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      Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarized

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      Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarizedIn 2016, I set out to understand why a border wall appealed to so many. I realized Americans are increasingly boxing themselves in – with vast impacts on the way we see the world “The border’s like our back door,” a concrete salesman named Chris told me in January 2017. “You leave it open, and anyone can walk right in.” It was the day of Trump’s presidential inauguration, and we were chatting on the exhibition floor of a trade show in Las Vegas, called World of Concrete. Circular saws, cement mixers, gleaming new trucks – it was an unusual place to talk about the politics of immigration.But the simple promise of a concrete wall between the US and Mexico had flung a business tycoon into the White House, and I wanted to understand what this was about.Chris was a millennial from a small town in western Ohio. With a trim beard and short, sandy hair, he projected an air of casual self-sufficiency. “I don’t really like neighbors,” he quipped, speaking with a dose of wry humor about how far he chose to live from other people.I was struck by the mismatch between the salesman’s genial manner and his suspiciousness, his sense of anyone beyond his home or country as a potential threat. I wondered, as we talked amid a sea of construction equipment, what it would take to build genuine warmth and concern for outsiders, rather than such walls.For the last five years, I’ve crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, pursuing conversation and debate between the coasts and heartland. I set out in 2016 to grasp the appeal of the border wall, the fantasy of sealing off the country with a stark, symbolic barrier. What I learned is that such barricades appeal to many Americans because they resonate with familiar boundaries in their daily lives.What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-maskerRead moreWhile Trump’s presidency has passed, the defensive thinking that drove his ascent remains a pervasive and powerful force. I think of the Gen Xer with a bushy beard and colorful tattoos down the length of his arms, whom I saw hawking a motion sensor lighting system with these words of advice: “I know it sounds cold, but you want to keep people away as best you can.” Or this motto and promise from the home security company ADT: “a line in the sand between your family and an uncertain world.” Time and again, I’ve heard such ideas expressed by Americans I’ve met and spoken with around the country in my job as an anthropologist: businessmen and truck drivers, police officers and media personalities.The give and take of neighbors has long been a foundation for our democracy, philosopher Nancy Rosenblum writes. But cultural and economic forces have worked stark distinctions – insider v outsider, familiar v stranger, safety v threat – deep into the texture of our daily lives. These hard lines and everyday divides fuel our political troubles in ways we don’t always realize.To get to this gated community on Florida’s Treasure Coast, you have to drive through a continuous stretch of walled compounds, everything inside hidden from view by towering hedges and palms. I show my credentials at the guardhouse, and the railway gate swings open. As I drive with the security director past sprawling homes and unnervingly empty streets, Timothy tells me about a residential population – wealthy, mostly white – primed for disaster and desperate for repose.One out of every six American houses in a residential community is secured now by such community walls or fences, and I met Timothy to try to understand why.Residents who live here are mostly seeking psychological assurance, he admitted: “They like us smiling and waving at them.”Contemporary gated communities build on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. Suburban interiors were designed as “escape capsules to enable their independence from the outside world”, architectural historian Andrea Vesentini has shown, built as shelters from the unpredictability of urban life. The pandemic has magnified the appeal of such distance and defense, with more features like security cameras, video doorbells and HEPA air filters built into new houses than ever before.These histories have profoundly reshaped how Americans live in relation to each other, as much as where. So much of everyday life and leisure now takes place in secluded spaces. The front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby that once epitomized American social life have given way to more private gatherings on the backyard deck, or time with the television and other screens indoors. These changes lessen the chance for happenstance conversation with neighbors and strangers.A realtor in Fargo, North Dakota, helped me understand the significance of these shifts. A fit man in his early 60s, Paul had worked in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan real estate market for more than 20 years. He took me one morning to a compact new house in a middle-class subdivision, the smell of fresh paint lingering in the cool air inside.Standing in the living room and looking to the front, I felt enclosed in the space, almost hemmed in: the house was fronted by a three-stall garage and one narrow window on to the street and sidewalk. Turn to the back though, and you were flooded with light from every direction, the rear of the house framed with big panes of glass instead of walls.“Doesn’t it bother people that there aren’t many windows in the front?” I asked Paul. “You can hardly see what’s happening on the street.”“The inside is what they care about,” he replied. “And,” he added, pointing out the sunroom at the rear of the house and the back patio beyond, “living on the back. This is where we engage socially with our neighbors.”The small patio was lodged between other private decks and yards, a place to socialize with others by choice rather than necessity. “This is my space, I’ll engage with who I want, when I want,” the realtor explained. “It’s a bit selfish,” he acknowledged.Whether it comes to the climate emergency or systemic racism, the migrant crisis or the ongoing pandemic, so much turns on whether we can acknowledge and accept the intertwining of our separate lives. But it’s not just our homes that are styled now like defensive fortresses.Over the last decade, imposing vehicles like SUVs and trucks have come to dominate the American car market, far outpacing smaller sedans in sales. These are automobiles designed with aggressive profiles and built as defensive steel cocoons, often marketed as ways to survive an uncertain and even hostile world. As an automotive designer in Los Angeles told me, such vehicles appeal in a society that is “suffering a case of insecurity”.There is a political side to such choices: researchers have found that cities with more sedans than pickup trucks will probably vote Democratic in a presidential election, while those with more pickup trucks will probably vote Republican. But it isn’t simply a matter of signaling partisan affiliation through automotive choice. Vehicles say a lot about what people care most about.Consider an exchange I had one morning in Los Angeles with the driver of a Cadillac Escalade, a few years ago. He was an Asian American dad, like me, and we’d run into each other on the driveway of a cheery and progressive nursery school on the Westside. I’d walked my daughter there that morning; his daughter was buckled into one of the Escalade’s seats. I was struck by how tiny the child looked inside the three-ton vehicle, how challenging it would be for her to clamber down to the ground outside.The hulking white automobile was brand new, still without license plates. Why an Escalade? I asked. “It’s perceived to be safe,” he replied. “You know, more mass.”More mass. The phrase kept playing on my mind as I walked back home. Whose safety was secured by all the vehicular mass hurtling down American roads, and at whose expense?The rise of the SUV in global automotive markets is the second largest cause of increasing carbon emissions over the last decade, more significant than shipping, aviation and heavy industry. And at an everyday scale, there are serious consequences for those who encounter them in collisions.Because of their rigid and heavy frames, SUVs and trucks are far more dangerous than conventional sedans for the pedestrians, cyclists and children at play who share American streets with automobiles. Pedestrian deaths on roadways in the United States have soared by more than 50% over the last decade.Someone in an armored cockpit, someone else on their own two feet: this too is a polarized encounter. Low-income Americans and people of color are much more likely to be struck and killed while walking, which brings home another difficult truth in these developments.Indifference is a privilege. Some can afford to seal themselves off from the world beyond, while those left outside must fend for themselves as best they can.The fortress mindset thrives on suspicion, and the urge to protect oneself can make shared spaces and resources seem more dangerous than they are. Take that necessity for life itself, the water we drink. American consumers now buy an astounding 75 billion disposable bottles of water each year, each a tiny enclosure of an essential resource, a shelter made for one. The bottled water industry has capitalized on widespread unease about the quality of public water supplies in the United States. Meanwhile, as interest and investment in shared public infrastructure lags, people are left with polluted and contaminated water, forced to rely on bottled alternatives.Two years before the pandemic began, I attended a bottled water trade show in Texas. Most everyone walked around with a small disposable bottle in hand, always closed, the little caps screwed back on after every sip. “I don’t drink public water,” people would avow, wrinkling their noses in distaste at the very idea of a drinking fountain. “Someone else’s mouth is on it and over it.”Water fountains were switched off across the country in 2020 when the pandemic struck. But they’d already been disappearing for years, and how many will return remains uncertain. Bottled water is regulated so loosely that its quality is difficult to judge. Yet many Americans have come to believe again in the purity of a resource untouched by the wrong people, a dark contemporary echo of the segregated fountains of the Jim Crow era.At the bottled water trade show, I spoke with a middle-aged white man in a brown suit who worked for a water conditioning company in west Texas. I noticed his habit of crumpling up each disposable bottle into a little ball when it was empty, and I asked him about this gesture.“I like to put things away,” he told me, describing how he’d throw these crinkled balls of plastic into the back of his SUV while he was driving. I imagined them piling up in heaps, a travelling signpost for the mountain of waste that all of us are building together.There’s a curious resonance between this faith in a sealed bottle, and a culture that celebrates the invulnerable body. Americans are often encouraged to imagine their own bodies as armored enclosures, to seal off against the outside world. Think of bottled sports drinks like BodyArmor or BioSteel. “Your body, your fortress,” their taglines read.The coronavirus pandemic has supercharged such ideas, setting off a boom in personal disinfectant products and touchless technology, making it easier to deny the truth that we depend on each other for our wellbeing. The deep resistance to face masks and vaccination in the United States also relies, quite often, on a highly individualized sense of bodily autonomy.I think of a middle-aged white businessman from Michigan with whom I’ve debated the pandemic for many months. A staunch libertarian, he considers compulsory public health precautions as tantamount to slavery. They deny, he says, “my feelings, my rights, my personal body”.Regular exposure to different points of view could complicate such diehard convictions. But our fractured media have deepened the existing fissures of American society.Walls at home and on the road, shielding the body from exposure and the mind from uncomfortable ideas: these interlocking divides make it more difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously; harder to acknowledge the needs of strangers, to trust their motives and empathize with their struggles. In an atomized society, others become phantoms all too easily, grist for the mill of resentment and mistrust.There’s a deep and pernicious history at work here. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have inflamed the prejudice against outgroups, bolstering stereotypes, as the political scientist Ryan Enos and others have shown. When such divisions are reproduced at an everyday scale, the gulf between self and other widens even further, and everyone becomes a potential outsider.But this isn’t all that is happening, or could yet happen.Around the country in 2020, the pandemic spurred a return to socializing with neighbors on front yards and porches. Cities and towns have carved out new places for walking, biking and outdoor life, new ways of sharing public space with people, known and unknown. It remains to be seen whether these are temporary adjustments or more enduring experiments.Movements for mutual aid, racial justice and cultural solidarity have also brought Americans together, spurring more radical commitments to collective care-taking, redrawing the line between stranger and kin. The vitality of such movements depends on adequate space and support. Calls abound to redesign our personal and public spaces for conviviality rather than isolation. Commons, parks and open streetscapes; living quarters and resources arranged to encourage social awareness, not solipsism; communication platforms that nurture contrary lines of thought: these spaces can nurture the capacity to live and thrive alongside others unlike oneself, working against the tendency to reject and retreat.Our feelings for others are structural realities as much as personal qualities. In a society built on walls of indifference, empathy will remain an elusive hope. For “the death of the heart” is one of the most tragic consequences of segregation, as James Baldwin observed: “You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall.”TopicsLife and styleTrump administrationVaccines and immunisationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Let’s go Brandon’ Santa Tracker caller insists he meant no disrespect to Biden

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      ‘Let’s go Brandon’ Santa Tracker caller insists he meant no disrespect to BidenJared Schmeck, 35, tells Oregonian he has ‘nothing against’ president to whom he repeated ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ rightwing meme The caller who ended a conversation with Joe Biden with the rightwing meme “Let’s go Brandon” – which means “fuck Joe Biden” – has insisted he was joking and meant no disrespect to the president.Caller tells Joe Biden ‘Let’s go Brandon’ during White House Christmas eventRead more“At the end of the day I have nothing against Mr Biden,” Jared Schmeck, 35, told the Oregonian newspaper. “But I am frustrated because I think he can be doing a better job. I mean no disrespect to him.”Schmeck, from Central Point, also said he was not a “Trumper” but rather a “free-thinking American and follower of Jesus Christ”.On Christmas Eve, the president and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, took calls to the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa Tracker, which each year purports to follow the progress of Santa and his reindeer.A traditional duty for American presidents, in 2018 it was nearly upended when Donald Trump told a seven-year-old belief in Santa Claus was “marginal” at that age.Biden and Schmeck discussed presents Schmeck’s four children were hoping to receive, and how one, Hunter, shared a name with the president’s son and grandson. Schmeck said he was hoping for a “quiet night”.Biden sad: “Lots of luck, dad.”All on the call laughed.At the end of the call, Schmeck said: “Merry Christmas and Let’s go Brandon.”“Let’s go Brandon, I agree,” Biden said, as his wife winced.Biden also said: “By the way are you in Oregon? Where’s your home?”But the call was disconnected.“Let’s go Brandon” originated in an interview with a racing car driver by a TV reporter who may have misheard a crowd’s obscene chant.It has flourished in rightwing and pro-Trump circles – even being promoted by Republican congressmen and the Texas senator Ted Cruz.Schmeck and his wife promoted the remark on social media. But they met with a tide of opprobrium, including a tweet in which the California congressman Eric Swalwell pointed to Biden’s painful personal history.“I refuse to believe we are this indecent as people,” the Democrat wrote. “Not on Christmas Eve. And not to a person who lost his wife and daughter at Christmastime. We are better than this. Be kind and Merry Christmas.”Biden commemorates 49th anniversary of crash that killed his first wifeRead moreSchmeck, a former police officer, told the Oregonian he was “being attacked for utilising my freedom of speech”.He also said he had received some potentially threatening phone calls of his own.“I understand there is a vulgar meaning to ‘Lets go Brandon’ but I’m not that simple-minded, no matter how I feel about him,” Schmeck said.“[Biden] seems likes he’s a cordial guy. There’s no animosity or anything like that. It was merely just an innocent jest to also express my God-given right to express my frustrations in a joking manner.”Schmeck said subjects stoking those frustrations with Biden included vaccine mandates and supply chain problems.He also insisted: “I love him just like I love any other brother or sister.”TopicsJoe BidenChristmasUS politicsOregonnewsReuse this content More

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      Lara Trump claims pricier turkeys are a liberal plot against Thanksgiving

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      Lara Trump claims pricier turkeys are a liberal plot against ThanksgivingEx-president’s daughter-in-law tells Fox News leftwing Americans ‘don’t want us to have any shared traditions’ Lara Trump, the Fox News contributor and wife of Eric Trump, has bizarrely claimed that the rising cost of the Thanksgiving turkey is part of a liberal plot to “chip away” at American traditions.During a discussion on Fox News about inflation and its impact on Thanksgiving-related purchases, the former president’s daughter-in law claimed leftwing Americans “want to fundamentally transform America” and were using the humble Thanksgiving turkey as a vehicle for their nefarious plot.Yes, there will be enough turkeys for Thanksgiving – at a priceRead more“Well, how do you that? You have to change America from the inside-out. You have to take away our traditions. So it might seem a little funny and a little ridiculous. ‘Oh, don’t have a turkey, then people won’t come over.’”In the exchange with the Fox host Pete Hegseth, Trump was responding to comments made by the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, that inflation had pushed costs of the traditional Thanksgiving bird to about a dollar more for a 20lb bird.“It all goes to fundamentally transforming this country, and the way you do that is you make sure that we have no commonality whatsoever, no traditions as Americans whatsoever,” she said. “You start chipping away at that, and they don’t care that Thanksgiving costs a lot more.”A battle over turkey inflation has been brewing for weeks, with conservatives accusing liberals of attempting to quash holidays, including Halloween, as part of an effort “to divide Americans up”.“They don’t want us to have any common ground. They don’t want us to have any shared traditions like Thanksgiving. A lot of places last month actually did away with Halloween because they wanted to be inclusive of the people that didn’t celebrate Halloween,” Trump added.Last week, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) warned that costs of the traditional turkey feast has risen 14% over the past year. The cost increase, up from an average of $46.90 for a family group of 10 last year to $53.31 in 2021, works out at $6 a person.Within the overall 6.6% increase in the cost of the family sit-down, including stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a veggie tray, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and coffee and milk, the cost of the bird has increased more than any other factor – 24%.At the same time, Butterball, the North Carolina poultry giant that produces more than 1bn pounds of turkey each year, told the Guardian that it had been preparing for this Thanksgiving a year in advance and prices “remain roughly the same as previous years, and turkey is one of the most economical parts of the Thanksgiving meal”.But the tradition of a turkey dinner is under pressure from some other quarters, with some questioning why it is necessary for millions of turkeys to be slaughtered. In a punchy essay for the Cut, food writer Mia Mercado argued that side dishes are the true stars of the holiday sit-down.“I’m coming for your precious holiday bird. Turkey is not welcome at my Thanksgiving,” Mercado wrote.TopicsThanksgivingUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t want people discussing her clothes – she could distract them by communicating | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t want people discussing her clothes – she could distract them by communicatingArwa MahdawiThe Arizona senator’s flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has inspired headlines and intrigue The Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who memorably posted a photo of herself wearing a ring that said “Fuck Off”, thinks it is offensive that the media keeps discussing her sartorial choices. Sinema has become a household name in recent months because of her resistance to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, but her flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has also helped keep the senator in the news. She’s inspired headlines such as Kyrsten Sinema’s Style Keeps Us Guessing (The New York Times) and Take note, AOC – Kyrsten Sinema’s bad style actually makes a statement (The New York Post).“It’s very inappropriate,” Sinema told Politico on Wednesday. “I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business. It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreIt doesn’t matter whether you’re a senator or a schoolkid, female clothing is unfairly policed. Professional women often find themselves getting scrutinized for their fashion choices in ways that their male counterparts are not. But does that mean, as Sinema seems to be suggesting, that it is automatically sexist or inappropriate to comment on what a female politician is wearing? Of course not. Fashion has always been used to make political statements and there are plenty of examples where a woman’s clothing or appearance is a legitimate news story. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as congresswoman, for example, she wore all-white to honour the suffragettes and Shirley Chisholm. In this instance, she was very much dressing for someone else.Style can have substance. One of the most famous examples of this is Madeleine Albright who used jewelry to communicate her views when she was secretary of state. “I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal,” Albright has said. “While President George HW Bush had been known for saying ‘Read my lips’, I began urging colleagues and reporters to ‘Read my pins.’”Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters, hasn’t explicitly urged anyone to “read her pins”, but it often seems like she wants people to pay attention to her wardrobe. Last year she wore a bright purple wig on the Senate floor; after voting she pointed at her wig, just to make sure everyone knew it was her. “Kyrsten is continuing to call attention to the need for all of us to stay home as much as possible and practice social distancing – which she is diligently practicing, including from her hair salon,” her spokeswoman later said. So are her fashion choices no one’s business, as she told Politico, or is she using them to make a political statement? I’m confused.But that’s the Sinema effect: she’s the former Green party-aligned activist who ran on a progressive policy platform then, as soon as she got into power, became one of the biggest roadblocks to getting any progressive policies passed. She’s nominally a Democrat, but is so chummy with the GOP that the Republican senator John Cornyn has said he “would be surprised if Republicans tried to unseat” Sinema in 2024. (He’s since walked that back a little.) She’s nothing if not inconsistent.One reason that so much attention is paid to the senator’s clothes is that people are desperate to understand what (if anything) she stands for, and clothes seem to be one of the main ways she expresses herself. Sinema seems to have forgotten that she is a public servant and that part of her job is communicating with the people she represents. She doesn’t hold public events for her Arizona constituents; she doesn’t communicate with the local progressive groups who got her elected or even her previous allies; she rarely gives interviews and, when she does speak to the press, says little of substance. The New York Times has described her as “one of the most elusive senators on Capitol Hill”; the Politico piece noted that “even after an extended interview, the first-term Democrat holds onto the air of mystery that’s become a signature part of her political brand”.Sinema owes no one an explanation for how she dresses, but there are plenty of other things she owes us all an explanation for. Like whether all the money big pharma has been sending her way has anything to do with her U-turn on drug prices. Sinema campaigned on lowering drug prices and making healthcare more affordable in her 2018 Senate race; as a senator she had the opportunity to help Biden do just that but instead was instrumental in massively watering down drug pricing reforms. She hasn’t given the public any details regarding this shift – just as she hasn’t given the public any meaningful details on why she is raking in so much money from multilevel marketing businesses (often criticized as pyramid schemes). If Sinema wants people to focus on her work instead of her wigs, then maybe she should remember who she is supposed to be working for. If Sinema starts providing much-needed explanations about what she stands for, there might be rather less talk about the thigh-high boots she’s standing in.TopicsFashionArizonaUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      We need to discuss the word ‘woke’

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      OpinionLife and styleWhat does the word ‘woke’ even mean? We asked our panelistsMalaika Jabali, Laura Kipnis, Rebecca Solnit, Bhaskar Sunkara, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zaid Jilani and Derecka PurnellAOC and James Carville just got into a spat over the word. But what does it actually mean? Tue 9 Nov 2021 10.08 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 12.51 ESTMalaika Jabali: ‘Woke has become distorted beyond recognition’It’s mostly people who don’t understand the original connotation of “woke” who still say woke. They can have it. Whether we’re talking about “critical race theory” from Black scholars, “identity politics” from Black feminists, or “woke” from Black slang, terms indigenous to our way of thinking or advocating get co-opted and distorted beyond recognition in mainstream society.Woke was another way to say “conscious”: having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Amid police killings in that “post-racial” society, these myths became untenable.Slang is organic. It arrives from particular conditions. There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. And just as “woke” evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. And others will continue to co-opt and distort.
      Malaika Jabali is the senior news and politics editor at Essence Magazine
      Laura Kipnis: ‘Wokeness is about style, not substance’The term “woke” wasn’t around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker – the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy “wokeness” against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude.The instinct is that something’s going on with you, the rebuker, that you can’t see in yourself; all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. Excessive. “Woke” is a one-word hermeneutics of suspicion, shorthand for the sort of characterology Maugham was performing, dissecting a fulminator’s self-relation and self-delusions.I believe it’s more useful as applied to political style than political substance, however: I can agree with the woke on politics – I’m for social justice too! – though I may be warier about righteous vanguards and missionary zeal.Mr Davidson says things like: “If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast in to the flames,” referring to the South Sea Islanders he and his wife mean to convert. “We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions,” says she, his equal in uprightness. Note the punitive rigidity underpinning the “good works”, the authoritarian streak, the self-congratulatory religiosity. Compare to your Twitter feed.
      Laura Kipnis is a writer. Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, will be out in February
      Rebecca Solnit: ‘Woke was kidnapped and has died’Once upon a time, the past tense of “wake” left its life as a verb and became an adjective of sorts, a term for describing the quality of having awakened, especially to injustice and racism. Like other vernacular words in the English language, Woke’s youth was among young Black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives. They were often angry at words, especially new words, most particularly words that disturbed their rest – awakened them, you could say – and Woke was such a word.This fairy tale ends badly. Rather than kill Woke, they tried to turn him into a zombie mercenary sent out to sneer at those who were concerned about racism and other injustices. This backfired and “woke” became a marker of the not-OK Boomer, a bilious word whose meaning was more in who said it than in what it meant or mocked. In other words, Woke died. Cool young people were not sad that Woke was dead, because he was no longer their word, and mean old people were not sad because they did not know he was dead. The end.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Language on the left can be a problem’To be “woke” once meant to be alert to the continued realities of oppression, particularly the oppression faced by Black Americans. But today, its meaning has shifted. To be “woke” is to lack urgency about building the coalitions that can win over working-class people and actually redistribute money and power to the oppressed.This isn’t to say that progressives have to avoid questions of social justice to win a mythically conservative working-class, but that we need to acknowledge the reality that working-class people of all races want basically the same things: good jobs, secure housing, dependable health care, and the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Framing universal concerns with identity-focused messaging or language stolen straight from academia is a huge mistake.James Carville absolutely has a point when he talks about Democratic party messaging being too far removed from ordinary voters — including the party’s base of black and brown voters. But he’s quick to conflate unpopular rhetoric with popular demands like Medicare for All pushed by the figures he maligns like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders.Our language on some parts of the Left is a problem. But that’s an easier problem to fix than the fact that Carville and Clintonite Democrats have lost the trust of millions of Americans with their defense of elite interest and decades of unpopular policies. Progressive have a program that can win — we now just need the right way to communicate it and new approaches to organizing people around their most pressing economic concerns.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor of Jacobin and a Guardian US columnist
      Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Woke is not a viable descriptor’Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. “Woke” is not, and has not been for some time now, a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains interested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber.The term has been co-opted and diluted of meaning by lazy ideologues and bad-faith actors on the right, which is a shame, since it’s more poetic and evocative than any pithy substitute I can think of.The challenge for anyone interested in something deeper than culture-war point scoring is to develop new language that is specific enough to persuade those who don’t already agree to consider the same old questions from new angles.Fairly or not, “woke” and “wokeness” now overwhelmingly signal that you’re not fundamentally interested in that rhetorical labor, and those who need the most convincing give themselves permission to stop paying attention.
      Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White. His next book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf
      Zaid Jilani: ‘You’re either with us or against us’The word woke loosely refers to a social media-fueled, leftwing political ideology that emerged in the English-speaking world in the early 2010s. The term is derived from the state of being awake to or conscious of structural inequalities in society and being hyper-aware of one’s own role in those inequalities. Someone who is woke is constantly inspecting every institution in society, looking for the presence of racism, sexism, and other forms of pervasive prejudice.What separates someone who is woke from someone who is merely progressive is not only this vigilance and awareness but a fervent belief that everyone must be enlisted into their social causes at all times and that the end justifies the means when battling injustice.Unlike traditional liberals, woke Americans place very little stake in value-neutral norms like freedom of speech and non-discrimination. As the antiracist activist Ibram Kendi says, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Kendi also informs us that you can only be racist or anti-racist, there is no middle ground, echoing former president George W Bush’s instruction that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.
      Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the Intercept and the Center for American Progress
      Derecka Purnell: ‘You have to wake people up – then you get action’From street corners to kitchen tables, friends and I have laughed and shouted each other down about the state of Black America. We argue about whether our people are “asleep” – unaware of, uninterested in, unconcerned with the violence that white people inflict upon us. Such violence can be found in demeaning interpersonal interactions with individual white people, and in the structural white supremacist violence in our housing, hospitals, jobs and schools.If “sleep” prevents us from collectively resisting this savagery, then one must remember Malcolm X’s message: “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.”Political expressions derived from Black activism, including “stay woke”, “Hotep”, “Black Lives Matter”, have strange careers. Like our heroes, they are lauded, branded, dehistoricized, co-opted and caricatured. For example, the Democratic strategist James Carville bastardizes “wokeness” as a “stupid”, inflexible commitment to ideas that seek to drastically improve society. His usage robs the term of its value to make us more politically aware and active on our terms. Why? James Baldwin explains that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” This rage threatens the status quo, what Carville and other wealthy, politically powerful people fight to protect.Ironically, Carville’s condemnation is exactly why Black people continue to tell each other to stay woke: elite white actors and institutions benefit from exploiting Black votes, activism and culture while telling us to bury our grievances about their violence. It’s how the Democratic party scribbles “Black Lives Matter” on banners for their conventions yet give more money to the police who kill Black people quickly.I suspect that, like his rightwing counterparts who are antagonistic to “critical race theory” and “white privilege”, Carville refuses to learn why Black people historically use wokeness to inspire our activism.I suggest he starts with Langston Hughes: “Negroes Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind. Beware the day They change their minds!” Or Malcolm X: “… there will come a time when black people wake up and become intellectually independent enough to think for themselves … this type of thinking also brings an end to the brutality inflicted upon black people by white people and it is the only thing that will bring an end to it. No federal court, state court, or city court will.”
      Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
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      I’m a gig worker with zero parental leave. Even four weeks off would make a huge difference

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      Parents and parentingI’m a gig worker with zero parental leave. Even four weeks off would make a huge differenceAs US politicians argue over paid time off for parents, workers like me are forced to keep working while caring for children Andrew Lawrence@by_drewMon 8 Nov 2021 06.00 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Nov 2021 12.21 ESTNine months ago I was not yet a bleary-eyed dad juggling work and two baby boys, but I did know a second baby was imminent. What should’ve been a happy milestone was quickly blunted by a boomeranging lament – that there would be no taking any paid parental leave for me, a gig worker.When my first was born, just before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer in the throes of an MFA program. My wife decided it was more cost-effective to stay home with our son than return to work; soon after Covid forced everyone inside, local daycare options vanished.And even though our son was thriving in preschool and my work wasn’t drastically affected by stay-at-home precautions, a second child – blessing and all – was still a nervous endeavor that was going to demand so much more of me. Still, for all of my agita about the challenge ahead, I was still well equipped. I write from anywhere (the kid’s room, the car), keep odd hours and that flexibility meshes well with diaper changes, school runs and bedtime stories. I can stay on the grind and contribute at home. I’m fortunate, sure, but I’m still killing myself to live. And it’s not just me.Working American parents are stretched thinner than ever. In the past half-century the share of working moms has jumped from 51% to 72%, according to Pew Research; almost half of two-parent families include two full-time working parents. And yet despite this trend toward balanced parenting the US remains the glaring exception among 41 resourceful countries that offer a national paid parental leave mandate. A 2019 congressional survey estimated 16% of private-sector workers qualified for family leave, and even then a recent Ball State University study found that only 5% of new dads take two or more weeks of leave. The figures are even more discouraging when you zero in on race. And yet there’s no question that part-time workers – 11% of whom have access to family leave, according to the Department of Labor – have it hardest. In a country that is increasingly pivoting toward a gig economy, this patchy social safety net should be an acute concern.Only nine states and Washington DC mandate paternity leave – and even then it isn’t paid. The Family and Medical Leave Act gives parents unpaid leave for public agency workers and employees who have worked at least one year at private companies with at least 50 employees. That’s even as the benefits of paid leave have been well established for decades – most obviously in kids who grow up to be happy and self-assured. But paid family leave is good for the economy too, as workers with access are much more likely to return to their jobs and strengthen the overall labor force.You’d think a president whose origin story derives from his being there for his kids after his wife and infant daughter were tragically killed in a car accident would have an easier time making a case for paid family leave. But it had been a sticking point in Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, with the terms going from 12 weeks to four weeks to out entirely (for Dino Senator Joe Manchin) to back in the fold when the bill narrowly survived a House vote last Friday. The haggling persisted even as Ball State researchers also found that 86% Americans supported some form of paid family leave, with participants on average pushing for 13 months off. When the Atlanta Braves utility player Ehire Adrianza took paternity leave before game six of the World Series, Braves fans mostly cheered – probably because it didn’t cost them the championship.Of course some will find demands for paid family leave laughable, especially coming from a parent who didn’t push. Last month Joe Lonsdale, a smirking tech venture capitalist and father of three, gaslit the Twitterverse after pronouncing any prominent man who takes six months off with his newborn was “a loser”. It was a not-so-subtle jab at the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who continues to draw harsh criticism for exploiting the 12 weeks of paid parental leave he receives from the federal government after he and his partner, Chasten, welcomed twins in September. “This idea that both parents should get maternity and paternity leave at the same time is a little weird,” quipped Joe Rogan, also a father of three, on a recent podcast episode.Allow Instagram content?This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.Allow and continueBut then again that figures. Rogan just scored a $100m deal from Spotify – which, incidentally, offers its employees six months of paid parental leave regardless of gender. (“And we strongly urge you to take it,” the company tells prospective workers.) Lonsdale and Rogan’s considerable fortunes don’t just buy home help on demand. (Tellingly, Ball State researchers found high-income-earning fathers were most likely to take leave.) It assumes not just that moms must bear the majority of infant caregiving, but also that they don’t need or aren’t deserving of undivided physical or emotional postpartum support. It assumes that same-sex parents can’t be overwhelmed, too. And it assumes childbirth to be a fairly straightforward affair.It dismisses the mounting challenges for women who choose to start their families after 35 (the start line for “geriatric” pregnancies), and altogether overlooks the childbirthing risks for black women – who are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Beyoncé, Serena Williams and Allyson Felix have been candid about their struggles. Meghan Markle, who has been just as open about her own pregnancy trials, made personal appeals to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Given the broad, bipartisan public support for paid family leave, it’s especially galling that pro-choice championing, family values-espousing conservatives and progressive Democrats were so obstinate about this. Even four paid weeks off makes a massive difference for workers like me. My wife and I committed to a home delivery. As we inched closer to the due date I promised to begin winding down my workload, but as a creative contractor running a small business, that’s easier said than done – and then not done at all when work got really nuts. The further we sailed past our due date, the more the frustration built. Ten days later I was finally forced to hit the pause button when the baby arrived and was immediately rushed to the hospital. While he lay in a NICU bed, there was still a toddler back home who’d be waking up any minute expecting a wardrobe change and a hot breakfast. If it weren’t for family rushing in from out of state and the profound generosity of so many friends and neighbors, I don’t know how we’d have made it through. Finally, just before Halloween, we brought the baby home to a hero’s welcome; his brother, dressed as Iron Man with hands outstretched, shouting “Gimme!” A baby in the hospital, Tony Stark back home, pets to feed, dishes to wash – this is a heaping plate in the best of times, let alone with the extra pressure of urgent work deadlines. But for the moment gig workers and small business owners who survive by eating what they kill have no choice but to press ahead with their jobs and react to the new additions to the family as they come. Now comes the hard part: reconfiguring routines, redrawing responsibilities, reckoning with the increased diaper flow, setting up the rest of the nursery – when all I’d rather do is take a nap. In a world where paid family leave is the norm it’s past the time the US did better by its working parents. TopicsParents and parentingFamilyUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Springsteen and Obama on friendship and fathers: ‘You have to turn your ghosts into ancestors’

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      Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen discuss their dads, their unlikely friendship, and second careers – as podcast hosts Sat 23 Oct 2021 04.00 EDTPresident Barack ObamaGood conversations don’t follow a script. Like a good song, they’re full of surprises, improvisations, detours. They may be grounded in a specific time and place, reflecting your state of mind and the current state of the world. But the best conversations also have a timeless quality, taking you back into the realm of memory, propelling you forward toward your hopes and dreams. Sharing stories reminds you that you’re not alone – and maybe helps you understand yourself a little bit better.When Bruce and I first sat down in the summer of 2020 to record Renegades: Born in the USA, we didn’t know how our conversations would turn out. What I did know was that Bruce was a great storyteller, a bard of the American experience – and that we both had a lot on our minds, including some fundamental questions about the troubling turn our country had taken. A historic pandemic showed no signs of abating. Americans everywhere were out of work. Millions had just taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, and the then occupant of the White House seemed intent not on bringing people together but on tearing down some of the basic values and institutional foundations of our democracy.Almost a year later, the world looks a shade brighter. But for all the change we’ve experienced as a nation and in our own lives since Bruce and I first sat down together, the underlying conditions that animated our conversation haven’t gone away. And in fact, since the podcast was released, both of us have heard from folks from every state and every walk of life who’ve reached out to say that something in what they heard resonated with them, whether it was the imprint our fathers left on us; the awkwardness, sadness, anger and occasional moments of grace that have arisen as we navigate America’s racial divide; or the joy and redemption that our respective families have given us. People told us that listening to us talk made them think about their own childhoods. Their own dads. Their own home towns.Bruce SpringsteenWhen President Obama suggested we do a podcast together, my first thought was: “OK, I’m a high school graduate from Freehold, New Jersey, who plays the guitar … What’s wrong with this picture?” My wife Patti said: “Are you insane?! Do it! People would love to hear your conversations!”The president and I had spent some time together since we met on the campaign trail in 08. That time included some long, telling conversations. These were the kind of talks where you speak from the heart and walk away with a real understanding of the way your friend thinks and feels. You have a picture of the way he sees himself and his world.So I took Patti’s advice and followed the president’s generous lead, and before we knew it we were sitting in my New Jersey studio, riffing off each other like good musicians.There were serious conversations about the fate of the country, the fortunes of its citizens, and the destructive, ugly, corrupt forces at play that would like to take it all down. This is a time of vigilance when who we are is being seriously tested. We found a lot in common. The president is funny and an easy guy to be around. He’ll go out of his way to make you feel comfortable, as he did for me so that I might have the confidence to sit across the table from him. At the end of the day we recognised our similarities in the moral shape of our lives. It was the presence of a promise, a code we strive to live by. Honesty, fidelity, a forthrightness about who we are and what our goals and ideas are, a dedication to the American idea and an abiding love for the country that made us.We are both creatures stamped Born in the USA. Guided by our families, our deep friendships and the moral compass inherent in our nation’s history, we press forward, guarding the best of us while retaining a compassionate eye for the struggles of our still young nation.My father’s houseBruce Springsteen and Barack Obama talk about the impression their fathers made on their lives and their concept of manhoodSpringsteen From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered a loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was a part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awful hard time.Obama It is. It is central to how people define themselves in the sense of self-worth. For all the changes that have happened in America, when it comes to “What does it mean to be a man?”, I still see that same confusion, and the same limited measures of manliness today, as I had back then. And that’s true, whether you’re talking about African American boys or white boys. They don’t have rituals, road maps and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.I talk to my daughters’ friends about boys growing up, and so much of popular culture tells them that the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest …Springsteen And violence.Obama And violence. Those are the three things. Violence, if it’s healthy at least, is subsumed into sports. Later, you add to that definition: making money. How much money can you make? And there are some qualities of the traditional American male that are absolutely worthy of praise and worthy of emulating. That sense of responsibility, meaning you’re willing to do hard things and make some sacrifices for your family or for future generations. But there is a bunch of stuff in there that we did not reckon with, which now you’re seeing with #MeToo, with women still seeking equal pay, with what we’re still dealing with in terms of domestic abuse and violence. There was never a full reckoning of who our dads were, what they had in them, how we have to understand that and talk about that. What lessons we should learn from it. All that kind of got buried.Springsteen Yeah, but we sort of ended up being just 60s versions of our dads, carrying all the same sexism.Obama You don’t show emotion, you don’t talk too much about how you’re feeling: your fears, your doubts, your disappointments. You project a general “I’ve got this”.Springsteen Now, I had that tempered by having a father who was pretty seriously mentally ill, and so in high school I began to become very aware of his weaknesses even though, outwardly, he presented as kind of a bullish guy who totally conformed to that standard archetype. Things went pretty wrong in the last years of high school and in the last years that I lived with him at our house. There was something in his illness or in who he was that involved a tremendous denying of his family ties. I always remember him complaining that if he hadn’t had a family he would’ve been able to take a certain job and go on the road. It was a missed opportunity. And he sat there over that six-pack of beers night after night after night after night and that was his answer to it all, you know? So we felt guilt. And that was my entire picture of masculinity until I was way into my 30s, when I began to sort it out myself because I couldn’t establish and hold a relationship; I was embarrassed simply having a woman at my side. I just couldn’t find a life with the information that he’d left me, and I was trying to over and over again.All the early years I was with Patti, if we were in public I was very, very anxious. I could never sort that through, and I realised: “Well, yeah, these are the signals I got when I was very young: that a family doesn’t strengthen you, it weakens you. It takes away your opportunity. It takes away your manhood.” And this is what I carried with me for a long, long time. I lived in fear of that neutering, and so that meant I lived without the love, without the companionship, without a home. And you have your little bag of clothes and you get on that road and you just go from one place to the next.And you don’t notice it when you’re in your 20s. But, right around 30, something didn’t feel quite right. Did you have to deal with that at all?Obama So there’s some stuff that’s in common and then there’s stuff that tracks a little differently. So my father leaves when I’m two. And I don’t see him until I’m 10, when he comes to visit for a month in Hawaii.Springsteen What brought him to visit you eight years after he left?Obama So the story is that my father grows up in a small village in the north-western corner of Kenya. And he goes from herding goats to getting on a jet plane and flying to Hawaii and travelling to Harvard, and suddenly he’s an economist. And in that leap from living in a really rural, agricultural society to suddenly trying to pretend he’s this sophisticated man about town, something was lost. Something slipped. Although he was extraordinarily confident and charismatic and, by all accounts, could sort of run circles around people intellectually, emotionally, he was scarred and damaged in all kinds of ways that I can only retrace from the stories that I heard later, because I didn’t really know him. Anyway, when he’s a student in Hawaii, he meets my mother. I am conceived. I think the marriage comes after the conception.But then he gets a scholarship to go to Harvard and he decides: “Well, that’s where I need to go.” He’s willing to have my mother and me go with him, but I think there are cost issues involved and they separate. But they stay in touch. He goes back to Kenya, gets a government job, and he has another marriage and another set of kids.Springsteen When he comes back to visit you, he has another family …Obama He’s got another family, and I think he and his wife are in a bad spot. And I think he was probably trying to court my mother and to convince her to grab me and move all of us to Kenya, and my mother, who still loved him, was wise enough to realise that was probably a bad idea. But I do see him for a month. And … I don’t know what to make of him. Because he’s very foreign, right? He’s got a British accent and he’s got this booming voice and he takes up a lot of space. And everybody kind of defers to him because he’s just a big personality. And he’s trying to sort of tell me what to do.He’s like, “Anna” – that’s what he’d call my mother; her name was Ann – “Anna, I think that boy … he’s watching too much television. He should be doing his studies.” So I wasn’t that happy that he had showed up. And I was kind of eager for him to go. Because I had no way to connect to the guy. He’s a stranger who’s suddenly in our house.So he leaves. I never see him again. But we write. When I’m in college I decide: “If I’m going to understand myself better, I need to know him better.” So I write to him and I say: “Listen, I’m going to come to Kenya. I’d like to spend some time with you.” He says: “Ah, yes. I think that’s a very wise decision, you come here.” And then I get a phone call, probably about six months before I was planning to go, and he’s been killed in a car accident.But two things that I discovered, or understood, later. The first was just how much influence that one month that he was there had on me, in ways that I didn’t realise.He actually gave me my first basketball. So I’m suddenly obsessed with basketball. How’d that happen, right? But I remember that the other thing we did together was, he decided to take me to a Dave Brubeck concert. Now, this is an example of why I didn’t have much use for the guy, because, you know, you’re a 10-year-old American kid and some guy wants to take you to a jazz concert.Springsteen Take Five, you’re not going to love …Obama Take Five! So I’m sitting there and … I kind of don’t know what I’m doing there. It’s not until later that I look back and say: “Huh.” I become one of the few kids in my school who’s interested in jazz. And when I got older my mother would look at how I crossed my legs or gestures and she’d say: “It’s kind of spooky.”The second thing that I learned was, in watching his other male children – who I met and got to know later when I travelled to Kenya – I realised that, in some ways, it was probably good that I had not lived in his home. Because, much in the same way that your dad was struggling with a bunch of stuff, my dad was struggling, too. It created chaos and destruction and anger and hurt and long-standing wounds that I just did not have to deal with.Springsteen The thing that happens is: when we can’t get the love we want from the parent we want it from, how do you create the intimacy you need? I can’t get to him and I can’t have him. I’ll be him. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll be him … I’m way into my 30s before I even have any idea that that’s my method of operation. I’m on stage. I’m in workmen’s clothes. I’ve never worked a job in my life.My dad was a beefy, bulky guy. I’ve played freaking guitar my whole life, but I’ve got 20 or 30 extra pounds on me from hitting the gym. Where’d that come from? Why do I spend hours lifting up and putting down heavy things for no particular reason? My entire body of work, everything that I’ve cared about, everything that I’ve written about, draws from his life story.Here is where I was lucky. At 32, I go into hardcore analysis. I don’t have my children until I’m 40, so I’m eight years into looking into a lot of these things, because what I found out about that archetype was it was fucking destructive in my life. It drove away people I cared about. It kept me from knowing my true self. And I realised: “Well, if you wanna follow this road, go ahead. But you’re going to end up on your own, my friend. And if you want to invite some people into your life, you better learn how to do that.”And there’s only one way you do that: you’ve got to open the doors. And that archetype doesn’t leave a lot of room for those doors to be open because that archetype is a closed man. Your inner self is forever secretive and unknown: stoic, silent, not revealing of your feelings.Well, you’ve got to get rid of all of that stuff if you want a partnership. If you want a full family, and to be able to give them the kind of sustenance and nurture and room to grow they need in order to be themselves and find their own full lives, you better be ready to let a lot of that go, my friend.My dad never really spoke to me through [to] the day he died. He didn’t know how. He truly did not. He just didn’t have the skills at all. And once I understood how ill he was, it makes up for a lot of it. But when you’re a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old boy, you’re not going to have an understanding of what your father is suffering with, and …Obama You end up wrestling with ghosts.Springsteen I guess that’s what we all do.Obama And ghosts are tricky because you are measuring yourself against someone who is not there. And, in some cases, I think people whose fathers aren’t there – and whose mothers are feeling really bitter about their fathers’ not being there – what they absorb is how terrible that guy was and you don’t want to be like that guy.In my mother’s case, she took a different tack, which was that she only presented his best qualities and not his worst. And in some ways that was beneficial, because I never felt as if I had some flawed inheritance; something in me that would lead me to become an alcoholic or an abusive husband or any of that. Instead, what happened was I kept on thinking: “Man, I got to live up to this.” Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or live up to his mistakes.You know, Michelle wonders sometimes: “Why is it that you just feel so compelled to just do all this hard stuff ? I mean, what’s this hole in you that just makes you feel so driven?” And I think part of it was kind of early on feeling as if: “Man, I got to live up to this. I got to prove this. Maybe the reason he left is because he didn’t think it was worth staying for me, and no, I will show him that he made a mistake not hanging around, because I was worth investing in.”Springsteen You’re always trying to prove your worth. You’re on a lifetime journey of trying to prove your worth to …Obama Somebody that’s not there.Springsteen The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.This is a condensed and edited extract from Renegades: Born in the USA by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. It is published on Tuesday (Viking, £35).TopicsPodcastsBarack ObamaBruce SpringsteenFamilyMenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More