Author Archives: jbfreedman

Reflecting on the 2024 Elections: The Failures of Cosmopolitanism

It is personally and professionally obligatory to reflect on the elections. Nobody needs my opinion, but it is my responsibility to give it nonetheless.

Let me preface my remarks by emphasizing that I do not think we need to draw any single overarching conclusion from the Democrats’ failures. In my mind, election results are a combination of contingent factors specific to this election and larger structural factors. To the extent that the election results hinged on the former — e.g. the unpopularity of Biden and/or Harris, post-pandemic inflation — there are not too many lessons to draw for the future. With a different candidate and a different environment, the Democrats may be able to win elections without doing too much differently. The oscillations of American politics suggest that the Democrats are likely to do better next election purely because voters dislike single-party rule and will vote against whoever is in charge.

On the other hand, insofar the Democrats’ issues are structural, they will continue to struggle. The promised Democratic coalition that relied on ever-expanding numbers of youth and minorities seems to be faltering. If the Democrats cannot find ways to expand their voter base, win back disillusioned former partisans, and attract new voters, they are likely to be stuck as the minority party for the foreseeable future.

Another way to frame this is about the range of possible Democratic coalitions. Since 1988, the widest margin of any winning presidential candidate has been 53% to 46%. When Barack Obama trounced John McCain in 2008, he won only 53% of the vote. In the ensuing elections, the largest margin was 51% to 47%. In other words, it seems likely that elections will be competitive and margins close no matter what happens. Yet those marginal gaps matter: if Democrats’ maximal victory is around 53% of the electorate, they have the possibility of consistently winning the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and doing so with large majorities. If their best efforts cannot exceed 50-51%, they may end up barely capturing the Senate or House in good years and being stuck deep in the minority in bad ones.

Was This Just an Enthusi-Chasm for Harris? (Yes, I Invented that Word)

Some commentators have suggested that the issue was primarily one of low Democratic turnout: As of this writing, Trump has exceeded his 2020 vote total by 2 million votes, while Harris lags nearly 8 million votes behind Biden — although much of that drop occurred in noncompetitive states. Anecdotally, this conclusion seems accurate: in Pennsylvania, where I vote, the lack of enthusiasm for Harris-Walz in Philadelphia was palpable in the weeks leading up to the election. (I texted numerous friends in the lead-up to the election with pessimistic messages about how things were looking grim because there seemed to be so little enthusiasm in Philadelphia for the Democrats. I have screenshots of the texts, because you always want to print your receipts.)

In reality, though, the lack of enthusiasm is only part of the story. I ran the numbers for the state of Pennsylvania. Harris earned more than 50,000 fewer votes in Pennsylvania than Biden did in 2020. The majority of this was in Philadelphia, where Harris ran short of Biden by more than 34,000 votes. Yet, at the same time, Trump improved on his 2020 totals in all but 2 of the state’s 67 counties. In total, Trump had more than 155,000 more votes in 2024 than in 2020. Whether this increase in votes is from new voters or voters who switched from Biden to Trump is unclear: total registration in Pennsylvania increased by 177,000 voters from 2020 to 2024, according to official state data. In other words, either Trump captured nearly the entirety of newly registered voters, or Pennsylvania saw significant vote shifting from Biden voters to Trump voters.

While some of this may be attributed to particular dissatisfaction with the incumbent administration, the across-the-board losses suggest that some of these issues are structural. If the Democrats want to be viable as a majority party, they are going to have to address some of these deep structural issues that have made them unpopular. While I do not have any clear answers, I want to reflect on some of my own experiences this election and the bigger questions they raise about American party politics.

On Culture and Cosmopolitanism

My first and most general reflection is on the cultural dimensions of contemporary American politics, which struck me viscerally throughout this election. I was appointed a Judge of Elections for the City of Philadelphia, which means I was in charge of one of the polling divisions in the city. It sounds more impressive than it actually is; nonetheless, you can refer to me as the Honorable Judge Doctor from here on out. Thank you.

I did not realize I was going to be sent to the most Republican area of Philadelphia to work as a Judge of Elections. The area of Port Richmond is a Polish neighborhood, with successive generations of Polish and other Eastern European immigrant families. It is heavily white and working class; the particular division that I oversaw is one of the most consistently Republican sections of the neighborhood and, therefore, the entire city.

Our polling place hosted three divisions, and the overall cohort of poll workers were predominantly middle-aged or elderly local residents from the neighborhood. The core of my team was an American high school student who had grown up mostly in China and a local EMT and community college student. They turned out to be extremely competent and made my job infinitely easier. Seriously, they rocked. They also enjoyed making fun of me for being overly neurotic. I have hope for the future.

In the hour preceding the opening of the polls, I scrambled to figure out how to get everything in order. (A combination of limited training and an obsessive fear of making mistakes slowed the process for me.) By the time the polls opened at 7am, there was a line snaking out the door and well into the street. Turnout was extremely high in the morning: the first hour was packed with no letup in the stream of voters coming to our division. I handled all scenarios that fell outside of the normal scope of operations, from provisional ballots to stuck ballots to voters who could not remember whether they were registered to vote. The high turnout in a Republican area was a fairly ominous sign for the Democrats.

For the rest of the day, there was a slow but steady trickle of voters until about 6:30pm. The voters coming early and around 5pm tended to be younger and more pre-professional; the rest were what I might refer to as “stereotypical” Trump voters. I could tell they were likely Trump voters because they were very explicitly the type of white, blue-collar, local Philly-accented (or Polish-accented) voters who dress and talk similar to those who are often seen at Trump rallies; or, more obviously, they were sometimes wearing MAGA gear. Many of the younger folks gave off strong Jersey Shore vibes. I could also tell who someone was likely to vote for based on which set of flyers they took from the canvassers outside. Far more voters entered holding Trump-Vance bumper stickers and the approved Republican list of candidates than the equivalent list of Democrats. The final tally for our polling place reflected this divide. The vote totals were at least two-thirds in favor of Trump and Republican candidates down the ballot.

A neighborhood polling place is not just a polling place; it is also a place where people see their friends. Many of the workers had known each other, and some of the voters, for decades. I was the clear outsider. The other workers did not judge me as an outsider right away. However, when they found out I lived in Center City—the wealthy, liberal part of the city—their eyes narrowed. Had I come to make trouble? To rig the election for the Democrats? One of the poll workers I was chatting with told me that it would take a couple of decades before I would come to be trusted by locals. But not before that—and certainly not on my first visit from Center City.

The lack of trust in me extended to their thoughts on the voting process itself. Some voters expressed a lack of confidence in the process, berating my team of poll workers for not checking everyone’s ID (we have to check signatures for all voters, and ID only for newly registered voters; we followed the prescribed process exactly.) Even some poll workers made comments suggesting that they felt parts of the process might be rigged in various subtle ways. They were doubtful about the provisional ballot process, claiming things like “that’s how they scam you.” When voters were told they had been inactivated and needed to fill out a form to be reactivated — usually following an address change — their immediate reaction was often to question whether the voting was rigged, a sentiment that lessened once it became clear that we were just following the rules and they could still vote.

The neighborhood was gentrifying, as evidenced by new pre-fab condos around the corner from our polling station (dismissed as overpriced crap by the other poll workers, who, frankly, were probably correct), but it was still a world away from Center City. The other poll workers told me how expensive Philadelphia had become, how they were struggling with health problems, and how it was on the verge of being too unaffordable for them—which was news to me, having previously lived in three nearby cities that were more expensive by multiples (median rent in Boston is at least double, if not higher, let alone New York).

This type of neighborhood is not new to me; like many Americans, I have family that fall into what might be called “white working class” America. We get along fine, but we clearly have different tastes in what we eat, the entertainment we consume, and the relative value we put on types of work and education. Even if my family is anti-Trump (for quirky contingent reasons, including the fact that they worked in Trump’s casinos for much of their careers), the driveways of their neighbors are festooned from top to bottom with Trump flags, Make America Great Again flags, and other anti-Democrat symbols. The neighborhood of my polling station in Philly felt similar, from culture to food to how people interpret the world.

It is clearly tangible that I—a hyper-educated, globe-trotting, tea-drinking, multilingual American—am an outsider in these places. In the wake of the election, I have been reflecting on the appropriate language to use to describe these divides. I think the appropriate word is cosmopolitanism.

What the Democrats represent—and what I represent, whether intentionally or not—is cosmopolitanism. I do not feel a particular attachment to feelings of home; in fact, I have zero attachment to my actual childhood home. (Sorry, New Jersey.) My family doesn’t live there anymore, nor do any of my friends’ families. I have not lived in the same city for more than five years since high school—and I will probably move again in the next year or two. My community is scattered all over the United States and the world. I communicate as often with people on the other side of the globe than I do with my neighbors—in fact, I don’t know any of my neighbors, and they don’t know me. I am American, and I have a weirdly specific attachment to America in moments of international soccer competition, but besides that I have very little connection to a deeply rooted sense of place.

I use the word cosmopolitan in a morally neutral sense: I do not want to imply that being cosmopolitan is better or worse. But it is different, and this difference matters.

Framing the cultural divides in America in terms of cosmopolitanism clarifies their roots and the political challenges they bring. Cosmopolitanism means being deeply connected to the wider world, with boundaries of concern and care that stretch far beyond the limits of local streets or neighborhoods hemmed in by parks or railroad tracks. It means a world of unfamiliarity and newness. It means novel challenges and, in most cases, discomfort: worlds that look, feel, and operate very differently than what we are used to, whatever that may be. A cosmopolitan outlook reflects decades of global interconnection, for better and for worse: cosmopolitanism can go too far—such as in the neoliberal consensus of globalization that creates a class of globe-trotting elites—but it can also be something that opens up new perspectives on the world and introduces us to new experiences. It is also somewhat inevitable at this point: decades of interconnection have made the world more globalized, and only some parts of this integration can be undone.

I learned long ago from Mike Lind that cosmopolitanism might not be all it is cracked up to be. I find his critiques quite compelling. I am skeptical of my own rootlessness and worry about the lack of stability that cosmopolitanism can bring. I accept the importance of nationalism in contemporary politics; I agree with George Orwell that patriotic sentiment and love of one’s nation can be a sign of moral decency, not moral decay. I embrace the critique of cosmopolitanism and think it is accurate in terms of electoral politics.

But my personal feelings are irrelevant in the case of national politics. The last few elections have proven that majorities of Americans do not seem to like cosmopolitanism. When people look skeptically on an overeducated elite from Center City traipsing into their neighborhood, it’s not personal—it’s a fear that I have come bearing a new set of values, tastes, and priorities that will exclude them. My vision of the world is unsettling, unrooted, and unfamiliar. Even if it is not intentional, my version of the world is foreign to them.

The problem for Democrats is that they exude this cosmopolitanism—and many leading Democrats insist that cosmopolitanism is morally superior and refuse to brook any suggestion to the contrary. The problem for me personally is that I happen to like many elements of cosmopolitanism. It is one thing to say I am willing to reject cosmopolitanism; it is another to actually reject it. I like living in Center City! I would much rather eat pho ga than Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. I feel more comfortable traveling around Asia than I do around the Midwest. Even Democrats who burnish sparkling non-cosmopolitan credentials can no longer outrun the aura of Democrats as cosmopolitans, as John Tester and Sherrod Brown found out this election.

My takeaway, both personal and political, is that the Democrats’ problem with cosmopolitanism is far deeper and more intractable than it seems. Opposition to cosmopolitanism is as cultural as it is policy-oriented. Democrats are on the minority side of the culture question—not just on hot-button issues like transgender athletes, but on the broader set of cultural tastes and values. It is surely true that the failure to take a more forceful position on immigration hurt the Democrats in this election, but I am not convinced that taking a harder line on immigration would have saved the Democrats. (Although at least pretending it is important might go some way to getting people to feel like they share some values, which is the necessary first step.) At the national level, people are not voting on specific policy proposals; they are voting on general inclinations about who shares their cultural tastes and political values.

This is the paradox: Democrats cannot win a greater share of voters without giving up on some parts of cosmopolitanism, but it is really hard to relinquish this because many of these parts are deeply attractive to the growing core of the Democratic base. If Democrats are going to win, they will have to combine the parts of cosmopolitanism that people like me like with a sense of rootedness, belonging, and trust. Otherwise they will continue to lose, or at least hit a low ceiling of potential voters, no matter what their actual policies are.

A younger version of me would say that the Democrats failed by being too elitist and failing to address the genuine needs of the working class. To some extent this is true. But just adopting more redistributive policies is unlikely to do very much. Many of the facets of the cosmopolitan world are good and valuable. But they need to be integrated with something that gives people a sense of not being adrift in the world. Until that happens, the travelers from Center City will always be viewed with suspicion. And rightly so.

On the Failure of Theories of Minority Rule

Despite being wildly unpopular, Trump is on track to not only win the electoral college; he is also slated to win the popular vote, with room to spare. While I am obviously displeased that Trump won, I hope this can once and for all put to bed the unhelpful theory that what ails Democrats is unfair institutions, not a lack of popularity.

Since 2016, many public intellectuals have latched onto the theory that the problem is institutions, not popularity. What prevents Democrats from winning elections, the argument goes, is the minoritarian bias in our political institutions. Republicans are empowered despite being less popular than Democrats, and the reason for their power is the structural bias built into American political institutions. The main evidence for this view is that majorities consistently support many Democratic policy positions, such as gun control, and Republican candidates only won the popular vote in a presidential election once between 1992 and 2020 (although they won the electoral college three times).

One of the most prominent arguments in favor of this view is Steve Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt’s follow-up to How Democracies Die entitled Tyranny of the Minority. (I think Steve and Dan are excellent scholars and was a TA for Steve’s course on comparative politics, but I disagree with their conclusion on this issue.) The crux of their argument is that American institutions uniquely (and dangerously) empower minority parties that allow them to implement a reactionary agenda despite lacking majority popularity. In this case, the minority party is the Republican party, which stands athwart progress. American political institutions empower conservative white minorities, who use this power to ensure they maintain power over emerging racial minorities.

This theory is appealing because it allows liberals—myself included—to think that it’s not our fault for being powerless. In this story, most people in America agree with us; the problem is that the systems are designed to prevent us from making the change we want to see. It also fits nicely with the zeitgeist: after 2020 and the national reckoning over police violence toward minority communities, arguments that centered on race as the key factor across American institutions fit the prevailing intellectual narratives.

The theory of minority rule assumes that there is this thing called “multiracial democracy” that everyone likes except a small sliver of authoritarian, racist Republicans. While large majorities of Americans support multiracial democracy (which should win because minorities are growing as a share of the population), the Republican Party uses the power of minority institutions to thwart its realization.

In a speech outlining the book in 2022, Levitsky explained the racial resentment at the core of contemporary American politics:

The Republicans are a party of White Christians, but White Christians are a fairly rapidly declining share of the electorate. Just thirty years ago, 1992, White Christians were more than 70 percent of the American electorate. They were an overwhelming majority. Today, they’re about 50 percent and declining. And that decline has triggered a fear among some Republicans that they’re about to lose electoral viability.

The idea of declining white majorities has been central to Democrats’ self-conception since the Obama years. At that time, writers argued that Obama had assembled a “coalition of the ascendant” that included women, minorities, and young people. These groups were all growing in society, while the core of the Republican party—the elderly, white men, and religious Christians—were declining. As a result, the Republican party was going to be condemned to irrelevance, while the Democrats would slowly solidify their power.

To avert their impending irrelevance — and despite the multiracial Democratic majority — Republicans have used core American political institutions to stymie Democratic policy priorities and try to entrench the politics of racial resentment.

A pretty solid majority of Americans favors the key components of multiracial democracy. Most Americans embrace immigration. They embrace diversity. They embrace the cause of Black Lives Matter. They support legislation to expand voting rights. And they voted for Democrats in seven of the last eight presidential elections. And yet, America’s new multiracial democratic majority has hurled itself against some of the world’s most powerful counter-majoritarian institutions.

While this is an appealing theory, the main issue is that the facts do not support it. As this election showed, in many cases, most people do not agree with the multiracial Democratic majority! Not only did more people vote for Trump than for Harris, the biggest shifts toward Trump were from racial minorities themselves. In Texas, Trump got 55% of the Latino vote. Many of the most vociferous Trump supporters are ethnic minorities, as seen in large populations of Arab Muslims, Chinese, and Latinos who chafe at Democrats’ cultural liberalism and were ardent Trump supporters.

Moreover, the apparent dominance of Democratic positions has also dissipated. While it is true that most Americans supported Black Lives Matter after 2020, as of 2024, this is no longer true. Most Americans do support immigration broadly in the abstract; yet, in July of this year, Gallup found that a majority of Americans support curbing current immigration levels. Feeling that the Democrats have gone too far, the apparently unbreakable popular majority of Democratic policy positions also disappeared.

The other argument of counter-majoritarianism is that the rural bias of American institutions, especially in the Senate, has entrenched Republican minority power. This is broadly true: as Democrats have cratered in rural areas, small, rural states that are entitled to two Republican senators get outsized representation in the Senate. The problem, however, is that Republicans are not just winning small, rural Western states; they are also winning large, populous states around the country. The second-most populous state (Texas) and third-most (Florida) are now solidly Republican. Of the 10 states with the largest populations, Trump won 7 of them, and their Senate representation is split fairly evenly. Many of the smallest states (Vermont, Delaware) are solidly Democratic. While there are structural biases against Democrats because of their geographic dispersion — for example, it is almost impossible to draw balanced and contiguous House districts in a state like Wisconsin because Democrats are so concentrated in small areas — the bias is far smaller and less determinative than such arguments suggestion.

Rather than multiracial democracy, a more accurate term would be multicultural democracy. But these cultures do not cleanly divide along racial lines. Many minority groups are culturally conservative and have more in common with Republicans than Democrats, while others have more in common with white working-class Americans than other minority groups. Recent immigrants are often the most critical of lax immigration policies because they are in direct labor competition with new arrivals. As we saw in this election, Black and Latino voters voted in record numbers and percentages for Republicans. So are Muslims. And if the Democrats took a more hardline stance against Israel’s war in Gaza, Jews might, too. It is not an issue centered on minority identity, but rather cultural familiarity and economic status—regardless of which identity group one might find themselves in.

The cultural cleavages center on cosmopolitanism and localism. Theories of minority rule assume that majorities of Americans support cosmopolitanism and are prevented from succeeding due to counter-majoritarian institutions. A much more logical explanation is that cosmopolitanism is simply less popular than we want to believe. And even if it might be popular on an issue-by-issue basis, it is not popular as an overall worldview, which is what drives national elections. When it comes to actual policy decisions that aren’t tax cuts, Republicans will almost certainly struggle: nobody wants to reduce healthcare or social security or drink polluted water. But as long as they continue to embody anti-cosmopolitan values, they will be powerful at the national level.

What is at stake is not multiracial democracy but multicultural democracy—especially the cultures of cosmopolitanism and localism. How to make those two cultures coexist is the key to a viable American future. As of now, the Democrats have not come up with any convincing answer.

Ancient Ruins and a Week-and-a-Half-Long Food Coma: Reflections on Italy

I went to Italy for vacation, which is a thing that people apparently do to “relax” and “enjoy themselves.” I am unfamiliar with these concepts, but I figured I would give it a try, as per this video.

While I have plenty of thoughts on pasta in Italy (it’s amazing), sandwiches in Italy (they’re amazing), and pizza in Italy (it’s fine), what was most notable about Italy — and Rome especially — was the overlapping histories from ancient to the present. The Colosseum makes a great photo-op, the various Fora are impressive, and my side trip to Ostia Antica, the ancient port city accessible by train, was fascinating; it was, however, a poor choice to explore all of these ruins—which almost by definition have no roofs—in the blistering 100 degree heat of the Italian summer. I guess this is why they wore togas. (I did not pack a toga.)

But it is not just that Rome has this incredible history; rather, you can feel in the streets how each successive source of political and cultural power wanted to lay claim to the inheritance of this tradition. The act of turning the Pantheon — literally, “of all the gods” — into a Christian church (only one supreme being, last time I checked) is one example of this. So too is how many of the key churches and other important political buildings preserve the remnants of ancient Roman columns as part of their facade to show the direct connection between themselves and the tradition of Rome itself.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Mussolini’s fascist regime, which undertook major physical alterations of a city whose center otherwise feels somewhat unchanged from earlier eras. Mussolini bulldozed a wide lane between the center of his government and the Coliseum so that he could see the structure directly from his office. Mussolini’s government was not just a response to the crisis of modernity in the early 20th century; rather, it claimed to be the inheritor of the great history of Rome.

I took a brief pit stop at EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma), a business district that was the model for Mussolini’s vision of a new, Fascist Italy. The district features extra-wide roads; imposing, sprawling structures that overwhelm a normal human scale; and plenty of monuments and manicured parks. It feels empty and cold, even in the 100 degree heat. It also feels imposing and hostile, showing the power of massive architecture and efficiency over the potential for narrow, complex, and unplanned human interaction.

At the heart of EUR is the Palace of Italian Civilization, better known as the Square Colosseum. Perched at the top of a hill and towering over everything around it, the gleaming white building features Colosseum-like arches covering the outside of a cubic tower. It is a modern building, yet it is designed to invoke all the power of ancient civilization. (Ironically, it now houses the headquarters of luxury fashion brand Fendi.) Not only do the arches mimic those of the Coliseum, the building is ringed by Romanesque statues invoking the virtues of the Italian people, as well as horse-riding statues at each corner featuring Castor and Pollux of Greek and Roman mythological fame. The virtues of the contemporary Italian population, the building suggests, are features of Italian Civilization that date back to its unique founding. Embracing the claims to this civilization and its founding gave Mussolini the authority to root his political power in tradition.

The power of civilization and history brings to life the writings of Hannah Arendt, who focused on the experience of Rome as the key example to highlight the importance of authority — or its lack thereof — in the modern world. Rome, she argues, shows how political authority throughout history has always sought to tie itself to some kind of historical or civilizational “founding.” The Roman vision of political authority lay entirely in the past, she says, “in the foundation of Rome and the greatness of ancestors.” Arendt writes:

The authority of the living was always derivative, depending upon the auctores imperil Romani conditoresque, as Pliny puts it, upon the authority of the founders, who no longer were among the living. Authority, in contradistinction to power (potestas), had its roots in the past, but this past was no less present in the actual life of the city than the power and strength of the living.

Those who lay claim to authority did so on the basis that they were inheritors of the past, of the founding, of something external to which they alone could appeal. Authority begets obedience without resorting to pure and unmitigated force and is essential for effective rule.

The pervasiveness of Christianity, too, she argues, follows the same script. If the innumerable churches that dot every street corner of Rome — and the fact that nearly all of the major works of art for 1000 years in Europe are “Madonna with Child” (or “Madonna with Child featuring John the Baptist”) — show that the power and authority of Rome passed down into the hands of the Church, the Church, too, attempted to stake a claim to inheritance of the Roman founding. This stood out to me in how the churches, sculptures, and art intertwined themselves with ancient civilizational symbols (not only Roman but also Egyptian; see the hieroglyphics on statues in downtown Rome, for example). Arendt argues that this is part of the continuity:

The extraordinary strength and endurance of this Roman spirit or the extraordinary reliability of the founding principle for the creation of bodies politic were subjected to a decisive test and proved themselves conspicuously after the decline of the Roman Empire, when Rome’s political and spiritual heritage passed to the Christian Church. Confronted with this very real mundane task, the Church became so “Roman” and adapted itself so thoroughly to Roman thinking in matters of politics that it made the death and resurrection of Christ the cornerstone of a new foundation, erecting on it a new human institution of tremendous durability.

In a city like Rome, where the lineage of history is so palpable, the power of continuity is unmissable. Even when new political orders are founded on rejections of the past, they still try to absorb the existing authority of the past while superseding it. This was what was so fascinating about Rome: from the pagan, pantheistic Roman Empire to the hyper-religious medieval Church to the Fascist rise and fall, every successive generation overlaid their authority on that of their predecessors. This was especially true in physical space, where they tried to situate themselves on the same ground as the prior regimes, and in the symbolic art and architecture, with direct references to sucking up the power of the past. Walking through the streets, it is not possible to easily separate between the ancient, the medieval, and the modern, for they all overlap and lay claim to each other.

The power of the authority of inheritance is not limited to ancient Rome. Because I spend a lot of my time thinking about China, I cannot help but make reference to a similar phenomenon further East: Mao’s decision to put the heart of the Communist government in Beijing. As the writer Simon Leys pointed out (and which I wrote about here), Mao explicitly chose to put a massive monument in the center of Tiananmen Square, right at the heart of the line of power from the gates of the ancient city.

The point of this decision was to appropriate the power and authority of the imperial space, thus connecting the authority of Mao’s government to the millennia of imperial rule. Leys writes, not concealing his frustration with the decision to ruin Beijing in the process:

The brutal silliness of the Monument to the Heroes of the People, which disrupts and annihilates the energy-field of the old imperial space by trying to appropriate it, epitomizes, alas, the manner in which the Maoist regime has used Peking: it has chosen the old capital in order to give its power a foundation of prestige; in taking over this city, it has destroyed it.

So, too, the contemporary Chinese leadership has put extra effort into drawing a direct connection between the history of Chinese civilization and their own claims to power. The CCP claims to be the inheritor of Chineseness, not only through occupying the physical space of Beijing but through attempts to connect the philosophy of the Party with the ideas and history of Chinese tradition. Just as successive waves of Italian political leaders tied the virtues and authority of ancient Rome to their own rule, contemporary Chinese leaders are attempting to do something similar to bolster their authority — which, Arendt says, is central to understanding politics in any era because it “gives the world the permanence and durability which human beings need precisely because they are mortals.”

Let me finish by saying one more thing: the pasta in Italy is amazing. What are we doing wrong in America? Perhaps our pasta lacks some kind of foundational myth. Or we just overcook it.

Some Brief Thoughts on the Taiwanese Election

Election season in Taiwan is fun: I just received my first robocall, with one candidate accusing another of being an interloper who has mansions in California and China. I cannot vote, but it’s nice to feel included!

There are many interesting macro storylines taking place in this election: the unpopularity of the DPP, the technopopulism of Ko Wen-je and the TPP, the changing political views of young people, and, of course, whatever last-minute craziness always crops up in the run-up to an election. All of these are interesting and important; what I want to elaborate here is one possible alternative way of thinking about the election to make sense of some of the macro cleavages underlying the party competition.

While most external articles of the Taiwanese election focus on China and its outsize role as both a topic of electoral conversation and potential source of election interference, I think it is much more interesting—and much more enlightening—to frame the core issue at stake here as competing claims to democracy. The most significant difference between the parties is less in their stated attitudes toward China—even the relatively China-friendly KMT opposes unification and “one country, two systems”—but rather about how each party conceives of the core way to protect the shared value of democracy and oppose the specter of authoritarianism. Given Taiwan’s relatively recent democratization, it makes sense that the importance of protecting democracy plays a central role in Taiwanese politics; what is interesting is how each party has portrayed its relation to the protection of democracy.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is currently in power, has built its campaign around the notion of taking the “democratic road.” (The main DPP ad this cycle features the outgoing president and incoming presidential candidate driving a car down “democracy road”; it is not subtle.) The DPP’s claims to democracy rest on its opposition to China: the party and its supporters view China as the fundamental threat to Taiwanese democracy; therefore, the best way to promote democracy is to keep Taiwan as separate as possible from China.

In its purest form, the DPP position is that any engagement with China potentially threatens Taiwanese democracy because it opens up potential channels through which China can infiltrate Taiwan, destroy Taiwan’s freedoms, and subsume Taiwan into China’s authoritarian system. If China is the largest threat, the DPP argues, then the sure path to protecting democracy is creating as much separation as possible from China: building up Taiwan’s defenses, opposing Chinese attempts at interference, and insisting on a more liberal, progressive politics domestically.

At DPP rallies and in conversations with DPP supporters, the distrust of engagement with China is palpable. Even if the KMT claims it does not favor unification, the DPP views this as a smokescreen for slowly allowing China to take over. More engagement will not reduce tensions between China and Taiwan, they argue, but rather a path toward Taiwan losing its democracy at the hands of Chinese authoritarianism. In one DPP advertisement, time unfolds in reverse, from today’s democratic society through the student-led Sunflower Movement in 2014 all the way back to the era of martial law that lasted from 1949 through the late 1980s under KMT rule. If the KMT regains power, the ad implies, democratic progress will be lost, and Taiwan will return to its authoritarian past.

This is not the only claim to democracy at stake, however. The KMT, which has its own complicated past with both authoritarianism and democracy, argues that the DPP, not China, is the main threat to Taiwanese democracy. The KMT has adopted the position that democracy requires rotating party power; if one party dominates politics endlessly, democracy has been lost. The KMT slogan for this election is, “Democracy requires a balanced system.” Or, as another slogan states, “The rotating of the seasons is the will of nature; the rotating of the political parties is the will of the people.”

There are two criticisms underlying this, both of which I think are relevant to Taiwanese voters but are rarely discussed in international discussions. First, critics of the current DPP administration allege that the party has acted anti-democratically during its time in power. The KMT (and others) accuse the DPP of abusing its power, cracking down on dissent, and using authoritarian tactics to bully opposition. These critics point to a number of particular instances that they claim represent DPP overreach and anti-democratic action: the decision to shut down a pro-KMT (and pro-China) television station; the year-long refusal to confirm a president of National Taiwan University, which critics claim was due to the academic’s support for the KMT; and excessive consolidation of power during COVID-19, during which authority was centralized under a pandemic control center that reported directly to the president.

While I cannot comment on the complexities of all of these cases, and this may well be partisan nitpicking, I have been surprised over the last few months how many people have raised these concerns about the DPP. Even avowed DPP supporters expressed their discontent with what they felt were excessively strong-armed tactics the DPP has used to get their way. Some of this relates to internal factional struggles within the DPP, and others personal vendettas; regardless, the ubiquity of the complaints suggests that there is a significant share of Taiwanese who think the DPP has pushed the boundaries of appropriate democratic behavior.

Second, and perhaps I am imposing larger theories onto the actual situation at hand, but there is an additional argument behind the KMT’s position that the DPP is endangering democracy. The KMT emphasizes that the DPP’s strong opposition to engagement with China in nearly any form is increasing tensions and making Taiwan less safe. Insofar as the largest threat to Taiwanese democracy comes from a forcible takeover of the island by Chinese forces, the KMT’s willingness to try to ratchet down tensions and keep China relatively mollified is a way of decreasing the likelihood of an invasion and therefore protecting Taiwanese democracy. If the threat of invasion is more damaging than the threat of infiltration, one could argue, then the KMT position is plausibly more likely to protect democracy than the DPP’s more aggressive stance.

Finally, Ko Wen-je, the technopopulist Taiwan People’s Party candidate, locates the problem with democracy in institutional sclerosis. He claims that democracy requires breaking out of the ossified two-party system: Democracy requires not only the rotation of parties but rotation past the same two parties, injecting new vitality into an otherwise inflexible system. Ko has also called for other institutional reforms, including replacing Taiwan’s presidential system into a parliamentary democracy and switching his role from president to prime minister, lowering the threshold for small parties to gain legislative seats, and increasing supervision of the executive branch.

Part of why it is hard to view the whole election only through the lens of China is that Ko’s positions on China (or on anything) are not entirely clear. On democracy, though, he has a strong institutional and procedural criticism. Ko has staked his claim that the existing two-party system has failed to adequately serve the people of Taiwan. Only through internal institutional reforms can Taiwan be more democratic and therefore preserve its democracy. The threat to democracy is not coming from across the Strait so much as in the internal design of domestic institutions — a message that has resonated with a significant number of supporters, who consistently told me that the parties were only looking out for their own interests and Taiwan’s democracy needed to find ways to speak for the people as a whole, rather than narrow party priorities.

The three claims to democracy represent distinct conceptions of what democracy means as the fundamental value of Taiwanese politics—and where the threat to democracy lies. The DPP sees the threat to democracy in engaging with China; the KMT with the DPP’s domestic structure and its unwillingness to engage with China; and the TPP in failing to overhaul the internal system.

In short, despite the common framing that the fundamental question of this election is about the level of China threat, the parties themselves are starting with the central agreed-upon value of democracy and all making claims to the most viable defender of democracy. Some of this includes China, but not all of it; and there are multiple competing claims for where the largest threat lies. While most Western observers have a natural affinity for the DPP’s position, the contestation over the meaning of democracy is worth taking seriously: it is not obvious to me that devolving the election into a question that focuses only on China as the sole source of anti-democracy is useful for understanding the unique character of Taiwanese politics, or of the complexities of the Taiwan-China relationship.

A very abridged Chinese (Beijing) to Chinese (Taiwan) dictionary

I spend much of my life embarrassing myself in one form or another, but there is nothing quite so embarrassing as going to a place and thinking you speak the language only to draw blank stares. When I showed up in Taiwan earlier this year, I thought I spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese — only to learn that people in Taiwan have different words for just about everything. It was not the harsh, guttural, and “r”-inflected accent that gave away the fact that I learned all of my Chinese in Beijing; instead, it was the fact that I used the wrong word for everything. (The accent probably didn’t help, though.)

Language skills are very malleable, and my accent quickly veered toward the more mellifluous intonations of Taiwan. Expanding my vocabulary took a bit more effort. I gave up trying to order specific types of fish at sushi restaurants (all the fish words seem to be different in Taiwan, and, let’s be honest, I want the chef’s assortment anyway). I came to understand that the reason I could never find a trash can in Taipei was not only because there are basically no trash cans in Taipei, but also because I wasn’t using the right word for garbage. (It’s the same word, but pronounced differently. The difference in pronunciation does not explain the lack of trash cans, however.)

I spent much of the next four months chronicling every time people raised their eyebrows at me and said, “We don’t use that word here” or “What the heck are you saying?” I developed the following handy (but nowhere near comprehensive) dictionary to translate Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Beijing (putonghua 普通話) to Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Taiwan (guoyu 國語). I am sure some of these are wrong, and I am happy to take suggestions to add more.

I cannot guarantee that I will spare you any embarrassment, but at least you’ll know why you are embarrassed.

Updated/expanded 1/12/24 — they keep coming…

	Beijing	Taiwan
Trash	垃圾（pronounced: laji)	垃圾 (pronounced: lese)
Public Transit	公交車	公車
Subway/Metro	地鐵	捷運
Hotel	酒店	飯店 (saying 酒店 means something much seedier than a normal hotel, which I found out the hard way when I told everyone I was staying in a 酒店 for the first few nights when I arrived)
You’re Welcome (No Worries)	不用	不會
New (place name)	新 (as in New Zealand, 新西蘭)	紐 (紐西蘭)
Eat In	在這吃	內用
Pick a name	起名 (pronounced qi-mingrrrrrrr)	取名
Taxi	出租車 (rental car)	計程車 (meter car)
Bicycle	自行車 (self-driven vehicle)	腳踏車 (foot-stamping vehicle)
Butter	黃油	奶油
Phone signal	信號	訊號
Farmhouse for tourists	農家樂	土雞城
Draft beer	扎啤	生啤
Stir fry with random stuff you have around	隨便炒	黑白切
Village	村	邨
Pretty good	挺好的	蠻好的（You can’t say 挺…的 in Taiwan, they think it’s weird)
Percentage	成/百分之	趴（According to Wikipedia: “趴 pā as “percent” originates from Japanese パーセント pāsento. This usage is also unique to Guoyu”)
Good morning/good night	早上好/晚上好	早安/晚安
Profile picture	頭像	大頭貼
Video	視頻	影片
Charging pack	充電寶	行動電源
Scrolling on the phone	玩手機	滑手機 (no matter what phrasing you use, people do a lot of it in both places)
Software app	軟件	軟體
Avocado	牛油果	酪梨
Potato	土豆	馬鈴薯 (土豆, or dirt-bean, means peanut in Taiwan. To be fair, they are both dirt-beans, of a sort)
Basil	羅勒	九層塔
Undergraduate	本科	大學
Kindergarten	幼兒園	幼稚園
Rollercoaster	過山車 (passing-through-the-mountains car)	雲霄飛車 (flying-through-the-clouds car)
Italian pasta	意麵	義大利麵 (意麵 somehow means an egg noodle dish from southern China, not Italian pasta)
Authentically local	地道	道地 (reverse, reverse!)
Project	項目	專案
Laptop	電腦	筆電
Electric scooter	電動車 (electric-powered vehicle)	Gogoro (a brand name)
Electric-powered car	新能源汽車 (new energy car)	電動車 (electric-powered vehicle)
Forearm	胳膊	前臂
Broccoli	西蘭花	花椰菜
Instant noodles	方便面（convenient noodles)	泡麵 (soaked noodles)
Salmon	三文魚	鮭魚
To hire	招聘	誠徵
Tissues	纸巾 or 餐纸	衛生紙（this means toilet paper in China, and it means all tissue related products in Taiwan. The lack of specificity here does not work in Taiwan’s favor)
Snail	蜗牛(pronounced wo niu)	蝸牛 (pronounced gua niu)
Ping pong	乒乓球 (ping pong)	桌球 (table tennis)

Obligatory thoughts on Ted Lasso

I have a natural affinity for soccer, puns, and especially soccer-based puns—so it should come as no surprise that I am predisposed to like Ted Lasso. And I do: watching season one was the most fun a person can have this side of The Great British Bakeoff. Season two, though? Well, with season three of Ted Lasso on the horizon, it is about time that I offer my unsolicited opinions on season two. (It’s not even worth a spoiler alert because the season aired a year ago, and if you haven’t watched it by now, you’re not likely to suddenly purchase an Apple product solely for those free three months of Apple TV.)

My first complaint with season two is mostly a personal one. The best parts of season one are the jokes about soccer and about England, and the best parts of season two are the jokes about soccer and about England. The moment when they discuss how all the fields are different sizes at Wembley is hilarious. When Ted finds out the NHS is free and is confused about how a country could provide health care without charging an arm and a leg — comedy perfection. And my favorite line of the entire season is when Ted reads Dr Sharon’s letter to himself in front of her and his only comment is, “You spelled favorite wrong.” I giggled with delight. The premise of the show—as stupid as it sounds—is just really, really funny.

The second season of the show mostly moves beyond this premise, which is probably the correct decision to make from a writing point of view. It does seem reasonable to conclude that it is not possible to do an entire second season of a show based on a premise that basically boils down to someone mixing up “American football” with “futbol.” I acknowledge this. An idea like this really should never have made it out of any self-respecting writers’ room. But no matter how stupid the premise sounds, it is still extremely funny. When the show moves away from this premise, it loses something essential that makes it cohere.

Seriously — the only things better than the first season of Ted Lasso are the original NBC commercials introducing Ted Lasso. They never get old.

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Obligatory thoughts on Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

As I understand it, a specter hangs over the literary world—the specter of The Great American Novel. Like the messiah (for Jews), The Great American Novel is something we have been waiting for for a long time, and, although there are plenty of prime candidates—anything written by Jonathan Franzen being perhaps the most oft-cited—it has been years since we last had a novel that captured the American zeitgeist in a profound way. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, I think, is worthy of the title. At the very least, it is a prime contender. (Warning: this piece contains spoilers.)

What this book is about is what makes a life worthwhile. The characters in the novel are, by and large, extraordinary individuals, but each of them has only their own little life, full of its own joys and terrors, highs and lows, friendships and failed relationships. Each of the four main characters goes on to be enormously successful in his respective field—Willem in acting, JB in painting, Malcolm in architecture, and Jude in law. (One critique of this book might be that it is only a portrait of success; there are no professional failures, which leads to a particularly rarified set of professional challenges. I am not making this critique, though; not all books have to speak to every little life.)

Is what makes life worthwhile based on professional success? Despite their elite educations, Jude and Willem do not seem to notice that they are successful, and even then it feels secondary to their other concerns. Malcolm is constantly worried that he will not be working at a prestigious enough firm, which causes him to turn down more appealing career opportunities. JB is the most tortured character when it comes to trying to let go of the seductive allure of success: his paintings are well-received, but somehow his colleagues have career retrospectives before he does. He is afraid of failing, but he is even more afraid of succeeding and then stagnating. There is a beautiful passage in which he describes how his friends’ careers are taking off beyond his, but leaving behind people he doesn’t fully recognize:

The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas. And yet here again, it seemed that Jude and Willem had something he didn’t, something that was protecting them from the suffocating ennui of being successful, from the tedium of waking up and realizing that you were a success and that every day you had to keep doing whatever it was that made you a success, because once you stopped, you were no longer a success, you were becoming a failure. (302)

Of the four main characters, Willem throughout is the least concerned about professional success or failure. He maintains the most earnest—perhaps childlike—attachment to a vision of worthiness that goes beyond any of the metrics that we normally associate with success. He seems happy to hold fast to the unadulterated belief that what matters most in his work is whether he is proud of it, not how audiences reacted or whether the critics gave it a thumbs up. He doesn’t seem to worry about having kids or leaving a legacy, even as his professional stature grows. All he cares about it is caring about others—a positive, pure, possibly naive vision that is either enviable or pitiable in a tragic world.

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Obligatory thoughts on Don’t Look Up

If having a take on Ted Lasso was the defining feature of “being a writer” in America in the first three-quarters of 2021, having a take on Don’t Look Up was the defining feature of writerdom for at least the final four-to-five days. Here is where I show that I am a real “writer” who is “relevant” because of all of my thoughts about topics that are part of the zeitgeist.

Similar to Ted Lasso (on which I have written many thoughts; perhaps I will publish them at some point, but don’t get your hopes up that I will do so any time soon. I prefer to publish only after things become irrelevant—it’s a personal brand thing), the critical response—and the critical response to the critical response—to Don’t Look Up are more revealing and intriguing than the content itself. Most sentient viewers, from what I’ve seen, agree that Don’t Look Up is not a piece of high art by any stretch of the imagination. It is blunt, in-your-face, and heavy-handed in its satire; if the movie attempted to look up the word “subtle” in the dictionary, it would not be able to find it, even if the page was already turned to words from “submarine” to “succor.” Like a Shakespeare play, you already know the plot before it starts, and there is no chance of some hidden meaning or unexpected twist at any point in the movie.

Most critics, though, still find something to dislike in the movie. Conservatives tend to dislike it because it reeks of the condescending, smarter-than-thou liberal harping about Donald Trump and the stupidity of Americans. The movie’s parallels to Trump are, like the rest of the movie, not subtle: the chant “Don’t Look Up” mirrors the cadence of “Lock Her Up,” and the fictional president, brandishing a MAGA-like hat, makes cultural appeals to supporters (who are described as “white working class”) and claims the cosmopolitan elites (the “not cool rich”) are trying to take their country away from them. They are portrayed as rednecks who eat up the president’s rhetoric and willingly blind themselves to reality until it’s too late.

Liberal critics hate it because it is so devoid of subtlety that it does not even pretend to think that it might be “art”—and because liberals, too, are targets of unabashed satire. It is not Trump and his followers who are obviously to blame for America’s failure to prevent its own destruction; instead, liberal elites are part and parcel of the country’s collective failure. The media and the entertainment industry, in particular, are complicit. They are keen to avoid uncomfortable ideas, partisan disagreements, or anything serious, lest it hurt their profits or their access to power. Both new and old media are so caught up in self-congratulatory ladder-climbing and an insatiable need to drive clicks and generate profits that they have lost all conception of any kind of larger public good. Everything is superficial entertainment, and exposing the truth is driven by a desire for personal recognition in the halls of power than serving society.

The editors of the not-New York Times newspaper (whose font looks rather similar to that of the New York Times and which seems to command the same respect in the media world as the New York Times) seem like they are the good guys: they are ready to break a big story in the name of public interest, to hold our government accountable. Yet it soon becomes clear that all they really value are click-through rates on their stories (replete with fancy consulting presentations about what stories are getting clicks) and looking respectable with political elites. “The Daily Rip,” the hottest talk show in the DC politico world, is the movie’s highlight. The show’s tagline—”keep it light, keep it fun”—succinctly encapsulates the thin (and thinning) line between politics and entertainment. The fact that the entire media ecosystem fawns over the show and would sell their souls to get an appearance on it is indicative of what the movie’s writers think of the world of media, both old and new.

This is a far cry from a David Foster Wallace-level critique of the unstoppable allure of television or The Entertainment—but if you accept that the movie is a polemic from start to finish, it’s moderately entertaining. A comet is not a perfect metaphor for climate change, and there is really only one joke that is genuinely funny: the repeated bewilderment that a three-star general charges them for free snacks. But it is hardly a terrible movie, and anyone with even a modicum of experience in the elite world of DC media will confirm that at least some of the barbs are well-deserved.

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Bo Burnham, Herbert Marcuse, and the Transcendent Potential of Political Comedy

If some sort of higher power were designing a comedian tailored exactly to me, he/she/it would probably create something that is basically Bo Burnham. Burnham, like me, started doing comedy in high school; and his interest in comedy is paralleled by an interest in the political and social contexts of the act of doing comedy—to wit, the relationship of comedy as an art to the real politics of the world, what makes a joke pathbreaking rather than offensive, and whether all jokes need to follow the “rule of threes.” The main difference is that Bo Burnham is among the most successful comedians of his generation, and I write solipsistic essays a few times per year and post them on my blog that nobody reads for no money.

Burnham originally got famous by singing comedy songs in his suburban bedroom—songs that very much toe the line between funny and offensive, yet also sit firmly on the side of “not punching down.” One of my early favorite songs of his was “New Math,” in which he does “math” problems by reframing them in cultural and political terms. Here’s one lyric, written when he was approximately 15 years old:

And what’s a bag of chips divided by five?
Well that’s a Nike worker’s meal
And Santa Claus multiplied by i
Well I guess that makes him real
And the square root of the NBA
Is Africa in a box
How do you trace a scatter plot?
You give the pencil to Michael J. Fox

Following this, he gives a knowing groan to the camera, acknowledging that he knows that bit is offensive, but he said it anyway. I mean, you definitely could not get away with that today, and probably for good reason, but it’s still brilliant. When I was 15, I wrote a series of Ogden Nash-style poems about foods you would find at a barbecue. I won second place in our high school poetry competition. Advantage: Burnham.

He’s now 30 and he has a new comedy special on Netflix filmed entirely during the pandemic about slowly going crazy while trying to make something create and worthwhile in the pandemic. The first song is perhaps the most directly relevant piece of artistic work aimed at me ever created in history, and it starts off by mentioning all the terrible things in the world: war, drought, protests, climate change, etc. He asks: should I be making jokes when so many terrible things are going on? He wants to do something good for the world, to be helpful, to add value, but all he knows how to do is make jokes—and he doesn’t really want to inconvenience himself. So what’s the solution? He sings:

The world is so fucked up.
Systematic oppression.
Income inequality.
The other stuff.
And there’s only one thing that I can do about it, while… while being paid, and being the center of attention.
Healing the world with comedy
Making a literal difference, metaphorically

I spent my entire college career outside of class performing comedy, thinking about comedy, writing comedy, and for much of my early life I wanted to do comedy professionally. But I also cared fundamentally about making the world a better place and contributing in some way to some kind of systemic change to make the world slightly less fucked up than it is. I have always cared about politics out of proportion with a normal human being, and doing fart jokes felt meaningless. I wanted to find a way to do comedy but also be politically relevant.

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Power and Powerlessness in the Georgia Senate Race

In the closing weeks of the Georgia Senate runoffs, Republicans charged that the Democrats would cancel Christmas, ban hamburgers, and destroy the fabric of America. Democrat and preacher Raphael Warnock would be “America’s first Marxist senator”; his fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff was compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I’m no expert on Christmas, hamburgers, or fabrics, but I am somewhat of an expert on Chinese Communism and Marxism—so I can say with some confidence that these claims are, in technical parlance, completely bonkers.

Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, despite being incumbents, are not running for something; they are running against the impending onslaught of socialism, which, by their telling, is basically already here. (This would be news to the DSA, but nevermind.) With only rare exceptions, the Republicans’ campaign is about warding off the arrival of some sort of invasive species that feeds on the blood of innocent Americans and will overrun the state of Georgia in copies of Das Kapital and veganism. Nevermind that Loeffler is a billionaire whose husband owns the New York Stock Exchange and Perdue is a millionaire corporate executive whose policy priorities of promoting outsourcing are anathema to rural Georgians. Loeffler and Perdue (and Donald Trump) claim that they are on the side of Georgians against “people who don’t share your values.” In other words, as one of their mailers says, “Joe Biden, the Hollywood Elite, and DC Liberals Want to Steal Your Future.”

Regardless of who ultimately wins, the fact that such bonkers claims carry such power is worth trying to understand. Why are Georgia voters, especially rural voters, receptive to these messages, and to believe wholeheartedly in the imminent death of Santa and meat-based cuisine? And why do liberals and Democrats have such trouble gaining political traction or combating these attacks? The political dynamics at play call to mind multiple episodes in John Gaventa’s excellent book Power and Powerlessness about coal miners in rural Appalachia. Rather than attribute support for exploitative local elites to condescending assertions that rural citizens have a “false consciousness,” Gaventa argues instead that understanding power requires thinking harder about powerlessness. Power corrupts the powerful and shapes their worldview; in the same way, powerlessness shapes the way that those on the outs of society come to understand the world. Similar to Gramsci’s idea of hegemony or studies of how colonized populations often end up accepting colonial ideologies, this understanding of powerlessness creates conditions in which the ideological narratives of local elites become the prevailing “common sense” of society, shaping the field of what is believable to the powerful and powerless alike.

Miners in the communities Gaventa studied in Appalachia faced terrible conditions and were completely at the whim of large mining companies, yet workers only rarely pushed back. More often, they actively supported the dominance of exploitative local elites. Multiple waves of social reformers who tried to help the miners failed miserably as local elites portrayed attempts to empower grassroots society as the work of hostile outside forces. Local citizens believed these claims, often made on the basis of cultural affinities, and fought to preserve the ideology that supported their powerlessness.

At the time of the Great Depression, unrest in the coal mines attracted national attention from writers, journalists, relief organizations, and other nonprofit groups. Local elites, threatened by these rebellions and the outside attention, had to rely on a new ideology to frame these events in order to maintain their power over the miners. Gaventa writes:

The ideology which emerged appealed to the forces of law and order, respectability, and patriotism as opposed to the forces of disorder, anti-religion, and anti-government brought in by the outsider. ‘Communism’, as interpreted to the population by ministers and government officials, meant belief in the principles of: 1) hatred of god, 2) destruction of property, 3) social and racial equality and class hatred, 4) revolutionary propaganda leading to the stirring up of class hatred, advocating of violence, strikes, riots, etc.; destruction of all forms of representative and democratic government and the rights of liberty guaranteed under the American Constitution—the right of free speech, free press, and the freedom of worship; 6) worldwide revolution overthrowing all capitalist government and the re establishment of the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, with headquarters in Moscow and with the red flag as the only flag.

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The New York Giants or the Democratic Party?

Few supporters outside of New York City
Peaked in 2008, and it’s been mostly downhill since
Only shows up to work one day a week, on average
Is playing a defense 75% of the time
Will get absolutely destroyed in 2022
Relies on the hard work of Black people to have any chance at victory, yet somehow out-of-touch older white people still call the shots
Owned by rich people
Frequently trips over themselves, even when no opponent is pressuring them
More concerned about producing a good sound byte than actually winning
Better at football than the New York Jets

BOTH: 1-9
DEMOCRATIC PARTY ONLY: 10