Really, it's not so bad -- I think.

Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark published one of his acerbic essays recently accompanied by this graphic:

Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark

As nearly daily, Last is thought provoking. Yet I question where he goes in this piece.

I think we can take it that the image captures Last's disgust with the small town Americans whose views are described in the ethnographic study from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University which serves as his text. Based in deep interviews in small town Wyoming, Michigan and South Carolina, the study documents that many adults in these communities don't much like democracy -- in fact, they hate majority rule because they know their white nationalist moral understanding of the true and good is simply not shared by the national popular majority. Most of us live in cities, suburbs and along the coasts; we encounter a mix of people and thoughts; we are not from this sad white tribe.

.. Our participants believe the American republic was always conditional on a particular moral order that has now been lost, and a people who held enough in common to uphold this order together. ... Our participants' fear of "too much democracy" is, at its root, a fear that popular will or procedural legitimacy have become misaligned with and elevated above the moral order that should orient both. They believe popular will and procedural legitimacy are important, but can become illegitimate when they stray too far from or threaten the moral foundation. ...

... The conservatives we met share a moral framework that precedes and judges all other aspects of life, including democracy itself. It is organized around four pillars: Faith, Family, Freedom, and Place. The relative importance of these pillars varies across participants, with Faith often being particularly dominant. In our participants' view, these pillars constitute the core of a good and moral life. Democratic institutions, processes, and norms are evaluated against this moral foundation rather than abstract theories of how democracy should work. 

This is not how most contemporary Americans think and believe; nor, approaching the 250th anniversary of the nation, are we willing to be confined in a moral framework from a self-consciously conservative rural minority. Most of us are not open to conversion to a cramped, ungenerous, orthodoxy of fear and decline. The people studied here respond to the majority's refusal to adopt their views by being down on our democracy; they know they are a dwindling minority faction.

The most telling anecdote in the study for me was this:  

...Participants argue the left has captured the institutions that shape what Americans believe before they ever cast a vote: institutions such as K-12 schools, universities, media, and public health, have all become vectors for pushing progressive values. Clint (70s, MI) and his wife call it the "raging river," a cultural current so powerful it has pulled their own children from faith and conservative values into an amoral progressive agenda, fracturing their family in the process. ...

This ethnographic study describes a set of America's losers. 

And the subjects of this study are all too aware and resentful of their loser identity. They wish they were not a minority, but they know they are.

Obviously, this hurts and makes such people fodder for charlatans promising impossibilities -- for Donald Trump. 

JVL worries that this recalcitrant minority, though it's huckster champion, is sinking the Constitutional ship. 

... I’m not sure how Democrats win over a voter who’s motivated not by unemployment, or the the Iranian nuclear program, or the price of eggs—but is rather lashing out because they’re angry that their children rejected their political views.

We are firmly out of the realm of policy here. Or reality, even. So long as there is a trans activist in San Francisco posting on BlueSky, these people will be aggrieved. Even if their preferred political party holds the presidency, controls Congress, and has an openly corrupt majority in the Supreme Court. Domination of the political system is not enough; they want the people who disgust them to disappear.

And—this is the key—the moral revulsion the participants in the study exhibit overrides their commitments to democratic processes and the liberal order. If “democracy” produces anything they dislike, then they are ready to be done with democracy. 

... This is not a new motivating force in American politics. And I don’t know what the cure for it might be. ...

I respond to that -- nothing in our history suggests that there is any easy cure, but we know what its elements might be: broad prosperity and opportunity available to a majority ... coupled with time. Throughout our history, the children have gone off in their own directions, whether physically to the western frontier or toward the "evil" cities. Trump's base of losers is having a very American experience in this our 250th year. But they remain an unhappy minority of losers ... 

• • •

Is the Agora study or Last's diatribe against the rubes really any different than the much-mocked "mainstream" media's dispatch of correspondents to chat with rural Americans in coffee shops? I have a hard time seeing a difference.

• • •

In the NY Times, David Wallace Wells [gift article] provides a different, and I think more accurate, assessment of this cultural MAGA moment under the Trump regime. In the majority, we're not willing to allow imagination and hope to be suppressed by MAGA's nostalgia for an imagined past.

... It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country. 

The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.

... Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading. ...

This July 4th, the majority continues to reveal that MAGA is a dwindling fraction, not an enduring "real" America. Most of us reject MAGA's terrified vision. 

I am a little shocked by the optimism that thinking about these several articles has let loose in me. Let's get on with making what democracy can of this country!

A warning by way of Britain: no deathly compromises

It feels as if it were going to be a more than usually unsettled few days, this coming week between the enormous LGBTQ+ freedom marches here in San Francisco and President Toddler's dumb and dopey July 4 appropriation of our national founding in DC over next weekend. 

As I come out of my rhinovirus brain fog, here's a warning from last week that I don't want to miss. 

Erin in the Morning: News and discussion on trans legislation and life provides just what the tagline of the substack says it will. This is news we need to attend to. And with MAGA bigots ascendant, this is news no one should ignore. So I pay attention when Erin issues a warning.

Reflecting on UK politics, where the governing left-leaning Labour Party has succumbed to a rightist-inspired panic attack on trans folk, Erin demands that here in the US, Democrats must find more spine. Deposed Prime Minister Keir Starmer's weaselly accommodation of his country's trans-hating bigots didn't win him any real allies or save his fumbling leadership.

... I often write about Democrats here in the United States, and I often criticize them for taking stances that capitulate to far-right framings on transgender people. In recent months, I lambasted eight House Democrats for voting to hand Trump more power to pull funding from schools that support transgender students. I slammed Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra for their retreat on transgender sports and, in Newsom's case, for floating the idea that trans people should wait until 25 to transition—a position with its roots in UK-based anti-trans activism. I've even criticized progressive icon and Mayor Mamdani for limiting his new clinic to patients 19 and older, using Trump's executive order age cutoff in what amounts to a retreat from his promises to use every tool at his disposal to fight for trans youth. 

Many have wondered why I have just as many sharp words for Democrats who retreat as I do for the Republicans driving the attacks. Starmer's resignation today should help explain why.

One of my biggest fears is not the Republican Party. They are the devil we know—terrible, and they will take every step to target trans people in the worst ways imaginable. 

But in the United States, we have one thing the UK no longer does: our major left-of-center party has not abandoned us. At least here, the harm can still be reversed. Executive orders can be revoked. Rules can be rewritten. Democratic-held states can serve as islands of refuge and support for transgender people, and a future Democratic administration can undo what this one has done. 

That is only true so long as the Democratic Party remains willing to fight for us. What happens if the only alternative party in the United States follows Labour's path and embraces transphobia too? Where does that leave transgender people?

The greatest danger to transgender people in America is not another two years of Republican rule. It is the potential for a cancer to grow inside the Democratic Party—one that whispers to its leaders that the vulnerable and "unpopular" can be thrown to the wolves in exchange for survival. 

But what the pundits pushing this strategy never tell those leaders is that there will never be enough to feed those wolves.  

There is no amount of concession on trans rights that will satisfy the other side. The ads will still come. And they will not stop at trans people… immigrants… disabled people… LGB people. 

One by one, each group will become the next "strategic sacrifice," until you are left with a party that has abandoned every community that once believed in it—all in pursuit of a political center that doesn’t even exist. You sell your soul, and all you have left are empty platitudes and a collapsing future. 

My emphasis. We aren't there yet. We have a choice about whether we will allow our panic about Trumpism to undercut our affirmation of human rights for everyone. And we can demand brave choices from our Democratic politicians. We are all in this together. 

• • •

It was nice to read a political journalist writing for a broad audience draw similar lessons in an account of Trump's gladiatorial follies on the White House lawn. Noah Berlatsky publishes at Public Notice. He has no truck with the racist malignant masculinity of the big hunk who celebrated his victory by shouting "Michelle Obama is a man." He sees scam.

... Even if the disgusting smear is not new, it highlights the ways in which the status, dignity, and rights of marginalized people are intertwined. The attack on trans people is not just an attack on trans people; it is also, and deliberately, an attack on Black women, on women of color, and ultimately on all women, on all Black people, and on the political party which the majority of all those groups call their own.

Some Democrats have wavered in their support for trans people during the Trump presidency. But this kind of smear directed at a Democratic party leader at a White House event should make it abundantly clear that throwing trans people under a wheeled conveyance will inevitably mean allowing said conveyance to run down and decimate large parts of the coalition. We need to fight back for everyone if we are going to fight back for anyone, because it is the right thing to do, and because fascists, in their hate, do not distinguish between us. ...

Again, the people may have to lead the pols on this -- but if we insist, we can! 

Still on a brain break ...

I stumbled foggily out to a store yesterday still full of rhinoviruses and found myself among crowds of lovely young women making their way to Dolores Park for the Dyke March. The scene reminded me of this classic lesbian poster by my friend Michele Lloyd.

And that's only a tiny slice of us. Happy Pride to all.

Regular posts will resume tomorrow, I hope. 

Blog hiatus

I'm having what's either ferocious allergies or an atypical head cold. Blogging will resume when I can breathe.

Go ahead, make up a story

I usually don't pause to take pictures while getting in my laps around Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park. But this was too good to leave uncaptured ...

You have to wonder, what was the husband in question doing? ... Or not doing? ...

California elections: I was both wrong and right

California's June primary election taught me some lessons about the numerous vehement opinions I bring to our election system.

For many years, I argued that widespread adoption of "abseentee" or "vote by mail" would detract from voter engagement rather than increase it. I was wrong.

I used to argue that campaigning to enhance Election Day -- marches, parties, the common accompaniments of 19th century elections -- would be the best way to increase turnout. This sort of thing does work in some contexts: homeless advocates have been known to march groups of street-living foks to City Hall to vote with some effect. But there is overwhelming evidence that automatically sending every eligible voter a ballot that can be mailed, dropped in a drop box, or delivered to a polling place is more effective.

Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle describes the extraordinary success of mail ballots in our state:

... California had the second-highest voter turnout (40%) of any state that has held a primary so far this year.  The state with the highest turnout: Oregon (41%), which, like California, mails a ballot to every voter. 

Trump doesn't like this, but if you want more civic participation, make convenience voting easy! 

• • • 

However, seeing the "top two" primary voting system in action in picking the candidates who will be on ballot in November was the absurd farce I've always thought it. In loathing the "top two," I was right. 

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton skewers the strange consequences of this systemic gimmick. 

... [Former state Sen. Abel] Maldonado says he crafted the current system 16 years ago believing it would produce “pragmatic and commonsense” officeholders. But that has failed, he acknowledges.

... Voters, regardless of party affiliation, can vote for any candidate. And the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party, advance to the general election. ... The idea was that candidates would be forced to appeal to centrist voters — not just party ideologues — and more moderates would be elected.

... Actually, the electorate has become so polarized in recent years — particularly during the Trump era — that very few centrist voters seem to be left.

... Democrat Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, favors dumping the top-two.

For one thing, she says, there was too much focus this spring on whether any Democratic gubernatorial candidate would qualify for the November ballot. Fear spread that so many Democrats were running that they’d splinter the party vote and two Republicans would finish first and second.

She wanted to hear less talk about the horse race and more debate over substantive issues.

“People were obsessing about a Democratic shutout,” Gonzalez said. “And people were waiting until the last minute to fill out their ballot because they wanted to vote for the candidate who was ahead to make sure someone made the top two. We didn’t have a policy discussion.” ...

Maybe we can get rid of this abomination? We implanted it by ballot initiative and we would have to vote it away in order to revert to a system in which each party gets a nominee. My instinct is that this would not be an easy campaign to win: voters tend to be protective of any arrangement which they think gives them more choices and presumably that's what defenders of the "top-two" would argue.

• • •

Meanwhile, it would be totally hypocritical of me not to point out that my candidate for US Congress from San Francisco is only still in the running because of the "top-two" system. If we'd had party primaries, Scott Wiener would be a Democratic shoo-in for November. In the current system, Connie Chan, still gives us a chance to elect a progressive, union supportive, Chinese immigrant from this city.  That seems like a good idea ...

Father's Day 2026

Roger looks pleased with himself, doesn't he? Although he remained fairly fit until he no longer could keep going, he didn't much go in for physical labor. On some photos like this, my mother wrote derisively, "Posed!" Later in life, she did the shoveling. 

This was in Buffalo, sometime in the winter of 1938, almost a decade before I arrived on the scene. He was in his mid-30s here.

If loving a child and doing no harm is enough -- and I sure think it is -- he was a good father.

Yet more on the Juneteenth holiday: against forgetting

Kevin Young self-describes as a post-evangelical pastor. Also a white guy and "a lifter." Not my instinctive go-to for theological or other insight. 

Yet, as belatedly and arduously the Juneteenth holdiay becomes more internalized as a national holiday, as well as a Black remembrance, he offers a perspective that I find compelling. He writes:

... The Hebrew scriptures are obsessed—I mean absolutely OBSESSED—with memory. 

The command to remember appears over 200 times in the Old Testament alone. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” says Deuteronomy 5:15. God did not issue that command as a footnote but as the foundation of Israel’s entire ethical framework.

You were oppressed. 
You know what oppression feels like. 
Therefore, you do not oppress.
Remember!

To forget is not simply to be careless. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, to forget is to sin.

When white people dismantle the legal protections of Black voters, erase Black history from classrooms, defund the celebrations of Black freedom, and quietly remove the holidays that honor Black lives from our national calendar, we are not just making administrative, fiscal, or even political decisions. 

No.

We are committing an act of spiritual forgetting. We are sinning against memory, and we are willfully sinning against the image-bearers we have chosen to forget. 

The alternative to forgetting is both pain admitting to horrors and joy in human liberation -- joy at the defeat of our particular American slavery, but also joy in in the possibility of wider community and a better future. This is a choice. "Let us march on til victory is won!"

Juneteenth 2026

Let us celebrate "a new birth of freedom!" 

Sociologist Robert P. Jones makes a suggestion that works for me:

... The period of 15 days that span the space between Juneteenth and Independence Day could ... function as an enduring season of critical patriotism for our time. Alongside the celebratory fireworks and other well-established practices surrounding the Fourth of July, we could develop a new civic liturgy that include the creative interplay of lament and celebration, reckoning and repair, truth-telling and hope. Borrowing from the High Holidays model, Juneteenth could function like Yom Kippur, recalling our struggles to overcome our shortcomings and achieve freedom, while Independence Day could echo Rosh Hashanah, recommitting us to shared national ideals.

Such a practice could also embrace a conviction that is deeply engrained in Judaism, Christianity, and indeed most religious traditions—that no people can live with integrity into the future if they cannot face their past failures to live up to their principles. ...

Bringing the Juneteenth and the Fourth of July together in a creative mutual orbit, where each is embraced by the gravitational force of the other, can also help us develop other rituals that are honest about our country’s failings while also being hopeful about its possibilities. 

Perhaps it takes time for a new federal holiday to acquire full potency. 

Juneteenth, proclaimed nationally in 2021, has been a living remembrance within Black culture, migrating from Texas along with the diaspora and particularly noted in California where so many African American citizens arrived from the southwest. Nationally the holiday still might take further seasoning. Somehow I doubt that Trump and MAGA will succeed in erasing this happy anniversary, anymore than they'll succeed in Making America White Again. All together now, "let us march on 'til victory is won!"

A lesson for us all

 

Last Sunday in church I had an unexpected experience. At the end of the service, the musician launched into a stirring rendition of James Weldon Johnson's hymn, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" -- otherwise known since the early 20th century as the "Black (or Negro) national anthem." 

 

In the sort of overwhelmingly white churches I attend, the hymn has become a commonplace. There was an era when a gay community whose men were dying in droves during the worst of HIV/AIDS took it up enthusiastically. That made a certain emotional sense; the lyric speaks the joy of the dismissed and discarded.

 

Yet I have been uncomfortable. The practice smacked of cultural appropriation; what right did a bunch of historically illiterate white Americans have to Black Americans' hymn of liberty?

 

Now the Trump administration has sought to erase the federal holiday that marks Juneteenth, the day of liberation from chattel slavery for four million Americans. No more free admission to National Parks to mark Black liberation under the MAGA regime!

 

Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin discusses why it feels so much more plausible and honest for us all to celebrate Juneteenth in this awful year when Donald's decrepitude tries to overrun us all.

Juneteenth Is Not Someone Else's Story 
Emancipation didn't just free four million people. It rebuilt the country the rest of us still live in.

 

... Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us, and not in some abstract, ceremonial sense. Emancipation did not simply liberate four million enslaved people and leave everyone else untouched. It rewrote the Constitution, redefined citizenship, and forced a reckoning over federal power that still shapes our politics. It launched a fight over Reconstruction whose outcome determined who could vote and who counted as a full citizen, a fight whose unfinished business runs through Jim Crow, through the civil rights movement, and into our own disputes over voting rights and equal protection.
 

... None of us, whatever our ancestry, lives outside the world that emancipation built. 

I am not ceding anything. This is part of my history too, not because I share an ancestral claim to bondage or liberation, but because I am an American living inside the consequences of that rupture and the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation’s history.
 

... Black Americans inherited Juneteenth as lived memory, as family history, as a chain of testimony passed down with a weight and intimacy I will never replicate. Nor do I have any interest in attempting to do so.
 

... Nobody should cede this story. Juneteenth is the only national holiday that celebrates the freedom of over four million people, in a nation that has long claimed to be ‘exceptional’ in advancing freedom. We should all be reaching for it, from wherever we stand, both as historians and students of history. Because a nation that only half remembers its emancipation has not yet finished becoming free.

This Juneteenth, it behooves us to celebrate emancipation and refuse to cede our aspirations for more perfect freedom.

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won."