What I am thinking. What I am reading.

I miraculously secured my renewed passport yesterday, and so Melissa and I leave on Monday for a trip to celebrate our tenth anniversary. We’ll still share content next week, but it will be scaled back until we return the folloowing week. Before we leave, however, I did want to share some scattered thoughts and recommendations.

What I am thinking…

• Perhaps not having big, positive ideas or a movement-centered politics is the ticket to victory politically these days. Perhaps that is what the exhausted majority is looking for, and a public platform that consists of “don’t do crazy things” is a sufficient contrast to much of the rest of our politics. It’s plausible. It even makes sense. In 2020, it’s part of why Biden won.

  But I don’t think it will be sufficient for electoral purposes over the long-haul, and I certainly don’t think it’s enough to actually govern. Centrist Democrats have long been unable to articulate a positive vision and ideology, and instead tend to communicate “we want what Democrats want, just less of it.” And when they oppose something, they’re often unable or unwilling to explain why, as a matter of principle, and fall back to practicalities and power analysis. This, obviously, breeds distrust.

  I’m thinking of this today because I was reading the latest email from Axios’ Mike Allen on “the rise of the anti-woke Democrat.” In politics (and religion, it turns out), it is somewhat alluring to say “I’m not one of those kinds of Democrats (Christians, etc.),” and it does the job of signaling a certain kind of intention or posture. It is not sufficient over the long haul, though, and as a basis for one’s identity, such an antagonistic foundation is weak, at best, and often destructive.

  If centrist Democrats really want to offer an alternative that can be consistently successful electorally, and win intra- and inter- party fights when governing, they must develop clarity on what they believe and want and will fight for, and why, as a matter of substance and principle, they oppose not just Republicans’ approach, but the approach of left-wing Democrats.

• This week, CDC announced its recommendation to reopen schools in the Fall, citing the negative consequences of school closings. From NYT:

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged schools on Friday to fully reopen in the fall, even if they cannot take all of the steps the agency recommends to curb the spread of the coronavirus — a major turn in a public health crisis in which childhood education has long been a political flash point.

  The agency also said school districts should use local health data to guide decisions about when to tighten or relax prevention measures like masking and physical distancing. With the highly contagious Delta variant spreading and children under 12 still ineligible for vaccination, it recommended that unvaccinated students and staff members keep wearing masks.

  The guidance is a departure from the C.D.C.’s past recommendations for schools. It is also a blunt acknowledgment that many students have suffered during long months of virtual learning and that a uniform approach is not useful when virus caseloads and vaccination rates vary so greatly from place to place. Some experts criticized the agency’s decision to leave so much up to local officials, however, and said more specific guidelines would have been more helpful.

  School closures have been extremely divisive since the outset of the pandemic, and advising districts has been a fraught exercise for the C.D.C. Virtual learning has been burdensome not only for students but also for their parents, many of whom had to stay home to provide child care, and reopening schools is an important step on the economy’s path to recovery.

  We’ve been torn over COVID-related restrictions (especially before the vaccine became widely distributed), particularly when it comes to schools, but also regarding churches and religious communities (I thought church restrictions were reasonable, generally, but often made and enforced without a respectful engagement of religious communities themselves). We’ve shared the work of Alec MacGillis, for instance, who was one of the earliest voices pointing out how school closures could perpetuate injustice and inequality. The concerns of anti-poverty and children’s advocates have not been without merit. There’s a chance that we look back at decision-making when it comes to schools, particularly in Democratic states, as one of the major domestic policy mistakes of the 21st-century. I think it’s fair to ask questions about whether schools are the last to reopen to protect children and families, or to protect profit. I think it’s fair to ask whether low-wage workers and children have been made to bear more of the burden of this pandemic on behalf of those with more political power and access. I tried to raise these very dynamics earlier this year for Breaking Ground.

  From another perch, though, I look at school closings and think that schools had to close because the government bears a greater burden and responsibility for protecting children in their care—children who are basically legally mandated and socially compelled to be in school if government schools are open. If people choose to take the risk of going to an indoor restaurant (say, in early-2021 or 2022), the government has some responsibility, but no one is legally compelled to eat at restaurant (some workers, of course, are compelled in other ways to work). But imagine if schools had been reopened earlier and a dozen children died from COVID-related complications? Imagine if hundreds had died? What if we saw teachers become seriously ill and face long-term health consequences? There’s a different responsibility governments would have for harm coming because they kept schools open than the harm related to closing schools. Here, as is so often the case, questions of political strategy/self-interest and questions of ethics are tied up together so that it is hard to know when one ends and the other begins. Was it cowardice to close schools? Or would the cowardice have been to leave them open?

  I really don’t know. I certainly did not know in the moment what to think about school closings, beyond the initial closings at the height of the crisis which I thought were necessary. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m in some ways even more confused about what decisions should have been made and when.

  What has always been clear is that it’s hard to take credit for what didn’t happen as a result of your actions as opposed to simply hanging the responsibility for bad things around the neck of your political opponent. This goes to explain much of our politics.

  I’m not sure I understand why the politics of these issues have broken down the way they have. Trump? Unions? Yesterday, I had the thought that it might be significant that Democrats are more supportive of school closings than Republicans and yet Democrats are less likely to have children. Maybe, I thought, I’d identified a failure of political representation: did Democrats drive school closings even though it would be Republicans’ kids who were primarily affected?

  Well, it turns out, it’s not as clear-cut in reality that Republicans are more likely to have children under-18 than Democrats. From a 2019 Yahoo! article:

  Liberals are not having enough babies to keep up with conservatives. Arthur Brooks, a social scientist at Syracuse University, was the first to point this out all the way back in 2006 when he went on ABC News and blew blue staters minds. “The political Right is having a lot more kids than the political Left,” he explained. “The gap is actually 41 percent.” Data on the U.S. birth rate from the General Social Survey confirms this trend—a random sample of 100 conservative adults will raise 208 children, while 100 liberal adults will raise a mere 147 kids. That’s a massive gap.

  But look at exit polls from 2020, and there’s no clear-cut advantage for Republicans among those with children under 18 in their home (in fact, Democrats have the slight-edge there):

  

  Similarly, once concerns grew about long-term school closures deepening educational inequalities, some started to wield this to argue Democrats were actively harming racial minorities by not supporting re-opening schools immediately. There was one problem with making this argument: the parents of racial-minority children overwhelmingly supported schools staying closed.

  In other words, while some aspects of COVID politics have been depressingly polarized, it’s striking how cross-cutting and disorienting the politics of school closings has been. It’s rare, with such profound political sectarianism, to have an issue that does not easily settle into partisan paradigms. Perhaps that is yet to come…

  Alternatively, debates around COVID restrictions might lead to something of a political realignment. Perhaps parents of young children break Republican in the midterms? Maybe, with schools reopened and the economy booming, midterm voters credit Democrats with making hard, but necessary, decisions? I honestly don’t know at this point.

  It will be worth tracking, however, and we’ll do just that…

What I’m Reading…

• I’ve written about Piranesi already, but I really must recommend to you Joy Clarkson’s wonderful podcast series/book club for Piranesi. You can follow along here. It has given me great joy over the last few weeks. I also just think Joy is a wonderful, wonderful person.

• I’m reading William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and it has helped me to focus really practically on what it might look like to follow Jesus more deeply and more fully. It’s been challenging in many ways, and I’m grateful that James Catford and Nathan Foster talked through the book a bit recently on the Renovare podcast.

• I recently reread Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, which I think is one of the best novels of the last decade, and it was even better on the latest reading. It was so good, that I decided to read her latest book, a collection of short stories, Florida. The first two stories, particularly the second (which is the most personally affecting short stories I can remember reading), are worth the price of admission. I just learned Groff has a new novel out this September and it has nuns!!!

• I read Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. Gotta say…didn’t dig it.

• I did get a blast out of Juliet Lapidos’ hilarious novel Talent. I’m not usually one for reading novels that try for humor—with the exception of Joshua Ferris’ work, they often fall short for me—but Lapidos’ surprising prose won me over relatively early on in the book.

• Former President Obama released his summer reading list, which includes some books I hadn’t heard of but have added to my list. It does include Klara and the Sun, which I loved!