More Perfect Union
We need to start telling a better story about America
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re sending America back for rewrites. It’s all there in the source codes, people. And Jack Hughes is enjoying a moment as pop culture and politics have merged timelines in “Ms. Spears Goes to Washington.”
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (making scampi), read (Austin Kleon’s musing on “scenius”), watch (dude, Questlove’s Summer of Soul), and listen to (Ambar Lucid’s “Get Lost in the Music” is really good.)
But first, can I tell you what really bugs me?
I got into campaigns back in 1993, opened a political consulting firm in 1997, and switched over to public service in 2015, which hasn’t exactly disentangled me from politics but has given enough experience and remove to say with near certainty that liberals, which I count myself as one, are wrong about being right.
NOW STOP THAT. Focus up, people. Come on back.
In your head, you probably read “liberals … are wrong about being right” and began shouting in your head that those Republicans, by god, lie! Can’t tell the truth if you asked them what time it is….!! Can’t even call them extremists anymore because they’ve in-housed their crazy and put the Drunk Uncles and Pre-Rehab Cousins in charge of the family trust. To be fair, it is hard to make the case that Republican elected officials who traffic in fact-based policy prescriptions and speak in documentable truths are not vanishingly rare. But this isn’t about them, at least right now. We get to Republicans later, first with a non-judgmental contrast in a bit and then at the end, which I promise many of you are going to hate. But that’s future you’s problem.
Right now we’re talking about how liberals are wrong about being right. To wit, we think it matters. And yes, being right is important when you’re maintaining a power grid, preventing the spread of a plague, or boiling water. Science doesn’t care about your opinions, but science also tells us that our brains do. Our brains do not sort through facts and use reason to arrive at a logical conclusion. What happens when we make a decision is that your emotional centers fire, and only then does your brain run over to the rational part of your brain to look for justification. (For more on this, read Drew Westen’s The Political Brain.) In this way, brains work like the Arizona recount; the results are so outrageous that you think there must be fraud, and then you go look for proof. What we think are carefully considered decisions are actually emotions in search of justification, which is yet more evidence that The Enlightenment was history’s greatest hoax.
The Enlightenment was history’s greatest hoax.
Nevertheless, the persuasion paradigm for liberals has been as follows: Please sit still while I explain things to you. For some reason, incuriously condescending to the people we’re trying to win over does not work. Weirdly, telling folks they are wrong does not win friends or influence people. You would think that liberals, lovers of reason, justice, and inclusion, would look at the evidence and change tactics, but we just can’t help ourselves. We would rather be right than win.
Which brings us to Critical Race Theory and the emotion-driven debate we’re having about it.
Let’s bring back the Republicans for a bit, and remember, we are here to observe, not to argue. Many of those who want to ban schools from teaching Critical Race Theory say schools are teaching White kids that racism is their fault. Being taught about white supremacy could make them feel guilty and conclude that there is something inherently sinful about being White. Therefore, teachers should “both sides” controversial issues if they discuss them at all. At their core, CRT opponents believe America is the greatest country in the history of the world and was conceived in liberty. Let’s call these folks the Virgin Birth Americans.
What’s the first thing liberals say when people talk about banning Critical Race Theory? Well, actually we don’t teach Critical Race Theory. So our first step is to tell someone that they’re ignorant. Cool, cool. But as Steven Lee pointed out in his Washington Post essay, the basic tenets of Critical Race Theory “are not even that controversial”:
First, anti-Black racism has a long history in American law, and some racist elements remain embedded in our legal system; second, and related to the first, anti-Black racism is still present not just in our legal system, but also in our overall system of governance; third, anti-Black racism on both the individual and systemic levels in America is much more prevalent than most Whites believe.
Underpinning that are two assumptions: First, America was conceived in sin and is systemically racist. Second, liberals, by telling a story that makes white people feel like they’re the bad guys in the dominant cultural narrative, don’t care about winning. We’d rather just be right. Let’s call this camp the Inherently Sinful Americans.
One can reasonably ask whether a union divided between Inherently Sinful and Virgin Birth Americans can hold, and in fact versions of the same question keep coming up on our book tour. It’s hard to talk for long about revealing the racist underpinnings of a cherished American myth without talking about the blowback to Critical Race Theory. Dave Ross, a CBS Commentator, pressed me on this point, asking whether Forget the Alamo and Critical Race Theory blamed White people for the sins of their forefathers.
One can reasonably ask whether a union divided between Inherently Sinful and Virgin Birth Americans can hold.
I told Ross that we need to tell a better story about America. I don’t see any possibility or advisability of appeasement between the Virgin Birth and Inherently Sinful camps, so propose telling a story that unites both. What if the story of America was a historically accurate redemption story. We were conceived in large part to accommodate slavery while pledging ourselves to achieve liberty and freedom. The conflict between what we were doing and what we were promising has animated the story of America ever since. That’s a good story.
I’d argue that the Founding Fathers even embedded a cheat code for our own redemption into the Preamble to the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It’s right there — “a more perfect union.” You could argue, prosaically and pedantically, that they were conceiving a Union more perfect than the self-governance disaster of Articles of the Confederation. But look at the sentence structure; forming a more perfect union is the purpose of uniting the states, and by doing so, joining in a common endeavor of continual self-improvement, can deliver the benefits of justice, domestic peace, common defense, general welfare, and so forth. The point of America is to become more perfect, not to attain perfection.
Can you really call yourself a progressive if any step in the right direction does not constitute progress if it doesn’t reach perfection?
This paradigm gives liberals a place to go when we want to sing the waddabout song. Barack Obama was elected president, and many liberals came to oppose him for not being the activist progressive president they imagined he would be. Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, and I saw a ton of Twitter talk about how this wasn’t justice and that the only true justice would be an alternate universe where Floyd was alive. Others held Darnella Frazier, the Black teen who videoed Floyd’s murder, up as a hero; others, understandably angry, shot back that she never should have had to do that in the first place, making it wrong to call her a hero.
Can you really call yourself a progressive if any step in the right direction does not constitute progress if it doesn’t reach perfection? Can nothing be good if bad still exists? This is when liberals turn on themselves, criticizing fellow liberals who know how hard it is to achieve modest gains.
I have a friend whose Instagram posts showing her experiencing Black joy are often adorned with the phrase “Someday we shall all be free.” I take undeserved comfort in the thought that I might live long enough to see that day. But what if there is no end to history? What if there is no mountain top, only the climb? What if that saying that it’s the journey not the destination is only half right; what if there is no destination, only a direction?
This fits into how Abraham Lincoln viewed the Union, as existing in perpetuity. The Southern states argued that the Constitution was a contract that could be broken. To which Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, said, “Nah, bruh.”
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was "to form a more perfect Union." But if [the] destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union, -- that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.
If the purpose of this country is to become “more perfect,” then we can accept that we still need to debug slavery from our operating system. We are blameless for what happened then. We are responsible for what happens now.
And if we are still in a Union together, then it finally follows that there is not a red America for them and a blue America for us. Want proof? Come to Texas, where we have some of the largest Democratic metropolitan areas in the country. Harris County, where Houston is, has more people than many states do. Republicans will try to carve out the Democratic parts in redistricting and with voter suppression to maintain the illusion that this is a Republican state. Insisting upon divisions is a fool’s errand to which our elected officials seem uniquely suited.
We have to tell a story that doesn’t make villains of those who don’t insist upon their villainy. We have to give Americans a way to be the heroes of this story of redeeming our country. Worrying ourselves about the redemption of those committed to opposing anti-racism might sound foolish, even offensive, but the alternative is to continue with a paradigm in which we remain insistent equally upon our rightness as well as their wrongness, never achieving anything more than a self-destructive stasis.
Telling an accurate and optimistic story about America? It’s kind of like adequately funding public schools. We should try it to see if it works.
Thanks for reading. If you liked it, please consider sharing it with friends or, for that matter, with enemies.
Ms. Spears Goes to Washington
by Jack Hughes
OK, OK, I’m sorry. When I unleashed Jack Hughes on you, I figured we’d have some fun following his flights of fancy has he drew pop culture parallels with politics. None of us expected those timelines to merge. This is on me. After all, Jack’s name is a homonym for j'accuse. The joke, as they say, is on me. In any case, Matt Gaetz (yes, that douche nozzle) has appointed himself head of the #FreeBritney movement and here we are.
How I’m getting through this
Makin’ scampi
Telling a better story about America
What I’m reading
Dan Balz: “2020 presidential polls suffered worst performance in decades, report says” - Not only were the 2020 polls unable to accurately measure Republican vote share but they have no idea why!
Clinton said that, if polls in 2022 are not particularly accurate, that would be a sign of a persistent shift in pollsters’ ability to reach particular groups of voters. “But if the polls do well in 2022, then we don’t know if the issue is solved,” he added. “Or whether it’s just a phenomenon that’s unique to presidential elections with particular candidates who are making appeals about ‘Don’t trust the news, don’t trust the polls’ that kind of results in taking polls becoming a political act.”
Ann Hornaday: “The controversy over Anthony Bourdain’s deepfaked voice is a reminder that documentaries aren’t journalism” - When there’s a movie controversy, Hornaday’s the first person to read.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/anthony-bourdain-roadrunner-deepfake-documentaries/2021/07/19/9b582702-e7c7-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html
Austin Kleon: “Fevered egos” - Smart antidote to the ego space race
The antidote to the Bad Idea of Genius is, in my opinion, Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius,” or the collective form of genius. Genius is an ego-system, and scenius is an eco-system.
Alyssa Rosenberg: “It’s not just the polls. Everyone wants their own metrics, and it’s making room for misinformation.” - I’m putting Rosenberg on the must-read list after this.
When respectable public opinion researchers miss the mark, less-reliable firms or quack metrics may fill the void. Boat parades, as it turns out, are not a good proxy for U.S. public opinion. But without common standards of what constitutes good evidence, it’s hard to cultivate a shared reality.
What I’m watching
Netflix’s This is Pop is wildly uneven. Loved the Sweden episode. Hated the Brill Building one. The rule for music producer docs is that they work when they focus on the glory of creation and not the glory of the creator.
The conceit that the footage from Summer of Soul had never been seen before is a canard. In fact, I saw some of the footage in a great Nina Simone documentary. Regardless, Questlove did a great job with this. Worth your time.
What I’m listening to
Childish Gambino and Brittany Howard remixing “Stay High”? Yes, please.
Whoever was responsible for telling me about Gloria Barnes’ “Home” really fell down on the job.
This track by Ambar Lucid, a self-taught musician and immigration activist, contains the source code for embedding directly into my brain.
Bryan and Chris got to go on the LBJ School’s podcast, With the Bark Off. (I had a scheduling conflict.)
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