Call Them by Their True Names Read online

  By the end of 2017, Richard Brody in the New Yorker found this way of framing our current situation so compelling he foregrounded it in his write-up of the year’s best movies, not usually a place for suggesting radical political reform. That the idea arrived there is a sign of how far it traveled, and how fast, during the fall. Brody declared,

  Any list of the year’s best movies has gaps—of the movies, performances, and other creations that are missing because they are unrealized, unrealized because the women (and, yes, also some men) who were working their way up to directing, producing, or other notable activities in the world of movies, who were already acting or writing or fulfilling other creative positions, had their careers derailed when they were threatened, intimidated, silenced, or otherwise detached from the industry by powerful men abusing their power for their own pleasure and advantage.

  The absence had become present in a lot of minds.

  But who is missing from the American narrative? It’s not only the women directors, the Black screenwriters, the not-so-misogynist lead journalists in the mainstream.

  It’s voters.

  Voting is a form of speech, a way to say what you believe in, what kind of world you want to see. Having a voice doesn’t just mean literally being able to say things; it means having a role, having agency, being able to say things that have an impact whether it’s “I witnessed this police brutality” or “No, I don’t want to have sex with you” or “This is my vision of society.”

  As far as I can estimate, about twenty million voters were disenfranchised in the last election. Voter ID laws, the Crosscheck voter database that discredits legitimate voters, purges of voter rolls, the 2013 Supreme Court decision striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, removing polling stations or cutting back polling hours, harassing people when they showed up at those stations, taking the vote away from ex-felons—the means are many, and the consequences are that a lot of people have been denied their rights, so much so that it’s the other new Jim Crow. (There is no clear tally of how many voters are missing, and it’s also complicated by the fact that some populations—more than six million Americans with felony convictions, for example—are prevented outright from voting, whereas others face obstacles and harassment—via voter ID laws, for example—that thin out their numbers.)

  Politics is how we tell the stories we live by: how we decide if we value the health and well-being of children, or not; the autonomy of women’s bodies and equality of our lives, or not; if we protect the Dreamers who came here as small children, or not; if we act on climate change, or not. Voting is far from the only way, but is a key way we shape the national narrative. We choose a story about who and what matters; we act on that story to rearrange the world around it—and then there are tax cuts to billionaires and children kicked off health care, or there are climate agreements and millions of acres of federal land protected and support for universities. We live inside what, during postmodernism’s heyday, we’d call master narratives—so there’s always a question of who’s telling the story, who is in charge of the narrative, and what happens if that changes.

  Sometimes, when journalists like Ari Berman at Mother Jones—the best voice on this issue—write about the suppression of the votes, people assume they’re saying Hillary Clinton should have won the last presidential election. If you changed who had access to the ballot in 2016, that might have been the outcome, but the story is so much bigger than that, and the potential outcomes are so much more radical.

  The Republican Party has maintained a toehold on national power by systematically, strategically, increasingly suppressing the votes of people of color over decades. They are a minority party. They could never win a fair national election with their current platform of white grievance and misogyny and favors for the most powerful, so they’ve set about to have unfair elections. And they have also gerrymandered the daylights out of a lot of states in order to hang onto majorities at the state and national levels; in 2012, for example, they took the majority of seats in the lower house of Congress with a minority of overall votes.

  Imagine that those 20 million votes were not suppressed, that voting was made easily accessible and encouraged, rather than the opposite. The party of white grievance would be defunct or unrecognizably different from what it is today. But the Democratic Party would be different, too. Imagine that the Democratic Party had to answer to more young people, more poor people, more nonwhite people, more people who believe in strengthening human rights and social service safety nets, economic justice, stronger action on climate change. Imagine a country where Democrats weren’t competing for moderate-to-conservative voters because the general electorate was far more progressive—as it would be, if all those people who lost their voting rights actually had them (and, yeah, if more younger people showed up). It wouldn’t change something as small as the outcome of the 2016 election. It would mean different political parties with different platforms and different candidates, different news coverage, different outcomes. It would change the story. It would change who gets to tell the story and how all our stories get told.

  We are a country that is increasingly nonwhite, and nonwhite voters are, overall, more committed to social, economic, and environmental justice. I believe that we are a country full of generous-minded progressive people, the people who voted in eight trans candidates in the November 2017 elections; and who, shortly thereafter, in the race to fill Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat, voted in moderate Democrat Doug Jones over lunatic-right Republican Roy Moore in Alabama. A friend noted that without suppression of the Black vote, Jones would have won not by less than two points but by several points. But had those votes not been suppressed one way or another since, basically, the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1870 and the Nineteenth gave all women that right in 1920, who’s to say that two white men, Moore and Jones, would have been voters’ only choices, or that Alabama would be what it is today?

  Teen Vogue’s Sarah Mucha reported, “Deuel Ross, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund … estimates that 118,000 registered voters in Alabama were unable to vote in [the December 17, 2017, special] election because they do not possess the proper photo identification required by Alabama law.” That’s about 10 percent of the vote. The game was changed by their absence, as it was by the enforced absence in 2016 of huge numbers of legitimate voters in states such as Wisconsin (one study estimated that about 200,000 more voters would have participated in Wisconsin’s election, had voting conditions in 2016 been what they were as recently as 2012). It was widely noted that Black Alabamans struggled heroically to overcome the obstacles against their participation, but they should not have to.

  There is good work being done, mostly on a state-by-state level, by grassroots groups and civil rights organizations, but it should be far more visible, far more passionately talked about, far more present in our imaginations. Reenfranchising the missing should be one of the great struggles of our moment. We should do it on principle, because it’s about righting a grave injustice. We should also do it because these voters are, overall, people with beautiful dreams of justice, inclusion, equality, and because these voters will write a different story of what the United States of America is, and can be, and should be. A different story of who and what matters.

  When you change your trajectory by even a few degrees at the outset, it can take you someplace completely different by the time you’ve walked a few miles, let alone gone along for decades, or a century and a half. Stripping citizens of their voting rights has steadily pushed us to the right, and we have ended up someplace we should never have been. Many lives have been crushed along the way, voices have been suppressed, wars have broken out, the urgent crisis of climate change has been denied and neglected. We can’t undo what has been. The story has been told, the line has been walked. But we can correct course. We can start by telling a story that millions of missing votes matter and by working to get those voters back in the game.


  II.

  American Emotions

  The Ideology of Isolation

  (2016)

  If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself, on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.

  This is the modern ideology we still call conservative, though it is really a sort of loopy libertarianism that inverts some of the milder propositions of earlier conservative thinkers. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in an interview in 1987. The rest of her famous remark is less frequently quoted: “There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”

  Throughout that interview with Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher walked the line between old-school conservatism—we are all connected in a delicate tapestry that too much government meddling might tear—and the newer version: “Too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’” At some point in the decades since, the balance tipped definitively from “government aid should not replace social connections” to “to hell with others and their problems.” Or, as the cowboy sings to the calf, “It’s your misfortune / And none of my own.”

  The cowboy is the American embodiment of this ideology of isolation, though the archetype of the self-reliant individual—like the contemporary right-wing obsession with guns—has its roots less in actual American history than in the imagined history of Cold War–era Westerns. The American West was indigenous land given to settlers by the US government and cleared for them by the US Army, crisscrossed by government-subsidized railroads and full of water projects and other enormous cooperative enterprises. All this had very little to do with Shane and the sheriff in High Noon or the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western trilogy. But never mind that, because a cowboy silhouetted against a sunset looks so good, whether he’s Ronald Reagan or the Marlboro Man. The loner taketh not, nor does he give; he scorneth the social and relies on himself alone.

  Himself. Women, in this mode of thinking, are too interactive in their tendency to gather and ally rather than fight or flee, and in their fluid boundaries. In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform—the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else—is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.

  US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’s first public questions, after a decade of silence during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, came in late February 2016, when he took an intense interest in whether barring people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from owning guns violated their constitutional rights. That there is a constitutional right for individuals to own guns is a consequence of Antonin Scalia’s radically revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment, and it’s propped up on the cowboy ethos, in which guns are incredibly useful for defending oneself from bad guys and one’s right to send out bullets trumps the right of others not to receive them. Facts demonstrate that very few people in this country successfully use guns to defend themselves from “bad people”—unless you count the nearly two-thirds of US gun deaths by suicide as a sad and peculiar form of self-defense. The ideologues of isolation aren’t interested in those facts, or in the fact that the majority of women murdered by intimate partners in the United States are killed with guns.

  But I was talking about cowboys. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins describes how Westerns valued deeds over words, a tight-lipped version of masculinity over communicative femininity, and concludes: “Not speaking demonstrates control not only over feelings but over one’s physical boundaries as well. The male … maintains the integrity of the boundary that divides him from the world. (It is fitting that in the Western the ultimate loss of that control takes place when one man puts holes in another man’s body.)” Fear of penetration and the fantasy of impenetrable isolation are central to both homophobia and the xenophobic mania for “sealing the border.” In other words, isolation is good, freedom is disconnection, and good fences, especially on the US–Mexico border, make good neighbors.

  Both Mitt Romney and Donald Trump have marketed themselves as self-made men, as lone cowboys out on the prairie of the free market, though both were born rich. Romney, in a clandestinely videotaped talk to his wealthy donors in 2012, disparaged people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

  Taxes represent civic connection: what we each give to the collective good. This particular form of shared interest has been framed as a form of oppression at least since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, bemoaned a “tax system which penalizes successful achievement.” The spread of this right-wing hatred of taxes has been helped along by the pretense that tax revenues go to loafers and welfare queens, who offend the conservative idea of independence, rather than to things conservatives like (notably, a military that dwarfs all others) or systems that everyone needs (notably, roads and bridges).

  I ran into this hatred for dependency in an online discussion of the police killing of Luis Góngora Pat, a homeless man, in San Francisco in 2016. More than a hundred messages into a fairly civil discourse started by a witness to the shooting, a commenter erupted: “I’m sick of people like you that think homeless people who can’t take care of themselves and their families [and] have left them for us taxpaying citizens to care for think they have freedom. Once you can’t take care of or support yourself, and expect others to carry your burden, you have lost freedom. Wake up.” The same commenter later elaborated, “Have you ever owed money? Freedom lost. You owe someone. It’s called personal responsibility.”

  Everyone on that neighborhood forum, including the writer, likely owed rent to a landlord or mortgage payments to a bank, making them more indebted than the homeless in their tents. If you’re housed in any American city, you also benefit from a host of services, such as water and sanitation, and the organizations overseeing them, as well as from traffic lights and transit rules and building codes—the kind of stuff taxes pay for. But if you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone.

  All this would have made that commenter’s tirade incoherent, if its points weren’t so familiar. This is the rhetoric of modern conservatives: freedom is a luxury that wealth affords you; wealth comes from work; those who don’t work, never mind the cause, are undeserving (those who are both wealthy and don’t work escape the analysis). If freedom and independence are the ideal, dependence is not merely disdained; it’s furiously loathed. In her novelistic paean to free enterprise Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand called dependents parasites and looters. “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency,” said one of Rand’s admirers, congressman Paul Ryan.

  The modern right may wish that every man were an island, entire of himself, but no one is wholly independent. You can’t survive without taking air into your lungs, you didn’t give birth to or raise yourself, you won’t bury yourself, and in between you won’t produce most of the goods an
d services you depend on to live. Your gut is full of microorganisms without which you could not digest all the plants and animals, likely grown by other people, which you devour to survive. We are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.

  There is, of course, such a thing as society, and you’re inside it. Beyond that, beneath it and above and around and within it and us, there is such a thing as ecology, the systems within which our society exists, and with which it often clashes. Ecological thinking articulates the interdependence and interconnectedness of all things. This can be a beautiful dream of symbiosis when you’re talking about how, say, a particular species of yucca depends on a particular moth to pollinate it, and how the larvae of that moth depend on the seeds of that yucca for their first meals. Or it can be a nightmare when it comes to how toxic polychlorinated biphenyls found their way to the Arctic, where they concentrated in human breast milk and in top-of-the-food-chain carnivores such as polar bears. John Muir, wandering in the Yosemite in 1869, put it this way: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”3

  This traditional worldview could be seen as mystical or spiritual, but the accuracy of its description of natural systems within what we now call the biosphere is borne out by modern science. If you kill off the wolves in Yellowstone, elk populations will explode and many other plant and animal species will suffer; if you spray DDT on crops, it kills off pests as intended, but it will also, as Rachel Carson told us in 1962, kill the birds who would otherwise keep many insects and rodents in check.