fast approaching election in November. If you’ve listened to any political commentary over the past 30 years, you’ve likely heard the common refrain, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The expression, popularized in the early ’90s by James Carville, a political strategist who was working for President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time, is often used to suggest that voting for the economy, quite simply, is what drives voters. The problem is there’s nothing really simple about it.
Even if you want to vote for the economy, it’s become difficult to discern which candidate will reflect your interests, as every election cycle brings us further away from campaigns based on coherent policy. Instead of platforms built on an internally consistent set of values, candidates run on collections of ideas that poll well with key constituents, resulting in an inconsistent track record on economic issues.
As a result, both the right and the left
have adopted their own policy projects that clash with their historical values.
For example, Democratic Party nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ recently announced proposal to give up to $25,000 to first-time homebuyers conflicts with the party’s populist ideals of representing “the
VOTING ALONG PARTY LINES MIGHT NOT GET YOU AS FAR AS IT USED TO IN TERMS OF ALIGNING YOUR VOTE WITH A PARTICULAR SET OF VALUES, ESPECIALLY ON ECONOMICS.
people” rather than the elite. On its face, the benefit would seemingly help a sympathetic constituency: people struggling to buy their first home. But the reality is that the credit would likely do little more than spur inflation in the housing market by benefiting current owners and developers
at the expense of future buyers who will have to face higher prices, erasing the benefit of the subsidy.
This isn’t just a Democrat problem. An example of analogous behavior on the right is continued Republican support for the mortgage interest tax deduction. This program hands government dollars over to homeowners based on the size of their mortgage. And it’s rich Americans who tend to have bigger mortgages and therefore get a bigger handout. On one hand, the mortgage deduction is in line with the Republican principle of small government and low taxes. But on the other hand, generously subsidizing home ownership financed by debt distorts the function of an entire real estate industry, undermining the long-celebrated belief that a free market can most efficiently and fairly set prices and allocate scarce resources. When these policies are sold as being part of either a conservative or progressive agenda, it makes it harder than ever to be a principled voter on the issue of the economy. Voting along party lines might not get you as far as it used to in terms of aligning
your vote with a particular set of values, especially on economics.
ECONOMICS IS A vast and complex field. But one simple way for voters to evaluate policy using an economic lens is to consider whether an individual or a collection of policies is intended to redistribute or grow the nation’s wealth. Progressive-minded voters tend to be more keen on policies that redistribute the nation’s wealth, whereas conservatives tend to prioritize policies that support growth. While policies can seldom produce growth directly, they can often create an environment that supports or constrains growth.
The classic and perennial example of pro-growth policy is cutting taxes. Reducing the burden of taxes on income or businesses increases the reward of working or generating profit. The assumption is that people and businesses will work harder if they are able to keep more of the fruits of their labor. It’s that “working harder” that will ultimately amount to more growth in the economy. A faster growing economy means more for the government to spend on social programs to help Americans in need.
In contrast, other voters will prefer candidates and platforms that are more focused on redistributing the wealth our nation currently generates rather than on growing the economic pie. Redistributive policies are really anything that has the government collecting tax dollars to hand back in the form of subsidies, tax credits or spending on targeted programs. That’s because the “distribution” of wealth changes as a result of these sorts of interventions. Examples of redistributive policy include spending on social welfare programs like Medicaid, which provides health care for low-income Americans, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and student loan cancellation.
USING THIS DICHOTOMY of growth versus redistribution can help Americans see beyond the rhetoric and choose candidates
and policy ideas that better match their own values. This exercise will be especially important in November, as neither candidate is adhering very strictly to the values historically celebrated by their party.
Student loan cancellation is supported by Harris, but student loan cancellation, a redistributive policy, isn’t about shuffling funds from the “haves” to the “have-nots.” Instead, like the mortgage interest deduction, it’s a giveaway to an already affluent population who take out loans to attend the most expensive schools. Since it will cost as much as $1.4 trillion to execute, it would require a future tax increase to cover the cost, which would also discourage growth.
Donald Trump also seems to be breaking with the historical economic vision of the Republican Party in supporting a platform of isolationist policies. As described in a 16-page document outlining the party’s priorities, Trump would likely embrace policies that limit outsourcing and re quire, or at least encourage, domestic pro duction of manufactured goods. There may be strong arguments for policies that sometimes restrict the movement of goods and services across borders, but they come at the expense of limiting growth. The rea son outsourcing and offshoring happen in the first place is because building things overseas is often better for the bottom line. And what is good for the bottom line is also good for growing the economy.
BOTH THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT HAVE ADOPTED THEIR OWN POLICY PROJECTS THAT CLASH WITH THEIR HISTORICAL VALUES.
Harris also supports policies to prevent what she calls “price gouging.” Her position preys on the insecurities of Americans who have endured rising prices at the grocery stores and gas pumps in recent years, but doesn’t amount to sound economic policy. Constraining businesses on the price they charge isn’t a new idea, but it’s usually one that’s historically been employed in places whose economies we wouldn’t want to emulate. (Think Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and the former Soviet Union.) Additional regulation on prices will discourage businesses from getting or staying in the game — a development that will ultimately cause harm to consumers who would otherwise benefit from healthy competition. On net, it will discourage innovation and growth. Republican nominee former President
Perhaps more concerning, from a con servative perspective, is that Trump has suggested making the Federal Reserve Board, which has historically conducted monetary policy to promote economic growth and stability independent of the political process, a political institution. While Trump claims that his monetary policy would be superior to the policy advanced by the independent Federal Reserve, he would likely be tempted to advance policy that would reflect positively on his administration rather than prioritizing long-run growth. That’s not a dig at Trump in particular. The fact that politicians are somewhat self-interested is the reason for an independent Federal Reserve in the first place.
Like me, most voters care deeply about more than one issue. So, the tradeoff between redistribution and growth might be just one small piece of a bigger puzzle that voters will face in deciding how to cast their votes this November. But at least by using this framework to evaluate economic policies, voters can get a better handle on what their candidate prioritizes when it comes to the economy and can cast their vote accordingly.
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Photo By Matt Sayles
CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEW ELITE
HAS THE PUSH FOR A WOKE AMERICA GONE TOO FAR?
BY MUSA AL-GHARBI
Starting in the interwar period (between World Wars I and II) and rapidly accelerating in the 1970s, there were shifts to the global economy that radically increased the influence of the “symbolic industries” — science and technology, education, media, law, consulting, administration, finance and nonprofits. People who work in these fields traffic primarily in data, ideas, rhetoric and images instead of physical goods or services. These “symbolic capitalists” are also the Americans who are most likely to self-identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists, leftists or “allies” to LGBTQ people. And for good reason.
From the outset, these professionals have defined themselves and their jobs through a commitment to social justice and altruism. Journalists, for instance, are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads, without regard to whether it serves others’ financial or political agendas. Symbolic capitalists successfully won higher pay, prestige and autonomy than most other workers under
the auspices that providing these benefits serves the common good — including and especially helping the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in society.
In the years that followed, symbolic capitalists sought to enhance their influence further by arguing that if still more resourc-
THERE IS MUCH TO CRITIQUE ABOUT “WOKENESS” AND HOW IT IS INSTRUMENTALIZED IN STRUGGLES OVER POWER, MONEY AND STATUS.
es and authority were consolidated in their hands, we would usher in an age of unprecedented social cohesion, progress and prosperity. Under their rule, opportunities would be allocated according to merit, resources redistributed according to need, disputes
by disinterested experts governed by reason and empirical facts. These experts would be mindful of the details and the big picture. And as a consequence, long-standing social problems and tensions would be ameliorated with an increasingly shared understanding of the facts of the world and the “correct” course of action.
To a large degree, we got what the symbolic capitalists wanted: Over the last half-century, the global economy has been increasingly reoriented around these industries. However, to put it mildly, things have not played out as we’d predicted. Instead, the U.S. has seen slowing innovation, economic stagnation, rising inequalities, increasing polarization, a “crisis of expertise,” diminishing trust in one another and social institutions, and, allegedly, epistemic chaos.
My forthcoming book, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” attempts to figure out what went wrong. As the book lays out, there is much to criticize about symbolic capitalists and the social order they preside over.
ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS ARE INCREASINGLY BOUND UP WITH SOCIAL STATUS AND INEQUALITY. PROFESSORS ARE DRAWN FROM A NARROW AND IDIOSYNCRATIC SLICE OF SOCIETY, WHILE RESEARCH AND TEACHING ARE OFTEN DISTORTED BY THE IDEOLOGICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC SKEW OF THE FACULTY.
There is much to critique about “wokeness,” the dominant ideology of symbolic capitalists, and how it is instrumentalized in struggles over power, money and status. However, it’s also critical to bear in mind that people are complicated. Societies, even more so. Social orders and ideologies tend to arise and persist for complex reasons, and should they fail, they leave behind complex legacies. The same is true of what it means to be woke.
IT’S EASY TO see why many hate bureaucrats and administrators. They exert significant (often arbitrary) power over other people’s lives. They are typically unelected and largely unaccountable to the people under their jurisdiction. Their rules and box-checking seem to make everything harder than it needs to be. And sometimes, there are just too many rules.
However, the absence of these professionals and their protocols is no picnic either. Societies with weak institutions, or contexts where the rules are not transparent and consistently enforced, tend to have much lower investment, high levels of instability, lots of nepotism and corruption, and even more arbitrary roadblocks that people have to work around (which tend to be far less predictable to boot). And although overly powerful and centralized institutions can easily slip into tyranny, overly weak institutions can also create grounds for oppressive, exploitative and likewise unaccountable non-state actors to fill the void.
If you travel the world, especially in the “Global South,” you can easily see what the world might look like without those busybodies and their rules. Most Americans, despite their complaints, would not want to make the trade. Instead, people from all over the world flock to America precisely because it’s a place where, far more than most other countries, people can count on relatively consistently enforced and transparent rules, functional institutions and checks (if often inadequate) on “private tyrannies.” These extraordinary features of American
society — broad freedom of trade and individual liberties paired with consistently (if imperfectly) functional institutions and rule of law — may help explain why the U.S., despite being in a period of stagnation, continues to be economically far ahead of the rest of the world (and the gap keeps growing). Two cheers for the bureaucrats and administrators, loathed as they are condemned to be.
In a similar vein, there is much to criticize about mainstream media. As my book details at length, contemporary journalists and pundits tend to hail from (and live in) relatively affluent urban and suburban areas. They have something approaching an ideological monoculture — and their values are significantly out of step with those of most other Americans. Unavoidably, journalists’ idiosyncratic values and their backgrounds shape the kinds of stories they focus on and how they talk about those stories — often in ways that are unfortunate. However, mainstream media is generally reliable, as well. Despite their myriad biases and blindspots, most journalists are committed to presenting readers with an accurate and fair-minded picture of the world (in a concise, compelling and accessible way). In this, they are lightyears ahead of their primary competitors.
Outlets like Fox News and Newsmax, for instance, also largely ignore people in flyover country, working-class people and local issues. They criticize the left for being elitist, but they are based in the same cities, drawing reporters who share similar demographic backgrounds, and cover the same types of stories (just with a different slant).
On top of this, they have an existential stake in villainizing mainstream media and perpetuating the culture wars — this is how they peel people off from other channels and keep them engaged — often in ways that are incompatible with telling the full and unvarnished truth, and often in ways that are pernicious for American society and culture.
Mainstream media has a lot of problems. But folks wouldn’t want to live in a world
where outlets like The New York Times didn’t exist anymore but sites like Breitbart News continued to flourish. That would not be an improvement. Certainly, alternative media can serve as a helpful check on mainstream reporting. They can also complement mainstream coverage, focusing on stories and perspectives that don’t get enough play. But they’re no replacement for the mainstream institutions they condemn. At present, there is no genuine alternative (and so, legacy media continues to limp on despite its myriad challenges).
Similar realities hold for higher education. There is a lot to hate: Academic credentials are increasingly bound up with social status and inequality. Professors are drawn from a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society, while research and teaching are often distorted by the ideological and demographic skew of the faculty. These are real problems. I’ve long been affiliated with an organization, Heterodox Academy, that seeks to raise awareness about these problems, and build momentum to address them.
However, it’s also the case that education, research, and credentialed expertise are of central and growing importance in virtually all spheres of contemporary life. Precisely the reason there is so much political contestation over K-12, higher-education and science and technology is because a lot seems to be at stake.
Frankly, there aren’t good substitutes for mainstream colleges and universities. Think tanks, for instance, are often comprised of the same demographic strata of society as professors. They’re marginally more diverse ideologically, but they also tend to be explicitly oriented toward particular ideological or political goals in ways that may subvert and circumscribe their pursuit of truth. Although there are many problems with “academic capitalism” in higher ed, think tanks tend to be even more beholden to the whims of donors because they receive very little direct money from the government (although many receive foreign funding and others receive
federal funds indirectly). Put simply, think tanks are an important complement to the knowledge production and dissemination roles that colleges and universities play, but they’d be terrible as outright substitutes.
Winston Churchill famously declared, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” The same thing holds for many of the symbolic professions. They’re deeply flawed, but they’re better than nothing, and better than most plausible alternatives too. They’re also better today than they were in the past, largely as a result of increased diversity and inclusion.
is greater representation of nonwhites, women, LGBTQ people and people with mental illnesses and physical disabilities in virtually all cultural domains. There is greater recognition and accommodation of the unique challenges faced by members of these populations. As the work of Michèle Lamont has powerfully illustrated, these changes matter. They have been transformational for how beneficiaries understand themselves and the ways they experience the institutions and societies they are embedded in. Myself included.
AMERICANS WHO ARE MOST PREOCCUPIED WITH LINGUISTIC HYGIENE ACTIVELY AVOID PERSONALLY INTERACTING WITH THE POOR, CONVICTED CRIMINALS, DRUG ADDICTS AND OTHERS.
At the time my father was growing up, segregation was still in place. All the way until 1973, 19 states had officially segregated higher education systems. “Miscegenation” (interracial unions, which I am a product of) was illegal throughout my father’s childhood. The idea that someone like me could attend a Ph.D. program at an Ivy League school, sell a book in a competitive auction between prestige university presses before I even graduated, become a fixture of major media outlets and a professor at a top research university — all while enjoying ethnically diverse collegial, friendship and romantic networks — this was not even in the realm of plausible aspiration for young Black men of my father’s time. My own children, however, take it for granted that opportunities like these could be within their grasp (should they choose to pursue them). This is no small thing.
AS SYMBOLIC CAPITALISTS have grown in power and influence, we have dramatically reshaped the symbolic landscapes of the institutions and societies we preside over. Many of these changes have been unambiguously positive. Beyond the gains in meritocratic opportunity described above, overt and casual abuse against members of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups is less common and less tolerated. There is increased awareness of the potential for unjust bias and discrimination even when people do not harbor ill will against members of minority populations. There
It hasn’t all been good news, though. Lamont’s work has also highlighted that, even as identity-based stigma and discrimination have steeply declined in recent decades, socioeconomic inequalities and segregation have increased just as dramatically. And as formal barriers preventing people from flourishing have been dismantled, there is a growing sense that those who are unsuccessful deserve their lot. There is diminished solidarity across lines of difference, and a reduced willingness to make redistributive investments that serve others instead of oneself or the groups that one personally identifies with.
Moreover, most of the benefits from the
symbolic shifts highlighted by Lamont have accrued to a fairly narrow band of elites who also happen to identify with historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups. The most vulnerable, desperate and impoverished in society have not been able to profit nearly as much. In many respects, their lives have been growing worse.
But here, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can recognize the highly limited nature of “progress” under symbolic capitalists, while also acknowledging that some real progress has been made.
As a prime example, let’s revisit the facts I highlighted at the outset, about how the middle class is shrinking while socioeconomic inequalities are growing. Part of this story is that growing numbers of middle-class Americans are slipping into poverty. However, at the same time, an even larger share of Americans has been moving from the middle class into affluence. Too many elites, to be clear, can cause its own problems. But it’s important to bear both trajectories in mind when people talk about the shrinking middle class.
And even as many Americans are earning more than they used to, most physical goods are much cheaper than they were in the past — and for those goods that are not lower in price, average incomes generally rose faster than costs. There are important exceptions to this rule, such as medical care, child care and college (which have gotten more expensive). The housing market, at present, is also quite tight (which is great for homeowners but terrible for first-time buyers). But it’s nonetheless the case that, all things considered, many Americans are enjoying more prosperity than ever. Symbolic capitalists may be among the primary “winners” in these shifts, but they’re far from the exclusive beneficiaries.
In fact, zooming out to the macro level, global inequality is at the lowest level in 150 years. And within the United States, socioeconomic inequality seems like it may be going down, too — although the U.S. trend seems to be driven more by declines in higher income brackets rather
than gains among lower and middle income earners (“leveling down” is not the ideal path to equality, but it’s perhaps the most frequent manner that inequalities get reduced in practice).
All to say, there are some very real problems in the symbolic economy. However, there is also much to celebrate. Something similar holds in the realm of ideas.
MANY VIEWS ASSOCIATED with “wokeness” seem to significantly diminish adherents’ psychological well-being — pushing them toward higher levels of anxiety, depression and cynicism than they might otherwise feel. However, this doesn’t mean said views are wrong. The truth is often unpleasant. Engaging in moral action often has costs. We can’t infer much about the “correctness” of views from the impacts they exert on believers.
THE “GOOD OLD DAYS” WERE LESS MERITOCRATIC, LESS COMPETITIVE, LESS OPEN AND TRANSPARENT AND LESS PRODUCTIVE.
And despite these risks, people aren’t stupid or crazy to find “woke” ideas compelling. They became popular for a reason. In part, my book demonstrates some ideas caught on because they were useful in elite power struggles. But most also helped expose and address significant shortcomings in how others were seeking to understand and mitigate social problems at the time. It was precisely because they were analytically powerful and morally compelling that many sought to mobilize them in other arenas.
Theories are, however, fundamentally about ignoring certain data to see other things more clearly. Consequently, any
theoretical approach that elucidates some important aspect of society will generally obscure other phenomena. It will handle some things well and explain other things poorly. Moreover, all theories are products of particular times and places, responding to particular needs and circumstances — and any theoretical approach may need to be refined and updated, or even eventually cast aside, as the “problem space” evolves. This is all to say, even powerful theories have their limits. A recognition of these limits does not diminish their power. On the contrary, it can help us deploy these ideas in cases where they are most effective and avoid applying them to cases where they are not particularly useful.
Many views associated with “wokeness” seem to be straightforwardly correct, even if they are often taken to excess. For instance, a key insight of the “discursive turn” in social research is that how concepts are defined, and by whom, reveals a lot about power relations within a society or culture. These definitions are not merely reflections of social dynamics. At scale and over time, they can impose their own independent sociopolitical influence. They can help legitimize or delegitimize individuals, groups and their actions; they can render some things more easily comprehensible and others less so; they can push certain things outside the realm of polite discussion and introduce new elements into the “language game.” This is a genuine contribution to understanding the world.
That said, today many symbolic capitalists seem to attribute too much power to symbols, rhetoric and representation. Many assert, in the absence of robust empirical evidence, that small slights can cause enormous harm. Under the auspices of preventing these harms, they argue it is legitimate, even necessary, to aggressively police other people’s words, tone, body language and so forth. People from nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds are among the most likely to find themselves silenced and sanctioned
JOURNALISTS TEND TO HAIL FROM (AND LIVE IN) RELATIVELY AFFLUENT URBAN AND SUBURBAN AREAS. THEY HAVE SOMETHING APPROACHING AN IDEOLOGICAL MONOCULTURE — AND THEIR VALUES ARE SIGNIFICANTLY OUT OF STEP WITH THOSE OF MOST OTHER AMERICANS.
in these campaigns, both because they are less likely to possess the cultural capital to say the “correct” things in the “correct” ways at the “correct” time and because their deviance is perceived as especially threatening (because their heterodoxy undermines claims made by dominant elites ostensibly on behalf of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups).
Overstating the power of language likewise leads symbolic capitalists to conclude that their symbolic gestures toward antiracism, feminism and so forth mark significant contributions to addressing social problems when, in fact, they change virtually nothing about the allocation of wealth or power in society, and there is not really a plausible account for how they could. Campaigns to sterilize language, for instance, will never lift anyone out of poverty. Referring to homeless people as “unsheltered individuals,” or prisoners as “justice-involved persons,” or poor people as “individuals of limited means,” and so on are discursive maneuvers that often obscure the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized despite shifting discourse.
In fact, the Americans who are most preoccupied with linguistic hygiene actively avoid personally interacting with
the poor, convicted criminals, drug addicts and others through strategies ranging from personal network choices to where they choose to live (and send their kids to school); their reduced use of public transportation; the zoning restrictions they typically support; their heightened use of police, personal security and surveillance services against folks who violate their aesthetic sensibilities or behavioral preferences; and beyond. More broadly, gentrifying the discourse about the “wretched of the earth” doesn’t make their problems go away. If anything, it renders elites more complacent when we talk about the plight of “those people.” On this, the empirical research is quite clear: Euphemisms render people more comfortable with immoral behaviors and unjust states of affairs. This is one of the main reasons we rely on euphemisms at all.
Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of symbolic capitalists’ approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences — for better and for worse.
ONE THING I came to realize in researching and writing my first book — an insight that
will form the basis of my next project — is that the primary divide in the U.S. today is between symbolic capitalists and those who feel alienated from our social order. The rise of Trump, the “crisis of expertise,” contemporary tensions around “identity” issues — these are all fronts in the same basic socioeconomic and cultural conflict.
Within the political sphere, the “diploma divide,” the “gender divide,” and the “urban/rural divide” are likewise proxies for the same core struggle, being waged between mainstream symbolic capitalists and people who feel sociologically distant from folks like “us.”
“We Have Never Been Woke,” for its part, is not a story about “good guys” and “bad guys.” It is not intended to promote some kind of clear social or political program. It does not conclude with a set of action steps or policy proposals. Rather than providing people with clean answers, its goal is to complicate readers’ picture of the social world and unsettle things that are taken for granted. What to do about the problems and dynamics the book highlights … that is something we’re going to have to figure out together.
AT STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY. THIS ESSAY IS ADAPTED FROM HIS BOOK, “WE HAVE NEVER BEEN WOKE,” PUBLISHED THIS MONTH BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
BRONZED
SOME STATUES MAY BE COMING DOWN, BUT THE ART FORM IS ON THE RISE
BY BILL GIFFORD
Matt Glenn’s sculpture studio is a lively place, jammed with works in progress. In one corner, a life-size clay figure of Johnny Cash, guitar over his shoulder, is serenading statues of Jackie Robinson, Elon Musk and Mr. Toad from “The Wind in the Willows.” A Vietnam War soldier stands guard over them all. It’s like the most interesting social event you’ve never been to, crowded into an unassuming building that once housed his father’s auto body shop. A genial older man in bronze sits on a park bench, smiling and taking it all in.
“His wife wanted to still be able to sit with him,” explains Glenn, a tall 53-year-old with a quarterback’s build and dark hair down past his ears. Glenn is a sculptor-for-hire, a 19th-century trade that is enjoying a 21st-century revival. Every figure in his crowded, rather messy studio in Provo, Utah, tells a story. Johnny Cash was commissioned for a music museum in Nashville, but when the pandemic hit, the order was paused. So were several others.
A few months later, protesters began targeting statues around the world, vandalizing them with graffiti and demanding that certain monuments be torn down outright. The casualties included not only Confederate leaders from the Civil War, but historical
figures ranging from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln. Not even vaunted figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses S. Grant were immune from protesters’ wrath.
Maybe the age of statues was finally coming to an end, Glenn thought. He wondered if it was time to close up shop, abandoning his lifelong dream of making a living as a
THERE SEEMS TO BE A CONSENSUS THAT BY MEMORIALIZING A PERSON IN BRONZE, WE ELEVATE THEM AND INTEGRATE THEIR LIVES INTO OUR COLLECTIVE MEMORY. BUT WHO SHOULD WE REMEMBER IN THIS WAY?
sculptor. In fact, the opposite happened. New orders began pouring in; suddenly, it seemed like everyone wanted a statue. “I think those old sculptures have sat in place for decades without people noticing them — it was just a man on a horse, not someone who’s a racist,” Glenn says. “But then it made people think, why not memorialize
some other people who’ve done great things? They don’t even have to be famous.”
Glenn’s company, Big Statues, has never been busier. The air in his shop smells sharply of solvents and plaster dust, and one must tread carefully or risk overturning one of many mysterious tubs of colored goo. When I visit, he’s juggling some 20-odd different projects at various stages of completion. It is an eclectic mix, ranging from a pair of Tuskegee Airmen to George W. Bush to Emmett Till to Chief Little Turtle, a Miami tribal leader who defeated a force of 1,400 federal troops in what is now Ohio. Coming soon: a figure of Charles C. Rich, an early apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and another of Rosie the Riveter.
The phenomenon of statues coming down is a culture-wide movement about which much has been written. But less attention has been paid in recent years to the statues that are going up — from small-town parks to the highest reaches of the art world.
“THE MONUMENT IS alive and well, and it is a global phenomenon,” says the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley. Best known as a painter who recreates classical styles and
STATUES ARE STILL BUILT THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, WITH MOLTEN BRONZE POURED INTO MOLDS. LATER, THE BRONZE IS TREATED TO ACHIEVE A FAMILIAR PATINA.
MATT GLENN’S STATUE OF ROSIE THE RIVETER STARTED AS A DIGITAL IMAGE AND A 3D-PRINTED MODEL. HERE IT IS WELDED TOGETHER AT ADONIS BRONZE IN ALPINE, UTAH.
poses, Wiley has recently begun creating monumental bronze sculptures that depict ordinary people in heroic poses. His figures have been exhibited everywhere from the Venice Biennale in Italy to downtown Crenshaw, in Los Angeles.
Wiley’s interest in bronze sculpture was sparked in 2016 when he visited Richmond, Virginia, and saw the enormous statues of horse-mounted Confederate generals that still lined Monument Avenue. He’d grown up in South Central Los Angeles, which lacks that kind of post-Civil War street furniture, and the unfamiliar figures triggered a visceral reaction. Representing men who had fought to prolong slavery, they reminded him of the statues he’d seen on a childhood trip to the Soviet Union in 1989, when he was 12 years old, on a youth exchange program. Similarly, he says, they felt like “symbol(s) of dominance and terror.”
He responded by sculpting “Rumors of War,” a towering equestrian statue with a Black man in the saddle, wearing Nikes and sporting stylish dreads. After its 2019 debut in Times Square, that piece was moved to Richmond for permanent installation at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, not far from where the generals stood. At the unveiling, Wiley noticed how elderly Black men and women reacted. “They had tears in their eyes,” he remembers. “It wasn’t an intellectual exercise, it wasn’t a political exercise, it was literally the addressing and redressing of a past and present that was designed to menace, designed to rob them of human dignity, and to populate their psyche with a sense of brokenness.”
Richmond’s Confederate generals were eventually taken down, in 2020, one outcome of a broader national reckoning on race and racism in many areas of society. That was not Wiley’s preference. He sees intrinsic value in statues, in the stories they tell and the beauty they often bring into our public spaces, even when they represent a person or idea we may oppose. “I hate the idea of melting them down and forgetting where we come from,” he says. “They should be part of our legacy, part of
our archive, and our continued reserve of national memories that we can draw upon for inspiration.”
“I think that the best thing to do is to respond with more statues,” Wiley says. He believes today’s artists should be invited to create newer works that better reflect contemporary values — and the ideals of the people who will be viewing those works. With “Rumors of War,” Wiley started a series that will culminate with a figure of a Black woman astride a horse, riding off to battle, set to be unveiled on Los Angeles’ famous Crenshaw Boulevard this fall as part of “Destination Crenshaw,” described as the largest Black public art project in the United States.
ABOUT 15 YEARS ago, Glenn found himself at a crossroads. He had been working in real estate development, and had just finished a big project, a hotel in Nauvoo, Illinois. Now he was wondering what to do next. He had always been interested in making art. He
borrowed a sizable lump of clay from another sculptor, and one evening, he pulled it out of the cabinet and started playing around. By dawn, he had fashioned a bust of Porter Rockwell, bodyguard of early Latter-day Saint leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
“Where’d you get that?” his wife asked in the morning.
“I made it,” he said.
He had found a new career. That clay model was just a first step toward the bronze that held a magic allure for him. “When you first see a bronze sculpture, your first instinct is to reach out and touch it,” Glenn says. “It’s energizing. It’s grounding.” He hands me a bronze ingot, like a large, heavy coin. It’s solid, slightly rough and weighty; it feels electric in my hand.
It was a bold leap for Glenn to try and make a go at a craft whose heyday was a century or two in the rearview mirror. Could he carve a niche for himself in an artform once practiced by such renowned artists as
GLENN IS THE ARTIST IN THE STUDIO, BUT HE IS ALSO SUPPORTED BY A TEAM OF SPECIALISTS AT THE FOUNDRY.
Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi and Utah’s own Mahonri Young? Could he accomplish that in an age when all art — and especially public art, which is often the case for statuary — is often viewed with as much suspicion as it is respect? These were big questions for somebody else to answer. An artist makes art.
The process of creating a bronze sculpture is essentially the same as it has been for 3,000 years: The sculptor creates a clay model of the figure that is used to create a ceramic mold, into which liquid bronze is poured and then allowed to cool. Glenn loves the first stage, working by hand: “There’s something very therapeutic about it. I get into a rhythm, and if I don’t have any outside distractions like a clock or a phone I can go for hours, as long as I have a Dr. Pepper and an energy bar.” Unfortunately for him, the sculptor’s art has been transformed by technology.
I follow Glenn into an office, where his colleague Dana Hansen frowns into a computer monitor. On the screen is a man in a baseball cap — legendary catcher Johnny Bench. With a few clicks, he can change the shape of Bench’s face, the texture of his skin, the length of his nose or any other characteristic, using a 3D modeling program called ZBrush. “We’re able to go into the software and just like with clay, quite literally start sculpting him,” Hansen says, clicking back and forth between his model and old photographs of Bench, who played for the Cincinnati Reds from 1967 to 1983. “The nice thing is there’s an ‘undo’ button.”
Once the image is finished, the file is sent to a 3D printer to create a miniature model from plant-based resin. If that looks good, a life-size model is fashioned from Styrofoam blocks, using a CNC machine. The foam model is then covered in clay, and Glenn puts on the finishing touches — adding texture, adjusting facial expressions, making the subject look more lifelike. Only then does it go off to the foundry to be cast. “It makes everything a lot quicker,” Glenn says. But there is still a role for the artist’s hand. “I’ll always go back and put my hands
on everything. If you let the software do it all, you end up with something that looks like a mannequin.”
SCULPTING IS A complex art with high consequence. If Glenn makes a mistake, that error could quite literally end up being cast in bronze. He studies diligently, going to seminars on technique and anatomy; he is obsessive about measurement and proportion. One wall is lined with a dozen spooky-looking plaster face masks. I have no idea who they are until Glenn points out that they represent David Letterman, Charlton Heston, Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Kiefer Sutherland, Halle Berry and other famous actors. Just the faces, no hair. He uses them for reference — “when I’m doing a
MAYBE THE AGE OF STATUES WAS FINALLY COMING TO AN END. HE WONDERED IF IT WAS TIME TO CLOSE UP SHOP, ABANDONING HIS LIFELONG DREAM OF MAKING A LIVING AS A SCULPTOR. BUT THE OPPOSITE HAPPENED.
sculpture of someone who’s in the vicinity of that face, to get the zygomatic arch or the occipital arch right, the lips right.”
Two years ago, the hard work paid off when he landed a dream assignment: to create statues of Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb and former President George W. Bush for the Little League stadium and hall of fame in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Bush was present at the unveiling, and Glenn was nervous; he sat next to the former president, who is himself an artist, at the Little League Classic game between the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles. Bush thanked him, he says, “for not making me look like Alfred E. Neuman,” referring to the longtime face of Mad Magazine.
Bush may strike some as a controversial figure, although the darker aspects of wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan that started during his tenure in the White House may have lost some of their bite in light of political developments in recent years. But that makes him an interesting case study. There seems to be a consensus that by memorializing a person in bronze, we elevate them in some fashion and integrate their lives into our collective memory. But who should we remember in this way? And how do we make sure that portrayal is honest and uplifting?
“We’re looking now at who should we commemorate, and how should we commemorate them,” says Alex von Tunzelmann, an independent historian and author of “Fallen Idols,” a history of statues that have been put up, and then taken down, at various times in history. It wasn’t that long ago that people were pulling down statues of Vladimir Lenin and Saddam Hussein. She is particularly intrigued by the new vogue for depicting ordinary people, or famous people brought down to the level of the spectator. “There’s all sorts of memorials going on that are brilliant.”
The latter happens to be Glenn’s forte. He’s even done a sculpture of a beloved neighborhood everyman in Manchester, New Hampshire. And he knows this medium has the power to illuminate the historical record, if not to right its wrongs. That’s why the Emmett Till project hit him differently. Photos of the slight, young teenager reminded Glenn of his own sons, one of whom was the same age at the time. “He was only 14 years old,” Glenn says.
When Till’s family took him to visit Mississippi from their home in Chicago in 1955, he was profoundly unprepared to navigate the South under Jim Crow. He was lynched after an interaction with a store cashier. His death provoked widespread outrage and helped to spark the Civil Rights Movement, inspiring Rosa Parks and contributing to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Back at the computer, Hansen makes a few clicks, and in an instant, we’re looking into the wide-eyed, half-smiling face of a young Emmett Till — soon to be immortalized in bronze.
THE KEEPER
AN ODE TO AN EVERYDAY SOCCER BALL
BY MATTHEW BROWN
Asoccer ball falls, slapping the concrete floor of the garage, and I forget what I was looking for among the mountain bikes, boogie boards, tool cabinets and stacks of cardboard boxes. Part of me wants to rake it back with the sole of my shoe and kick it up to my hands, like I taught my kids, but today I act my age and bend down. Gripping the seams, I study the polygonal panels, silver streaks and navy blue blobs that fade into specks against a white background. It feels light in my hands but heavy on my mind. I’m not sure where to put it now that so much has changed.
My youngest daughter just left for college, so this is the first season in three decades that I won’t be watching my kids play sports. It wasn’t always easy, but now I can’t imagine a life void of road trips to tournaments, carpools to practice and even gloomy drives home after a loss, when I would tease out hidden hurt and frustration. How does such a life hold its shape? I’m surprised this ball is still holding its last pump.
My mom said it gave her too much anxiety to watch me wrestle, even if I pinned my opponent the one time she did. But as a father, I embraced that stress. When my oldest son was on the mat, I’d catch myself shadowing his moves, twisting my torso like a life-size remote control. My leg wouldn’t stop twitching if I watched any game from the bleachers, so I’d pace the sidelines if I could. I still
get teased for my video fails that showed the empty half of a basketball court with a soundtrack of the action taking place off-camera.
Under a flickering fluorescent light, I turn the ball over in my hands and wonder where it belongs now. Scanning the garage, I spot another ball. Then another. Soon I count five, each perched on a box or stuffed in a mesh bag with other equipment. One is lime-green and flat, scuffed from all the hours getting kicked against a stone wall. The smallest one is pink, picked out by our youngest before she could know her parents were luring her into the beautiful game.
By the time she was old enough to compete, I had learned not to insert myself into the contest. I focused on her own determination, her ups and downs. Watching her play became a respite from my personal stresses, no matter the score, and nothing was more rewarding than hearing her say, “Thanks for coming, Dad.” I was pleased when she plucked her favorite — a red and black ball with a galactic design — from a repurposed flowerpot in the garage and took it with her. Turns out, she left me a perfect vacancy.
The pot looks at home here, among holiday decorations, ski boots, a baseball bat, boxes of documents and just enough space for a midsize SUV. For a minute, I did wonder if it was time to let some things go. But not today. Instead, I drop the ball there, right where it belongs.
THE SCENT OF GERANIUMS
BY JOEL LONG
I’ve plucked spent flowers from geraniums on the front stoop, knowing new ones come when withered are gone. I smell my hands, smell Mary’s geraniums, greenhouse where we went to buy them, winter plants near the workbench, basement windows, frosted dusk, summer plants in beds beneath the twilight porch. To touch them brought the taste my hands hold now. Memory is the just pattern in the caterpillars’ back, blue-gray mantra stretched, cut slate fluid along the pulsing form of one, one hundred bodies carpeting the plum trunk. Everything moves in time, fragrant and warm. Inside the geranium, another set of flowers rises in green ether, a gentle fist we cannot see, prophecy recalled. This time, it will be vivid as every tooth in the hound, every pig’s snout or rasp, barbs sharp and varied as any wound the butcher’s daughter makes, jackhammer, wildfire, hail, her breath, blue eyes beneath the lenses in her glasses. Each cell remembers the shape it will become, that fanned geranium, damp cluster considering a sphere, scent, translucent. How can I describe them, what little I know without missing the clustered filaments, the grief, the colors the hummingbird knows, cinnamon, rust, joy, turquoise, bronze? The scent on my skin leads me to the mother of my mother, three diamonds lost, flower petal, so small, so red the hummingbird’s heart and wings have no measure for the bells whose sound wakes no one every thousand years.
JOEL LONG’S BOOK OF ESSAYS “WATERSHED” IS FORTHCOMING FROM GREEN WRITERS PRESS. HIS BOOK “WINGED INSECTS” WON THE WHITE PINE PRESS POETRY PRIZE.
THE FUTURIST
LESSONS FROM LIVING WITH THE LONG VIEW
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
Nobody knows for sure how human life will look 26 years from now, but Ana Carcani Rold has made it her life’s work to help people and institutions plan for whatever that may be. She’s a futurist and CEO of Diplomatic Courier, a magazine and media network for diplomats with its own think tank, called World in 2050. Even so, on a personal level — perhaps surprisingly — she remains deeply committed to the present, which is all that we can control.
Her calling was birthed in a hectic life that required a lot of looking ahead. She is also a board member of Smithsonian Science Education Center, co-founder of Learning Economy Foundation and a member of the National Press Club. She served on the Women’s Democracy Network advisory council and previously taught political science for 15 years at Northeastern University, with a master’s degree in international peace and conflict resolution at American University. She speaks five languages.
“There’s only so much time to do it all
well,” Rold says, so she went all in on being organized. The future is her business, but it’s also personal: She wants her kids to thrive in a world that makes that possible. As one enters high school and the other middle school, she knows that their future
FUTURISTS BUILD SCENARIOS SO THEY CAN BE BETTER PREPARED. THEY’RE STRATEGIC PLANNERS LAYING OUT VARIOUS VERSIONS OF WHAT COULD HAPPEN.
may not resemble what past generations have faced. Their careers may not yet even exist. “My daughter’s in the Class of 2028,” she says. “By 2030, 60 percent of the jobs we take for granted right now, the industries we know, won’t exist.”
WHAT IS A FUTURIST?
It’s a misunderstood craft. People think being in the strategic forecasting business means you’re foretelling the future, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Futurists build scenarios so they can be better prepared. They’re strategic planners laying out various versions of what could happen. They look at trends, opinion polling, all sorts of different things. They also are students of history, because sometimes it’s easy to predict what could happen if you find out how people behaved in the past. But the No. 1 skill is being a good planner.
WHAT ARE MEGATRENDS?
GIVE US AN EXAMPLE.
Megatrends are multidecades long. By connecting these, working on them in parallel, we have a better chance of helping the future to arrive well. One example is exponential technology radically reshaping the world. The big public discussion right now is about generative artificial intelligence,
ANA CARCANI ROLD
but we’ve been playing with small AI for a long time. We don’t realize how much that dictates how we love, care, hate and buy things. The underlying modern economy has been shaped by algorithms for 20 to 30 years. Another is energy transition and disruption due to climate change. It’s tied to conflict in certain parts of the world and you’re going to see massive demographic shifts that will affect geopolitical issues.
And this is the one you hear about the most on the news: societal and governance institutions under pressure. Polling data says we don’t trust institutions. We don’t trust people of authority as much as we used to, we don’t trust the media, we don’t trust our politicians, but we do trust at a community level. We distrust international institutions that used to be so well regarded, like the United Nations, but we trust our mom-and-pop shops or a local newspaper because we know those people and they’re part of our community.
HOW DO WE PREPARE OUR KIDS FOR THAT?
That’s another example, grappling with the next rebalancing of education in the aftermath of the pandemic, the economic crisis and all the geopolitical uncertainty. At the same time, there’s a growing movement to radically transform how we do it. Education systems are no longer able to shape students to be ready for the future. And education is no longer linear. You don’t go in, do your four years, get a degree and spend 30 years in a career. Now people change paths four or five times in their lifetime. It’s more like a zigzag. You go in and out of institutions. You acquire skills in other places, so you’re learning everywhere and it happens all the time.
WHICH MEGATREND IS THE MOST IMPACTFUL?
This is one that I’m passionate about — individual and societal well-being. Can we measure well-being in a way that tells us that society is thriving? If your people are happy, does that matter the same way
that GDP matters? We can’t compartmentalize health anymore. We have hard data that shows that when people are flourishing, they have mental, physical, spiritual, intellectual and social health. We are made of all of these neurons, and for humans to flourish, all of them have to work together.
IT SEEMS LIKE ALL THESE ADVANCES WOULD MAKE US HEALTHIER.
We talk about things that were unheard of before, that the people who will live to 1,000 have already been born. We’ve advanced in abundance, in ways that used to be thought of as science fiction. But it’s a paradox. Our children are suffering more and more from anxiety. Technology kind of owns them; it’s not a tool set for them. It’s
demand employers care about them too. Now you see more employers covering mental health. They’re recognizing that it is something they need to address. Data shows that if a person is suffering in any of these areas — add financial health as well — that if they’re worried about where their next meal is coming from, or if they don’t have a good job or don’t have shelter, they are not performing at work, and the company is suffering. It’s to the organization’s benefit to invest in employee well-being because it’s good for their bottom line.
DO EDUCATION AND WELL-BEING OVERLAP?
WHAT YOU NEED ARE SKILLS THAT TECHNOLOGIES DON’T HAVE, WHAT WE USED TO CALL SOFT SKILLS.
robbing them of a real childhood or a way to advance. So there are true issues, anxieties we all feel and we’re trying to figure out what that means. So what, that AI is going to be able to write for me? So what, that AI is going to predict that I care more about this type of food versus another? It doesn’t do anything to advance human flourishing if it only replaces things we should be doing ourselves.
THAT SPEAKS TO INDIVIDUALS. HOW DOES THIS AFFECT ORGANIZATIONS?
It’s increasingly difficult to retain top talent if you’re a company that doesn’t care about employees as individuals. You see the younger generation who are unabashed to talk about mental health, trauma and
Lots. As we go through this rapid technological advancement, we’re seeing that you need people with different skills. It used to be that you needed to be able to code, but now AI will do the coding for you. What you need is skills that technologies don’t have, what we used to call soft skills. Being a human being that’s flourishing, that has agility and resilience and tenacity and grit, all of those things that were nice to have now are critical skills. You need people who can do teamwork, who are emotionally intelligent, who are agile. When things are highly unpredictable, you need people who are grounded and have emotional stability, the skills to navigate problems with grit and help others to do the same.
WHAT’S YOUR LAST WORD?
I think about this a lot: Would I do things differently if I were to go back into my 20s? It’s a hard way of thinking about things as a futurist, because it brings regret. I would have done this a bit different, and then that mistake wouldn’t have happened, and things would have been easier. But that’s a useless exercise. It’s useless to think about the years before, and it’s useless to think about the years after. It’s very important that you think about the near term, right now, the present, because those are the years you have the most agency to change things. This is the decade where you can actually do something.
OUTSIDE GREEN RIVER, UTAH
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAX LOWE
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