Despite being the heart of American democracy, Washington, D.C. remains denied full self-rule—its laws subject to congressional veto and its people without a vote in Congress. As new political threats emerge, the fight for D.C.’s right to govern itself is more urgent than ever.

WASHINGTON— I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1996 to attend American University. Like so many students before me, I came for the politics and the promise of possibility. I expected to leave after four years. But nearly three decades later, I’m still here—still captivated by this city’s rhythm, its resilience, and its restless desire to be something more.

What I didn’t know at the time, what I couldn’t have fully understood at eighteen, was just how fragile D.C.’s claim to self-determination really was. After graduation, I paid taxes here, I voted in local elections, and I watched our mayors govern through boom and bust. But always, hovering above it all, was Congress—ready at any moment to veto our will. Washington may be the seat of American democracy, but its residents have never been granted the full rights of citizenship.

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A City Without a Vote

Washington, D.C. is a paradox. It is home to over 700,000 residents—more than Vermont or Wyoming—yet it has no voting representation in the United States Congress. As the U.S. Constitution states, Congress holds “exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the federal district. And that power has been used repeatedly to block, override, or threaten the laws and rights of D.C. residents.

In July, that threat became headline news once again when President Donald Trump floated the idea of a federal takeover of Washington’s government. Citing crime and homelessness, he said bluntly, “We could run D.C. flawlessly… We would run it so good, it would be run so proper… The crime would be down to a minimum.” He even suggested replacing the elected mayor with a presidentially appointed administrator, claiming, “We’d get the best person to run it.”

This week, following a brutal 3 a.m. assault on Sunday near Dupont Circle on Edward Coristine—a 19-year-old government employee known as “Big Balls” and a prominent voice in the DOGE initiative to shrink government—by a group of about 10 juveniles, President Trump once again reignited his call to bring Washington, D.C. under his total control.

These aren’t the only times Trump has suggested a federal takeover—he did so regularly during his first administration and on the campaign trail. However, his most recent calls come at a time when Republicans control both chambers of Congress. The idea, once unthinkable, suddenly seems entirely plausible.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has responded with cautious realism. “When a President has both houses of Congress, limited home rule is just that,” she said, acknowledging how precarious D.C.’s local authority is. D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton was more direct, calling Trump’s comments “a dangerous escalation” and warning that any effort to strip D.C. of its limited autonomy would be met with fierce resistance.

But none of this is new. The District’s history is a long saga of striving for self-governance, only to be repeatedly denied.

The Long Road to Home Rule

In the early days of the republic, residents of what would become D.C. still voted in Maryland or Virginia elections. However, in 1801, when Congress formally assumed control of the District, those rights were abolished. For more than 70 years, the city had no elected local government.

That changed briefly in 1871, when Congress established a territorial-style government with an appointed governor and an elected legislature. But after a few years of financial mismanagement, Congress abolished the system in 1874 and replaced it with a presidentially appointed three-member board of commissioners. Washingtonians wouldn’t have another elected mayor for a full century.

The real breakthrough came in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act. Signed by President Richard Nixon, the law enabled D.C. residents to elect their own mayor and city council, granting them authority over local legislation and budgeting. But there was a catch: Congress retained the right to review and overturn any local law, and all of D.C.’s budgets had to be approved by Congress.

In other words, home rule was granted, but never guaranteed.

This imbalance has played out repeatedly. Congress has used its oversight powers to block the city from funding abortion care for low-income women, regulating marijuana, or even implementing local voting rights for non-citizens. In 2023, Congress overturned a D.C. criminal justice reform law. President Joe Biden—who supports D.C. statehood—signed the repeal, saying, “I support D.C. statehood and home-rule—but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward.”

The Fragile Line Between Democracy and Control

When Trump suggests taking over D.C., he isn’t operating in a vacuum. A similar federal intervention happened in the 1990s, when financial mismanagement led Congress to impose a Control Board with sweeping authority over the city’s budget. That board operated until 2001, effectively suspending home rule during that period.

What makes Trump’s remarks particularly alarming is not just their authoritarian tone, but how plausible they are under current law. As Reuters reported, “For Trump to take over the city, Congress likely would have to pass a law revoking [the Home Rule Act], which Trump would have to sign.” In theory, Congress could abolish D.C.’s elected government tomorrow, and there’s nothing Washingtonians (or anyone else) could do to stop it.

As D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson put it, “The federal government doesn’t have a good track record from when it used to run the city. [A takeover] is much more complicated than five-minute statements.”

What’s Really at Stake

The debate over D.C. statehood is often reduced to partisan shorthand—two Senate seats for Democrats, given the city’s long history of liberalism. But the real issue is one of fairness, governance, and belonging.

Washington, D.C., pays more in federal taxes per capita than any state in the country. Yet our residents have no voting members in Congress. We fight in wars, serve on juries, and follow federal laws—without any direct say in how those laws are made. As former mayor Anthony Williams put it years ago, “There are only three groups of people denied voting rights in our country: children, convicted criminals, and citizens of the District of Columbia.”

The city’s budget, despite being funded mainly through local taxes, still requires federal approval. D.C. cannot tax the incomes of non-residents, even though hundreds of thousands of people commute into the city each day and use its services. Nearly 43% of the land in the District is tax-exempt, primarily due to federal ownership. Unlike governors, the mayor cannot deploy the National Guard in emergencies. And the U.S. Attorney—not a locally elected prosecutor—handles major criminal cases.

All of this means that Washington, D.C. is both a modern metropolis and a colonial relic—governed by others and vulnerable to outside whims. Every Washingtonian lives with the ever-present knowledge that the right to self-determination and self-governance can be taken away at a moment’s notice, and that may soon become reality.

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Can social media still be used effectively to organize for social change? Free speech attorney Nora Benavidez, GenZ influencer Deja Foxx, BlueSky CEO Jay Graber and scores of other tech leaders and influencers taking the SXSW stage here this week say yes. Some of that work has already begun.

AUSTIN, TEXAS—Last year at the annual SXSW conference held here annually, the vibe was a kind of sub-basement worry over the state of democracy. This year here in Austin? For some, one of shock and awe in response to the new Trump Administration’s ongoing attacks on civil society—a sector which this conference’s leaders and attendees have always held dear.

Despite the weaponization of some of the leading social media platforms by diehard Trump supporters trafficking in hate speech, could social media still be used effectively in some form to fight back?

“It’s now or never,” says celebrity GenZ influencer Deja Foxx. “Right now we’re in such a tenuous global moment regarding our democracies worldwide, I don’t think we can afford to stand back nor rely on our leaders, alone, to save us.”

Fighting Back

Speaking Monday at a gathering of influencers discussing the rise of hate speech online, free speech attorney Nora Benavidez of Free Press urged attendees to “not give up” on using social media to organize for change.

“Social media platforms initially held a lot of promise at the start of the Internet age, enabling us all to be connected actively,” she said. Social movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #MarchForOurLives and others later became international movements and in most cases, led to policy reforms. “But now,” Benavidez said, “it’s getting harder. We’ve seen all systems, and particularly social media, get weaponized, despite a lot of pressure to push Meta, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms to do better.”

Elon Musk “and other bad actors,” she added, “are now testing the edges of how far they can push the platforms.” Over the last two years, social media companies, including Meta, X, Facebook and others have fired staff that had been moderating content. Fact-checking has also been discontinued.

“But this doesn’t mean the battle is over,” Benavidez said. “It does mean it’s time to fight back.”

Said Foxx: “We’re out on a limb now, a decade after social media was still working more strongly. Today’s platforms are swinging to the right and they’re censoring information, like on things like reproductive rights. And for content creators like me, it’s become increasingly difficult to use these platforms to create change and develop community.”

Bluesky to the rescue?

Bluesky, the popular new platform alternative, has positioned itself to help.

Its CEO, Jay Graber, an early keynoter here this week, told attendees that decentralized platforms like the one she’s building with Bluesky, “prioritize users over the platform’s bottom-line interests.”

“…If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky or took it over or, if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” Graber said onstage. “There’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative.”

Bluesky is built on the open-source AT Protocol, and its users, Graber said, “like the fact that Bluesky’s open social media ecosystem ultimately means that no one person controls it.”

At 33 million users, Bluesky is still much smaller than Meta Chief Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp tally. Meta, alone, has more than 3 billion daily active users.

But Graber says Bluesky is just getting started, offering people “real choice now,” and not just a new platform but “a new paradigm”—a new way of thinking about what’s possible while being connected in more independent, social change-making ways.

Benavidez says new platforms and more organizing offline will help build the new movement. “Digital life is not real life,” she told conference attendees. “You have to mobilize on social media and in person to make change now, to mute hate speech and organize, and to break the ‘bro-ligarchy’ that Elon Musk and others have now on most other social platforms.”

And the good news, she said, is that “we now have new and very real possibilities, new platforms like Bluesky encouraging us and a lot of growing motivation among influencers. I see that we are starting small, but we’re starting now. The urgency is felt, and the energy is growing fast.”

Got a comment? Please share it here. On Bluesky yet? So are we, here at New Rules. Follow us there, too!

President-elect Donald J. Trump has repeatedly suggested purchasing Greenland from Denmark, citing economic and national security interests, though Denmark and Greenland have firmly rejected the idea. Historically, U.S. territorial acquisitions, such as the Louisiana and Alaska Purchases, were driven by the selling nations' financial or strategic needs, a condition currently absent in this case.

WASHINGTON—In the past month, President-elect Donald J. Trump has suggested that the United States purchase Greenland multiple times, in person and on his social media platform, Truth Social. He also has made calls for the acquisition of Canada and the Panama Canal, citing strategic economic interests and national security concerns. When pressed by reporters, Trump did not rule out using military force to take the island territory. 

Denmark, the nation responsible for the self-governing territory's foreign affairs, defense, and monetary policy, has rebuffed the president-elect. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said last week that Greenland has made it clear that it is not for sale, noting that Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Egede “has been very, very clear … that there is a lot of support among the people of Greenland that Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either.” However, a small survey released Sunday by Patriot Polling suggested that there might be some public support in Greenland, with 57.3 percent of respondents approving of the territory becoming part of the U.S.

So why is this important today? The statements from the Scandinavian country sound eerily similar to those made over a century ago before it sold territory to the United States. Could this be a little bit of history repeating itself?

The U.S. has a long tradition of expanding its territory through acquisition. Over its history, much of the land mass identifiable on the map as the United States today was purchased from other nations, including France in 1803, Spain in 1819, Russia in 1867, and, yes, even Denmark in 1917. Without strategic acquisitions, most states and nearly all territories that make up the U.S. today would not exist.

Paradise, Purchased

Following the Civil War in 1867, the United States began on again off again “negotiations” with Denmark to take control of the Danish West Indies in the Caribbean Sea. These efforts were led by then Secretary of State Wiliam Seward, who is, perhaps, best known for “Seward’s Folly,” the purchase of Russian territory that would eventually become Alaska that same year.

While Seward's bid for the Danish West Indies was unsuccessful, the idea of the U.S. purchasing these islands, namely St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas, was born. Nearly 70 years later, after a series of failed bids, a national security threat turned the idea from concept to reality.

In 1915, the British ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland, causing the ship to sink in just 18 minutes, killing nearly all 1,200 people aboard, including 128 Americans. Germany defended its actions, claiming the ship was carrying munitions, a point that was later confirmed. However, the incident sparked international outrage and nudged the U.S. closer to war.

One of the big fears at the time was the looming threat of Germany’s annexation of Denmark. American leaders believed that a naval or submarine base could be built in the Danish West Indies, from which Germany could launch additional attacks on shipping in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. So, the U.S. revived its bid and threatened to use military occupation if Denmark refused to capitulate.

The negotiations were swift, and on March 31, 1917, the Danish West Indies were sold to the United States for $25 million in gold, which is about $616 billion today. Today, they are known as the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Greener Pastures

Following the end of World War II, in 1946, the United States proposed purchasing Greenland from Denmark for $100 million in gold—equivalent to $1 billion today. In a November 1945 statement, U.S. Senator Owen Brewster described the acquisition as "a military necessity." While Greenland remains an autonomous territory today, a 1951 treaty with Denmark gives the United States much control over the island’s defense. 

Much like the period leading up to the acquisition of the Danish West Indies, President-elect Trump believes there is a clear economic and security threat to the U.S., especially as the waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans warm and competition with China and Russia grows. Greenland is roughly midway between Washington and Moscow; shipping lanes once closed, including the Northwest Passage, are now open, and unexplored natural resource reserves, including rare earth minerals, are now accessible or will be in the coming years.

But what makes the talk of a Greenland acquisition today different from the past? Simply put, the nations that offloaded their territory to the U.S. historically had some overwhelming reason to do so. They either needed capital to cover a costly war or conflict, as in the case of France or Russia, or the cost of maintaining those territories became too much to bear, as in the case of Spain, or both. That is not the case with Denmark today.

Also, unlike today, there was limited global pushback to the U.S.'s past territorial expansion despite some localized disputes, Indigenous resistance, and limited diplomatic tensions. Many nations either viewed these historic deals as advantageous for their interests or could not effectively oppose them. Regardless, over time, though, the acquisitions were recognized as instrumental in shaping the United States's economic and geopolitical power.

But could Denmark and Greenland change their minds, paving the way for Trump to acquire the island territory for the U.S.? It’s possible.

“When you look at the history of the growth of America, whether it be the Louisiana Purchase (from France), where we more than doubled the size of the United States of America, or whether it was buying Alaska (from Russia) … Both of those were incredibly positive,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in an interview with ABC News. “Anything can be not for sale until it suddenly is.”

St. Louis, long divided along racial and economic lines by the "Delmar Divide," implemented approval voting in 2020 to address fractured electoral outcomes and foster broader representation. While praised for its simplicity and inclusiveness, approval voting has faced political backlash, including recent state-level prohibitions, raising questions about its future in Missouri and beyond.

WASHINGTON — St. Louis, Missouri, like many cities across the United States, has a long history of racial segregation. Here, Black and white communities are separated along Delmar Boulevard, better known to locals as the “Delmar Divide” — Black St. Louisans live to the North and their white counterparts to the South.

The friction between these two parts of the city came into focus during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 when Matt and Patricia McCloskey exited their mansion on Portland Place, a private gated community, while armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun, to confront protestors passing through. The images and video of this altercation immediately went viral.

As long as people can remember, white communities have held power in this city, which has translated into political and economic favor and fortune being damned off from the North while it flowed freely in the South; essentially ensuring that Black communities suffered while white ones prospered. Nearly every measure of social and economic well-being breaks at the Divide, from broadband access to property values to mortality. There’s roughly a 20-year life expectancy gap between the two regions.

Despite St. Louis's shifting demographics in recent years—Black and white demographics are now about equally split in terms of the total population, according to the Census Bureau—the white population continued to win citywide races at the ballot box. Races across the city from mayor to alderman often featured a crowded field of candidates, too, making it nearly impossible for any politician, Black or white, to win a clear majority and a mandate. Between 2015 and 2019, eight city elections saw winners with less than 37% of the vote; five of those winners earned less than 20%.

However, that all changed in 2020 when St. Louis implemented approval voting, a new electoral system in which voters may vote for all candidates they approve of. The candidate receiving the most approval votes wins—it’s that simple. St. Louis Approves, the organization advocating for the change, built a city-wide coalition by attending community events, holding town halls, and knocking on doors to drum up support, which garnered 68% support of the electorate.

Approval Voting 101

The most recent mayoral election in St. Louis in 2021 showcased the city's use of approval voting, a system adopted to provide a more representative and voter-friendly approach to elections, which shifted the dynamics of the St. Louis mayoral race. In this election, voters were empowered to support multiple candidates, providing a clearer picture of overall voter preferences. On average, voters selected 1.6 candidates, suggesting that many embraced the opportunity to choose more than one candidate.

Proponents say the new system also reduced the strategic pressure often associated with "lesser evil" voting, as residents could back their preferred candidates without fear of inadvertently helping their least favorite candidate win. Candidates, in turn, tailored their campaigns to appeal to a wider base of voters, knowing they could garner support even from those who favored another contender as their top choice.

As a result, Tishaura Jones, a Black woman who served as the city’s treasurer, won a broad coalition representing 57% of voters above and below the Delmar Divide for the first time. A map of her approval votes revealed strong backing not only from the North, where she had long been popular but also from significant parts of the South.

“The outcome reflected the diverse preferences of St. Louis residents,” according to Nina Taylor, CEO of the Center for Election Science, a proponent of approval voting. “Overall, the election demonstrated that approval voting could effectively encourage broader participation and dialogue in the city's political process, paving the way for other jurisdictions considering electoral reform.”

Biggest Barriers

The introduction of approval voting in St. Louis was widely praised by voters. A survey conducted by Change Research after the March 2021 election found that 81% of voters appreciated the system's simplicity, and 67% liked expressing their preferences without worrying about whether their favorite candidate could win.

Approval voting has also gained traction beyond St. Louis. Fargo, North Dakota, implemented approval voting in 2018, becoming the first city to adopt it for municipal elections. Internationally, this voting system is also used to elect the United Nations Secretary-General and in decision-making processes by several private-sector organizations and non-governmental entities, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which employs approval voting for electing its leadership. Similarly, various academic institutions and professional organizations have adopted this method to streamline elections and reduce polarization.

Critics, however, have pointed out that the system might disadvantage polarizing candidates who inspire deep loyalty from a subset of voters and tend to outperform in primary elections. In 2022, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen attempted but failed to repeal approval voting, arguing that the new system threatened their power. However, in this year’s Missouri election, voters approved Amendment 7, a constitutional amendment prohibiting ranked-choice or approval voting by a roughly 2-to-1 margin—becoming the 11th state to do so. St. Louis will continue to use approval voting because it was implemented before the statewide ban.

League of Women Voters Missouri President Marilyn McLeod said, "We regret that Amendment 7 was approved by the voters. It was misleading due to the inclusion of the requirement on citizenship to vote (which already is required) and it will prohibit any chance in the future to adapt different ideas on elections that might prove beneficial, especially on the local level."

Despite these setbacks, Taylor remains positive about the future of approval voting. “We need to get back to speaking about ideas and policies,” she said. “We need to get away from divisive rhetoric. This helps us get there.”

America feels fractured, with economic struggles, political divides, and social tensions undermining the promise of the American Dream. Decades of stagnant wages and rising costs have left many feeling disillusioned. Yet, beneath the cracks, there remains a shared desire for a better future driven by common-sense solutions.

WASHINGTON—Whether it’s the partisan politics, the growing chasm between the rich and the poor, or the everyday challenges preventing the American Dream from being realized, this country feels broken today. It is taking a toll on our physical and financial well-being, our relationships with friends and family, and our belief in government and democracy. This didn’t happen overnight; it’s been years in the making.

For decades, Americans, much like citizens of peer nations worldwide, have seen their purchasing power decrease. Salaries have only increased modestly, while the cost of living has increased substantially, especially on big-ticket items like education, housing, and health care. Individuals are forced to do more (or the same) with less or cut back, which has forced them to delay life milestones, like creating a family or purchasing a home—a first-time mother's average age is now 27, and a first-time home buyer's average age is now 38, which are historic highs.

The post-pandemic years saw record levels of “greedflation,” especially at the grocery store, where, according to the USDA, prices jumped 25% on average. This rightly caused a lot of anger, which was directed towards incumbent political parties in democracies worldwide rather than at companies actually raising prices to fatten their bottom lines and please shareholders.

According to ABC News, nearly every incumbent party worldwide lost seats or was removed entirely from power this year. Interestingly, there wasn’t a prevailing ideology that took hold other than voters wanting change. The liberal Labour Party took control in the United Kingdom, for example, while the conservative Republican Party won in the United States despite the two having vastly different ideologies.

“The problem that Trump tapped into… it is a problem so much bigger than inflation for two years. It is a five-decade stagnation in decline and American living standards,” noted Kathryn Edwards, a Washington, D.C.-based economist, on TikTok. “It is a structural failing of our economy.”

More Alike than Different

Economic distress opened the door for provocateurs in politics and media to lean into wedge issues that divide us, like reproductive and trans rights and immigration. The social media ecosystem, driven by its algorithms, rewarded those who stoked outrage and fear and undermined our institutions. Our media bubbles reinforced bias and led us to believe that our family and neighbors were against us—the so-called “enemy within.” The result, according to Gallup: “A record-high 80% of U.S. adults believe Americans are greatly divided on the most important values, while 18% believe the country is united.”

Yet, research consistently shows that Americans are united by a shared desire for a better future and common-sense solutions to pressing challenges. A Pew Research Center survey this year, for example, found that nearly three-quarters of Americans—across political and demographic lines—agree that creating economic opportunity is critical for future generations. Shared economic prosperity is central to America’s ethos and necessary for its survival as a democracy.

“For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared during his 1941 State of the Union Address, in the waning days of the Great Depression and less than a year before entering World War II. “The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple.” Americans fundamentally desire four freedoms, he argued: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Despite the narrative of division, most Americans do, in fact, believe that we want the same things, according to Ipsos research released earlier this year. “Despite this enduring sense that America is divided interpersonally, most Americans feel that other Americans want the same things out of life as they do,” they wrote. “The goal is not a red or blue; it is one that most Americans agree on.”

What’s Broken Can Be Fixed

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places,” the famed American writer Ernest Hemingway wrote in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, capturing the raw essence of resilience through adversity. This powerful line is part of a larger reflection on the inevitability of pain and the varied ways people respond to it. It speaks to the universal truth that hardship is an inescapable part of life, yet true strength can emerge in the process of healing.

Though written in the context of war and loss, Hemingway's words echo a philosophy deeply aligned with the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken objects are repaired with gold, transforming them into something new and beautiful. His perspective suggests that the places where we are broken can become sources of strength and character, offering hope for those who can endure and for the future. For Hemingway, much like in the art of kintsugi, the cracks in life’s veneer were not to be hidden but embraced.

These themes of resilience and repair are also foundational to the American story. In his 1853 book Democracy in America, the French aristocrat, diplomat, sociologist, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian Alexis de Tocqueville captured an enduring truth about the United States when he wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” His words are a reminder that resilience, repair, and, to some degree, reinvention, not perfection, are at the heart of the American experiment.

Wars, economic upheavals, and social injustice have tested America’s core ideals throughout its history, and today is no different. Yet, time and again, the country has found ways to confront its shortcomings by coming together, even when the odds seemed unsurmountable. America’s greatness is rooted in the ongoing collective effort to address its imperfections, to bridge its divides, and to strive together toward a better future.

“Democracy is hard,” said Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 2000. “It requires sacrifice, compromise, and a willingness to engage with those who think differently from you.”

“The power of the people won’t simply disappear overnight just because somebody we didn’t vote for wins the White House. Democracy lives in the people, and as long as people hang onto that, democracy will be hard to kill.”

NEW YORK— Elections matter. And this one really does. What does it say about our country?

Just before midnight last night, in case you missed it, everything about Kamala Harris’s final campaign rally in Philadelphia was meant to frame today’s election as a historic referendum on American democracy. By staging her final closing argument for the presidency in Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation—and at the city’s iconic “Rocky Steps” —a visual metaphor to underscore her position as an underdog rising to a great challenge—the Democratic nominee told the crowd of an estimated 20,000 that a vote for her would be about healing versus hate and the opportunity to resist fascism and build a healthier democracy. “We’re in this together,” she said to cheers of “Yes She Can!” Harris continued: “This could be one of the closest races in our history as a nation, so voting matters. … The momentum is on our side! We will win!”

Just after midnight tonight, Harris lost. Both Harris and Trump supporters had said they were convinced their candidates would win—and that if they didn't, the consequences for America would be existential.

Sure, Harris ran a terrific campaign and visionary ground game. [It’s already a case study soon to be published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how to build a successful, nation-wide, digital-first awareness campaign in just under 100 days.] But it wasn’t enough; the post mortems will continue for weeks. Trump’s White House win was definitive. Republicans also won a majority in the Senate; the House is still too close to call.

So what happens now? Will democracy also be seen as having lost?

A ‘Movement Moment’

In 2016, when Donald Trump won his election to the White House the first time, the morning-after shock waves also were intense. I remember waiting in my company's conference room for eight people to show up for a long-scheduled strategy meeting on an unrelated topic. Only one person showed up—marketing colleague Arabella Meyer. The rest emailed their multiple regrets—about the election, not just for skipping the meeting. Arabella hung out for a while to share the shockwaves, but mostly we just looked out the window of my office at Bryant Park. It was raining. Nobody was in the park; very few people were out on the street, normally one of the busiest in the heart of Manhattan.

But then, in the weeks and months which followed, Trump's surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, record-breaking donations to pro-democracy nonprofits, and waves of grassroots organizing, compelling fellow writer/editor Micah Sifry (Substack editor of The Connector] to declare that "we're in a movement moment."

And for a while, the energy wasn't emerging only from the "liberal" resistance movements. Conservatives launched their own political groups and responses. According to Atlantic writer Franklin Foer, the warnings back then of impending autocracy in America at the time "helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump."  Writes the Atlantic writer McKay Coppins: "That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside of the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden's victory had represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached President simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again."

But the story didn't end there, and here we are, four years later - in another reality. The worries about shifting closer toward autocracy have been heightened with Trump's recent, more explicit, un-democratic plans, including talk of weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, banning the journalists he doesn't like from covering him and replacing thousands of civil servants in Washington with loyalists -- people who won't object to whatever he requests of them.

And so the question remains. Will the surge of mass resistance that followed Trump's shocking victory in 2016 be repeated again now, after Donald Trump’s win again tonight?

Insights from our #NR Network

I asked a variety of well-known thought leaders in our New Rules network before the polls closed: Will democracy be seen as being lost if Trump wins, or will it be, as it was in 2016, a catalyst for new forms of resistance, resilience and activism?

And the short answer? "Rain or shine, we're still going to be in a democracy," says Documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns.  "It won't go away any time soon—but now if we wish to keep it in the coming year or two or three, we've got to fight back harder—much harder, regardless of who wins. And not with talk, but with widespread action to strengthen the rule of law in our legal system, our election systems, improve the breadth of media coverage to more fairly represent this country's growing multiracial, multigenerational citizenry, and much else."

Here are some other insights from our network about what happened, early lessons—and what’s now and next:

• American historian Heather Cox Richardson: “We all had hope that Americans had heard how bad things would be under Donald Trump and would decide, even it they didn’t like the policies of Harris-Walz, to vote for them, instead. But they did not, and there are many lessons. The biggest one, to me, is that we’re in a swirl of disinformation. The right wing emphasized to ordinary Americans that they had things to fear that were not real, and erased the things are are real—so that those who voted for Trump really, truly voted for things that were the opposite of what they said their wanted, and this will be a real problem going forward. I mean, objectively, our economy is fabulous, the best economy we have seen since the 1960s. Real wages for 80% of Americans have gone up; income for the top 20% have gone down in that period. That is generally what most voters would like, but they don’t know that. They think the economy is terrible, a failing economy, and that Trump is going to come in with his tariffs and save that, but every economist will say that’s exactly backward. I think we have to grapple with the fact that many Americans have been put into a position of something that a lot of political theorists, especially those coming out of Russia, call political technology— which is that you can get people to vote away their democracy and to vote for the people they are told to vote for, so long as you can create a false world for them to believe in. And to a large extent, that’s one of the things that happened here.”

• NYU professor and expert on disinformation, Ruth Ben-Ghiat. "We have been operating from a dated playbook that does not reflect the realities of our times and has led to overly cautious and inconsistent responses to flagrant violations of international law and foreign, national and transnational influence operations. If we are going to realize the promise of democracy as a political system based on the values of accountability, transparency, equitable justice and solidarity and reign in bad actors out to destroy a democratic international order based on humanitarianism and the rule of law, U.S. foreign and national security and defense policies will need a revision. Harris-Walz have been for this as a democratic value.”

• Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund:  “We are here now, in this kind of election, because our democracy is not healthy. What are the non-negotiables that we share about our democracy? We’re a multi-racial democracy now, and it’s not an easy thing. We’re going to disagree with each other about a lot of stuff but if we’re going to be a country and a democracy, we will need to have fundamental values on which we all agree. For example, a peaceful transfer of power is not negotiable. That is not a partisan issue. Democracy and our country thrives when all people have a voice. So I think on the other side of this election, we will need to do a real forensic examination of our systems to understand how we got here so we don’t get here again. Democratic institutions, our political system, media, academia, the legal profession— we all have shortcomings in all of our institutions that undergird our democracy. There are cracks now in democracy’s foundations. Do we paint over those cracks or do we commit now to doing some deeper work? I think in this election year, especially, there’s been a wake-up call and that’s exactly what we need is this kind of accounting to make our democracy work better and be stronger.”

• American historian Michael Beschloss:  “I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of what constitutes a fascist. You go through American history and you cannot find another major party nominee and candidate who promised to be a dictator for a day, to suspend the rule of law, possibly terminate the Constitution, and pit the U.S. Army against domestic political enemies. We’ve never had anything like this, so anyone who tries to normalize this election, this is one of the kind we’ve never seen before in American history. …This is as much a turning point in my view as the elections held in 1860 (Civil War) and 1940, when we were deciding not just whether to fight fascists in Europe, but whether to adopt fascism at home. There were those voices who said back then that democracy was outmoded. Charles Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, wrote a book that said democracy does not work anymore. But neither of these voices were a major party’s presidential nominee who just won the presidency, and did it again.”

• Evan Osnos, writer for The New Yorker.  "What if we were wrong about our country's appetite or its readiness for a multiethnic democracy? Part of what had been hanging in the balance with this election is the conviction that if Kamala Harris were to win, then it would be Donald Trump who would be the strange parenthesis in American history rather than Barack Obama."

Tomorrow

For now, regardless, don't lose sight of where we’ve been and the possibilities still ahead.

We've been a rough-and-tumble experiment for nearly 250 years, we're in a vastly different media ecosystem today and it's not the same world many of us lived in just a few decades ago. But so far, our democracy has held. For many of us, this experiment in democracy now faces another critical test. For many others of us, this experiment is still just getting started.

___

Got some thoughts before the polls close? We'll be writing more about what's next in the coming days, weeks and months, and with your input about what's next. Vote today but also share your thoughts. Regardless of who you vote(d) for, we're in this together.

NOTE: This piece was updated to reflect some new and updated responses from some in our network to Donald Trump’s win, the morning after.

A new report says 62% of registered voters believe an outbreak of post-election violence is likely if Donald Trump loses the election next week. To mitigate risk, businesses are creating new programs to ease employee conflict while some local communities are creating in-person public service campaigns. Will it be enough?

CHICAGO—The election is seven days away, and counting.

How are you feeling about America’s future?

[No, really. Let us know. This year’s election-year roller coaster has been delivering big, steady doses of electoral anxiety for months, so if you’re feeling more stressed than usual, welcome to the club.]

Last evening, I asked the same question—how are you feeling about America’s future?—to a standing-room-only crowd at one of Chicago’s favorite “third space” community hangouts, KibbitzNest Books, Brews & Blarney on the West Side of the city’s popular Lincoln Park neighborhood. Using Post-it notes (this third space bar is WiFi free), volunteers from the cross-generational crowd offered up an eight-word paper “Wordle” that listed the following words as their answer: anxious, afraid, weary, miffed, confused—and “oddly complacent” along with the words blinkered and detached.

[KibbitzNest, located about two miles north of where the Emmy Award-winning drama, The Bear, is filmed, has been hosting a series of neighborhood conversations this fall in the run-up to the November 5th election; I was invited to help moderate one of the sessions.]

The words chosen came as no suprise. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that politics is a leading cause of stress for 7 out of 10 adults—from both parties, and nearly three-fourths of those surveyed also said they are worried about the future of democracy. On Tuesday, the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released a new survey of its own that estimates 42% of the roughly 244 million Americans registered to vote this year are “extremely” or “very” concerned there will be post-election political violence.

And wait—there’s a bit more data point drama to share. According to the AP-NORC survey, which polled voters supporting both parties, as many as 6 in 10 voters think Donald Trump—after years of publicly denying he lost the 2020 election—will again refuse to accept election results if he loses next week; more than half of registered voters surveyed said they are concerned the former president and his allies might try again to overturn the results, as they attempted to do on January 6, 2020, using unlawful means.

The F Word

Of course, it’s no wonder public worry is running high. Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly and more than a dozen other former, high-ranking Trump aides went public recently with the statement that Trump meets the definition of a “fascist”— and confirmed reports that Trump had told them all on numerous occasions that he openly admires Adolf Hitler. While Trump has not denied his admiration for Hitler, Trump insists he is “not a Nazi,” though his speeches over time have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused and more profane, according to a detailed review by the Times of his many hundreds of public appearances over the years. His recent riffs have meandered from the irrelevant to irreverent, whether focusing on Arnold Palmer’s penis size, or saying Kamala Harris “is a very low-IQ individual who is drinking or is on drugs,” or that his political opponents are “vermin” and immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., or that wind power is killing birds and is stopping people from watching television.

“Plenty of presidents have been called unwell, or called dictators by their political opponents,” Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote recently, “but none until now has been publicly accused of being a “fascist” by his own handpicked advisers … and no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad.”

State and local officials are preparing for multiple possible disruptions across the country, but especially in key swing states. In the state of Pennsylvania, which holds 19 Electoral College votes which both Trump and Harris say they’ll need to win, officials have created an election-threat task force that includes security representatives from the governor’s office, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard and Pennsylvania’s Emergency Management Agency.

If Harris wins, security officials say, Trump attorneys and supporters may launch targeted attempts to unseat her; in Pennsylvania, all 67 counties must legally certify the results by November 25th. [Four years ago, Republican commissioners in three counties—Lancaster, Berks and Fayette—refused to certify the vote, which may happen again.]

Warns American Historian Michael Beschloss: “If you think there’s stress now, wait until you see what happens when Trump wins— or loses. His reckless behavior makes him very dangerous.”

Politics at Work

Of course, with political polarization at an all-time high, state election officials, government agency leaders and political campaign managers aren’t the only people preparing now to manage risk before—and after—Tuesday. Employers in the workplace and hosts of third spaces in local communities are also on the alert—regardless of their political affiliation or voting preference.

According to new data from the upcoming Integral Index, an annual study of more than 2,000 US employees conducted with the Harris Poll, two groups of employees stand out in terms of their view on discussing politics in the workplace. It’s an interesting combination: younger workers and senior leaders are far more comfortable with having political conversations at work, but also are more concerned about political tensions erupting around them when they do.

Many HR leaders have been setting up small “stress management” programs for months—partly to avoid any post-election fallout among employees, and the reasons are clear. Perceptyx, an HR analytics firm, found in a recent survey of 2,300 people that 1 in 3 employees have already experienced a recent conflict stemming from a political disagreement at work. What’s more, 80% of those who faced such conflicts are now actively seeking a new job, making them 1.6 times more likely to quit their current position than their colleagues. “Understanding the impact of an election result, especially in a high-conflict election year as this one, we know exactly when it’s coming and can prepare for the potentially disheartening—and as a result, disruptive —feelings it could stir up,” says Shawnee Irmen-De Anda, chief people officer at the online counseling and therapy firm Thriveworks. “It will also have an impact on some employees’ mental health.”

GenZ workers have been most susceptible to workplace dust-ups over politics, says Perceptyx—and are 2.3 times more likely than Boomers to have a political disagreement at work and 5 times more likely to have experienced bias, prejudice or discrimination due to their political beliefs.

Harvard Business Review recently published A Leader’s Guide to Navigating Employee Activism, citing some potential actions employers might take to lower the political heat in the office this week and beyond—and check out other ideas in the Corporate Playbook developed by Civic Alliance, a non-partisan organization committed to civic engagement.

Words Matter

Civic organizations and philanthropic foundations are also stepping up to help ease workplace, campus and community tensions tied to next week’s election.

The Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), a leading third space organization founded during the pandemic by two dozen of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations—including the Ford, Rockefeller, Obama, Ronald Reagan, Gates, Bezos, Bloomberg and Kresge foundations—just completed a five-year research project that measures the reaction of more than 5,000 registered voters to 21 words used often by nonprofit causes and civic organizations.

Called the Civic Language Perceptions Project’s How to Talk Bridgey guide, the report includes an index, based on a survey that ranks whether commonly used words are met with a favorable response in today’s political climate and can bring people together. The report also looks at whether a word is received negatively and pulls us apart.

Democracy is on the ballot this fall, yet the word “democracy” is one of the words the report cites as being among the most divisive, ranking a lowly 15th in PACE’s analysis of the power of the 21 words to bring people together.

“On this word, democracy, there’s a pretty big disconnect,” says Amy McIsaac, author of the report and head of the project. “ We’ve heard from democracy advocates that the word is off-putting to conservatives who believe it’s a Trojan horse for liberal agendas.”

McIsaac suggests using the word “freedom” instead, adding, “that’s why Vice President Kamala Harris and her 2024 campaign team have been using that word often, too—to be heard by all sides. There seems to be a relationship between partisanship and negativity this year. …Words matter, and so will this election.”

Got any new data to share on post-election planning for risk management? Give us a shout by sharing a comment. And don’t forget to vote!

NOTE: This post was updated October 31st to cite state and federal government agency deployments of election-threat forces to guard against efforts by bad actors to disrupt this year’s election.

A new field of citizen “democracy defenders” is stirring up a new bipartisan movement to defeat election deniers and restore support for democracy.

NEW YORK—Tim Walz has had a vibe shift. So has Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is undergoing one, himself—as is JD Vance, due to his penchant for provocation.

And now, citizenship is getting one, too—a vibe shift that makes it not just cool again to participate in our democracy, but critical—to make sure the November 5th election is not another “too close to call” contest, but that every vote is counted fairly and every voice is heard this election year without disruption by those who still believe (or want others to believe) the false claim that President Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election.

Fears of disruption in this year’s vote counts are real. The pro-Trump election denier movement is escalating its push to challenge the rights of large numbers of pro-Harris voters to vote this year. Across the eight U.S. swing states in which this year’s race for the White House will be decided, hundreds of new organizations have been scrambling in recent months to prevent another election denial crisis and any new efforts by Donald Trump or any future candidates to challenge the will of the voters.

Fear Factor

A new report by the non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group focusing on special interests distorting U.S. democracy, says that “election denialism and their voter fraud lies have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states.” CMD Executive Director Arn Pearson says there are more than 100 election deniers now sitting on election boards in U.S. swing states—plus 50 running for Congress and 81 who are leaders of local Republican organizations. All deniers, CMD says, potentially can influence the way votes are counted and certified. “The potential for creating chaos if the votes are close is enormous,” Pearson says.

In the recent Vance-Walz vice presidential debate, Vance’s refusal to say whether he believes the 2020 election was stolen has only elevated concerns that election deniers could disrupt this year’s vote count, especially in the swing states, where vote margins are expected to be razor-thin. “Being extra vigilant that all votes are counted fairly is one thing, but continuing to spread lies about the outcome of the last election to encourage a drive to challenge some voters unfairly is quite another,” says Ashley Quarcoo, executive director for the two-year-old, non-partisan Election Trust Initiative.

Quarcoo and leaders of other new voter rights groups say that “getting onto the vibe wagon” is needed, to help make more people aware of how important it is to vote this election. “It’s time to focus on signing up more people to vote but also is about fighting a flood of voter suppression efforts by some pro-Trump supporters and those who still believe he won the 2020 election,” says Quarcoo. “We’ve got to be ready for challenges now and in the future, and we don’t see ourselves as fully ready yet.”

The 'Vibe Wagon’

Last month, the Broadway cast of Hamilton recorded new lyrics for a song they called The Election of 2024—which, like the play itself, emphasizes why democracy is important and that every vote counts. Made in partnership with two leading voter rights nonprofits, WhenWeAllVote.org and VoteRiders.org, the song urges the 41 million GenZers now eligible to vote to do so— many for the first time. To the tune of Here Comes the General, actor Jean-Marc Delacruz shouts: “I am not throwing away my vote, folks.”

According to Pew Research, most Americans still feel it’s very important to vote “to be a good citizen and member of society—a fundamental act in a representative democracy”—but most also believe a good citizen “should be willing to take to the streets when significant issues are at stake.”

Not all of the new citizenship groups are working to increase voter registration. Others are helping election officials replace outdated election system technology, to increase security; fund the hiring of more poll workers and professionalize and improve the efficiency of the individual voting systems set up by individual states.

Still other groups are focusing on pumping up legal efforts to monitor the country’s election systems to enable increased accountability.

Bipartisan Efforts

Advocates for ensuring free and fair elections this year include some legal scholars with conservative credentials, including the prominent conservative scholar and former federal judge Michael Luttig and GOP political attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, who recently joined the voter rights movement and are co-leading some of its efforts. [Luttig recently endorsed Kamala Harris for president, saying Trump “sought to overturn an American election which he had lost fair and square, and as a result, vast numbers of Americans today no longer believe in the elections in the United States of America.”]

The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the R Street Institute also are working across party lines to bring together conservative leaders and election administrators across the country to work with voter rights groups and concerned citizens to find common ground. “We need spaces like this for folks on the right to test these issues out and also to have candid conversations with other conservatives,” says Scott Warren, founder of Generation Citizen, a new civics education organization.

Before and after the November 5th election, new citizenship group organizers and legal scholars say they will be especially monitoring the extent of election denier activity in eight key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Their focus is mostly on the following:

• Mass purges. Georgia has seen, by far, the most mass challenges to voter registrations by election denial groups attempting to purge voter rolls in support of Donald Trump’s reelection bid. Using new apps and online tools, volunteers for the election denial group, True the Vote, have been filing hundreds of thousands of challenges to voter registrations nationally. Last month, True the Vote rolled out a new app called VoteAlert, designed for 2020 election deniers to share conspiracy theories and to coordinate their efforts for 2024 to “catch election cheaters.” Wired magazine, in a recent investigation, said True the Vote, in 2022, claimed to have evidence showing “so-called ballot mules” were being used to stuff drop boxes to sway the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor but later admitted in court they had no such evidence. True the Vote is again supporting Donald Trump in this year’s election.

• Obscure legal theories. Some election deniers are using obscure legal theories to persuade state and local officials in key swing states to challenge voters who don’t agree with them. “Election deniers, the people who still believe Joe Biden stole the presidency from Donald Trump in the last election, are trying to challenge more and more legitimate voter registrations,” says Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute in Washington. “We want voter rolls to be up to date. Everyone does. But election deniers are now engaging in new software and AI-assisted purges of certain groups of voters regardless of their registration status,” Waldman adds. “Unbridled, these are new forms of voter suppression.”

• Donald Trump’s statements on election results. Trump has said, publicly, on three separate occasions during the past two months, that the only way he could lose the November election is if voter fraud is committed by his opponents. Such statements have been conjuring up new fears among many election officials that Trump is planting new seeds across his MAGA network “to reprise post-election day protests that would again challenge the outcome of a free and fair election,” the Brennan Center’s Waldman says.

Lofty Ideals?

Can this new “voter vibe” movement to increase voter registration, blunt efforts at voter suppression and increase election security make a difference this fall?

The Brennan Center’s Waldman is hopeful. But he says he thinks the election denial movement won’t go away any time soon.

Meagan Wolfe, an election administrator in Wisconsin, says that over the last four years, she has seen “an alarming change in the way some Americans now perceive the voting process.”

“ … No matter how many facts we present or how transparent we are about our work,” Wolfe says, “there is still misinformation that persists” about the fairness of the system and the legitimacy of President Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020. To be most effective in battling attacks on poll workers by election deniers, she says, “is not asking someone to take someone else’s word for what’s going on, but to actually invite them to go see it for themselves.”

Stay tuned.

NOTE: This story was updated for a final time on October 6th to include new information on bipartisan efforts to preserve voter rights.

In this era of fear and anxiety, who wins the White House will likely depend, ultimately, on how each candidate makes us feel.

CHICAGO —Feelings have always played a role in politics. But not as big a role as they’re playing this election year.

Sure, policies still matter to voters—a lot. We just got quite an earful on plenty of of all that in the first, if not only, high-stakes debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—just as we will, again, on October 1st, during the vice presidential debate between Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, to be hosted by CBS News.

But in this year of fear, anxiety, high conflict and social turbulence, it’s not about data and policy differences so much as it is about a candidate’s temperament, and how well each will be able to connect emotionally with voters in today’s politically charged climate as a compassionate ally, solidly prepared to move both them and the country forward.

Not convinced? As a very young reporter covering Bill Clinton’s White House campaign for Hearst News back in the day, I was always being reminded by Clinton’s lead strategist, James Carville, of his famous line, “It’s the economy, stupid” —a reminder that despite attack ads, poor debate performances and other issues of the day, it would be the state of the economy that would always make or break a candidate’s bid for higher office.

In these times, though, Carville says that phrase he coined is no longer entirely true. “That trope doesn’t bark much anymore,” he said in a recent interview—at least not in this year’s fight for the White House. He and today’s top strategists, political thought leaders and some top GenZ influencers now say the new battleground is emotion.

A CNN poll released the morning after the first Harris-Trump debate showed that 63% of the network’s viewers felt Harris turned in a better and more “emotionally solid” debate performance than Trump; the Atlantic, sizing up the emotional component of the first debate, said “Harris stayed human, while Trump went feral.” Taylor Swift endorsed Harris on Instagram after the debate in a post that received 7.8 million likes, saying, in part: “I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” She signed it, “Childless Cat Lady”—a reference to a remark by GOP Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance lamenting what he perceived to be the emotional deficit of a country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Swift included with her endorsement a photograph of herself holding one of her three cats.

Big Feelings

 “If this were an era defined by big policy questions and little else, that would be one thing. But it is an age now defined by Big Feelings,” says writer Anand Giridharadas, who has been tracking efforts by aspiring autocrats to play the emotional card in their campaigns.

“There is a lot of anxiety and fear and great confusion among millions of people about who they will become on the far side of head-spinning change,” he said at a recent conference of journalists. “There is the emotional crises of men unsettled by a future of gender equality. The anxiety of many White people unsettled by a future of racial equality. The anxiety of many young people” worried about the future health of the planet, along with growing fear over government inaction to stop what is now becoming a common and continuous string of school shootings. And there have been unresolved questions in this era over whether pro-democracy leaders and movements can, in their own way, “get the blood up” to defend the rule of law and its ideals of pluralism, economic justice and basic human rights.

“…All around us, people are not sure how to make sense of their place in a world of upheaval, nor the ability of their governments to serve them any better than now,” Giridharadas continued. And in an era such as this, “leaving the politics of emotion, of passion, to autocrats … would be a dangerous abdication.”

While connecting emotionally with new audiences is critical, trusting a candidate can be seen as a emotional risk, says Manos Tsakiris, director of the University of London’s new Centre for the Politics of Feelings. Democratic elections in the U.S. and in democracies around the globe this year are being rocked and seeded by a set of new emotional flares—biased algorithms, disinformation, and targeted, emotional appeals created by Russian social media trolls and global autocrats meant to intentionally whip up voter anger and persuade many Americans to start questioning the value of democracy, itself.

“Political language today has become saturated with emotion,” says Tsakiris, who co-founded the Center in 2021 to study how politicians and aspiring autocrats are using emotion to influence voters in democracies around the world. “Historically, democratic political theory has focused on reason and rationality as a means of taming emotions. …But now, we’re seeing some politicians using emotion, void of reason and deep thought, to convince new voters to depart from our democratic values.”

Vibe Watch

So, dear readers, with the most respected public opinion polls now showing an increasingly polarized electorate with Harris and Trump locked in a dead heat, here’s some back-of-the-envelope context to consider about the Big Feelings our candidates and their communication teams are both navigating, sharing and designing this presidential election year, for better or worse, to shape how voters will feel and engage with others about the November election.

Being a media professor during an historic U.S. election year has given me and my grad students access to a ton of fresh examples of how vibes and memes are influencing the mood of the electorate—and, by extension, how both facts and emotions are shaping the outcomes of campaigns.

My students’ first-week assignment this new semester was to start ‘vibe-watching’ the new memes, attack ads, and TikTok videos the candidate’s teams are using to generate emotion and connections with target voters. Here are some of the pre-debate, non-partisan observations they shared, with permission, on global polling, the use of attack ads and the gender gap. All have been fact-checked. Spoiler alert: They’re just getting started!

• Race and gender vibes. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, a collaboration of university media professors tracking the communications used in political campaigns, 100 % of Trump’s attack ads have been focused so far on Harris, with 95% attacking her personally and only 5% talking about policy differences. The attack ads, distributed in swing state counties considered most likely to go from blue to red, question Harris’s laugh, her experience, her racial identity and suggest that in past jobs, she has been “a DEI hire.” Trump’s ads are also meant to build fear by describing her as a potential danger to the country, suggesting her focus on the Middle Class makes her a “Marxist” and her lack of bias against others “makes her a member of the Communist Party.” Trump spokespeople acknowledge that very little of this name-calling, so far, has stuck; Trump advisors say they’re testing which Republican vibes best spike the emotions of MAGA supporters and targeted GenZ men who fear social change will not include their interests. Harris is also starting to roll out attack ads, hers designed to inform voters about Trump’s policies and how his former top cabinet officials feel he lacked competency as President. According to political marketers, attack ads sometimes work by either persuading voters to change their preferences for office—or, most often, to avoid voting for a particular candidate altogether.

• Secret vibes. Team Trump’s recent visits to various “sundown towns” across the Sun Belt and Midwest were intentionally scheduled to convey a “secret, inside vibe” meant to reassure White voters who fear racial equality that he understands their fears. [Trump advisors acknowledge this is true.] Sundown towns are places in America where the resident populations, back in the early 20th century, made local laws intended to force Blacks to leave town before sundown, so as to keep those cities and towns ‘White-only.’ Most of these towns are still mostly White and proud of their history. Trump’s repeated mis-pronouncement of Harris’s first name has also been called a “secret vibe” meant to both entertain supporters and convey his opposition to Harris in a way that has nothing to do with her policy positions. During the first Harris-Trump debate, Trump avoided looking at Harris and did not call her by her name.

• The Joy vibe. Kamala Harris’s new “joy” campaign was not created only to convey happy talk and contrast the Harris-Walz campaign with Trump’s campaign speeches about “American carnage.” In communities of color, the use of the word “joy” is a cultural reference to the organizing strength of political movements built on the values of resilience, inclusion— and resistance to racial bias, gender bias, segregation and religious freedom for all Americans, including Whites. In this emotion-driven strategy being pushed by the Harris-Walz team, Trump might have finally met his match when it comes to emotional targeting.

• The freedom vibe. MAGA supporters want freedom. So does everyone else. But democracy? Not unless it is re-set to work better. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 72% of Americans say the U.S used to be a good example of democracy, but isn’t anymore, and a median of 40% of adults polled across 34 other democracies around the world say U.S. democracy “used to be a good example for other countries to follow.” The Harris-Walz strategy, therefore, is consciously avoiding references to “democracy,” using the word “freedom” to acknowledge, says Walz, that “you can still be clear-eyed about the injustices and violence and hypocrisy America was built on but still see the promise of its story—not by rejecting things as they are but by supporting new leaders to make democracy work better, for all.” The Trump Team is also mostly avoiding the use of the word “democracy” in their campaign messaging.

• The relevancy vibes. Harris and Trump are duking it out on social media, mostly to woo the 41 million GenZ voters now registered to vote— many for the first time this year. There is a widening gender gap among young Americans; Trump is targeting young White men on the streaming platforms Kick and Twitch, who are deep into bro culture and have concerns about the topic of gender equality. Harris, meanwhile, is targeting young women on TikTok, X and Instagram, to connect with them using popular culture references to GenZ fashion, music and food memes to underscore her relevance and understanding of what they care about, how they relate to each other and what they want and need from their leaders. [See our recent stories, Politics, Re-wired and GenZ Influencers: the new swing voters?].

• Ezra Klein, the journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, explained at a recent media conference his early lesson on how best to connect emotionally with an audience. He said: “All through school I was heavily bullied, but the thing that was very clear to me then—as a kid who wanted to be liked by other people but often wasn’t—was that what mattered in the school yard was not the thing you said but the mood of the crowd when and after you said it.”

I hope we’ve given you some additional context and input on the messaging being used to fuel the start of the Harris-Trump race for the White House. Please share your take on this year’s emphasis on emotion. We’d love to hear your feelings, too!

NOTE: This article was updated on 9-11 to include new poll numbers and to share some post-debate references to the emotional punch of the Harris-Trump debate on 9-10.

Both parties, post-Biden, are now re-making their campaigns for the Internet, using new digital tools to enlist the help of America’s next-gen influencers reshaping media, culture and power to connect more deeply and directly with voters online. Might America’s 41 million GenZers ultimately decide who wins in November?

NEW YORK— With just two months left until Election Day, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pivoting their campaigns to resonate more powerfully with the GenZ crowd—and most of it is happening online.

GenZ influencers are now the key players, connecting with new communities through platforms like TikTok, Twitch, Kick and Instagram. Both campaigns, just a couple of months ago obsessed with Joe Biden’s age, are now racing in the final stretch to secure the support of young voters by leveraging pop culture, meme culture, and digital-first strategies.

For Harris, this means ZOOM rallies, TikTok collaborations, GenZ forums and a surge in polls. For Trump, it’s now all about bro culture, gaming platforms, and GenZ and Millennial partnerships with male-centric influencers like Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys.

GenZ influencers and the Internet “have never been more important to electoral politics,” says John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Volpe, the author of Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America, says GenZ influencers “are today’s tastemakers, meme sharers, video creators and organizers and now wield significant power when it comes to persuasion and encouraging millions to vote.”

“A month ago, when Joe Biden was the nominee,” says Leah Feiger, WIRED’s senior politics editor, “it looked like (the Democratic Party) couldn’t figure out how to put a single TikTok or Instagram post together without being accused of being the cringiest grandparents imaginable. And then? Everything changed.”

Digital Dollars

Between now and November, both campaigns and their affiliated political action committees plan to spend hundreds of millions of new dollars on digital media to fuel their re-set strategies.

Since Harris stepped into the race, Democrats have raised $615 million—more than three times what the Trump campaign raised for the period—and last month, political ad marketers say, grassroots dollars came in faster and in bigger amounts than either party has seen in recent history.

The Harris campaign is committing more than $200 million of its more than $300 million ad budget for the next two months to focus on targeted social media, streaming and short-form video content to reach more voters on their phones and other devices. The Harris TikTok team, comprised of five staffers all under the age of 25, is being responsive to what is trending day-to-day on the platform, creating a kind of call-and-response with the app’s users that is proving remarkably effective in building support. Over the next nine weeks, the campaign will be focusing most on Midwest voters and deputizing additional teams of GenZ influencers and digital content creators to help “flood the zone” on TikTok and other social platforms popular in the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

The Trump-Vance campaign, for its part, is spending roughly $135 million on a barrage of digital attack ads to bring Harris down. Team Trump and its allies have been focusing mostly on the Sun Belt, outspending the Harris campaign in Georgia and Arizona and as much as the Harris team and its allies in Pennsylvania. Trump’s new attack ads have already begun to run on traditional TV, and this fall, his campaign will be spending more heavily on running digital video ads across a wide range of social media platforms, especially those most popular with young male gamers and livestreamers. In the battleground states, there is the highest chance of turning a red state blue, or a blue state red, and the race is now in a dead heat.

In all, says national media strategist Shawna Presley Vercher, some $1.9 billion worth of political advertising, marketing and messaging—“a gargantuan amount”— will be used to fuel both campaigns, largely on social media, to influence how the next two months will play out and who wins. [See our March story, New Power, on how TikTok’s digital crowd is challenging traditional power this election year.]

Harris’s Feel-Good Focus

Democrats are now registering more voters than Republicans, and post Labor Day polling says the Democratic lead among young voters is back, with Harris topping Trump by an average of 20 points among GenZers.

Harris ZOOM rallies continue to keep raising millions of dollars online from new groups the DNC is targeting for support, including Grateful Dead fans, Christian evangelicals and conservative Republicans. ( Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and her father, Dick Cheney, the former Republican Vice President, this week endorsed Harris, citing “the danger that Donald Trump poses.”)

Harris also keeps moving ahead in swing state polling, while also boosting her reach online. Beyond the digital firsts staged at the Democratic Convention—holding meme parties too numerous to mention and hosting 200 of the most strategically influential digital content creators and online influencers to cover the convention (a first for the DNC)—the Harris campaign is also embracing pop culture and social media to establish an emotional connection with GenZ voters.

It’s working. On TikTok this week, after @KamalHQ posted an August recap video of the DNC convention using the just-released song, Diet Pepsi, by the young singer/composer Addison Rae, Rae reposted it to her 88 million followers on TikTok—a decision heralded by GenZ political influencer @matthew.rein as being “one of the most important stories of the election so far.”  Explained Rein: “Addison Rae, the fifth biggest influencer on TikTok, deciding she’s willing to now associate herself with Kamala Harris and the campaign in this way, even as small as it might seem … is a confirmation of everything KamalaHQ and that campaign have been working towards” to win over GenZ.

Rein added: “Sure, we can talk about policies and about the 725-page Inflation Reduction Act until we’re both blue in the face. All of that is very important but it doesn’t change the fact that people vote based on how politics makes them feel. …Young people have the power to decide this election. Should people vote just because Addison Rae reposted a KamalaHQ video? No. But it shows that Kamala Harris and her campaign know how to connect with young people. And that, in my opinion, will make the difference this November.”

Adds fellow GenZ influencer Tanna Wroblewski, aka @yourfinestpardon, who has 73.7K TikTok followers: “It’s so cool that the Harris campaign is showing up on TikTok, where all of us are having the important conversations, to really encourage people to get out there and vote. …Dare I say it’s now an exciting time to be watching and learning about and being a part of politics?”

Trump Courts ‘bro culture’

Donald Trump, meanwhile—pushing to regain his footing in the wake of Biden’s retreat— is now warming up to some of the biggest and most influentual “bro culture” gamers and online streamers who are already voicing their opposition to Harris. Some of the social media stars being tapped by Trump and his allies include Mr. White and U.F.C., Dave Portnoy and his Barstool Sports media network, YouTubers like Jake and Logan Paul, podcasters including Theo Von and livestreamers like Adin Ross.

Adin Ross, 23, who now has 1.2 million followers on Kick, a new gaming and livestreaming platform, is emerging as a key Trump influencer, helping to expand Trump’s MAGA base and boost its reach among young, and predominantly white young men, some known for their support of Trump’s re-emerging brand of “masculinity politics.” Ross, an internet personality and online streamer known for his collaborations with celebrities, had 7.3 million followers on Twitch before being banned recently for making antisemitic and racist comments. Now on Kick, Ross is building back his following by making Trump a regular guest. Last month, he gifted Trump with a gold Rolex wristwatch and new Tesla Cybertruck during a livestream to thank him. Ross’s August interview with Trump attracted more than a half million viewers; Ross urged them to vote for Trump in November.

Trump is also getting support from the Nelk Boys, a pair of self-described “pranksters and partiers” who are the YouTube influencers Kyle Forgeard, 30, and Jesse William Sebastiani, 31. The Nelk Boys have 4.6 million followers on TikTok, 7.56 million subscribers on YouTube and host the Full Send podcast, on which Trump has been a guest twice, along with mega-influencers and content creators Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. J.D. Vance was interviewed on the Full Send podcast last month. Send the Vote, a new political action committee co-founded by John Shahidi, the president of Nelk, is raising $20 million to spend on voter registration drives aimed at Nelk’s young male fans. Known for being controversial, The Nelk Boys gained new followers during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last month by posting a “prank” video on TikTok of a man using a sledgehammer to pound in Kamala Harris’ face on a big-screen TV while watching her deliver a televised speech at the convention.

“Now that a gender gap is a mega-trend spanning across swing states and racial groups and is most prominent among younger voters,” New York Times reporter John Branch says, Trump considers these new platforms a powerful battleground on which to fight Harris—one which his campaign aides say will be able to help Trump regain much of the social media support he had for his 2020 bid for reelection against Biden. [For more on the gender gap, see our July story, A New Gender Gap, Rising.]

Both the Trump and Harris campaigns, for the next two months, will also be focusing more aggressively on young voters in rural communities previously overlooked, unreachable or not yet into politics.

Names and Numbers

Using targeted influencers to connect directly with even some of the smaller digital communities online can expand a candidate’s base of young voters focused on key issues and down-ballot candidates—and help campaigns burst through the digital echo chambers shaping most social media feeds. “There are now so many different spaces where people are getting their news, where people are getting influenced by the people around them in their For You feeds,” says Makena Kelly, WIRED’s politics reporter. Republicans may have locked in more of the big business influencers, like Elon Musk, Kelly adds, “but both parties are reaching a lot more of those smaller power influencers and creators who probably, if you think about it, collectively have a much wider reach.”

Here are some of the top GenZ influencers and online content creators focused on young voters, a list co-curated by WIRED’s Kelly and excerpted here, with permission. [For a fuller list, see WIRED’s Visual Guide to the Influencers Shaping the 2024 Election.]

These influencers and content creators are being cited based on the size of their followings and their data-driven influence leading followers politically:

Top political influencers and creators on the left

• Josh Helfgott: He makes TikToks that deliver news related to LGBTQ+ rights and has 5.5 million followers on the platform and 598K on Instagram.

• Carlos Eduardo Espina: A TikToker and immigrant rights activist whom The New York Times referred to as a “one-man Telemundo.” He met with Joe Biden to discuss immigration policy last year. He has 934K followers on Instagram and 10.3 million on TikTok.

• Heather Cox Richardson: A historian and professor at Boston College who writes a weekly newsletter about how current political moments intersect with history. She has been a guest on our New Rules Media podcast and has 1.5 million followers on Substack.

• Gen Z for Change: This youth-led nonprofit, formerly known as TikTokers for Biden, brands itself as “the place where the creator economy and progressive politics intersect on social media.” The group, which helped Biden/Harris in 2020 and partnered with the White House on other campaigns, is now helping a deep network of new influencers and social media creators spread calls to action over TikTok. Last year, it launched Gen-Z X El Cambio, a hub run by and for GenZ Latinos to share their perspectives and educate others on U.S. politics and pop culture. Gen Z for Change has 1.7 million followers on TikTok and 100K on X.

• Vitus Spehar, aka @underthedesknews: Spehar is one of the most influential news creators on TikTok. They have 3.1 million followers on the platform and post video explainers covering current events and electoral politics. They also have attended multiple White House influencer events.

Top influencers and creators on the right

WIRED’s top five picks, by size of followers, are:

• Elon Musk: The CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX and the wealthiest person in the world, Musk bought X (formerly Twitter) in 2022. He endorsed Donald Trump in July and interviewed him on X last month. Musk has 193 million followers on X and is promoting a theory that a free-thinking “Republic” could only exist under the decision-making of high-status males.

• The Nelk Boys: The Nelk Boys began as YouTube pranksters but now host their own podcast, Full Send, where their commentary intersects with right-wing talking points. Trump and J.D. Vance have been among their recent podcast guests. The Nelk Boys have 7.3 million followers on YouTube.

• Logan Paul: A professional wrestler and co-founder of Prime Hydration, who got his start on Vine before transitioning to YouTube. He has 23 million followers on YouTube and he is the older brother to Jake Paul. Logan hosted Donald Trump on his Impaulsive podcast last June.

• Jake Paul: A professional boxer and vlogger, Jake got his start on Vine and officially endorsed Donald Trump after the assassination attemp on him made in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier this summer. Jake campaigned with Vivek Ramaswamy this year and collaborated with Andrew Yang in 2020. He has 20.7 million followers on YouTube.

• Ben Shapiro: Ben is the co-founder of The Daily Wire and one of the most popular conservative commentators and podcasters. He has 7 million followers on YouTube.

Who are the online political influencers and creators you follow, or those you’ve just added to your watch list, and why? Please share with us and your fellow subscribers by providing a link or two as a comment.

NOTE: This post was updated on September 7th with new polling and campaign budget data. Several new links also have been added, referring to additional political influencers to watch online.

The Olympic Games have historically spurred national pride. However, this year, leading up to the Games, something’s different, and the shifting social, economic, and political landscapes, as well as the divisions at home, have eroded how we feel about ourselves as Americans and our country. Could recent events signal a ground shift toward an Americana redux and a new sense of national pride during these Games and into the future?

PARIS—With the strum of a guitar, the rhythmic tap of a tambourine and the snare of a drum sampled from Nancy Sinatra, Beyoncé, resplended in a bedazzled unitard, matching cowboy hat and boots and a dramatic floor-sweeping cape inspired by the American flag — all designed by fashion designer, Tom Browne — introduced Team USA to viewers at home in the U.S. through a reimagining of her song YA-YA. Her appearance was a surprise, yet a natural extension of her concept album, Cowboy Carter, a journey through a reinvention of Americana.

But it wasn’t her country twang, patriotic imagery, or the shots of Team USA that caught my attention; it was what she said in her monologue that was seemingly overlooked by major media. “Get a look at America, y’all,” she demurred with a smirk and perhaps a hint of shade. “These hopes and dreams, these superstars that represent us, the people of this big, bold, beautiful, complicated nation, all rooting together for them.”

Complicated. It’s a powerful word fitting for the current state of affairs in the U.S. and my experience at these Games. My nephew, a GenAlpha, remarked that we shouldn't look “too American,” and my father, a Baby Boomer, shared that his official red NewEra baseball cap bearing the American flag and Olympic rings was mistaken disparagingly by his more liberal friends at home, as a symbol or endorsement of MAGA (Make America Great Again), the political movement spearheaded by former President and current presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

In conversations with dozens of Americans while traveling, I’ve found that they have complicated feelings, too; it is how we collectively feel about this nation today. This past week's shifting political landscape has only contributed to this state of mind and, perhaps, a degree of disassociation. Karen Weinstein from North Carolina, who I met the night before the Opening Ceremonies with her 19-year-old son, perhaps put it best when she politely, yet dismissively, said, “We’re not here to talk politics. We’re here for Team USA.” The team is a unifying force.

Yet, while it’s hard to avoid the occasional political discussions, Americana and American patriotism are on full display here, overshadowing those deep divisions at home. There is guarded hope amongst some, too, especially with President Joe Biden exiting the race and Vice President Harris becoming the presumptive nominee less than 48 hours later. And, the sense amongst those I’ve talked to is that the early days of a reimagined Americana and resurgence of American patriotism may very well be underway.

Here’s what you need to know

• In the most recent Gallup poll on Americans' national pride, 41% of respondents considered themselves "extremely proud" to be an American, and an additional 26% said they were "very proud," a near all-time low.

• Nearly two-thirds (59%) of Republicans cited extreme pride in the same survey, compared to just over a third (34%) of Democrats and (36%) Independents. This contrasts with 2003, just over twenty years ago, when a majority of each political affiliation — 86%, 65%, and 62%, respectively — had extreme pride for the country.

• The biggest split between Republicans and Democrats was in 2019 when three-quarters of Republicans (76%) were extremely proud compared with only a fifth (22%) of Democrats — a more than 50-point split.

• The lowest point for Republicans was in 2022, for Democrats in 2019, and for Independents in 2023, roughly tacking to political fortunes or lack thereof.

• As of 2023, patriotism in the United States varied greatly by age and generation. According to Statista, roughly one in five (18%) of those between 18 and 34 years of age considered themselves extremely proud to be American. In contrast, about half of respondents 55 and older considered themselves extremely proud to be American.

Restarting America

“Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began,” wrote for her popular Substack, , on July 28. “When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us.”

This change at the top of the Democratic ticket has spurred hundreds of thousands of Americans to action. Dan Kanninen, the battleground states director for Harris, told reporters during a Monday afternoon call that more than 2,300 campaign-related events happened during the first weekend; 360,000 new volunteers joined—double the number from three days prior; 29,000 volunteers knocked on 126,000 doors in 48 hours, then they made six times as many phone calls than before the ticket switch, which still needs to be formally accepted at the Democratic National Convention.

In addition, diverse intersectional groups have come together to support Harris and her unifying message for the country, albeit separately within their unique groups, starting with Jotaka Eaddy’s grassroots organization Win With Black Women, which hosted a Zoom attracting some 44,000 attendees — with 50,000 more listening on other platforms when Zoom reached capacity. According to organizers of other events, over 164,000 white women joined another call, and over 200,000 “white dudes for Harris” came together across multiple platforms. Black men, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans have also held their own online meetups. Together, these groups collectively have raised millions for her campaign.

Signals for the Future

The outpouring of support for Harris does not suggest a possible sea change alone. However, the growing political participation of younger people, particularly those in GenZ, could. They are voting progressive and at higher rates than previous generations. They’re also running for office nationwide in local and statewide elections.

“Historical turnout data for youth ages 18-29 also confirm that today’s young people are among the most electorally engaged in recent decades,” notes the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University. “According to the Census data, 31% of young people under age 30 voted in 2022. That’s the third-highest youth turnout in a midterm cycle in the past 50 years, less than one percentage point behind 1982 and four-and-a-half points behind the all-time-high youth voter turnout in 2018.”

The viewership for these games may also offer a clue for the country’s direction. After drawing 28.6 million viewers for Friday’s Opening Ceremonies, the weekend telecasts on NBC Universal platforms grew, averaging 34.5 million on average over the first three days. This is up 79% (from 19.3 million viewers) over the same period for the last Summer Olympics three years ago in Tokyo. It is comparable to the 2012 Olympics during the Obama Administration when American pride was significantly greater than today, yet still a far cry from 1984, when nine out of ten households tuned in.

So, could we be in the early days of turning around our complicated relationship with our country? Could we be on the precipice of reimagining Americana and reclaiming American patriotism from groups that have long used the flag and its symbolism to divide rather than unite us? KJ Miller, co-founder and CEO of Mented Cosmetics, a multi-million dollar beauty brand, and Lecturer in the Practice of Management at Yale University, believes so.

“When I saw her (Beyoncé) opening up for the Olympics with her song and rocking all of the American paraphernalia,” Miller said in a recent TikTok. “I realized she is not wearing the American flag to reclaim it for herself — she’s wearing it to reclaim it for us. She is hoping it becomes a trend for us, for the people who’ve been marginalized, for the people who’ve come to equate that flag with hatred and realize, ‘Oh no, it belongs to us too’ … I feel like we are all starting to feel a sense of patriotism almost that we haven’t been able to feel in a long time.”

Here’s what the founders had to say about partisan divides and how they overcame them to create the United States. This election year, consider the importance of compromise to save American democracy and build a better union.

BEMUS POINT, NY — The Constitutional Convention convened during the hot summer of 1787 at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia. It was a meeting of 55 delegates—all white men—from 12 states (Rhode Island refused to send delegates) to revise or replace the Articles of Confederation.

William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut kept a diary during the Convention, frequently recording the weather. On 33 of the 80 days, he noted it as “hot” or “very hot.” William Paterson of nearby New Jersey called Philadelphia “the warmest place I have ever been in.” And South Carolina’s Pierce Butler’s wife left the city because she “could not support the excessive heat of the climate.”

The hot weather in Philadelphia was only eclipsed by the heated debates inside. Delegates locked horns over the details of Congressional representation, presidential powers, how to elect the president, the slave trade, and a bill of rights, eventually compromising on contentious issues. The historian H. W. Brands, in his book Founding Partisans, contends that the founders were willing to make compromises on the points they hated because of a shared singular goal: uniting the weak and disparate states into a single, strong nation that could compete on the world stage.

The compromises they agreed to that summer were imperfect, and the debates that started in Philadelphia continue today. However, the founders paved the way for an ever-evolving and fragile democratic experiment that has lasted nearly 250 years. Yet, it has been tested from time to time, including today.

As Ben Franklin, the oldest delegate at 81 (the same age as President Biden), was leaving Independence Hall, Elizabeth Powel, a socialite and close friend of George and Martha Washington, asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

A Fragile Unity

America’s divides have always existed, yet somehow, we’ve kept the republic together while expanding civil rights by focusing on its foundational ideas.

By the time the Constitutional Convention concluded, the fissures of that hot summer in Philadelphia had begun to take shape in the form of partisan divides. The Convention temporarily papered over those differences, but cracks would recur and sometimes widen into chasms in the coming years. These chasms would, at times, turn violent.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” George Washington warned in his 1796 presidential farewell address, advocating for a political culture that prioritized the common good over partisan interests. He believed that constructive political discourse and cooperation among different viewpoints were crucial for the health and longevity of the nation.

Yet, ideological rifts and personal animosities persisted and were as intense, if not more so, in those early days than they are today. On July 11, 1804, just 15 years after the Constitution became the law of the land, feuding Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met on the dueling grounds at Weehawken, New Jersey, to fight the last of a long-lived political and personal battle. Hamilton would die in this duel, and Burr would be indicted for murder.

According to Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton, Burr apparently eventually recognized that he shouldn't have been so bothered by Hamilton. Upon reading a scene in Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which Shandy’s Uncle Toby catches a fly and then releases it, Chernow notes that Burr is said to have remarked: "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me."

But America’s divides didn’t stop there, nor did its violence. America went to war with itself over slavery in 1861 when the Confederate States seceded from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which led to the bloodiest war on this soil, killing as many as a million people. It lurched through the violent racial divisions of Reconstruction and Jim Crow following the Civil War, too.

In the 20th and 21st Centuries, the U.S. contentiously expanded the rights originally reserved for those 55 white male founders and their ilk to women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. Some of these fundamental rights are still being debated in the legislatures and the courts, like the right of women to have an abortion, for Blacks to vote, and for gays and lesbians to marry.

Today, the nation is confronted with the epidemics of gun violence, opioid use, and loneliness. It’s contending with income inequality and growing misinformation and disinformation. It’s further challenged by growing distrust in institutions, including everything from the military to the media, and deep partisan divides.

An Uncertain Future

It’s no secret that the last couple of decades have been tough on American unity. By seemingly all accounts, the country appears more divided than ever. It’s fair to feel like the wheels are coming off the proverbial bus.

“Over the past two decades, partisan gaps on all of the issues … have either remained roughly the same or expanded,” Frank Newport wrote for Gallup last year. “This reinforces the fundamental (albeit not surprising) conclusion that when Americans are divided into two groups based on their political identity, they are also predictably divided into two groups on a wide range of politically and socially important issues.”

However, the handwringing over the perilous state of the American republic may be overstated, thanks partly to the federalism established by the Founding Fathers.

“For American democracy to have died after the Midterm elections, or for it to die in 2024, an unlikely confluence of several unlikely events would need to happen in a particular order and within a fairly narrow timeframe," wrote Shadi Hamid, now a columnist and member of the Editorial Board at The Washington Post and author of The Problem of Democracy, for UnHerd in 2022. “In a country as large and unwieldy as ours, as evenly divided as ours, with as much separation of powers as ours, with enough federalism as ours, and with a media as vigorous as ours (against Republican overreach), the notion that democracy would die or even that it could was a nightmare. The good thing about nightmares is that you wake up from them.”

Regardless, on this Independence Day and as the 2024 election cycle heats up, Americans shouldn’t sleep on the fundamental principles of our democratic experiment or eschew the hard work needed to keep it by finding common ground with fellow citizens. “People make better electoral decisions when they directly confront those on the other side of issues — even people they find disreputable and abhorrent,” David Brooks wrote for The New York Times this week.

Dialogue, debate, and compromise are what makes democracies work, and it might help to start with those things that unite us in our now hyper-pluralistic society. “Americans can appreciate that most people want the same things, and nearly all can agree that the division in the country has gotten worse in the past decade,” IPSOS found in April. “Despite this, centering shared American experiences and values may create the stepping stones for bridging that seemingly vast divide.”

And it doesn’t hurt for all of us to take a cue from Ben Franklin, who believed that compromise is an essential ingredient to America’s success. “When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint,” he said. “In like manner here both sides must part with some of their demands, in order that they may join in some accommodating proposition.”

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.

Americans are poll-obsessed. Which pollsters rank highest for accuracy and transparency so far this election year? Check out our brief and basic guide to help you spot the good polls from the bad and navigate what’s ahead.

NEW YORK — Okay. Full disclosure. I’m a bit of a data nerd, and I’m addicted to this election year’s public opinion polls.

With autocracy on the ballot, my obsession with political polling has never been quite as pronounced. And now, the amped-up, wildly unprecedented, age-baiting cage-match for the White House is making it hard not to notice my news feed getting flooded —by the hour—with new polls and surveys en masse.

With the presidential election just months away, U.S. voters are being inundated with news about polls telling them who’s ahead, who’s not—and since the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the race, who else besides J.D. Vance and Kamala Harris may be joining the fray.

Are polls still relevant, or even accurate? Are some too “instant” to matter? How do political polls affect the presidential election, and outcomes? How can you determine which polls are more accurate than others, and select which polls to watch?

Read on.

Has there ever been a presidential election year so dominated (and influenced) by polls?

American historian Jill Lepore says no. From the late 1990s to 2012, she says, more than 1,200 polling organizations conducted nearly 37,000 polls by making more than 3 billion phone calls. This year, alone, the number of polling organizations has doubled, as has the number of polls being conducted.

Has there ever been a presidential election year with as much misinformation swirling, questions circulating about both candidates’ mental acuity and AI-generated “deep fakes” darting around to skewer the general public’s opinion of one candidate over the other, without being held accountable for false framing? Has there ever been a contest for the White House with as many public doubts about any candidates’ ability to lead?

No. Campaigns have always been a bit nasty, but this year’s penchant for turning that ‘nasty’ into thousands of high-speed, true-and-false “attack” videos made on the cheap and spread across social media in a heartbeat is something very new. Generative AI only recently burst on the scene, and media distribution speeds have become nearly instant, enabling sophisticated, tech-driven campaign ‘war rooms’ to react, in near real-time, to each turn of events—large and small.

Doctored GOP videos of President Biden—along with hundreds more highlighting Biden’s actual communication mis-steps in his debate against Trump—are still getting shared by the thousands, and globally. Short videos of Trump’s most blatant lies about Biden—and now Harris—are becoming daily bulletins. Fact-checkers at CNN and NBC News say they have had trouble keeping up. [“The lies are sprinting the 100-meter dash and the fact-checking is taking a stroll on the beach, so it’s never going to catch up,” said one Democratic strategist.]

I’m not alone in my poll fixation.

A new Pew Research poll says that while a majority of Americans (62%) are “worn out” by 2024 presidential campaign coverage, they also are closely following coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump (73%)—and will continue to do so, with 40% of them following all polls “very closely.”

“General election polls are blaring like sirens,” says The New York Times’ opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, “with no end in sight. … The public’s demand for polls guarantees a robust supply of them this year.”

Voters Beware

But voters, beware. “A lot of instant Internet polls are pure publicity malarkey, which are difficult for most voters to distinguish from so-called scientific polls, and they’re sowing confusion, and making even good polls into bad polls, by influencing their results,” says historian Lepore. In other words, this year’s new breed of polling isn’t just helping us understand the atmosphere of an election. Instant polling can mislead us in a lot of ways, if we’re not careful nor up to speed on the issues and candidates—nor familiar with some of the basics of how polls are conducted.

Here’s a brief guide to help you navigate and distinguish the good polls from the bad—something to remember after the recent Trump-Biden debate. What we see happening isn’t always the same as what people feel about what they just saw.

• Inaccuracies. Many polls got it wrong in 2016. Hillary Clinton was not a “shoo in.” [Trump won, not Clinton.] In 2020, Biden won, not Trump, and in 2022, there was no “red wave.” Historically, even before then, pollsters weren’t getting it right most of the time. In 1948, George Gallup famously, and wrongly predicted Dewey would win over Truman; in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower unexpectedly defeated Adlai Stevenson, with dozens more famous pollster misses to follow. Gallup, like today’s Nate Silver, liked to say pollsters take the “pulse of democracy” but the late writer, E.B. White, advised Gallup against rushing to translate poll results into meaningful conclusions. “Although pollsters can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs,” he said. The takeaway for us? Don’t take one poll seriously. Look for patterns across a variety of polls.

• Disinformation. Many years before ChatGPT was released, the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Laboratory created a relatively new polling tool, one they called the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST). In collaboration with the pollster YouGov, it used AI-generated headlines to test how susceptible Americans are to AI-generated fake news. One headline was “Certain Vaccines Are Loaded With Dangerous Chemicals and Toxins.” Another was “Government Officials Have Manipulated Stock Prices to Hide Scandals.” YouGov asked those being polled if they believed the headlines. The results were concerning: 41% of Americans incorrectly thought the vaccine headline was true and 46% thought the government was manipulating the stock market. By mixing real and AI-generated images to accompany such headlines, politicians can blur the lines between fact and fiction and use AI to boost their political attacks. Be on the look-out for fake news. Seeing is no longer believing in a politically divided election year.

• Decreasing response rates. The best and most responsible pollsters, whether Democratic, Republic or nonpartisan, want nothing so much as reliable results. Yet today, with response rates often in the single digits, difficulty remains. Polling shapes politics. Size and inclusion matter. Most political polls are still merely tools that help uncover public opinion —but some are not accurate representations of it because those polled don’t always represent a full mix of those registered to vote. Does the poll include a good mix of young and old people? A balanced mix of registered Republicans and Democrats? Genders? Races? Incomes? Polls which are inclusive in these ways tend to be more accurate than not.

• Lack of Transparency. What should you look for in a poll to know it was conducted well? Who conducted the poll, and how— and when was it conducted, who was interviewed and how were they selected? All of these factors are key to the accuracy of results. But there are challenges. A lot of polls are still being conducted by phone— despite the fact that fewer people than ever answer phone calls in today’s smartphone environment unless they know the person who’s calling them. And who’s being polled? Sometimes, those queried either know nothing about the matters the polls purport to measure, or express no opinion about them. Such polling problems, known as non-opinion, forced opinion and exclusion bias challenges, can dramatically skew results. “The first question a pollster should ask but doesn’t do often enough,” the sociologist Leo Bogart advised famously in 1972, is, “Have you thought about this at all? Do you even have an opinion?” Before considering any poll to be gospel, check out the poll’s methodology statement and list of questions included in the poll’s survey findings. Check to see if the poll, as published, includes transparency information about its sample size, when the poll was conducted, a description of respondents and response rates. The best polls make this information clear, and easy for anyone to access.

• Sponsor bias and polarization. Sponsors of polls can meddle by making questionable tradeoffs between attention and accuracy. Not only are many polls commissioned by partisan groups with obvious biases (and some bordering on disinformation), some sponsors seek provocative polling results and use them to gain the prominence of stature and the expert academic authority they lack. Sponsor bias is especially demonstrative in political campaign polling, with results often differing by as many as 3 or 4 percent points, or more outside the margin of error, says Silver. Polarization is a relatively new challenge for pollsters when designing a fair poll.

• Wording bias. What you hear from respondents depends on who you ask—and how your phrase the questions. Framing matters. For example, do you let people answer the questions as they like, or limit them to choosing one of two answers to control options rather than listen for new insights? And how are the questions framed? Example: If someone asked you if you prefer cats or dogs? What if you prefer neither, but have a strong preference for parakeets? Limiting responses tends to catalyze inaccurate results—or certain kinds of results that may be misleanding. How questions are phrased can manipulate the truth, or keep pollsters from finding it to begin with.

• Assumptions about voter turnout and crowd sizes. Comparisons of new data to historic data is fine, but often only valid to generalize. Example: How many people attended an Inauguration ceremony for Trump versus Obama? Pollsters can only extrapolate the turnout rates of previous years—or, in this case, compare aerial photographs of both crowds. [To disprove Trump’s claims that his inaugural crowd on the national mall was larger than Obama’s, the aerial photographs of both ceremonies were made public.] And beware of polls or news stories labeling anything a “record crowd.” The last couple of election cycles have cited “record turnouts” across both sides of the aisle, especially by younger voters, but with fuzzy or incomplete data to back up any specifics, thereby lessening the value of already-displaced historical precedents. Voter turnout is the number of people who voted in an election, not a crowd count of those attending political events.

Polling the pollsters

Which pollsters rank the best in terms of credibility, accuracy, transparency and inclusive reach and methodology?

According to 538’s pollster ratings, here is a list of the nation’s Top 10 most credible and accurate political polls/pollsters operating in 2024:

1. The New York Times/Siena College poll

2. ABC News/The Washington Post

3. Marquette University Law School

4. YouGov

5. Monmouth University Polling Institute

6. Marist College

7. Suffolk University

8. Data Orbital

9. Emerson College

10. University of Massachusetts Lowell Center for Public Opinion

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    What’s your take on what to watch for when ranking pollsters this election year? Please share! And don’t forget to vote. Every vote counts.

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    This post was updated July 26th to reference Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris’ announced bid for the White House.

Hannah Drake and Kwame Scruggs each founded and lead award-winning Black history projects to celebrate the resilience and spirit of America’s new national holiday

NEW YORK — Happy Juneteenth!

To those not yet familiar, Juneteenth— a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth” —is our newest federal holiday in the United States, observed annually on June 19th for the past three years—and again today—to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.

It’s also a holiday meant to celebrate Black resilience and achievement, and to recommit our nation to honoring, advancing and enforcing its constitutional promise to extend all civil, legal and political rights and protections to all American citizens, regardless of race, under law.

Since 1865 and the end of the Civil War, the day has been celebrated informally, first as a cultural holiday by newly freed slaves and their descendants across the American South, then by American Blacks centering on arts, food and music festivals in the 1920s and 1930s. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Juneteenth evolved again, focusing on racial discrimination and the need for social change. But it wasn’t until 2021, following the national uproar over the killing of George Floyd and the pandemic’s outsized death toll on Black Americans, that Juneteenth was made a federal holiday to acknowledge our promise of racial equality and the work still needed to achieve it.

President Biden, in his 2021 proclamation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, called it ”a day to remember the moral stain of slavery and the long legacy of systemic racism, inequality and inhumanity … and a day to recommit ourselves to the work of equality and justice, to celebrate our incredible capacity to heal, hope and emerge from our darkest moments with purpose and resolve.”

Divisions Endure

While all states now recognize Juneteenth as a holiday, only 27 states and the District of Columbia, for 2024, have made Juneteenth an annualized paid holiday for state employees, with the remainder maintaining at least a ceremonial observance.

Divisions also remain this election year, systemically and politically—on race and Americans’ opinions on the legacy of slavery in America. According to Pew Research, only 27% of registered voters who support Donald Trump for president this election year say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in America today “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 73% of these Trump supporters say slavery has had little or no impact.

Opinions among Biden supporters are nearly the opposite, Pew says, with 79% saying slavery’s legacy still affects the position of Black people in America today, with only 20% saying slavery’s legacy has not had much effect, if any at all.

“This year, amid renewed racial tensions and efforts to diminish the voting rights of Black Americans and some efforts by some conservatives to exclude key aspects of Black history from what is taught in American history classes, we still live in a time when Juneteenth should be a powerful reminder of what is possible but also what is still needed to advance democracy’s credibility,” says Jendayi Frazer, a Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Bush administration.

George Selim, a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League and former Homeland Security director for community partnerships in the Bush and Obama administrations, wrote in an essay for Politico magazine that “America’s white supremacist movement is still less in a state of defeat as in a state of regrouping—the dangers of which cannot be overstated.”

Signs of Light

Hannah Drake, a spoken-word poet, visual artist and author—and Kwame Scruggs, an educator— are storytellers who have won national awards and scholarly recognition for their exploration of historic narratives, to help new generations of Americans expand their knowledge of Black history, resilience and achievement.

I first met Kwame and Hannah early last fall on the Omega Institute’s sprawling, 250-acre Hudson Valley campus, where I was filming a short-form documentary on racial healing for a British news organization and the Harlem Wellness Center nonprofit.

What follows is a quick look at their projects and how, in their own words, these initiatives build on the spirit of what Juneteenth represents.

The Alchemy Project

Kwame, a devotee of the late, acclaimed literary critic and mythology expert Joseph Campbell, teaches the hero’s journey to high school dropouts in Akron, Ohio, using ancient Greek and Roman myths to help them advance their self-knowledge and overcome their anger and emotional pain.

“I start by teaching them chiefly about the hero’s journey—how a hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than themselves,” Kwame says. His favorite text, and one popular with his students, he says, is Michael Meade’s classic text, Water of Life, which addresses the important issue of men and violence in modern culture. At once a mythic journey, a study of psychology and a treatise on initiation, the story, Kwame says, “helps students discover the wisdom and guidance of the ages so they can relate these stories to themselves and find a purpose for their lives in the turbulent times in which they and we now live.”

All 31 stories Kwame performs and reads through with them function as a core symbol for both personal and cultural renewal, and for the redemption of nature from a wasteland. “I’ve found that telling youth that they are on a dangerous path or are doing something wrong, they become defensive,” Kwame says. “But if you tell them through a story, it allows students to look at the history of slavery and the traumas experienced in their modern lives objectively, to relate these stories to their own lives.”

“… The goal is to help these boys and young men see themselves in these stories,” Kwame says. “Myths have been around for thousands and thousands of years, so they provide us with a roadmap to navigate our way through life. …I haven’t been successful with all students, but most end up having their lives turned around, using the stories to inspire them to ‘heal thyself’ before healing others. We look at the character traits of the hero and have them incorporate and trace the hero onto their own lives, and absorb the lesson of not giving up.”

The (Un)Known Project

Hannah Drake’s (Un)Known Project in Louisville, where she resides with her daughter, is both a memorial to enslaved people in Kentucky—many of whose stories will never be uncovered—and a challenge to the public to unearth and share those narratives which may be “hidden in attics and archives, in family genealogies and in corporate histories.” The hope, she says, is to help shift the narratives about former slaves from the category of “forgotten” to “known.”

Hannah says she got the idea to create this project after visiting Natchez, Miss., and its Museum of African American History and Culture, where she saw a map showing the slavery route from Louisville down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, to Natchez—in the 1800s, one of the largest slave-trading cities in the United States. By the 1850s, she learned, Kentucky was one of the leading states exporting people to the deep South—at the rate of about 2,500 to 4,000 a year. “I knew Louisville was instrumental in the slave trade,” Hannah says. “But I didn’t know how intricate and deep.”

She then conducted further research into the fate of the enslaved at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice museum in Montgomery, Ala., and discovered records of freed slaves lynched by racial terror in the South. Many of those lynchings were recorded in public records, but without identifying details, and listing those killed as being “unknown.” Before Hannah left the museum that day she said, she thought of two words: Unknown Project.

Fast forward to 2021. On June 19th of that year, the nation’s first federal Juneteenth holiday, Hannah and her work partner, Josh Miller, unveiled what had become the (Un)Known Project in Louisville to challenge the public to unearth narratives that may exist but have not yet been shared about some of the former slaves and their their histories. She has since begun work to help create records for present day families to find and encourage residents to come forth.

“I don’t want people to feel any shame in sharing names and histories of former slaves,” Hannah told the New York Times. Already, she says, people—black and white— have contacted her and Josh, sharing names of enslaved people—in one case on a family ledger, in another in a will. “It’s okay to release those names if you have them. To me, it’s healing on both sides,” she says.

“…All our lives are better on Juneteenth and on other days,” she added in an interview, “when we can tell the full story of America in hundreds of different ways that are personal, we can help ourselves and so many others to better understand our evolution as a nation and the pain and the promise —and the work still needed and left to be done, for us all, and with us all, looking forward.”

For more about Kwame’s work, check out this interview with the Pacifica Graduate Institute. For more on Hannah’s project, check out her story in The New York Times and watch this video made by Voice of America about her personal journey that led to her present-day work.

Have some Juneteenth stories and remembrances to share? We’re eager to hear more!

Ali Velshi is an enterprising, award-winning journalist, who many have called a rare kind of “journalist’s journalist” for his deep skills getting beyond cable news’ hot takes, hourly headlines and partisan-leaning, ‘he said-she said’ debates to deliver a more fair, factual and deeper understanding of current events —the kind that doesn’t simply tell people what’s wrong in the world, but can help them hear what works and see what is possible—and what is needed from all of us to better navigate today’s choppy waters.

As the chief correspondent for MSNBC and the anchor of his own weekend show and the stand-alone podcast, The Velshi Banned Book Club, Velshi is known for his immersive on-the-ground reporting and his interactive discussions with small groups, which form part of his ongoing series, Velshi Across America. He previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for Al Jazeera America and CNN.

Born in Nairobi and raised in Toronto and now an American citizen, Velshi brings a global and cultural perspective to his work based on a deep and passionate appreciation of cultural differences and local contexts.

I caught up with him Friday at a private talk for students, alums and faculty at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he was sharing his thoughts on the recent national wave of student protests and also taking questions from students about his new book, Small Acts of Courage: a Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.

“It’s not too late to breathe new life into our nation’s democracy by exhibiting small acts of courage,” he told students, questioning him about recent on-campus debates over whether democracy is the best alternative for a changing world. “By advocating for social justice as a living, breathing experience—as a way of life more than an ideology—we don’t just live here, we then become citizens whose responsibility it then becomes to make democracy—not yet finished—a more perfect union.”

“Democracy isn’t something that simply exists,” Velshi added. “It’s something that takes constant care and nurturing.”

I invited him afterwards to have a quick conversation with Bradley and I in our podcast studio—and what follows are some short, edited excerpts of our conversation with him yesterday. Our full interview with Velshi will be featured in its entirety on our first season podcast, launching soon as a series on resilience.

MARCIA: Our country, so obviously, feels deeply divided over so many things, including democracy, itself. Your new book, Small Acts of Courage, is getting good bipartisan reviews as a fresh take on what ails us. But what can small acts really accomplish?

ALI: You don’t have to boil the ocean. You don’t have to solve all of the problems out there that are making you feel overwhelmed. Just the act of solving something small in your vicinity—like attending a school board meeting, or supporting a public library or making it easier for people to vote— can play an outsized role in the fixing of democracy. You may not see the fruits of everything you’re trying to deal with right away, but if you’re planting that seed, a tree will grow.

… ‘Small acts of courage’ refers to the idea that you can do the things that are in front of you to make things more just and free for everyone. Even my family, while they wished for an end to apartheid while living in South Africa, their efforts were actually focused on small injustices that were going on, locally, all around them.

… And when you look at some of the amazing people in this country, the United States, who are doing things—like the two lawmakers in Tennessee who were censured from the state legislature a year or so ago for their effort to do something to make school children safer from gun violence—they were not trying to fix all injustices at the same time. They were aiming for specific things, and were in action and these things are now getting fixed. And people like that, ordinary people in action, can take those victories and go on and do bigger things and more important things, and then these people can become your Gandhis and your Martin Luther Kings or your Nelson Mandelas or your Presidents of the United States.

MARCIA: Your book also is as much about the journey of your family as it is about immigration and our nation’s struggle to achieve a more perfect union as a more inclusive democracy.

ALI: More than a century ago, my great grandfather sent my grandfather —then seven years old—away from India to live at Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi’s ashram in South Africa, which changed my family’s trajectory forever. From childhood, he was imbued with a deep commitment to social justice with an ethos of public service and a belief in absolute equality among all people—ideals my parents carried forward as they escaped apartheid, then emigrated to Kenya, and then ultimately to Canada. I was born in Kenya and raised in Toronto, and now l am an American citizen who lives in New York.

When my parents lived in South Africa, only about 5 or 6 percent of the population had the right to vote. Democracy was fantastic for those who had the right to vote. There was a real democracy if you were white in apartheid South Africa. But everyone else didn’t have that right and so that’s how we have to look at things now. While there are those among us who do not enjoy the same rights we have – the same access to voting, the same access to marrying whom you want, the same access to making reproductive decisions, then none of us have these rights, right? It can’t just be democracy for most of us and democracy for some of us, it’s got to be democracy for all of us. That’s a battle I grew up understanding was crucial —and weirdly, I didn’t expect this, but 54 years after my parents arrived in North America, we’re still actually fighting for an inclusive democracy. I didn’t expect we’d be in the same arena today.

BRADLEY: Being someone who believes in democracy, it must drive you crazy when people on the right and on the left are either deriding democracy in some way or are outright attacking it. What do you say to these folks?

ALI: I say that is a privilege felt by people who have never had to struggle with not having a democracy. To not like democracy, to not subscribe to politics, to distrust all politicians is intellectually lazy. Sure, there are lots of things that go on in politics that are very unsatisfying. There are a lot of politicians who give you cause to dislike politicians. And there are silly associations people make between democracy and some system they don’t like or understand – be that capitalism or socialism. People make all sorts of associations that don’t make sense. My view, though, is that whether or not they make sense, do something about it rather than complain about it. And understand that democracy is a construct, within which we are pluralists. … We may not share a faith. We may not share an ethnicity. We may not share a background. We may not share economic status. And yet? We can share dinner. Or lunch. Or a conversation. Democracy makes that possible. And despite our differences, we all accept that school shootings are bad. Homicide is bad. The affects of climate change are bad. And so on. So we must accept, as partisans of democracy, that the erosion of democracy is also bad.

MARCIA: I’m working on a short-form documentary on the evolution of democracy, and one of the interviews in it is with Judge Raymond Dearie, of the Brooklyn federal court. He was appointed to the bench decades ago by President Ronald Reagan and still presides occasionally over naturalization ceremonies held at the courthouse for new citizens. In my interview with him, he said “immigrants are the fuel of our democracy” because “democracy gives them the freedom to make a better world for themselves and others.” Why do you think some people today might not agree?

ALI: I’m glad you asked that question because immigration has been put into the wrong narrative in today’s debates. Immigration issues are a fight for an inclusive democracy. …Throughout American history, immigrants have frequently gotten a bad rap. They won’t be able to adjust. They don’t speak the language. They drive wages down – and it’s all been debunked. Today is proof. We have a lower than 4% unemployment rate and wages are going up at a higher rate than inflation. So if all of these immigrants are driving wages down, then why would those things be happening? And the trope about immigrants committing more crime? Migrants don’t commit more crime than native born Americans, and for a really good reason. For the rest of us, these crimes would be misdemeanors. But for them? It would mean getting kicked out of the country. The disincentive to commit crime if you’re an immigrant is very, very high.

BRADLEY: What do you tell that young person who is stepping into the electorate for the first time, or some older adults who are staunchly held in their views of the world how to come together, how to bridge some of these divides with small actions?

ALI: …Developing empathy for people who disagree with you is becoming harder, but we must do it. …In conversations with people who don’t agree with you, turn your personal alarms off. Just turn them off. Let them finish their entire sentence without you getting crazy about the way they said something, or the pronoun they didn’t use. It may upset you a great deal, but just turn your alarm off long enough, and then talk to them. And empathize with them and actually repeat back to them what they said they fear or what they said they don’t like. Tell them that you listened to them and then walk away from the conversation if that’s all you can stomach. Or maybe say let’s continue this later, but let’s have a meal together. There are ways to do this. We don’t have to end up as a polarized society.

MARCIA: As we ask all of our podcast guests, what, then, is your New Rule for us as a nation?

ALI: The new rule is that democracy is not free. The new rule is that citizenship is not about your set of rights that you think you have. It is also a series of obligations in which you need to engage. You have work to do in the preservation of democracy.

…I describe our democracy today as being somewhat like a cactus. You can’ t put it in the closet and forget about it. It needs a little love. It needs a little care and a little moisture every now and then. And if we step up to that role, and democracy survives (which I ultimately believe it will), then you get to tell your grandchildren about it when they ask you what you were doing back in 2024, when it looked like America and the world were coming apart.

I would absolutely hate to have to tell them that things, instead, got worse— because we didn’t step up, or because we weren’t really paying attention.

Have a comment to share on Velshi’s book, his family legacy or the fight for democracy? Add you comments here!

Memes are having a moment.

As the 2024 presidential campaigns get under way, many Americans have simply tuned out. But not on social media.

Memes—those memorable, unscripted mishaps, behind-the-scenes comments or funny asides caught on 30-second video or audio clips that get shared by millions on TikTok or Instagram? They are as popular as ever.

And when they go viral, they stick. Remember when a fly landed on then-Vice President Mike Pence’s head during a 2020 debate with Kamala Harris? Or last summer, when President Joe Biden took a nosedive after delivering remarks at an Air Force Academy graduation ceremony? Donald Trump is another famously memed figure in American life. Photographs of him falling asleep during his trial last month in New York, and subsequent fraud conviction, also have gotten shared by millions. And let’s not forget the recent TikTok photos and shares about the upside down flag—a “Stop the Steal” symbol— displayed by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife outside their home.

Long dismissed as inside jokes with no political importance, memes are evolving into powerful political tools of persuasion this election year. They’re now being used to influence public opinion up and down the ticket, and more aggressively this year than the last time Donald Trump ran against Joe Biden for the White House.

“The 2024 election seems more destined to be waged in a media environment where a lot of sway voters will be forming at least some of their opinions based on funny videos that their cousin’s husband’s sister shares in the group chat,” says Clare Malone, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

No debate there. Memes matter. They can catalyze votes, change minds and are being used by politicians to organize supporters—directly—to serve as “brand ambassadors” and influencers of public opinion.

Fun versus Fights

If you use a social media platform—and we know most of you do—it’s more than likely you’ve seen a satirical meme (or created one as a form of political satire) which made you and others chuckle. [Think ‘Trump Baby’ —an angry orange baby holding a mobile phone—from the last presidential election, and check out ‘Dark Brandon’ from this election season.]

They’re like editorial cartoons— but with one huge difference. These digital memes can be made by anyone who knows how to use Photoshop, and, depending on their appeal, can be distributed to millions in a heartbeat, immediately off the news.

Politicians, themselves, now make them. One meme about aging that is still making the rounds since January is a photo of a birthday cake given to Joe Biden, engulfed in flames (too many candles), which Biden’s communications people created on his birthday to disempower detractors from creating their own. “He knows he’s not getting younger and so the way to deal with concerns about his age is to make jokes about it,” said Malone.

Donald Trump also went onto the PR offensive, making a “rebel”meme out of his mugshot showing a facial expression he rehearsed and then tweeted out himself, immediately after his August 2023 indictment on racketeering and related charges. According to Trump aides, the mugshot meme was used by Trump to signal to his supporters that his indictment “would be handled as being a part of his ‘outlaw brand’” rather than as anything else.

But what happens when memes go beyond a laugh or an obvious PR spin campaign? When a meme is no longer shared simply as an inside joke? Or when bad actors disguise political disinformation or hate speech as a meme, to enable wide and semi-covert distribution outside the moderated media ecosystem?

One controversial example still being used by some internet subcultures is Pepe the Frog. What began as a harmless cartoon has morphed into an image used by the alt right to spread hate by white nationalists.

As this year’s election season heats up, PBS Learning Media, a resource for high school teachers, is distributing a new video to teach students about the messaging power of memes. In a new video on meme-watching, students are taught that there are “good memes” and there also are bad ones that are short bits of social messaging advocating harmful ideologies “disguised” with humor. The video also points out memes used by election-year candidates to score political blows, sometimes below the belt—with a smile.

Danger Zones

While many memes are particularly popular among GenZers, they are not limited to a specific age group. But their excessive misuse can lend itself to more harmful ideas getting disguised as humor, and lead to what some call “mematic warfare.”

Just this past week, at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum in Arizona, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said social media sites like China-owned TikTok are partly to blame for algorithmically promoting memes and other “content without context” to share criticism of Israel’s war effort against Hamas in Gaza while diminishing the prominence and reach of opposing opinions also expressed on the site. Blinken also cited, in part, a changing media environment in which many people “no longer all read from the same authoritative news sources and instead learn about current events on chaotic social media feeds.”

According to Joan Donovan, the director of Harvard’s Technology and Social Change Project, which published research on Covid misinformation and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, social media are becoming on-ramps for small and extreme subcultures to amplify their political views, manipulate the media and provide “first takes” of disinformation campaigns to fight opponents and identify “political enemies.” Donovan’s research reveals how information “disguised as somewhat humorous and harmless memes” was used to organize the Proud Boys and other internet subcultures to participate in the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Donovan, a co-author of the 2023 book, Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, says efforts to regulate social media are not attempts to dismiss free speech, but rather efforts to “better balance” how the internet and algorithms interact with our culture, and then interact with our politics.

“There are now systems in place to take speech that has an agenda or is harmful and to amplify it, so that it becomes so omnipresent that it cannot be avoided and therefore, be used to change people’s minds,” Donovan said in an interview. “ …What many people see now on social media— when they’re just there to maybe just RSVP to a niece’s wedding—are meme after meme or news article after news article highlighting a specific point of view, which can suck us down a rabbit hole, regardless of whether we wanted to be there or not. …The trouble is that tech companies are still not creating guardrails to reign some of this in. .. and we need to start considering how to do this to support the integrity of our information systems and our election systems.”

“…Memes are now giving extreme beliefs and disinformation a better chance to not only be seen and heard loudly but also to take those people who can be persuaded quickly from the wires to the weeds and inspire offline action,” Donovan added.

What now?

So how might we reasonably expect memes to keep evolving—and how might we go about creating ways now to moderate their use and veracity in this, or any other, high-stakes election year?

Meme Wars co-author Emily Dreyfuss agrees that today, government regulation of tech companies, requiring them to moderate the content on their sites more rigorously, is critically needed to create the guardrails companies will need “to build trust and make our democracy more measured and effective.”

Otherwise, Dreyfuss adds, “aggressive campaign rhetoric and hate speech will continue to be turned into memes and into fodder for ‘jokes’ and persuasion strategies, which then can be used to push an extreme agenda forward with a level of influence not possible before the internet.” Donovan likens the use of political memes now to “a chess match being waged by political subcultures and small-member extremes” to win influence.

The New Yorker’s Malone, in a recent conversation on the New Yorker Radio Hour, says her theory of American politics, especially after observing the political campaigns conducted during the past decade, “is basically that very little of them (campaigns) are really about policy anymore. It’s now all political pheromones. …If a person (running for office) parries back with a humor meme that you like, and it seems to be done well and it’s not corny, then yes, maybe political memes will work” to help influence someone’s vote, she says—and at least for a variety of influential groups.

New rule? Memes aren’t just funny inside jokes anymore that can foster a sense of exclusive community.

Memes can now deliver a laugh as easily as a vote for the other side.

This story was updated to reflect new developments.

What’s your take on memes? Got a favorite, or one you think has spread disinformation? Share it here. We’ll be curating some of them for an update on their influence later this election year.

Alex Garland’s new movie, Civil War, pre-screening this week in New York City and hitting local theaters across the country on Friday, is taking our fears of deep polarization to a fever pitch and, says The Atlantic, is providing us with “a narrative of uncomfortable resonance.”

It imagines a worst-case scenario in which American society unravels into bloody combat, as frontline journalists try to make sense of the chaos and rebel forces from warring states descend onto the White House to evict a president who has refused to leave office and is staging attacks on his own citizens. Leading the opposition are two different states (red state Texas and blue state California), which decide to ally against the threat they consider greater than their partisan differences: efforts by dis-informants and fascist, pro-autocracy activists to destroy democracy, itself—and keep a majority of citizens from fighting back to build our democracy into a more perfect union for the benefit of all.

Early reviews don’t argue the film’s power. After its premiere last month for SXSW’s high-profile, hard-to-please film crowd in Austin, Texas, cross-generational reviewers and film industry leaders described it as “an emotional wallop” and a “wake-up call.” In a post-premiere audience Q&A, writer-director Garland told SXSW audiences “it’s a warning, and an argument against polarization.”

“…America has its own brand of exceptionalism and probably, in reality, feels its democracy is immune from disappearing,” he said, “but present day events and global history show us again and again that nobody is immune. We’re all subject to the same threats of fascism, and if we don’t start rising above our partisan differences to share our common values, provide checks and balances to power and exhibit human decency to solve the problems we share, then we will become totally out of control.”

Divide and Conquer

No question we feel divided across society today. At the very least, we’ve all got a personal story to share about how our partisan differences can de-socialize us or, worst case—as during other crises in our national history— descend into shouting matches with friends and family members over holiday dinners, far and wide.

But are we, today, more irretrievably vulnerable to disinformation and political violence, and therefore, more deeply divided as a nation— or are we really less divided ideologically and behaviorally—and share more values than we think?

New polls focusing on what divides us—and how—are beginning to suggest the latter, saying that despite political campaigns, disinformation and anti-democracy movements pushing forward this election year to turn us Americans against each other over race, gender, sexuality or immigration status, there is much shared frustration with Washington over its failure to otherwise come together to approve things already agreed and work out new bipartisan solutions to create better.

A number of new researchers on public opinion are also stepping forward to say we’re less divided than we think on other issues, as well. “Consensus may be hiding in plain sight,” says Tim Dixon, co-founder of More in Common, an international group studying division.

New Findings

Consider these emerging survey data findings, some by relatively new polling companies joining the polling industry to focus more on what diverse communities share in common beyond division—data that is shared with a variety of companies and nonprofits seeking new ways to close divides in the workplace, communities and state and local governments:

• Populace, a nonpartisan think tank that gets cross-ideological backing from tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg and uber-conservative industrial magnate Charles Koch, says its polls analyzing Americans’ values, aspirations and political views have found Americans share more in common and mistakenly believe their views are in the minority. Its recent polls also have found that many people think, erroneously, that the country, as a whole, embraces values and priorities far different from their own. Founder Todd Rose said in a recent interview with the Chronicle of Philanthropy ‘s Commons Project that Populace conducts surveys differently from what Gallup and other polling firms produce because it aims to divine “private opinion”—by asking choice-based questions requiring respondents to consider tradeoffs in their answers and to choose policy statements that align best with their policy priorities.

• According to a Populace survey, Biden and Trump voters rank some key issues similarly in importance, and nearly identically on the issues of quality health care, safe communities, unbiased criminal justice systems, the need for a thriving middle class and a modern physical infrastructure. And the shared values most closely held include the protection of individual rights like free speech, peaceful assembly, freedom of religion and the right to bear arms, but with some restrictions to keep schools and communities safe.

• According to IPSOS, the international market research and consulting firm headquartered in Paris, most polling shops have a “blind spot” because they do not have “political extremism” or “saving democracy” as attributes in their most important problem questions shared with voters. In a recent poll to which Ipsos added “political extremism or threats to democracy” as a main worry among voters, the firm found “significant shifts in what Americans cite as their chief concern compared to more typical main issue questions.” Added Ipsos President Clifford Young in a recent interview: “Most public pollsters show immigration as the dominant issue of the day, but the market right now has a blind spot and is not capturing a critical concern among the public. …It looks like ‘saving democracy’ will be the key issue this electoral season, beating out the economy and immigration.” Young says this suggests that “the anti-Trump vote is real and that Biden might be down, but not out.”

• The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University has done polling to find common ground across American society, and George Barna, chief of the Center, says it has found there is a “supermajority”—two-thirds of both the Republican and Democratic parties—which support policies that aim to increase the manufacturing workforce, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and make Social Security and Medicare financially solvent. “These issues should not be weaponized by politics but worked on to achieve, together, despite other differences,” Barna says. “That’s what good governance is about.”

• More in Common, an international group studying division, found that Americans consistently see their political opposites as more extreme than they really are. Co-founder Tim Dixon says “we misunderstand each other often but even those who hold quite clear views are not as extreme as what the other side thinks.”

• A recent Newsweek survey found that outside the Beltway, consensus is being forged quickly between red state and blue state voters over the legal protections for abortion. In Ohio, which voted for Trump before and after he installed Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v Wade, 57 percent of voters now support a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. And on the issue of immigration, blue-city mayors now agree with red-state governors that waves of migrants crossing the southern border represent a crisis that President Joe Biden needs to address.

• A new survey by Pew Research says 65% of Americans are “exhausted” by the division in national politics, persuading them that the country is more divided than it is, with increasing belief that this perspective is warped by the intensity of the partisan battles over issues, but not by the beliefs of individuals they know and speak to from “the other side.” Populace’s Rose told the Chronicle: “We have a tendency to assume the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority but people are starting to question these assumptions. In truth, Americans hold many of the same values and aspirations for their lives and the country.”

New Rules

In short, breaking through the propaganda machine and creating content that disputes lies and misperceptions this election year will “not be a lost cause” and may be helpful in closing some of the sharpest divides.

Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who studies civil wars and a former researcher of the Political Instability Task Force, a U.S. government program at the Wilson Center that helps policymakers understand and anticipate political crises at home and aboard, says another U.S. civil war is “very unlikely” but acknowledges that “there are so many bad things that could happen well short of a civil war.”

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat agrees. The New York University history professor who writes a column on Substack called Lucid about fascism, authoritarianism and propaganda, says “it will be critical this election year for pro-democracy campaigns to acknowledge democracy’s failures and to rally more Americans into the fold to help make it more inclusive, and to fight disinformation with bold and widespread messaging, together.

“…Resistance to tyranny is about keeping alive the feeling that it is possible to change things, that there are openings for change to occur and that we are the ones to make it happen.”

Adds Harvard historian, author and New Yorker writer Jill LePore, a long-time critic of what she calls “Americans’ public addiction with polls” says “the problem with polls isn’t technical. It’s political.”

Stay tuned.

Boston College history professor offers something hard to find in the maelstrom of today’s mainstream media world.

While cable news and social media spit out rapid-fire, hair-on-fire hot takes to track our democracy in crisis, Heather, in her public appearances and popular newsletter, Letters from an American, does just the opposite. A recent Vanity Fair profile said her Substack stardom and fan base of nearly 2 million readers underscores “today’s need for someone to calmly situate the political news of the day into stories within the long arc of historical context.” Heather, in other words, uses her incredibly detailed knowledge of American history and conversational voice to both accurately synthesize and contextualize today’s political chaos into clarity. Using language one might deploy in a letter to a friend, she delivers just the facts to help us understand how we got here, and where we are going—and how people have handled similar challenges in the past, and why our political parties are handling them in certain ways now.

Often writing her daily dispatches into the wee hours, Richardson says her goal is “to help people understand that our history is replete with stories about how ordinary people have been able to say ‘enough’ and to turn things around to preserve democracy when it has been challenged the most by those who would destroy it.”

I recently caught up with Heather as she was wrapping up some public meetings in Dallas as part of her book tour for her latest tome, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She said she’s seeing a rise in grassroots energy to block any further drift towards authoritarianism, and says she’s optimistic—despite Donald Trump’s steady rise in recent polls.

What follows are some short, edited excerpts from our conversation. Our full interview with Heather about what she calls “the Save Our Democracy movement that the media have missed”—and her take on the rise of disinformation—will be featured in its entirety, as an audio episode in our forthcoming #NewRules’ podcast, set to launch later this month.

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MARCIA: Your national book tour is taking you all over America, from Cape Cod to Chicago; Little Rock to Dallas and beyond. Thousands of people have been attending your forums, book signings and interviews with local leaders and hundreds of ordinary citizens at each stop. What are you learning from them and how have they enhanced your understanding of what's happening in America today?

HEATHER: People had, for a while now, been saying to me there is a movement underway in this country. I get emails from people as I sit in my house in rural Maine. I tell them, ‘Yes, I know.’ I'm constantly watching the national and the international scene through my computer. But being on the road? What’s really jumping out at me now are the thousands of people turning up at my talks to talk about democracy and our need to protect it. I see the depth of their passion and profound interest in making sure this country continues as a democracy.

It’s really not something that has been reflected yet in the national media which most of us are consuming. It’s happening, for now, under the radar. At the grassroots level—the true grassroots level, not on Astro Turf.

And it’s not something exclusive to me. I’ve been talking with some friends who do similar work in different areas and settings, and they’re saying the exact same thing. Something big is happening.

MARCIA: Have we seen anything like this before?

HEATHER: What it reminds me of is the 1850s, the start of an extraordinary groundswell of people determined to reclaim their democracy. If you lived in 1853, you would think the elite slavery advocates had taken everything. They had the Supreme Court, they had the Presidency, they had the Senate and they were making inroads on the House of Representatives. And they were very articulate about the fact that they believed in a society in which a few rich guys should run society for everyone else and take all the wealth everybody was creating because they believed they were the only ones who knew how things should work. And they had all the nodes of power. They ran the Southern states, and in 1854, they managed to get through the House a law that said they would spread their system of enslavement over the West. They told people that when that was finished, the Westerners and Southerners would make slavery national, and then they’d clean out the North, as well, and then take the whole system global. They were very clear about all of this.

But Americans woke up in 1854 and they began to organize and look at each other and say we don’t agree about immigration, we don’t agree about financing, we don’t agree on internal improvements, but —by God—we agree that we don’t want to be an oligarchy. We want to be a democracy. And so by 1856, they created a new political party, the Republicans. By 1859, Abraham Lincoln articulated a new vision of government that would work for ordinary Americans rather than just for those very few people on top. By 1861, Lincoln has been elected to the White House. By 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending human enslavement as an economic system in the United States. And by the end of 1863, he delivered the Gettysburg Address, calling for a government of the people, by the people and for the people — promising a new birth of freedom. It took less than 10 years.

And while we honor Lincoln for his role in that, and while people always talk about how brilliant Lincoln was, Lincoln did it because ordinary Americans got together and said ‘not on our watch.’ And I look around what’s happening in America today and at the millions of people in all sorts of organizations that are not being covered by the legacy press and I think we’re doing the exact same thing today.

MARCIA: Do you think it might be more difficult to organize today? Disinformation is on the rise, and this past year, some highly sophisticated forms of AI have been released, catalyzing bad actors to create ‘deepfakes’ to discourage people from voting for a certain candidate, or to convince people to not trust anything they read or see, so they will not vote at all.

HEATHER: Disinformation is actually an attempt to destabilize a society. And we're seeing that quite deliberately being promulgated across the country and also around the globe. And the first thing to remember about that, is that it is a deliberate psychological technique. Disinformation doesn’t happen by accident. The idea is to throw so much disinformation at somebody, so much wrong information, that they lose a grip on reality and there's too much coming at them and they get so overwhelmed that they either become apathetic and pull away from the political arena or they vote against their own interests.

This was happening in 2016, to help get Trump elected, and it is still going on. And we know, for example, that since October 7th to now, that the amount of disinformation coming out of Russia has gone up 400%. People spreading it are trying to create a reality that doesn't exist and the handbooks for doing this, a lot of them, have come out of Russia.

What matters is that we care about democracy and we speak up when we see it being undermined. Look at what former President Trump and what the people who support him have been talking about, like what they're saying on social media—that they're going to weaponize the Department of Justice and go after political figures and journalists if Trump wins. This is not democracy. We all know that, so it’s time to come together in support of a common goal: that democracy, its values, need to continue.

MARCIA: There’s been much talk and profiling of the generation of Americans who will be voting for the first time—if able—for 2028. Generational change has historically catalyzed changes, as well.

HEATHER: Yes, by 2028, the younger generations will significantly outnumber the Boomers as voters. They already outnumber Boomers as people but a lot of them aren’t voting yet. But as voters in 2028, they’re going to outnumber the Boomers and their priorities are going to be much different. Their top priority is gun safety, then climate change. Their third is civil rights. They’re very concerned about economic justice. Our job today is to make sure there is going to be a 2028 election.

MARCIA: What, in your view, do we most need as Americans to better navigate the challenges we share today?

HEATHER: This is easy. Take up oxygen.

I'm an idealist, which means I believe that ideas change society, and I think the reason that we're in this mess, these many messes, is because decent people have not voiced their opinions, have not spoken up for democracy, have not spoken up for each other. Have not spoken up for a fairer economy, have not spoken up for education, have not spoken up for the things that the vast majority of us care about.

Share how you care about things, speak to your neighbors, speak to your friends—because we know people take those interactions much more seriously than they take anything that somebody like me could say. Take up oxygen across the back fence, at a school board meeting, at the playground. In the supermarket.

If you really want to have a say in the American future and what it looks like, if you really want to change the ship of state, speak up. Mind you, we are not always going to agree, but we’re going to learn from each other.

Just do not let yourself be browbeaten into passivity, because I think that’s what we’ve seen for the last 40 years, and it’s time for Americans to take back their agency.

In our history, there have been many attempts to undermine democracy and many successful attempts to protect and expand it. Once again, we are at a time of testing, and how it comes out will rest, as it always has, in our own hands. I’m optimistic.

No, the Pope did not wear a Balenciaga puffy jacket to walk the streets of Rome last May.

Taylor Swift did not participate in the porn that faked her likeness last week— images which went viral on X and Telegram. Some bad actors swapped her face and likeness, investigators say, onto the face and body of someone else.

Donald Trump did not get arrested and bullied by police outside Trump Tower in Manhattan last year. A video was doctored to make it look like he had, and then went viral with the support of his fans.

And no, Hillary Clinton never voiced her support for Ron DeSantis—nor did President Joe Biden voice a recent robocall telling Democratic voters in New Hampshire to avoid casting their ballots in that state’s Jan. 23^rd primary. “Voice-cloning” is now cheaply available to even the most cash-strapped adversaries.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming.

Some of you may remember seeing Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, a few years ago, bragging about having “total control of billions of people’s stolen data.”  Sure, it may have sounded true at the time, but in reality, it was a video made by tech rivals using artificial intelligence to make a “deepfake”—a single image or video intended to diminish someone’s reputation, twist the truth, or worse, to maliciously disinform and erode public trust.

The earliest deepfakes weren’t taken very seriously. The technology wasn’t as accessible nor as sophisticated; lip-synchs were often botched and face features copied badly. Others contained obviously questionable content, or were made to simply be fun to watch. Take, for example, the ongoing entertainment series of @deeptomcruise videos being shared on TikTok by actor Miles Fisher, a Tom Cruise impersonator with 5.2 million followers. Fisher doesn’t look exactly like Cruise in real life, but Fisher’s TikTok videos are made to create a sharper resemblance, and to showcase action few fans would expect of Cruise. In one of his videos, Fisher uses voice-cloning tech to make Tom speak fluent Spanish. [In real life, Cruise does not.]

@deeptomcruiseI'm taking lessons.

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But last year changed everything. When ChatGPT4 , DALL-E and other generative AI tools were released to the public a year ago, these more advanced tools offered users new ways to visually manipulate images. They also encouraged widespread experimentation—and often, without offering guidance to discourage misuse. Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old Chicago construction worker, was an early user among the millions of ordinary citizens trying out generative AI’s new visual image tools last year. Using MidJourney, Xavier’s spoof to “make the Pope drip” [street slang for fashionable] went viral. He told BuzzFeed afterwards that he didn’t mean any harm, and was surprised the Vatican saw it differently. “I just thought it would be funny,” Xavier said.

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Election-Year Guardrails

Now, at the start of the 2024 election season, generative AI tools are being taken much more seriously, given their potential to be used by bad actors to make fakes to further drive polarization and diminish trust in the election process. More than 40 countries will be electing new leaders this year, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

DeepMedia, a company making tools to detect synthetic media, predicts that some 500,000 election-year deepfakes will be shared globally in the coming months. Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, recently told Reuters: “It’s going to be very difficult for voters to distinguish the real from the fake, and you could just imagine how either Trump supporters or Biden supporters could use this technology to make the opponent look bad. … And it can all happen so fast, that deepfakes could drop right before the election that nobody will have a chance to take down.”

Ten states—including Virginia and Texas—have criminal laws against deepfakes but there is currently no federal law in place. Meanwhile, Democrats in Hawaii, South Dakota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Nebraska, as well as Republicans in Indiana and Wyoming, have introduced additional legislation that would ban media created with the help of AI within a specific time frames before elections if that media doesn’t include disclosure. Arizona Republicans proposed a bill to allow any candidate for public office who will appear on the ballot, or any Arizona resident, to sue for relief or damages from any people who publish a “digital impersonation” of that person.

Some tech companies also have offered some safeguards. Just before the Senate Judiciary Committee began holding hearings on AI last fall, Google, and then Meta, announced they would require political ads appearing on their platforms to disclose whether AI was used to create them. Enforcement of these new policies, however, will pose unprecedented challenges.

“We are in the middle of a growth of authoritarianism globally, a decline in trust and in mainstream media, (and) pervasive mis- and dis-information,” says Sam Gregory, Executive Director of witness.org, a nonprofit media watchdog. “We need a globally inclusive response to this broader phenomenon of generative AI and synthetic media.”

Steps to Fight Back

So how can we, as tech- and media-savvy citizens, help to find fakes, or at least detect many of them when they cross our radar?

It’s still difficult without a team of tech whizzes to help spot AI-driven disinformation. But here’s a short list of some of the more popular AI technologies and uses to watch for in the months ahead:

• Voice Cloning.  This is voice-mimicking software that uses advanced AI algorithms to convincingly imitate the voice of a politician or celebrity to create confusion and mislead consumers, voters and the general public. One of the best warnings about this technology was released last September by the Polish startup, Elevenlabs. The company posted a short video on YouTube to show how voice-cloning can be filtered into disinformation schemes. Elevenlabs took the widely-shared speech given by actor Leo DiCaprio at the UN’s 2014 Climate Summit, and then used speech synthesis and voice cloning capabilities to make Leo speak in the voices and pacing of famous people like Joe Rogan, Steve Jobs, Robert Downey, Jr., Bill Gates—and even Kim Kardashian.

• Corporate fundraising clones. A person who is manipulating a company executive’s voice, or that of a political donor, needs just a few seconds of real audio to make a good fake. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier this month began accepting public submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge, which is aimed at promoting the development of ideas to protect executives, employees and consumers from the misuse of AI-enabled voice cloning to commit financial fraud and other harms.

• Face fakes.  In deepfake videos, a person’s face is swapped with another to make it look like that person did or said something they didn’t—like what happened in the Taylor Swift case. Face-fake technologies also are being used to persuade consumers to sign up for expensive products and services online. Last October, actor Tom Hanks warned people that an AI-created video using his likeness was being used to sell dental insurance online. "I have nothing to do with it," Hanks said in an Instagram post. Soon after, CBS Mornings co-anchor Gayle King sounded the alarm over a video purporting to show her touting weight-loss gummies. "Please don't be fooled by these AI videos," she said. One of the more widely shared face-faking videos was created to warn people about the technology, called This is not Morgan Freeman.

• Robocalls. The use of AI in elections is becoming more prevalent and poses a serious threat to election outcomes, says The Hill, because there are few, if any, safeguards in place to prevent false information from being disseminated. The recent Joe Biden robocall case was a form of “deepfake disinformation designed to harm Joe Biden, suppress votes and damage our democracy,” said Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. Robocalls can make a candidate appear to say something he or she did not, and spread false information about voting.

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New Detection Tools

Some universities and news organizations have begun offering “fake news detection” guides to help consumers spot deepfakes more easily. MIT’s Detect Fakes is a short quiz that enables users to compare two videos to decide which is real. Microsoft’s Spot the Deepfake is a 10-question quiz that has users detect signs like mismatched shoes or earrings, or eye movements that don’t synch.

Other new detection tools also are emerging, including free versions, like Content at Scale and GPTZero, as well as versions that charge for access, such as Sensity. Tools—which is designed to spot embedded markers in AI-generated images and look for unusual patterns in how the pixels are arranged, including in their sharpness and contrast.  

But deepfake detection tools are still early in development, and it’s not yet certain which tools to trust, says witness.org’s Sam Gregory, who specializes in deepfake detection. Mya Zepp, with IJNet’s Disarming Disinformation project, says it’s essential that journalists and creatives who are committed to sorting fact from fiction have access to reliable tools so they can more easily spot what’s fake and warn their audiences and stakeholders. Most critical, says Professor Lilian Edwards of Newcastle University in the U.K., a specialist in Internet law, is to “stem the potential chaos” of both real deepfakes and claims of deepfakes that seriously erode public trust.

“The future doesn’t have to be one in which anything can be called a deepfake, anyone can claim something is manipulated, and trust is further corroded,” Edwards recently told Guardian writer Ian Sample. “The problem may not be so much the faked reality as the fact that real reality becomes plausibly deniable.”

I have a special affinity for Japan, having traveled there multiple times during the past two decades to examine disruptive demographic change in action, namely the decreasing birth rate, growing older population, and depopulating regions, which pose significant challenges to its economic growth and sustainability.

Economically, Japan is striving to rejuvenate its once-dominant position in global markets, contending with slow growth, deflationary pressures, and the need for structural reforms in labor and corporate sectors. However, Japan also confronts environmental challenges, notably its vulnerability to natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis and the ongoing issue of nuclear safety post-Fukushima. Politically and internationally, Japan is navigating a complex regional landscape, balancing its close alliance with the United States with the need to manage tensions with neighbors like China and North Korea, all while playing an increasingly proactive and pivotal role in global issues ranging from climate change to security.

So it’s no surprise that I was drawn to Kohei Saito's latest book, “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto” (Astra House), which offers a radical intervention to a world teetering on environmental catastrophe. It’s not just another academic treatise on environmentalism but a reimagining of how we perceive growth and progress. Kohei, a Japanese scholar renowned for his interpretations of Marx, turns his gaze to the concept of degrowth, challenging the very bedrock of our capitalist beliefs.

At the heart of Kohei’s narrative is a simple yet subversive question: What if the relentless pursuit of economic growth is the root of our environmental crises rather than their solution? With a blend of Marxian analysis and contemporary environmental thought, Kohei’s book is as much a critique of modern capitalism as it is an exploration of alternative paths forward.

But this is no easy read. Kohei’s reliance on dense theoretical frameworks can be daunting, and his focus on critique over practical solutions might leave some readers yearning for more concrete guidance. Yet, these are minor quibbles in an otherwise compelling work.

Kohei’s exploration of degrowth is not just an academic exercise; it's a call to action. In a world facing unprecedented environmental crises, his book offers a radical alternative vision. It's a vision that challenges us to rethink our relationship with the planet and with each other.

As Kohei himself puts it, "The pursuit of growth has led us to the precipice. It is time to consider the path of degrowth, not as a step backward, but as a way forward towards a more sustainable and equitable world."

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