Voter Day Quotes

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as the president of the United States for the next four years. . . . And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation--all expenses paid--wherever he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that's where he went. Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?

The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every four years; a Congress with a 99% incumbency rate; a Supreme Court comprised of nine politically appointed judges whose only oversight is the icy scythe of Death -- all these reveal a system fully capable of maintaining itself. But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity. It is important to remember there still exist other forms of government in the world today, and that dozens of foreign countries still long for a democracy such as ours to be imposed on them.

Four Millions of people heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land, not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so, voters in every part of the land, the right not to be abridged by any state, is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day . . . The adoption of the 15th Amendment . . . constitutes the most important event that has occurred, since the nation came into life.” It was a stunning statement of Grant’s faith in the new black electorate. He further urged Congress to promote popular education so that “all who possess and exercise political rights, shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the government a blessing.

Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy. As

Only one thing to it: a strong stomach. The guts to gladhand a man you're going to stab in the back; pledge allegiance to principles you stomp on every day; righteously denounce some despot in the press and sell him arms under the table. The talent to whip up the voters' worst passions while you seem to call on their highest instincts, and the sense to stay wrapped in the flag. That's politics: I'll take the simple life.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over... We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-

In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious to be controlled and regulated in all things. 'You get yourself born,' says the German Government to the German citizen, 'we do the rest. Indoors and out of doors, in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in work, we will tell you what to do, and we will see to it that you do it. Don't you worry yourself anything.' And the German doesn't. [published in 1900]

That which does not destroy you buys you another day to destroy others. By the way, remember last year when I was winning in Ohio or Indiana or Iowa, one of those, and I said I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and I wouldn’t lose voters?

Some of the leaders of the backlash said their name was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.” Maybe this was true at first. But the Tea Party was soon infused with paranoia that had nothing to do with taxes. While the ugliness caught Washington observers by surprise, anyone who had spent time in a battleground state recognized it instantly. Back in Ohio, volunteers had been told to check boxes corresponding to a voter’s most important issue: economy, environment, health care. But what box were you supposed to check when a voter’s concern was that Obama was a secret Muslim? Or a terrorist? Or a communist? Or the actual, literal Antichrist? How could you convince a voter whose pastor told them your candidate would bring about the biblical end of days? Other people were just plain racist. Outside an unemployment center in Canton, a skinny white man with stringy hair and a ratty T-shirt told me he would never, ever support my candidate. When I asked why, he took two fingers and tapped them against the veiny underside of his forearm. At first I didn’t understand. “You won’t vote for Obama because you’re a heroin addict?” It took me at least ten seconds to realize he was gesturing to the color of his skin.

To my generation has now come the challenge. In the days to come we will be tested on whether we have the moral courage, the realism, the idealism, the tenacity, and the ability to sacrifice some of the current comfort to invest in the future... I believe that this generation will rise to the challenge... The experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less than forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.

The political merchandisers appeal only to the weak­nesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this pur­pose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully se­lected samples of the electorate are given "interviews in depth." These interviews in depth reveal the uncon­scious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given so­ciety at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look "sincere." Under the new dispen­sation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The person­ality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really mat­ter. In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to con­centrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most -- and prefera­bly (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex is­sues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most con­scientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchan­dise the political candidate as though he were a deo­dorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.

Big data is a type of supercomputing for commercial enterprises and governments that will make it possible to monitor a pandemic as it happens, anticipate where the next bank robbery will occur, optimize fast food supply chains, predict voter behavior on election day, and forecast the volatility of political uprisings while they are happening.

Politicians talk too much bullshit with their little heads. One day they'll get caught in their zippers and feel the real pain of the voters.

Still, there will come a day when the Trump era is over. In the best-case scenario, it is ended by the voters at the ballot box. In the worst-case scenario, it lasts more than four years. In either case, the first three years have shown that an autocratic attempt in the United States has a credible chance of succeeding. Worse than that, they have shown that an autocratic attempt builds logically on the structures and norms of American government: on the concentration of power in the executive branch, and on the marriage of money and politics. Recovery from Trumpism—a process that will be necessary whenever Trumpism ends—will not be a process of returning to government as it used to be, a fictional state of pre-Trump normalcy. Recovery will be possible only as reinvention: of institutions, of what politics means to us, and of what it means to be a democracy, if that is indeed what we choose to be.

Thanks in part to Klan intimidation of Republican voters—white and black—Democrats had returned to power in Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia in the 1870 elections.

He believed the future of the nation was at stake, and he returned day after day to fight his war against the “slaveocracy.” And Quincy voters sent him back to Congress again and again. Louisa fretted about his health and safety, but she had lost all influence over him and could do nothing to restrain him. He was unstoppable—a meteor spiraling out of control in the political firmament.

Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.

I am subject to constant criticism all day long,” the president told me in our Oval Office discussion. “And some of it may be legitimate; much of it may be illegitimate. Some of it may be sincere; some of it may be entirely politically motivated. If I spent all my time thinking about it, I’d be paralyzed. And frankly, the voters would justifiably say, ‘I need somebody who’s focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.

[T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. —William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty

Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan echoed the divisive rhetoric Nixon had used and ran for the presidency by warning voters that government couldn’t provide solutions to the problems of the day. Instead, he said, government was the problem. He won with 50.7 percent of the vote.

Tammany owed much of its power to the fact that it got the children young and educated them in the party ways. The dumbest ward heeler was smart enough to know that time, no matter what else it did, passed, and that the school boy of today was the voter of tomorrow. They got the boys on their side and the girls, too. A woman couldn’t vote in those days but the politicians knew that the women of Brooklyn had a great influence on their men. Bring a little girl up in the party way and when she married, she’d see to it that her man voted the straight Democratic ticket.

Third, resistance is a tradition of building blocks; a continuum of action that may not have dislodged injustice in its own time, but whose revolutionary founders left behind the framework and tools for a subsequent generation to take up, and ultimately carry out its vision. We can stand back and admire certain laws and protections now—child labor laws, voter enfranchisement for all, an eight-hour work day, clean water, for example—and appreciate the irreversible process of resistance that not only guaranteed their formation, but fought off the innumerable attacks that once kept them from rising.

Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future.

I AM WRITING IN A time of great anxiety in my country. I understand the anxiety, but also believe America is going to be fine. I choose to see opportunity as well as danger. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it. I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while deemphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and morally wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I’ve said this earlier but it’s worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, “I hope you will let it go,” about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to almost be darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.

Despite Alex Jones’ enormous appeal, not one candidate was pushing for his support as the primaries drew closer—not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not Ben Carson, not Jeb Bush. No one! It was just mind-boggling how candidates chose to turn their backs on such a pool of potential voters as those millions of Americans who listen to or watch Alex Jones every day. Alex didn’t need any convincing

Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered.

It is midnight in Washington,” Schiff began. “The lights are finally going out in the Capitol after a long day in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.” Over the course of the next twenty-five minutes, he said it was not enough to let voters decide because if the Senate were to let Trump off, he would be free to use his power to advantage himself with impunity in the election. “He has done it before, he will do it again,” Schiff warned.

your present temper may not mark the healthful pulse of our people. When your enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find below the storm and passion that calm level of public opinion from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which their final action will be determined. Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of the republic to be decreed for the next four years. Not here … but by four millions of Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home and country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and reverence for the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by, burning in their hearts—there God prepares the verdict which will determine the wisdom of our work tonight.33

So, like all right-wing parties that depend on rural voters, the Republican Party has an interest in maintaining, not alleviating, their struggles. Rural voters who are satisfied and optimistic might consider the entreaties of both parties, but the more dissatisfied and angrier they are, the more they'll stick with the GOP. Come Election Day, despair is a Republican candidate's chief asset, because that despair is easiest to convert into anger, and that anger into votes

The more Trump listened to them, the more he hardened around the notion that he had been robbed, and in the days following the election he would resolve to do what no other sitting president has done in the history of the United States—hold on to power despite the indisputable will of the voters. The next ten weeks would prove to be the most elaborate and extensive campaign to overturn a presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution, all orchestrated from the Oval Office.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

In these churches, the ministers are second in importance to the church ladies, who organize voters, make sure the church-run buses are ready on Election Day, and help people fill out absentee ballots. These ladies often, but not always, are also the ones cooking the fish. The churches almost always serve whiting because it’s cheap. Whiting is also delicious after it’s been fried golden in hot grease and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and slathered with hot sauce and mustard. You walk into the fellowship hall to the sound of crackling and popping and the smell of hot grease wafting through the air. Every politician knows you eat white bread with fried fish, but they’re also aware that white bread sticks to your teeth and the roof of your mouth like glue. If you’re an elected official, the thing you don’t want to do is get that white bread stuck in your teeth. So you need to use your tongue and suck that bread off your teeth very, very hard. A country biscuit might come with your meal, but if you’re at a real country church, you’ll likely be served some liver pudding with the fish and grits.

nothing knee-jerk about their politics. Two out of three of them say that abortion is “always” or “usually” morally wrong. They are far more likely than voters age thirty and over to identify themselves as politically “strictly independent.” In fact, more than any other generation I’ve tracked in my polling, Globals seem determined to find a middle ground on the hot-button issues of the day and to decide each one on a case by case basis, not because their party leaders are urging them in one direction or the other. I like to tell audiences that while First Globals might not be more...

However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, and therefore on election day her feelings—represented by her vote—count just as much as anybody else’s. Feelings guide not just voters but their leaders as well. In the 2016 Brexit referendum the Leave campaign was headed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. After David Cameron resigned, Gove initially supported Johnson for the premiership, but at the very last minute Gove declared Johnson unfit for the position and announced his own intention to run for it. Gove’s action, which destroyed Johnson’s chances, was described as a Machiavellian political assassination.4 But Gove defended his conduct by appealing to his feelings, explaining, “In every step in my political life I have asked myself one question: ‘What is the right

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that as speculation or an opinion. That was a stone-cold fact during the 2016 campaign and throughout Trump’s presidency to this very day. To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for — indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62

Those who rage against and work against expanding the electorate know what's at stake. The goal is to block access to the ballot and to policy making because letting the agitators inside might yield new laws to remedy inequality or injustice. The fear of these elected officials is a loss of power, grounded in an assortment of causes like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, or an inchoate desire to keep the world as it was when they sat at the peak of influence. They forget that the bygone days of political tranquility never truly existed—the agitators simply hadn't amassed sufficient power to be heard. But they are getting closer to it every day.

NBC News reporter Douglas Kiker observed, while covering the Wallace campaign, “It was as if somewhere, sometime a while back, George Wallace had been awakened by a white, blinding vision: they all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern! Anybody who travels with Wallace these days on his presidential campaign finds it hard to resist arriving at the same conclusion.” Wallace voters who agreed to be interviewed sounded like Trump voters in 2016. Most of them denied race had anything to do with their choice of candidate. They said they supported Wallace because he told it like it was and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

In the placid, docile German of to-day, whose only ambition appears to be to pay his taxes, and do what he is told to do by those whom it has pleased Providence to place in authority over him, it is difficult, one must confess, to detect any trace of his wild ancestor, to whom individual liberty was as the breath of his nostrils; who appointed his magistrates to advise, but retained the right of execution for the tribe; who followed his chief, but would have scorned to obey him. In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious, to be controlled and regulated in all things. He disputes, not government, but the form of it.

If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all. For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system. Modern cynics and skeptics see no more reason for landing a man on the moon, which we shall do, than the cynics and skeptics of half a millennium ago saw for the discovery of this country. They see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that "knowledge is power," more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, "enlighten the people generally ... tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day." And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school. Secondly, the educated citizen has an obligation to serve the public. He may be a precinct worker or President. He may give his talents at the courthouse, the State house, the White House. He may be a civil servant or a Senator, a candidate or a campaign worker, a winner or a loser. But he must be a participant and not a spectator.

If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all. For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system. Modern cynics and skeptics see no more reason for landing a man on the moon, which we shall do, than the cynics and skeptics of half a millennium ago saw for the discovery of this country. They see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that "knowledge is power," more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, "enlighten the people generally ... tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day." And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school. Secondly, the educated citizen has an obligation to serve the public. He may be a precinct worker or President. He may give his talents at the courthouse, the State house, the White House. He may be a civil servant or a Senator, a candidate or a campaign worker, a winner or a loser. But he must be a participant and not a spectator. - President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (from a commencement address given at Vanderbilt University on May 18, 1963)

In the year of your lord 1963, August 27, I was in a hotel room with John Lewis and three other members of SNCC and I was livid. I had provided several lines to John’s speech and they were being removed. I remember the lines. The first was, If the dogs of the South continue unchained, then we will bite back, we will move on those tender parts that bleed so readily, that bleed so profusely. Okay, I said, understanding that there was a lot of blood in the statement—rather, threat—and so I added the word nonviolently. This was not satisfactory. The next line was, The Kennedy administration does not even talk a good game, failing to support voters’ rights while paying mere lip service to civil rights, as if there is a difference. We say fuck the administration that still walks hand in hand with Jim Crow. Well, I could see that the word fuck was a bit strong and so I suggested screw and then 45 screw nonviolently. I was never much of a player in the politics of the day after that evening.

It seemed to numerous voters that, thanks to the growing power of the ACLU, criminals were beginning to have more rights than the victims. Preachers across the country were becoming alarmed about the young people’s apathy and lack of morals. Some blamed television. Or as Reverend W. W. Nails put it, “The devil has three initials: ABC, NBC, and CBS. They love Lucy more than they do the Lord and they would rather leave it to Beaver than to Jesus.” The average middle-class Americans who worked hard every day, who were not criminals, not on welfare, and had seldom complained, suddenly and collectively started showing signs of growing disillusionment, worried that with all the new social programs they were now going to have to carry the rich and the poor on their backs. They were tired of having to pay so much income and other taxes to support half the world while they struggled to make ends meet. They began to feel that no matter how hard they worked or how much they paid, it was never appreciated and it was never enough.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

We want things to return to normal, back to a world in which we do not have to waste time rebutting demented conspiracy theories and fact-checking farcical lies every single day. We want a government that operates competently and honestly, headed by a president who behaves with dignity and integrity. If we were at risk of under-appreciating the quiet grace of decency, Trump has cured us of that. But after we evict the squatter, we must repair the house he trashed. Trump became president because millions of Americans felt that a self-satisfied elite had created a pleasant society only for themselves. Millions of other Americans felt disregarded and discarded. They determined to crash their way in, and they wielded Trump as their crowbar to pry open the barriers against them. Trump is a criminal and deserves the penalties of law. Trump's enablers and politics and media are contemptable and deserve the scorn of honest patriots. But Trump's voters are our compatriots. Their fate will determine ours. You do not beat Trump until you have restored an America that has room for all its people. The resentments that produced Trump will not be assuaged by contempt for the resentful. Reverse prejudice, reverse stereotyping, never mind whether they are right or wrong--they are wrong--just be aware that they are acids poored upon the connections that bind a democratic society. [...] Maybe you cannot bring everybody along with you. But you still must try--for your own sake, as well as theirs.

Still dark. The Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through a file of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?” “An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.” “You’ve been awake a whole hour?” “My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide out. I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.” “You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.” I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?” In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?” “Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.” I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.” She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.” “I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.” “Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.” I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.” Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?” “No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.” Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?” “Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS AND LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and the a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.” She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?” The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.” “But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.” I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere. She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster,

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

And I myself woke up one day and realized all the people in my old life hated me… but somehow I didn’t care. We each became immune to the Blue Plague, which labels all resistance as racist, bigoted, Nazi scumbags.

In the 2016 elections, white fear ruled the day. Trump used fear to prime the pumps of white American racial resentment by fanning the flames of the birther myth against Barack Obama, claiming that Obama was not a native-born American citizen. For years Trump stoked the fires of the birther myth, continuing even after Canadian-born Ted Cruz became his primary opposition in the 2016 Republican primaries. Donald Trump deftly used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed. All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion. There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group’s demands visible make every other group’s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.

My mother, who somehow managed to stay politically active while raising four children, roped me into canvassing door-to-door for Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty’s opponent for mayor, in our precinct in Woodland Hills. Bradley would be, if he won, the first black mayor of L.A., so it felt like a historic election. Bradley polled well in our precinct, and we were optimistic. Then Yorty won the election, and the precinct breakdowns showed that our neighbors had evidently been lying when they told us canvassers that they would vote for Bradley. It was a well-known phenomenon, apparently, among white voters, these voting-booth reversals. Still, I was outraged, and my cynicism about organized politics and the broad mass of what I was learning to call the bourgeoisie deepened. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as everyone knows, on the night of the 1968 California primary. I watched the news on a small black-and-white TV, sitting cross-legged on the foot of my girlfriend’s bed. Her name was Charlene. We were fifteen. She was asleep, believing I had left after our evening’s usual heated, inconclusive cuddle. I had stopped, however, to watch the TV after I saw that Kennedy had been shot. It was after midnight and Charlene’s parents were out watching the voting results with friends. They were Republican Party activists. I heard them pull in the driveway and come in the house. I knew that Charlene’s father, who was an older man, always came in to kiss her good night, and I knew, well, the way out her window and how to catfoot it down to the street. Still, I sat there, unthinking yet cruelly resolved, until the bedroom door opened. Her father did not have a heart attack at the sight of me, calmly watching TV in my underwear, though he could have. I snatched up my clothes and dived out the window before he said a word. Charlene’s mother called my mother, and my mother gave me a serious talk about different types of girls, emphasizing the sanctity of “good girls,” such as Charlene, who belonged to some debutante club. I was embarrassed but unrepentant. Charlene and I had never had much to talk about.

By undermining confidence in the system, modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID and tangled rules for participation. And those who are most vulnerable to suppression become the most susceptible to passing on that reluctance to others.

Black southern voters were shut out of the process entirely through the imposition of poll taxes they could not pay or literacy tests they could not pass. Some states outright banned black voters from primaries, and others sent armed men to polling stations to deliver a frightening message to any African Americans who had the temerity to attempt to cast a ballot. The winners of those elections rose through the ranks in Washington, creating a fearsome southern bloc that presidents such as Roosevelt were loath to cross.

Until he had run for Governor three years before, W. (for Wilbert) Lee O’Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics—not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer. He had turned to radio—in 1927—to sell more flour. At the time, newly arrived in Texas, he was the thirty-seven-year-old sales manager for a Fort Worth company that manufactured Light Crust Flour. An unemployed country-and-western band asked him to sponsor it on a local radio station. The Light Crust Doughboys were not notably successful until one day the regular announcer was unable to appear, and O’Daniel substituted for him; finding that he liked the job, he decided to keep it.

Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy.

The fight over the Ten Commandments monument got Moore national news, and he became something of a cult figure for many in Alabama. But what few knew was that a video of the monument was made and sold by a company that helped Moore pay for his legal expenses over the fight that led to his removal from the supreme court.3 That little detail perfectly encapsulates the monetization of phony morality that is so common with the professional Christian conservatives. Six days after being removed from office for the second time, Moore announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for senator in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Donald Trump’s appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Despite multiple allegations of molesting an underage girl, sexual harassment of barely legal teenage girls, and being such a general creep that he was allegedly banned from his local mall in Gadsden, Alabama, Moore defeated the appointed incumbent Luther Strange and became the Republican nominee. When Moore won the nomination, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee endorsed him. Trump supported Moore’s denials, and on Election Day Moore won 67 percent of white voters.4 Only black voters, particularly black women who turned out at record levels, saved the state of Alabama from being represented by an accused child molester who said that he first noticed his wife when he saw her in a high school dance performance. Moore was thirty at the time.

And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s children,—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from politics.

[on sponsored elections] Thus the dramatic denouement of the election is voter turnout, which measures the ability of the forces of democracy and peace (the army) to overcome rebel threats. [...] "Off the agenda" for the government in its own sponsored elections are all of the basic parameters that make an election meaningful or meaningless prior to the election-day proceedings. These include: (1) freedom of speech and assembly; (2) freedom of the press; (3) freedom to organize and maintain intermediate economic, social, and political groups (unions, peasant organizations, political clubs, student and teacher associations, etc.); (4) freedom to form political parties, organize members, put forward candidates, and campaign without fear of extreme violence; and (5) the absence of state terror and a climate of fear among the public. Also off the agenda is the election-day "coercion package" that may explain turnout in terms other than devotion to the army and its plans, including any legal requirement to vote, and explicit or implicit threats for not voting.

When he was asked about how to keep voters focused on the issues in the midst of Trump scandals, he replied, “I mean, I think we’ve got to work in two ways. Number one, we have got to take on Trump’s attacks against the environment, against women, against Latinos and blacks and people in the gay community, we’ve got to fight back every day on those issues. But equally important, or more important: We have got to focus on bread-and-butter issues that mean so much to ordinary Americans.”53 Oh man, fuck this. Seriously? Who exactly are these “ordinary Americans” whose issues are more important than the destruction of our environment and the systemic racism and sexism that are literally crushing women and people of color in this country? Hint: they don’t look like me.

We think of Barack Obama as the first president elected with a nonwhite majority, but Ulysses S. Grant was actually the first president elected with a nonwhite majority. He only won the popular vote in 1868 because four hundred thousand African Americans voted for him. By 1890, only a few thousand were still able to vote in the South. This is a story of Ulysses S. Grant that needs to be told, that has not really been told, of a person who stood up against the voter suppression of his day. That was really the goal of the Ku Klux Klan, to suppress the vote.… He wanted to stop [voter suppression] and give these African Americans—freed people—their right to vote.

You're right of cribbing against a government is none, if you can't take out time to vote for one.

In a democracy, you cannot blame only a leading leader but also the entire leadership, including the voters’ choice, if the party fails to fulfill its promises. Prose, whether in the form of a quotation or something else, expresses various colours of character and life in its context and accurately mirrors society; therefore, read not only the content of the writing but also understand and share what you think will enlighten others’ lives. What are the attributes of a leader? When the nation understands and realizes that, it blocks the route for the leadership, with the foresight, upon dishonest, rude, and immoral ones. Otherwise, the rope of idiocy remains in the hands of idiots. The day you vote is an opportunity to vote not for a leader but for a party manifesto and constructive thoughts and plans. Indeed, you will have good fortune, a bright and joyful social status, and prosperity will always be a part of your society and life. You are the real leader of the universe if you also lead the hearts and not just the minds. The mind keeps the knowledge while the heart showers the fragrance of love towards the soul; it is the base and circle of the knowledge. A leader doesn’t mean to have governmental power; it means to lead its people on the right, secure, equal, fair, and visionary way of life. Be a leader, not a lawyer and judge, not an official; express party program(me) honestly for the nation and face all the challenges before accusing, abusing, and blaming others. Indeed, it shows dignity and venerable leadership. The opposition leaders and those in power can keep reputable the four pillars of democracy in the context of constitutional duties, transparent justice, truth, and honesty; they can also discredit those by their wrong character and fallacious decisions and deeds. Real and true leader neither has a special status nor contradict others. If he keeps the distance in any way or shape If he says things that don’t exist If he brings you in a destructive direction If he what promises, but do not keep his words If he put you naked in the open sky and himself in a comfortable tent If he gives you false hopes rather than the practical helping He is just an opportunist, a cheater, and a liar but not a leader. Promises of the leader before the election build expectations in the minds of voters, and after winning the election, those cause humiliation in the eyes of voters if the leader fails to fulfill them. Therefore, fly not so high that you cannot land easily; be honest with yourself. Political leadership is a significant spirit and defense of the armed forces of any state, whereas the armed forces are a protective shield for them. Both are compulsory for each other, as the political leadership has one point, and the armed forces have zero points, which becomes ten points. Otherwise, it stays one or zero, establishing nothing. A selfish and empty of vision and solution leadership prefers its own political and personal benefits and interests instead of its people; indeed, it collapses in the face of ruffians and traitors of the constitution. As a reality, such a state and all institutions face conspiracies in global affairs; consequently, diplomatic isolation and trade failure become destiny; it leads towards destruction with self-adopted strategy and character.

In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men.

That optimism aside, Louise Day Hicks had entered Congress, setting up a similarly urgent campaign to drive her from the seat in her 1972 reelection bid. But this time around, David Nelson was out of the running. After the 1970 race, Nelson began serving as assistant attorney general under Robert Quinn, and by 1972 was in line for an appointment to a federal judgeship. For his part, Moakley’s second run for the seat came as an independent. This ensured Moakley would appear on the final ballot, competing with Hicks for an electorate that had over one hundred thousand more voters. With Moakley and Nelson out of the Democratic primary, advocates who wanted to organize against Hicks needed a new candidate.

Before scientists began researching the Leadership LAB’s technique, few studies supported the possibility that campaigns could change voters’ views on polarized, partisan, politically controversial issues, especially not with door-to-door canvassing. The academic literature in political science is aggressively pessimistic in this regard. In their book Get Out the Vote! , political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber examined more than one hundred published papers detailing attempts to influence voters’ opinions with mailouts, canvassing, phone calls, and television ads. Green and Gerber concluded it was highly unlikely any of them made any impact. Zero. In the rare instances in which a communication technique did alter people’s opinions, people tended to revert back to their original position within a few days after their social networks reasserted their influence. Fleischer paid Donald Green a visit at Columbia University and showed him what the LAB had been up to over the last few years. After seeing some of the videos, Green was astonished. “One day, Dave announced to me that he thought that he had had this insight,” Green told me. “He had found what was lying behind resistance to same-sex marriage and what kinds of things could encourage a change of opinion. I, being the skeptical sort that I am, said that you really need to test it rigorously before I, or anyone else, is going to believe you.

That logic of American partisanship came under a more sustained and ultimately more effective assault in the Progressive Era, however, precisely because of its relation to the logic of the Constitution. As we have seen, the early progressives critiqued the American system for lacking coherence and sacrificing responsiveness, energy, and effectiveness in government for the sake of stability, safety, and cohesion in society. They argued that this trade-off was neither successful nor necessary, and that unity could be achieved by unified leadership, especially presidential leadership, not by aimless negotiation. So they sought a politics in which different parties offered thoroughly distinct and comprehensive policy programs, the public selected among them on Election Day, and then the winning party would have essentially unlimited power to pursue its program until the public voted for someone else. The competition among factions in society would not be resolved by their bargaining within the institutions of government but by voters choosing among them at the ballot box and letting whichever won a majority deploy all the powers of government in the service of its vision.

William Henry Harrison promised voters that if elected he wouldn’t run for another term. How prophetic—he died thirty-one days after taking office.

She is not really aware at this point of his deep desire for fame, although on their previous meetings and phone calls she has sensed his ache to be somebody; to be noticed; to be listened to; a king of sorts; a public figure with voters; or a prophet with disciples. For now, however, he clearly enjoys audiences of small gigs, viewers of television shows, and the female fans, hoping perhaps that one day he may well be the most famous man in the world, possibly validating his own existence, because without all of this he just has himself – a man with a smile on his face, but with a seemingly sorrowed centre.

rejected as discriminatory took effect just two hours after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County, affecting hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. Other states previously subject to preclearance redrew district lines, tightened voter-ID requirements, purged voter rolls, canceled same-day registration, restricted early voting, and closed polling places—all in ways that made voting more difficult for minority voters

Since I left the United States in 1998, I've cast absentee ballots. Americans overseas vote from the last state they lived in, which for me was New York. Then we got the house on Emerald Isle and I changed my location to North Carolina, where I'm more inclined to feel hopeless. In 1996, in line at the grocery store in lower Manhattan, I'd look at the people in front of me, thinking, Bill Clinton voter, Bill Clinton voter, convicted felon, Bill Clinton voter, foreign tourist, felon, felon, Bill Clinton voter, felon. At the Emerald Isle supermarket that I stomp off to after the fight with my father, it's Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and then the cashier, who also voted for him. Of course, these are just my assumptions. The guy in the T-shirt that pictures a semiautomatic rifle above the message COME AND TAKE IT, the one in fatigues buying two twelve-packs of beer and a tub of rice pudding, didn't necessarily vote Republican. He could have just stayed home on Election Day and force-fed the women he holds captive in the crawl space beneath his living room. The morning after our argument, I come downstairs to find my father in the kitchen. 'Are you still talking to me?' he asks. I look at him as if he were single-handedly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, as if he had knowingly cast the tiebreaking vote and all of what is to come is entirely his fault. Then I say, 'Yes. Of course I'm still talking to you.' He turns and plods into the living room. 'Horse's ass.

the flight back to Washington, D.C., Nixon’s campaign manager, Leonard Hall, told the vice president the Democrats stole the election. They had received reports of voter fraud in a number of key states, including Illinois, Texas, and Missouri. He pressed Nixon to do something about it, maybe even contest the election. Nixon took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to make a hasty decision on something that would divide the nation. No, he’d have to think about that, talk it over with GOP leaders. He didn’t want to be a sore loser.

On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.

French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell, while not writing about reality TV directly, provides an explanation for this genre’s success when he says: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Isn’t this what happens on reality TV? Right before our eyes we see people who are hoping to be called to adventure, to be chosen for a hero’s journey, and to obtain the boon. As we watch and vote for our favorites, we find pieces of ourselves mirrored in the contestants, feeling as if we, too, are on the hero’s journey. While it’s true that all of the finalists can sing or dance, sew or cook, the contestants often move us simply because they don’t seem to know how talented they are. As we watch contestants with self-doubt and raw talent acknowledged by the judges and the voters, we muse to ourselves, “Maybe I don’t know how magnificent I am, either.” If that contestant has been discovered—or chosen—perhaps we can be, too. Even though, in the end, there is only one winner, we are inspired by seeing so many heroes move to the center of their lives, conquering fear and insecurity.

The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance and driven voters to embrace Trump.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

From a raw political standpoint, Trump’s decision to adopt a set of views that offended and alienated minority voters, ugly though it was, turned out well for him. He would soon go further, broadening his attacks to include illegal immigrants. Trump did so at precisely the moment when Republican leaders, led by party chairman Reince Priebus (Trump’s future chief of staff), released an “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s defeat that included a detailed plan for how the party could recover. Its most important recommendation was that Republicans embrace comprehensive immigration reform in order to broaden their appeal to minority voters. In so many words, Republican leaders were telling their rank and file that they needed to be more like Trump during his Apprentice glory days—while Trump was arriving at the opposite conclusion and, with Bannon’s eager encouragement, doing everything he could to build a political movement around white identity politics. A wily

On Election Day, to the surprise of Romney and his backers, Democratic voters turned out in far bigger numbers than the Republicans expected. The Koch network had spent an astounding $407 million at a minimum, most of it from invisible donors.

The last few days have proven to be pivotal in the minds of voters with the recent revelations in reopening the investigation of Secretary Clinton,” it read. “Early polling numbers show declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump,

On August 19, 1934, the great majority of Germany’s registered voters went to the polls and handed Hitler 38 million votes, thereby demonstrating overwhelming approval. With this strong mandate, Adolf Hitler claimed that he was the undisputed Führer of the German people. It was in this way that the German Worker’s Party, GPW, started by Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart in 1919, in the beer gardens of Munich, came to power. The next day, on August 20, 1934, mandatory oaths swearing loyalty to Adolph Hitler were introduced throughout the Reich.... Soldiers of the Armed Forces, including the German Officers’ Corps, swore the following oath of loyalty: “I swear by God this sacred oath: I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time in the fulfillment of this oath.” The following is the Oath of loyalty for Public Officials: “I swear: I shall be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, respect the laws, and fulfill my official duties conscientiously, so help me God.” It is interesting to note that these oaths were pledged to Hitler himself, and not to the Constitution or the German state. Oaths were very seriously taken by members of the German armed forces and were considered to be part of their own code of honor. This put the entire military in a position of servitude, making them the personal instrument of Hitler. In September 1934, at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, Hitler proclaimed that the German way of life would continue on for the next thousand years.

Legal obfuscation and amnesty schemes The UPA government is trying to use every trick of the trade to provide escape routes for black money looters. Take, for example, the complex strategy being adopted to change the colour of money from black to white, with a unique ‘Fair and Lovely’ amnesty recipe. The press reported in 2011 that the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) was “seriously considering” recommending to the government a scheme on the lines of the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) announced in 1996 to bring back black money stashed in tax havens abroad for productive use in India. It is reported that the source of the money will not have to be disclosed, but criminal action will be taken if the money (or the assets) pertain to proceeds of crime. How the two halves of the sentence can be harmonised defies logic. In a democracy, every citizen is entitled to know the character and integrity of every other citizen, lest one day a crook manipulates a constituency of voters and colleagues in his party and occupies the office of prime minister. Concealing vast amounts of money and depriving a poverty-stricken nation of the revenue it badly needs is a criminal offence by itself. How would we find out whether or not one such criminal is already in office, instead of being in Tihar Jail?

The Universe itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy; large liberty of "voting" there, all manner of choice, utmost free-will, but with conditions inexorable and immeasurable annexed to every exercise of the same. A most free commonwealth of "voters;" but with Eternal Justice to preside over it, Eternal Justice enforced by Almighty Power!

In a way, Trump’s mistreatment of the media had done Hillary a favor by freeing her of the decorum of a traditional campaign. But it also meant the reporters who spent their days trying to cover and explain Hillary to the American public never got to bridge, as one reporter who traveled with the first lady in the 1990s put it, the “disconnect between the kind of person you could convey or are in private and amongst us on these trips, so much sense of humor, very warm and engaging in what we see on television or in the news.” How could we communicate Hillary’s “funny, wicked, and wacky” side to voters if we never saw it for ourselves?

We can’t understand what happened in 2016 without confronting the audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin, the unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI, a political press that told voters that my emails were the most important story, and deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture. I know some people don’t want to hear about these things, especially from me. But we have to get this right. The lessons we draw from 2016 could help determine whether we can heal our democracy and protect it in the future, and whether we as citizens can begin to bridge our divides. I want my grandchildren and all future generations to know what really happened. We have a responsibility to history—and to a concerned world—to set the record straight. I also share with you the painful days that followed the election. A lot of people have asked me, “How did you even get out of bed?” Reading the news every morning was like ripping off a scab. Each new revelation and outrage made it worse. It has been maddening to watch our country’s standing in the world plummet and to see Americans live in fear that their health care might be taken away so that the superrich can get a tax cut.

Here, courtesy of Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, is a prime example of how an editorial edge is woven into your "news": This was President Bush's first day at the office, and he did something to quickly please the right flank of his party: he reinstituted an anti-abortion policy that had been in place during his father's term and the Reagan presidency but was lifted during the Clinton years. Rather is telling you in no uncertain terms that President Bush used this important issue to make a political payoff in his first act as president. Compare that to Rather's characterization of Bill Clinton's first day as president: On the anniversary of Roe versus Wade, President Clinton fulfills a promise, supporting abortion rights . . . Today, with the stroke of a pen, President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise to cancel several anti-abortion regulations of the Reagan-Bush years. A cynical player of partisan politics versus a man fulfilling a promise to voters--two very different ways of characterizing men, each of whom was both appeasing a wing of his party and fulfilling a campaign promise. Although I was personally thrilled with Clinton's decisions on abortion rights, I can't pretend, as Dan Rather chose to do, that it was a matter of pure principle. Spin is that simple, that insidious, and a part of your nightly news.

As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.

Congressman Upton insisted that he hadn’t changed his position on environmental issues. But Jeremy Symons, then a senior vice president of the nonpartisan National Wildlife Federation, said that the transformation was “like night and day.” He continued, “In the past the committee majority viewed the Clean Air Act as an effective way to protect the public. Now the committee treats the Clean Air Act and the EPA as if they are the enemy. Voters didn’t ask for this pro-polluter agenda, but the Koch brothers spent their money well and their presence can be felt.” At