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    How does an Obama speechwriter befriend a Joe Rogan fan? Via surfing

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    What do men want? Democrats need to know after their election drubbing by Donald Trump and the “manosphere” last year. They have responded by commissioning “Speaking with American Men”, a strategic plan that will study “the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” in online spaces.News of the two-year $20m project reinforced critics’ view that Democrats have become the party of an aloof, college-educated liberal elite whose pursuit of working class men resembles a Victorian explorer wielding a butterfly net. Which makes the publication of David Litt’s book, It’s Only Drowning, a timely contribution to Democrats’ ongoing post-mortem.Litt is a former senior speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White House Correspondents’ Association dinner monologues. The 38-year-old has written speeches and jokes for athletes, chief executives and philanthropists and was head writer and producer in the Washington office of the comedy studio Funny or Die.It’s Only Drowning, his third book, centres on an improbable friendship that develops between Litt, a Yale-educated liberal with a fear of sharks, and his brother-in-law Matt Kappler, a tattooed truck-driving electrician who listens to podcaster Joe Rogan and never registered to vote.Their chasmic differences in background, education, ideology and lifestyle initially seem unbridgeable but, when Litt asks Kappler to help him learn how to surf, the shared experience provides neutral ground for connection.“What started as a surfing book became a story about basically a will-they won’t-they?, except it’s whether an Obama speechwriter and a Joe Rogan superfan can become friends,” Litt says in an interview at the Guardian’s office in Washington. “Like a lot of Democrats, my natural inclination is to be a little annoying and condescending. I certainly wasn’t doing that when I was the one who desperately needed to learn from him.”View image in fullscreenLitt, who divides his time between Washington and Asbury Park, New Jersey, describes himself as a high-functioning, high-anxiety person who experienced situational depression during the coronavirus pandemic. He had a feeling of overwhelming dread, difficulty getting out of bed and found himself endlessly doomscrolling.His wife Jacqui’s brother, by contrast, seemed to be thriving. Kappler is a guitar player, a motorcycle enthusiast and a daredevil surfer. Litt reflects: “I had always thought of him as a crazy person, and I still do, but he was able to deal with the ups and downs of life in a world that’s on fire in a way that I began to envy.“He did well during the pandemic and he seemed resilient in a way that, to be totally honest, I didn’t. I definitely was not about to get tattoos or try to drive a truck because I would bump into things, but I could see myself trying to surf and that’s what happened.”It would not be easy. At the age of 35, it required developing new muscles and confronting intense fear and humiliation. Still, Litt moved to the Jersey Shore and enlisted Kappler to help with surfing lessons. After months of struggle, he set the ambitious goal of riding a big wave in Hawaii.Surfing became a metaphor for confronting fear, both physical and existential, and an antidote to Litt’s habitual overthinking. He says: “Weirdly, the feeling I get, that sense of dread when a wave is about to crash down right on top of me, is actually somewhat analogous to the feeling I get when reading the news these days. It’s that sense of looming disaster and there’s nothing you can do about it.”And most importantly, Litt came to consider Kappler a friend. “One of the only things more difficult than learning to surf is making a new friend in your 30s, so I feel like I might be even more proud that I was able to accomplish that than riding an overhead wave on the North Shore.”As he tells this story, Litt reflects on America’s deep political and cultural divisions and how they were exacerbated by the pandemic. Differences in taste and lifestyle become “identifiers” declaring political allegiance. Litt admits that, had Kappler been a friend rather than family, he would probably have cut off contact after learning that Kappler refused the Covid shot.“He played electric guitar in a ska band that is a big deal on the Shore; I played ultimate frisbee. He was into death metal and I was into Stephen Sondheim. So we never had anything in common. In the run up to the pandemic all of these differences weren’t always political but then somehow they started to feel like they were telling us what team we were on. It felt like we’d been drafted into opposite sides of the culture war.”Litt does not pretend that there was a Hollywood ending in which he and Kappler found common ground and changed each other’s minds. But he does argue in favour of shared activities that allow for connection and understanding between individuals with differing views.“What we found was this neutral ground. Surfing is a space that is not politically coded and you can talk about something that isn’t one of the gazillion fault lines in our society right now. It’s hard to find those spaces but, for the exact same reason, it’s worth trying.“I heard from a lot of people in the run-up to this book coming out who said, ‘I have a friend or family member where politics is tearing us apart. We can’t talk about anything in the news and how do I convince them?’ What I would say now is talk about something else. Don’t talk about what’s in the news.“Start by looking for that neutral ground and forgetting about this idea of common ground, because the reason it feels like we have no common ground is that we don’t. We just disagree on a lot of important things as a society.”Litt knows that, had Kappler been registered to vote, he would certainly not have done so for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Back in 2016, Kappler said he would have backed either Trump or Bernie Sanders because they were the most entertaining.Litt says: “Truly the biggest divide between us politically is that I think about politics a lot and that’s part of how I define myself. Matt watches the news, he cares about what’s going on in the world, but that’s not his identity. He’s not a political person.“One of the problems that Democrats have right now is we’re very much the party of news junkies and most Americans are not news junkies.”Celebrity politics and cultural influence have moved towards Republicans and the likes of Rogan and Elon Musk, who appeal to anti-establishment sentiment and claim to prioritise common sense over political parties. A new generation of rightwing podcasters and influencers started out as entertainers and latched on to issues later.“Democrats are still lagging.” Litt says. ‘The new media voices that are developing, many of them are great, but they tend to be political first and entertainment second, or politics as entertainment, and so they don’t appeal as much to people who don’t find politics entertaining and those are the voters we’re going to need in ‘28.”Democrats also have a well documented class problem. It has come to be seen by many as the party of Hollywood celebrities and college-educated elites, with a whiff of contempt for blue collar workers in the heartland, summed up by Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”The party’s perceived shift toward identity politics and social justice issues alienated some working class voters who once formed its base. Ahead of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”It turned out to be bad maths. Last November Republicans swept the White House and both chambers of Congress. Trump won 56% of voters without a college degree, compared with 42% who favoured Harris, a shift from 2020 when Trump and Joe Biden were roughly even.Litt points out the homogeneity of Democratic circles and the lack of organic relationships with working-class people, particularly those without college degrees. This disconnect hinders their ability to understand their issues or effectively communicate.Recalling his time volunteering for Harris’s ill-starred election campaign, he says: “I would sometimes be on conference calls and people would talk about a policy or message and say, ‘Do we think this is going to work? Do we think this is going to be effective?’ I would basically say, well, let me go surfing and find out.“Nobody else said, ‘Oh, let me go talk to my working class friend,’ because Democrats often do not have working friends who don’t have college degrees. The people who are in office, and the people who work for those who are in office, almost all are college educated and almost all their friends are college educated.“You have Democrats sit in rooms where literally everyone has a college degree, and they say, how come people without college degrees don’t feel like we’re thinking about them or that we’re welcoming to them? Well, look around the room.”Litt acknowledges that he is writing about a friendship with one other white man, the smallest possible sample size, making it hard to draw sociological conclusions about working class people of colour.But he also notes that Republicans have sought to “repolarise” the country on educational and culture war lines while making race less important in determining how people vote. Polls show that Trump did make big inroads with Latino men and, to a lesser extent, with African American men.Litt says: “I don’t know that race stopped mattering but I do think there was a Democratic view that race mattered so much more than anything else, especially for people who are not white.“What we saw is very clearly no, that’s not true and was maybe not the most empirically based attitude to have. The base of the Democratic party is still Black women but I do think there was some some of that racial depolarisation.”Democrats do have a strong policy agenda for blue collar workers but have failed to communicate it, Litt argues. His friendship with Kappler will not explain everything. But he offers it as a start for a party that somehow allowed Trump – a millionaire businessman who cuts taxes for the rich – to steal its clothes.“If you had asked me three years ago, do you have a lot to learn from your brother-in-law, I would have said not really, and one of the things I had to learn was that’s a deeply obnoxious attitude. I’m still a professional Democrat – I can still be plenty annoying – but I think I am less self-righteous than I used to be. And it turns out life is more fun and you’re more persuasive that way. So why not?” More

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      The genteel, silver-tongued thinker who fathered US conservatism – and paved the way for Trump

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      Back when the “public intellectual” was still a thriving species in America, the conservative writer William F Buckley Jr was one of the most famous – of any political stripe.On the PBS television show Firing Line, which he hosted weekly until 1999, he debated or interviewed people ranging from ardent rightwingers to black nationalists. In between, he edited the magazine National Review, wrote three columns a week, wrote or dictated hundreds of letters a month, and was known to dash off a book while on vacation. He was photographed working at a typewriter in the back of a limousine as a dog looked on. In Aladdin (1992), Robin Williams’s genie does Buckley as one of his impressions.Buckley’s extraordinary energy is captured in a sweeping new biography that also uses its subject to tell a larger story of the American right. “As far as I’m concerned, he invented politics as cultural warfare, and that’s what we’re seeing now,” the writer Sam Tanenhaus said.View image in fullscreenTanenhaus spent nearly three decades researching an authorized biography that was published on Tuesday, titled Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.Buckley is often remembered as the architect of the modern conservative movement. For decades he worked to unite anti-communists, free marketeers and social conservatives into the coalition behind the Reagan revolution. Yet today, almost two decades since Buckley’s death in 2008, the conservative landscape looks different. Free trade is out, economic protectionism is in. The Republican party’s base of support, once the most educated and affluent, is now increasingly working-class.Even as Donald Trump remakes the right in his own image, however, Tanenhaus sees Buckley’s thumbprints.One of the biggest is Trumpism’s suspicion of intellectual elites. Although Buckley was a blue blood and loved the company of artists and literary people, he memorably said that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University”. His first book, in 1951, accused professors of indoctrinating students with liberal and secularist ideas – more than half a century before the Trump administration’s bruising attempts to pressure Ivy League universities into political fealty.Tanenhaus, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, spoke to me by video call from his house in Connecticut. He is a gregarious and funny conversationalist. At one point, he paused a digression about Joan Didion to observe: “Wow. There’s a vulture in my backyard. For God’s sake.” He said he looked forward to reading my piece about him, “unless you’re saying bad stuff about me. Then send it to me and say: ‘My editors made me write this.’”Our free-flowing, one-and-half-hour conversation gave me some sense of why Tanenhaus’s biography took so long to write. It also made me better understand how the conservative Buckley was charmed into the decision to allow a self-described “lifelong unregistered liberal Democrat” unfettered access to his papers, and to give that person the final – or at least most comprehensive – word on his life.The outcome is a lively, balanced and deeply researched book. At more than 1,000 pages, including end matter, the hardback is an engrossing, if occasionally wrist-straining, read.View image in fullscreenTanenhaus was born in 1955, three weeks before Buckley published the first issue of National Review. Writing the book, he said, often felt like a kind of “reconstructive journalism” where he relived history that he had experienced but never considered in its context. As a liberal and an “unobservant, ignorant, secular Jew”, he also had to try to understand someone with whom he had little in common, politically or culturally.Although Buckley’s views on some subjects evolved over time, “he was pretty and firmly entrenched with two foundational ideas,” Tanenhaus said. “One was Catholicism, which was the most important thing in his life. The second was a kind of evangelical capitalism.”Unlike many of his mentors and allies, who tended to be ex-Marxists or ex-liberals, Buckley was not an ideological convert. His father, a wealthy, devoutly Catholic and rightwing oilman from Texas who raised his large family in Connecticut and across Europe, loomed large over his early life.Buckley and his nine siblings were desperate to impress their father. He was loving to his family and also racist, in a “genteel Bourbon” way, and antisemitic, in a more vitriolic way. In 1937, when Buckley was 11, his older siblings burned a cross in front of a Jewish resort. He later recounted the story with embarrassment but argued that his siblings did not understand the gravity of what they were doing.Although Buckley came to make a real effort to purge the right of racist, antisemitic and fringe elements, Tanenhaus thinks his upbringing held sway longer than most people realize. One of the most interesting sections of the book concerns Camden, South Carolina, where Buckley’s parents had a home. In the 1950s the town became notorious for violence against black people and white liberals.View image in fullscreenDuring his research, Tanenhaus discovered that the Buckleys – who were considered by their black domestic workers to be unusually kind relative to the white people of the area – also funded the town’s pro-segregation paper and had ties to a local white supremacist group. After a spate of racist attacks in Camden, Buckley wrote a piece in National Review condemning the violence, but not segregation itself. He defended segregation on the grounds that white people were, for the time being, the culturally “superior” race.Buckley’s views on race began to change in the 1960s. He was horrified by the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls. During his unsuccessful third-party campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, he surprised both conservatives and liberals by endorsing affirmative action. In 1970 he argued that within a decade the United States might have a black president and that this event would be a “welcome tonic”.Despite his patrician manner and distinct accent, Buckley had a savvy understanding of the power of mass media and technology. National Review was never read by a wide audience, but Buckley and his conservative vanguard fully embraced radio, television and other media. A technophile, he was one of the first to adopt MCI mail, an early version of email. Tanenhaus thinks he would thrive in the age of Twitter and podcasts.Yet the current era feels a world away in other respects. For one, Buckley’s politics rarely affected his many friendships. “His best friends were liberals,” Tanenhaus said. He greatly admired Jesse Jackson. It was not strange for Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist, and Timothy Leary, the psychonaut, to stop by his house.Buckley was deeply embarrassed by the notorious 1968 incident in which Gore Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi”, on-air, and Buckley responded by calling Vidal an alcoholic “queer” and threatening to punch him. It was an exception to a code of conduct that Buckley generally tried to live by.“If he became your friend, and then you told him you joined the Communist party, he would say: ‘That is the worst thing you can do, I’m shocked you would do it, but you’re still coming over for dinner tomorrow, right?’” Tanenhaus laughed. “It’s just a different worldview, and we don’t get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.”Being the authorized biographer of a living person entails a special relationship. You become intimately familiar with your subject – perhaps even good friends, as Tanenhaus and his wife did with Buckley and his socialite wife, Pat. Yet you also need critical distance to write honestly.It was impossible to finish the book “while he was still alive”, Tanenhaus said. He realized in retrospect that Buckley’s death was “the only way that I could gain the perspective I needed, the distance from him and the events that he played an important part in, to be able to wrap my arms around them”.He thinks Buckley also understood that a true biography would be a full and frank accounting of his life. “I think that, in some way, he wanted someone to come along and maybe understand things he didn’t understand about himself.”Despite his disagreements with Buckley’s politics, Tanenhaus was ultimately left with a positive assessment of him as a person. “He had a warmth and generosity that are uncommon. When you’re a journalist, part of your business is interacting in some way with the great, and the great always remind you that you’re not one of them. They have no interest in you. They never ask you about yourself. Buckley was not like that.”He is not sure what he would have made of Trump. Buckley was willing to criticize the right, and was an early critic of the Iraq war, Tanenhaus said. Yet “conservatives can always find a way to say: ‘Whatever our side is doing, the other side is worse.’”View image in fullscreenThis is Tanenhaus’s third book about conservatism. I asked what he thinks the left most misunderstands about the right.He instantly responded: “They don’t understand how closely the right has been studying them all these years.” He noted that Buckley surrounded himself with ex-leftists and that he and other conservatives made a point of reading left and liberal books and studying their tactics of political organizing.But that doesn’t seem to go the opposite direction. Leftists and liberals “don’t see that the other side should be listened to, that there’s anything to learn from them. And they think, no matter how few of them there are, that they’re always in the majority.”Buckley once said that his “idea of a counter-revolution is one in which we overturn the view of society that came out of the New Deal”, Tanenhaus said. Today, Trump is aggressively moving, with mixed success, to roll back the federal administrative state – a vestige of Buckley’s vision of unfettered capitalism, even if Trump’s other economic views aren’t exactly Buckley’s.“It would not be far-fetched to say we are now seeing the fulfillment of what he had in mind,” Tanenhaus said. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump has ‘never evolved, which is dangerous’, his niece Mary Trump says

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      Donald Trump has “never evolved” and “isn’t close with anybody”, according to Mary Trump, the US president’s niece and a vocal critic of his business and political career.The daughter of Donald’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr (nicknamed Freddie), Mary Trump told the Hay festival in Wales – where she was discussing her latest book about the Trump family, Who Could Ever Love You – that she no longer has relationships with anyone in her family apart from her daughter.She described herself as “the black sheep of the family”, calling her grandfather, Fred Trump, Donald’s father, “literally a sociopath”, and adding: “Cruelty is a theme in my family.”She explained that much of her understanding of her uncle comes from when she was in her 20s and Donald hired her to ghostwrite his second book.“I can’t say we got closer, because Donald isn’t close with anybody,” she said, but working with him for six months in his office, she got “a little bit more insight”.“He is the only person I’ve ever met who’s never evolved, which is dangerous by the way,” she said. “Never choose as your leader somebody who’s incapable of evolving – that should be one of the lessons we’ve learned, for sure.”She also described the president as “one of the most provincial people I know, and that does not serve us well, at all”.Reading from her book, she described the moment a friend of her father’s, Anna Maria, met Donald for the first time. “When she first encountered Donald, he was a cocky, rude teenager, who was intensely jealous of his older brother, Freddie.“Donald didn’t have any friends, so she felt sorry for him, but whenever they included him, they regretted it. Nobody in Freddie’s circle could bear to be around this arrogant, self-important, humorless kid.“Over the years, Anna Maria watched Donald devolve into an even more arrogant adult with a widening, cruel streak.”In the book she also recounts Donald throwing a baseball at his young nieces and nephews when he was in his 20s and she was eight years old. Her brother bought her a catcher’s mitt for Christmas one year, and she “realised it was probably to protect me from having every bone in my hand broken from Donald throwing a baseball at me as hard as he could”.Mary also told audiences that after Donald’s older sister, Elizabeth, was born, doctors told his mother “that it would be very dangerous for her to have more children” because of her health issues. “She did, and the next one was Donald. About which I will say nothing more,” Mary joked.His mother later became very ill, meaning Donald, “at a very crucial developmental period, did not have his primary caregiver, and the only person left was his dad, the sociopath. So you can imagine how that sort of changed the trajectory of Donald’s life.”Mary is a psychologist whose previous books, Too Much and Never Enough and The Reckoning, also involve her uncle. She distanced herself from him around the time he began his first presidential term in 2017.In 2021, the former president sued her for $100m for giving the New York Times information for its investigation into his finances. The lawsuit sends “a very clear message to me”, she said. “But what if everybody capitulates? Then what? Well, then we lose, and that’s unacceptable.”She added that she does not “understand people who are afraid of Donald, because he’s so pathetic. I would be embarrassed to be afraid of him.” More

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      Original Sin: book on Biden’s health decline reopens Democratic party’s wounds

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      in US Politics

      ‘Protest can shape the world’: Rebecca Solnit on the fight back against Trump

      by

      On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the “Hands Off” protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn’t do anything, because they didn’t have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I’ve heard versions of “no one cares”, “no one is doing anything” and “nothing came of it” for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn’t really looking and sometimes that they don’t recognise impacts that aren’t immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing.For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he’s in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden.Tesla aside, activists sometimes really do have tangible results and even immediate ones. The protests around the world and in Seattle, where we blockaded the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, encouraged the global south nations inside to stand up and refuse a raw deal from the global north and corporations. At that very meeting that very week. It might be the most immediately and obviously effective protest I ever attended, in fortysomething years of attending protests (even if protesting this version of corporate globalisation under the rubric “free trade” is hard to explain during a catastrophic tariff crisis).View image in fullscreenBut that was an exception. Mostly protests, campaigns, boycotts and movements do a lot, but do it in less tangible and direct ways than these. They influence public opinion, make exploitation and destruction and their perpetrators more visible, shift what’s considered acceptable and possible, set new norms or delegitimise old ones. Because politics arises from culture, if culture is our values, beliefs, desires, aspirations shaped by stories, images – and yeah, memes – that then turns into politics as choices and actions that shape the world.If you want to measure impact you need more sophisticated tools and longer timeframes than the many versions of “where’s the payoff for this thing we just did”. Take the Green New Deal, advocated for passionately by the young climate activists in the Sunrise Movement, starting around 2018. The simple story to tell about it is that, as legislation cosponsored by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey, it did not pass. The complex story is that it shifted the frameworks in which we think about climate and economics in consequential ways. In other words, it was very effective, just not directly. It strongly influenced the Biden campaign’s platform in 2020. His administration sought to pass it as Build Back Better and succeeded in doing so with the watered-down but still impactful Inflation Reduction Act, which influenced governments in other countries to amplify their own climate policies. (The Trump administration is dismantling some of it, but some will survive.)The Green New Deal as a proposal and campaign moved us beyond the old jobs-versus-the-economy framing that had plagued environmental activists for decades, making it clear that doing what the climate requires is a jobs-creation programme, and you could care about both. I don’t hear the old framework any more, and one of the hardest things to detect in the department of indirect consequences is the thing that doesn’t happen or the frame that no longer circulates. Jobs v environment is one. Another is the many stereotypes-become-slurs that treated female rape survivors as inherently dishonest and unreliable, deployed to protect countless rapists. This blanket discrediting is not part of the culture the way it was before the feminist insurrections that began in 2012-13. Seeing what’s no longer there or what didn’t happen is also an art, whether it’s seeing the persecution that ceased or the forest that wasn’t cut down.One of the aphorisms I have been coming back to for at least half my lifetime is “everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”, attributed to Einstein and useful for almost everything. Because we get explanations of how things work – big things such as politics, change, history, human nature – that themselves don’t work when they fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, uncertainties and indirect and delayed influences and consequences. It’s like hacking off all the limbs of a tree because you’d rather call it a log or because you haven’t quite figured out what leaves and branches do. Or looking at a tree today and saying it isn’t growing, since it hasn’t visibly changed since yesterday. Which, put that way, sounds infinitely ridiculous and yet in speech – which, ideally, reflects thought – people do it all the time.As I write in my forthcoming essay anthology No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, “It’s not that I have anything against the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward, and the predictable. It’s just that I think much of what we face and endeavour to achieve requires an embrace or at least a recognition of its opposite. So I have chased after the long trajectories of change as both the often forgotten events and ideas leading up to a rupture, a breakthrough, or a revolution, and the often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward. I’ve celebrated how a movement that may not achieve its official goal may nevertheless generate or inspire those indirect consequences that matter sometimes as much or more than the original goal. I’ve also noticed how often a movement is dismissed as having failed during the slow march to victory, when victory comes. So much activism has, on the sidelines, people telling us we can’t win, who routinely vanish if and when we do.”One of the curiosities of American political life is that Republicans refuse to acknowledge the complexities and interconnections as ideology, but are very good at working with them practically, while the opposite is true of the Democrats. Republicans and the far right famously built power from the ground up, getting their people to run for school board and other low-level positions at the state and local level, working hard on winning state legislatures to pass voter-suppression measures that would help Republicans broaden their power even while they narrowed their support. They played the long game, patiently building power, pushing propaganda, recruiting – and of course did so with hugely wealthy foundations and billionaire donors who could afford to underwrite such efforts and provide the stability for such campaigns.View image in fullscreenIn other respects, Republicans deny that everything or anything is connected to everything else, that actions and policies have consequences, that the shape of a life is not entirely up to that individual but is influenced by economic and social forces, that everything exists in relationship. It’s convenient for rightwing ideology to deny the reality of environmental impacts, be it mining and burning fossil fuel or spreading toxins, because acknowledging the impact of individual and corporate actions would justify the regulations and collective responsibilities that are anathema to their deregulated free-enterprise rugged individual ethos. Likewise, it’s convenient to claim that poverty and inequality are the result of individual failure, that the playing field is level and everyone has equal opportunity, because if you acknowledge that discrimination is real – well, discrimination is itself a system, and they prefer to deny systems exist.Democrats on the other hand have long recognised the existence of systems, including the systems that are the environment and climate, as well as the ugly systems of discrimination that have permeated American life such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. But they’re remarkably bad at building political frameworks to address this, failing where Republicans succeed when it comes to the long game of building power from the ground up, being on message, having a long-term strategy and sometimes, it seems, any strategy at all.So we live in an environment of conflicting and confusing information, furthered by the way the mainstream media too often see background and context on what just happened as editorialising and bias, so tend to present facts so stripped of context that only those who are good at building context themselves can find meaning in them. Media outlets routinely play down protest and when they cover it often do so dismissively. Media critic and former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes of the thin coverage of the Hands Off rallies: “Organizers said that more than 100,000 demonstrators came to the protests in both New York and Washington DC. Crowd estimates are always tricky, but that certainly seems like a big story to me.” She points out that for many months news outlets have commented on how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter than in 2017. “But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProtests against Trumpism in 2017, which were probably sneered at and dismissed at the time, are now being used to dismiss 2025 protests. But the most precise calibrators of these protests, Erica Chenoweth and colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium, write: “And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago … In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017.”The Consortium counted 686 protests on 21 January, 2017, with total participation above 3 million, making the Women’s March the biggest one-day protest in US history. Meanwhile more than 1,300 US rallies happened on 5 April this year. This is part of why it’s hard to recognise the impact of such events; they’re so often written out of the story of change. Mostly the story of change we get is that great men hand it down to us, and we should admire and be grateful to them and periodically implore them for more crumbs.This is built into how history narrows down the civil rights movement and all the crucial work done by women into a few great men, into how the decades of dedicated work by the abolitionist movement are written out of the version in which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves out of the blue. It’s built into the superhero movies in which problems are solved by musclebound men deploying violence to definitively defeat evil, when the real superheroes of our time mostly look like scruffy stubborn people who build alliances and networks and movements over years, with an occasional burst of drama in the legislatures, courts and streets (but mostly through stuff that looks like office work, even if it’s administration for liberation). The language of “save the whales/children/country” suggests some kind of finality, and so do the plots of action movies. But evil comes back, so you have to keep defending your reproductive rights, your freedom of speech, your marriage equality, your forests and rivers and climate, even though maintenance is not as exciting as conflict.The phrase “theory of change” has become popular in recent years, as in “what’s your theory of change?” Mine is that categories are leaky and anomalies abound. That change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, that it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences, and that what ends up in the centres of power often begins in the margins and shadows. That stories have profound power and changing the story is often the beginning of changing the world.Something the current crisis in the US demonstrates is that power is rarely as simple as it’s supposed to be. We see those who are supposed to be immensely powerful – captains of industry, prestige law firms, Ivy League universities – cringe and cave in fear while ordinary people (including lawyers and professors) stand on principle and judges mete out the law without intimidation. As for the unpredictability, I find hope in the fact that we’re making the future in the present, and while you can’t predict it with the certainty too many self-anointed prophets seem afflicted with, you can learn a lot from the patterns of the past – if you can remember the past and view events on the scale of those patterns that spread across decades and centuries.Places popular with tourists often put out maps that oversimplify the terrain on the assumption that we visitors are too dumb to contend with the real lay of the land, but those maps often mislead, literally, so you wander into a sketchy neighbourhood or a marsh that’s not on the map. What I’ve tried to do as a writer is give people maps adequate to navigate the rocky, uneven territory of our lives and times. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘100-year timeframe’: how Project 2025 is guiding Trump’s attack on government

      by

      David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.There’s a reason Project 2025 came out so long.“They’re looking at a 100-year timeframe,” Graham said. “They’re looking at things from the New Deal and saying, ‘This is where the government went wrong, and we need to fix these things. We need to change them permanently and reframe what the government does and what its relationship with every American is.’”The New Deal is the name given to the vast expansion of the federal government under Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression and laying the foundation of the modern US state.Project 2025 was published in 2023. As the 2024 election loomed, Democrats raised alarms about its hardline policy recommendations on issues including climate, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive healthcare and more. Incendiary rhetoric raised awareness too. Kevin Roberts, Heritage president and author of the Project 2025 foreword, said he and his allies were “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”, then peppered his own book with images of fire and destruction. In praise of Roberts, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, said it was time to “load the muskets”.To Graham, such bellicose rhetoric was “terrifying” but also, in retrospect, a clear signpost to things to come. “To say that publicly before the election is really a strange public relations choice. It’s such a chilling thing to say. But you know, it told us what they wanted.”Amid controversy, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and its authors. But then he won the election. At the outset of his second term, he duly unleashed slashing cuts to federal staffing and budgets and a barrage of executive orders advancing policies directly linked to Project 2025 or firmly in its spirit.Graham is an award-winning reporter, used to working fast. He started writing The Project “at the very end of November”, weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, “and turned the book in in mid-January”.He wrote the book, he said, because “we the press, we the American public, had talked a lot about Project 2025 during the election, and it felt like it had kind of gone away – but it remained really relevant. And I felt like there was a lot in it that I didn’t understand, and a lot that had been missed.”During the 2024 election, experts did indeed advise that such policy plans for possible administrations have existed for decades but have rarely been enacted. The sheer size of Project 2025 might also have lulled some into a false sense of security. Like many reporters, Graham “had dabbled in parts of it”. Unlike many, he found “it was a different experience to read the whole thing altogether.“I think it is both more radical in some ways than it came across – like, when you’re just reading atomized policies, you don’t get what a social program it is – [but] one of the other things that I think is interesting is how there are ideas that I think are either [only] fairly objectionable or might have widespread appeal, right next to ones that are totally out in right field. You’ll be in the same paragraph or in the same chapter.“And the third thing I think is interesting is the way there are disagreements within the text, either between the authors or between the authors and Donald Trump. Those cleavages within the right I think are worth paying attention to now.”Trump opponents looking for cleavages will not find them in the influential office of management and budget, now directed by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist, advocate of “traumatizing” political enemies, and Project 2025 co-author. The original director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, fell victim to political necessity in 2024, forced out of the Heritage Foundation as Trump came under pressure – but remains a true believer, recently declaring Trump’s actions in office to be beyond his “wildest dreams”.But there is also Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has led Trump’s so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge, in attacking federal agencies and departments with startling speed and recklessness.“This is one of the places I have been most surprised,” Graham said, “because I think the methods that they lay out [in Project 2025] are really important. I thought that an important part of this was going to be how deeply people like Russ Vought had thought about, ‘OK, how can we work within the bounds of the law to achieve these things? How can we rework the bureaucracy?’ And in fact, Musk came in and just blasted right through it and made it a lot easier for them, and a lot faster. I certainly didn’t expect that. It’s not contemplated in the book or in the original document.”Nor are Trump’s beloved tariffs much loved by Project 2025 and its free-trade-loving authors.Graham said: “There are these big differences within Project 2025. The most obvious place is the chapters on tariffs … they [also] disagree with Trump on Ukraine. They’re much more hawkish on Ukraine, and anti-Russia. You have this sort of standard, ‘We stand up for Israel, We oppose Iran,’ sort of thing, but foreign policy is barely mentioned. It’s all about China. And Trump talks the talk on China, but then many of the things he’s doing, like tariffs, which are discussed in Project 2025 but not as a major priority, are alienating the rest of the world, which makes it very hard to take on China.“But then, even something as small as how to handle childcare, you have different people having different views [within Project 2025]. One of the things that jumps out at me is they did a really good job of figuring out how to meld these longstanding social and religious conservative priorities on to Maga. They find places where they can work with Trump.Trump is very interested in talking about trans rights and Democrats, and men are very interested in fighting back much more broadly on gender norms, LGBTQ+ rights, and so … Project 2025 becomes sort of like a tip of the spear to get Trump’s attention. They care about “wokeness”, and DEI, maybe for different reasons than he does, but they’ll attack that, and it gets him onboard.On another key issue of Trump’s second term, Graham sees the White House and the ideologues of Project 2025 much more closely aligned.Project 2025 is “very focused on illegal immigration, but also on legal immigration. Overall, the point is to have fewer people who are born overseas in the US, by whatever means necessary. And so they talk about mass deportation, and they talk about detention centers, but they also talk about reducing the number of visas that people get and trying to … find people who have lied on their citizenship applications, to revoke citizenship, denaturalization.“There are things where you see maybe not a direct correlation but the same spirit. So we see in Project 2025 an argument that we need to crack down on student visas from quote, unquote, unfriendly countries, and use student visas as a sort of tool of political warfare.”Trump may not be implementing Project 2025 word for word but its authors have much to delight them. Conversely, Graham’s book is sprinkled with lines that prompt grim laughter.Consider the case of James Sherk, a Trump adviser on civil service and labor issues in the first term who drafted “Schedule F”, a proposal to reclassify about 50,000 civil service jobs as political, thereby allowing a president to fire such people at will. Under Joe Biden, Schedule F was shelved. Ahead of Trump’s second term, Project 2025 advocated putting it swiftly to use.Last year, Sherk spoke to ProPublica. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap your ability to implement your agenda.”Under Trump, more than 260,000 government workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early.

      The Project is published in the US by Random House More

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      in US Politics

      How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

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      View image in fullscreenSo far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children.A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement’s centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. “The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: ‘Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,’” she said in an interview.View image in fullscreenPersonhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of “law and order” grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement.After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion.Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets.“The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,” Ziegler said. “It’s a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.”State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it’s abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described “abortion abolitionists” have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream “pro-lifers”, “abolitionists” believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers.Neither “pro-lifers” nor “abolitionists” are particularly popular. After Roe’s collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think “a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.”Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos.None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn’t think “abolitionists” are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing “a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think”.“If you don’t worry about what you’re doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,” Ziegler said. “You don’t need to convince most Americans you’re right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.”With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters’ misgivings.The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement’s drift away from democratic norms.View image in fullscreenThis interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people’s rights, anti-abortion leaders “didn’t want to talk about race because they weren’t sure that people of color were persons with rights”, Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination.“I think that’s one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,” Ziegler said of the movement’s co-option of civil rights rhetoric. “It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.”As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restrictions on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF.“I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,” Ziegler said. “There’s an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.” More

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      Go-to author on White House reverses take on Biden and slams former president

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      “Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail,” Chris Whipple wrote in The Fight of His Life, his 2023 book on the 46th president, who was then warming up his re-election bid at the age of 80.In that book, Whipple quoted Bruce Reed, a senior aide, describing a long-distance flight. When others appeared exhausted, Biden was raring to go, Reed said. Biden showed “unbelievable stamina”.Speaking to the Guardian in January 2023, Whipple said Biden’s “inner circle” was “bullish about Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to govern. I never heard any of them express any concern and maybe you would expect that from the inner circle. Many of them will tell you that he has extraordinary endurance, energy.”Put it this way: much has happened since.Obviously, there was that whole 2024 election thing. You know – the one when Biden dropped out after a disastrous debate exposed his decline for all to see. There was also the day in February, before the campaign kicked off, when the special counsel Robert Hur declined to charge Biden with mishandling classified documents, because he found him too addled and sympathetic a prospective defendant.Hur wrote: “He did not remember when he was vice-president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice-president?’) and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘In 2009, am I still vice-president?’) … He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”Whipple, a former CBS producer, has emerged as a go-to author on the White House and those who work there. In The Gatekeepers, he examined the lives of chiefs of staff. Then came The Fight of His Life. With hindsight, Whipple seems to have missed key evidence of Biden’s decline.But Whipple is back with a vengeance. Uncharted, his third book, hits Biden and his aides like a bludgeon. Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew, fares little better: Whipple depicts a candidate who never should have been there, a sentiment repeatedly expressed by senior Democrats.Whipple had access. People talked. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, is a key source – and demonstrates startling cognitive dissonance about Biden’s mental and physical decline. Klain says Biden should have stayed in the race – but also gives an absolutely withering account of debate prep at Camp David.At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, Klain describes Biden as “startled”. Whipple writes: “He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” He fell asleep.“‘We sat around the table,’” says Klain in the book. “‘And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’” Klain, Whipple writes, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US”.Come the debate against Trump, Biden gave perhaps the worst performance of all time. He shuffled, he stared, he made verbal stumbles and gaffes. He handed Trump the win.Klain also tags Biden for skipping a post-debate meeting with progressives in favor of a family photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz.“‘You need to cancel that,’” Klain says he told Biden. “‘You need to stay in Washington. You need to have an aggressive plan to fight and to rally the troops.’” Biden rebuffed him and instead held a Zoom call with the progressives. It went badly.“‘All you guys want to talk about is Gaza … What would you have me do?’” Biden said. “‘I was a progressive before some of you guys were even in Congress.’”How do you remind people you’re old without saying you’re old?Whipple also pays attention to Trump. Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff, and Karl Rove, a veteran of the George W Bush White House, speak on the record. So does Paul Manafort, a campaign manager in 2016, later jailed and pardoned.“Democrats wanted to know why Harris had lost to Trump and his MAGA movement,” Whipple writes. “Susie Wiles wanted to know why Harris and her team had run such a flawed campaign.”Wiles did not view a Trump victory as inevitable. Whipple asks Wiles: “‘Did that mean Harris couldn’t have won?’”Trump’s campaign chair didn’t mince words.“‘We’ll never know,’” she replies, “‘because it didn’t seem like she even tried.’“‘Voters want authenticity … and they didn’t get that from her.’”Leon Panetta, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, echoed Wiles.“‘I thought they were thinking they could tiptoe into the presidency without getting anybody pissed off at them,’” he tells Whipple. “‘Baloney. You’ve got to make the American people understand that you’re tough enough to be president of the United States.’”Rove does take a jab at Trump and Chris LaCivita, the ex-Marine who became a senior adviser. Rove introduced LaCivita to Trump, via the late megadonor Sheldon Adelson, but didn’t think LaCivita would take the gig. “‘I’m surprised because I know what he thinks of Trump,’” Rove tells Whipple. “‘He thinks Trump’s an idiot.’”LaCivita condemned January 6, after which he “liked” a tweet that urged Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment and remove him from power. LaCivita deleted the post – but did not join the second Trump administration.Back in 2023, in The Fight of His Life, Whipple wrote: “Presidents do not give up power lightly.” Andy Card, chief of staff to George W Bush, weighed in: “‘If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying. This applies to presidents, of any age, who are driven by vast reserves of ego and ambition.’”Biden did go – but not voluntarily. In Uncharted, in merciless detail, Whipple shows he should have gone much sooner.

      Uncharted is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      The America I loved is gone

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More