Top 5: Alcohol, divine justice & transatlantic relations
And more...
In an effort to bring even more value to our readers, you’ve likely noticed we’ve been producing more content over the last several weeks: interviews, essays, analysis and more. Much of it we’ve offered for free, while some of the new content has been for subscribers, along with the Political Brief and Faith in the News posts that go to subscribers every week. Here’s some of the special content you might have missed from the last month or so:
Considering race in politics, business and media (for subscribers only)
Political Brief: Inflation is Coming? (for subscribers only)
Let us know what kind of content you would like to see, who you would like to see us interview, etc. Thank you for allowing us to serve you in this way.
-Michael and Melissa
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“America Has a Drinking Problem” (The Atlantic)
Because we like essays that confront the downsides of things that are widely embraced, and alcohol certainly makes that list. From Kate Julian:
Over time, groups that drank together would have cohered and flourished, dominating smaller groups—much like the ones that prayed together. Moments of slightly buzzed creativity and subsequent innovation might have given them further advantage still. In the end, the theory goes, the drunk tribes beat the sober ones.
But this rosy story about how alcohol made more friendships and advanced civilization comes with two enormous asterisks: All of that was before the advent of liquor, and before humans started regularly drinking alone.
“‘The Point Was to Win,’ Barack Obama Writes” (NYT)
Because Ezra Klein and President Obama dig deep into polarization, how it has developed and how to navigate it. There’s much to embrace and learn from here, and some assumptions worth critiquing. We’re linking to the op-ed above, but would also recommend reading the full interview. Here’s an excerpt:
One of the ways that our politics have reoriented since your presidency is around education. For reasons that are too complicated to go into here, when polarization splits along educational lines, as it did in 2016 and 2020, the Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College gets a lot worse.
But you did something really unusual in 2008 and 2012: Educational polarization went down.
In 2012, you won noncollege whites making less than $27,000 a year. Donald Trump then won them by more than 20 points. He kept them in 2020. What advice do you have to Democrats to bring educational polarization back down?
I actually think Joe Biden’s got good instincts on this. If you’re 45, and working in a blue collar job, and somebody is lecturing me about becoming a computer programmer, that feels like something got spit out of some think tank as opposed to how my real life is lived.
People knew I was left on issues like race, or gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and so forth. But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.
The challenge is when I started running in 2007-2008, it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. They might say what kind of name is that? They might look at me and have a set of assumptions. But the filter just wasn’t that thick.
The prototypical example is I show up in a small town in Southern Illinois, which is closer to the South than it is to Chicago, both culturally as well as geographically. And usually, the local paper was owned by a modestly conservative, maybe even quite conservative usually, guy. He’d call me in. We’d have a cup of coffee. We’d have a conversation about tax policy, or trade, or whatever else he cared about. And at the end of it, usually I could expect some sort of story in the paper saying, well, we met with Obama. He seems like an intelligent young man. We don’t agree with him on much. He’s kind of liberal for our taste, but he had some interesting ideas. And you know, that was it.
So then I could go to the fish fry, or the V.F.W. hall, or all these other venues, and just talk to people. And they didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value. If I went into those same places now — or if any Democratic who’s campaigning goes in those places now — almost all news is from either Fox News, Sinclair news stations, talk radio, or some Facebook page. And trying to penetrate that is really difficult.
It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through. And that is one of the biggest challenges I think we face.
At the end of the day, I actually have found that — and this still sounds naïve. I think a lot of people would still question this. But I’ve seen it. Most folks actually are persuadable in the sense of they kind of want the same things. They want a good job. They want to be able to support a family. They want safe neighborhoods. Even on really historically difficult issues like race, people aren’t going around thinking, Man, how can we do terrible things to people who don’t look like us? That’s not people’s perspective. What they are concerned about is not being taken advantage of, or is their way of life and traditions slipping away from them? Is their status being undermined by changes in society?
And if you have a conversation with folks, you can usually assuage those fears. But they have to be able to hear you. You have to be able to get into the room. And I still could do that back in 2007, 2008. I think Joe, by virtue of biography and generationally, I think he can still reach some of those folks. But it starts getting harder, particularly for newcomers who are coming up.
“A New Proposal for Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America” (The Art of Association)
Because this interview by Daniel Stid with Theodore R. Johnson is very good and Johnson gives us “a new proposal for overcoming racism and renewing the promise of America.”
“Democracy and Divine Justice” (Wisdom of Crowds)
Because “Our political imagination, which seems to shrink daily, has trouble comprehending a world of varied political types. Non-democracies exist, of course, but they are not us. We do not assign them the same moral agency, and, in a sense, they cease to be actors in the world who are subject to reward and punishment and instead become part of the fabric of the world itself—not an agent but the terrain.”
“Joe Biden: My trip to Europe is about America rallying the world’s democracies” (Washington Post)
Because for the past couple of weeks, scholars across a fairly wide ideological spectrum — in think tanks and in academia — criticized the Biden administration on its approach so far to Europe and openly doubted the future of the transatlantic relationship (much of that doubt a legacy of the Trump admin). Since some of the president’s closest advisors are Europhiles, this op-ed seems to be a response to that doubt and criticism.