Untitled Flashcards Set

“I’M DONE APPEALING to power from outside,” Katey Lauer, the West Virginia activist, told me. “We have to be the people that are governing ourselves.” Four years after the chemical spill that revealed a government in disrepair, a proudly radical movement was gathering in West Virginia. The state was an unlikely laboratory for progressive politics, but a “revolutionary spirit” was in the air, as local activists put it. On February 22, 2018, more than 22,000 West Virginia teachers, school-bus drivers, and staff walked off the job, the first statewide school strike in nearly thirty years. West Virginia teachers were among the most poorly paid in America—forty-eighth in the nation—and they had gone without a raise for four years. Many lived from paycheck to paycheck, and worked second jobs when they weren’t in the classroom. Accompanied by spouses and children, thousands of chanting teachers filed into the doors beneath the golden dome of the state capitol. They wore red bandannas, a symbol of labor battles going back to 1877, when West Virginia railroad workers sparked the first national strike in U.S. history. The workers with red bandannas went on to wage some of America’s most iconic labor fights, becoming known as the “rednecks,” a term that only later became a byword for poor white prejudice. Over the decades, the spirit of the red bandannas faded in West Virginia as the share of unionized workers sank from 38 percent in 1978 to 13 percent by 2018, but the teachers’ strike marked the opening of a different era. It lasted nine days and succeeded in winning a 5 percent pay raise—and inspired similar strikes in other Republican-led states, including Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Other industries followed, and by year’s end the United States had recorded more workers on strike in 2018 than in any year since Ronald Reagan was in office. But the revolutionary spirit of 2018 extended far beyond the world of organized labor. In ways only beginning to become clear, the moral calculus of Trump’s presidency was stirring a full-scale resistance to the established order, a movement against racism, misogyny, and economic exploitation across a broad spectrum of American life. Since the fall of 2017, when dozens of women had accused the film producer Harvey Weinstein of rape and sexual abuse, the #MeToo movement had catalyzed accusations against powerful men around the globe. The fury was fueled not only by decades of dismissal and silence but also by Trump’s ongoing escape from accountability for his own transgressions, despite his own voice on tape and accusations of misconduct from twenty-six women. By the spring of 2018, the number of women signing up to run for the House of Representatives had broken records, but an even starker measure emerged from Emily’s List, a super PAC focused on electing pro-choice female candidates. The group tracked the number of women who contacted it for help in running for office even if most, ultimately, did not run. In 2016, a total of 920 women contacted Emily’s List that year for assistance. In 2018, the number was 34,000. The backlash to Trump was not only a rebuttal to the politics of exclusion and fear and dominance; it was also a war on the dogma of starving a government to the point of dysfunction; it was a declaration of hope that a well-run government could be a unifying force. That rebuttal, from across American life, felt analogous to a biological process—antibodies converging on an illness in the body politic, a battle to suppress the culture of “thoughts and prayers,” white supremacy, the corruption of democracy, and the sheer force of cynicism. Instead of looking at issues separately—as matters of economics or politics or safety or the environment—people demanded to acknowledge how the connections among them were a barrier to progress. In West Virginia, the protests carried the imprint of activism far away—of Occupy Wall Street and of the Sanders campaign. Teachers carried banners that declared, “Public Employee Healthcare—NOT Corporate Welfare.” They were rising up against economic and political imbalances that had become increasingly untenable. Recently, the Walmart in McDowell County had closed, which had not only eliminated 140 scarce local jobs; it had also eliminated the supplier to a local food pantry that fed 11,000 people. To Katey and other progressive activists, the teachers’ strike was the glimpse of an opportunity: “Evidence that something like what we were imagining could be possible,” she told me. After years of issue-based campaigns— gathering signatures, pressing lawmakers—Katey had grown demoralized. The levers of representative democracy were out of reach to those without money. In the fight over water quality, for instance, the chief regulatory agency, the Public Service Commission, was stocked with former industry executives. “They are buddies with the very companies that they’re supposed to be regulating,” she said. “It was a wake-up call for me,” she added. “We’re done knocking at the door of the capitol. We want to occupy it.” Even as the strike was under way, Katey started roughing out a political plan with another up-and-coming activist, Stephen Smith, who was considering a run for governor in 2020. At thirty-eight, Stephen was a West Virginia native who had graduated from Harvard and returned home to work on poverty alleviation. He was tall, telegenic, and a passionate speaker, which invited comparisons to Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic congressman who was challenging Ted Cruz for a Senate seat in Texas. Stephen was running a nonprofit that had succeeded in pressing legislators to raise the minimum wage and expand school-breakfast programs. But, like Katey, he was increasingly frustrated by the depth of corruption and propaganda embedded in West Virginia politics. “When your government doesn’t do right by you, you have to pick up the slack,” he told me. “The solutions will not come from any company or political party, or politician. They will come from regular people, like they always have.” In West Virginia, the incumbent governor, Jim Justice, was an especially attractive target for activists on the left. Justice was a billionaire who had inherited a coal-mining business from his father and expanded it into an empire that encompassed real estate and hotels. Since he had defected to Trump’s party, critics had unearthed other similarities between them: according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail, “Justice’s coal operations have been cited for pollution and safety violations, and his companies have millions in unpaid back taxes.” In November 2018, Stephen entered the race; Katey was his campaign manager. But their campaign against the governor was only the most visible piece of their projects. Their ultimate goal was to recruit a broad slate of candidates they called “West Virginia Can’t Wait,” to run for offices up and down the ballot. In homage to the rednecks, they wore red bandannas as they traveled the state, signing up people who wanted to become members of city councils, magistrate judges, and county commissioners—all in hopes of creating what they called a “people’s government.” Wherever they went, they held public town halls—eventually surpassing two hundred—and collected thousands of voter surveys, which formed their platform. At the town halls, one of their most effective bits was a riff on musical chairs: Stephen asked for six volunteers; then he picked two who were permitted to spread out over two chairs each. While the other four jostled for the two remaining chairs, they rarely stopped to question why the first volunteers had received twice their fair share. So it was in America today, Stephen said. The game reminded me of a comment by one of Trump’s friends, Carl Icahn, the corporate raider: “I don’t believe in the word ‘fair,’” he told a biographer. “It’s a human concept that became conventional wisdom.” The activists behind West Virginia Can’t Wait embraced progressive aims—single-payer health care, free college, an end to homelessness—but they avoided the term “progressive,” because rural voters greeted it warily. A generation of conservative attacks on a government “here to help” had left a deep imprint. Instead, the activists created their own label; they declared themselves the opponents of the “good old boys” system, a political culture of cronyism that allowed companies and investors to extract value from the land and the people without a fair return. In policy terms, their proposals included a tax on the state’s forestland, which had been owned for more than a century by national railways without generating revenue for citizens. As they trooped from one county to the next, holding town halls and meetings with local bigwigs, they never knew how their caravan of young, left-leaning activists would be received. In the small southern city of Hinton (population 2,676), while they waited to meet with a local police officer, a receptionist eyed them warily. In the meeting, Stephen started with the question he often opened with: “What’s the first thing you would do if you were governor?” The cop’s eyes widened. Then he unloaded on the problems of political corruption and corporate influence in politics. “How come these lobbyists are controlling everything?” he asked. For an hour they talked about the levers of influence and the imbalances of power that had drawn Stephen and Katey into the race. Katey had no illusions that she and a local cop in Hinton would see eyeto-eye on everything. “There are a thousand other things on our platform that we would not have agreed about,” she told me. But she was struck by the possibility of assembling a more diverse coalition than people assumed, organized around frustration with the failures of democracy. “It’s not as simple as ‘This guy is with us on everything—or he’s not!’” she said. “I think the left imagines that in order for us to make progress, everyone has to agree about everything. I don’t think that’s true. I think in order to make progress, we have to build alignment around things that we want to advance, and let there be complexity—and move forward, anyhow.” As months passed, they found their audience. They recruited a slate of rookie candidates, including more than a dozen teachers and other school workers who had been radicalized by the strike. To join their slate, candidates had to promise not to accept corporate donations, or avoid a debate, or cross a picket line. “We thought if we could find twenty or twentyfive of these people to run, that would be a miracle. A year later, there are ninety-three of us,” Stephen said. Their movement stood out in West Virginia for one more reason: in one of the country’s most rapidly aging states, they were young. “More than half of us are forty years of age or younger,” Stephen said. For millennials, the diverse generation of Americans born between 1981 and 1996, the call for justice and fairness reflected deep frustration with the basic economic framework of American life. The 2008 financial crisis, and the recession that followed, had altered the course of their lives; they were approaching middle age in poorer financial shape than every living generation before them—with less wealth, less property, lower rates of marriage, and fewer children. In 2016, for instance, a typical millennial household had an average net worth of about $92,000, which was nearly 40 percent less than Gen X households in 2001, adjusted for inflation. Stephen’s campaign eventually broke the state record for individual contributions in a governor’s race; when they uploaded the donor roll to the secretary of state’s office, the website crashed from the load. In one of America’s most politically demoralized places, they had attracted 2,449 small donors; Justice, the incumbent, had 13. Far from Washington, each new drama of the Trump era reverberated through American life in ways both public and private. In the fall of 2018, Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court; a psychology professor named Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexually assaulting her thirty-six years earlier, which Kavanaugh denied. Ford was inundated with death threats, but she testified anyway before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified.” Ford’s testimony became an inspiration to women around the world. Members of the public called in to C-SPAN to reveal their own decades-old stories of rape and harassment, and to speak out against their oppressors and for themselves. On social media, women from Ghana to France to Hong Kong posted their admiration for Ford after watching the hearings. In Charleston, West Virginia, Jamie Miller, an artist and mother of four, heard Ford tell her story and reached a decision: Miller called her grown children and told them that she had been sexually assaulted in her teens. The assault had left her pregnant, and she had an abortion. “It was something I never talked about,” Miller said later. Even though Kavanaugh was confirmed, Ford’s testimony, she said, “woke me up.” Miller decided to become a volunteer at the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, the state’s sole abortion provider. It was harrowing work; she escorted patients through a gauntlet of protesters, including the most persistent among them, an aspiring politician named Derrick Evans. He implied that he was carrying a gun; if his First Amendment rights were taken away, he told a reporter, he still had his Second Amendment rights. He specialized in livestreaming his confrontations on Facebook, where he accumulated a following of more than 40,000 viewers. In one video, he shouted at a patient, “You’re still going to be a mother when you come out of there, just the mother to a dead baby!” Evans took a special interest in hectoring Miller, the volunteer, posting videos of himself calling her a “witch” and a “baby killer.” On Facebook, one of Evans’s supporters wrote, “If you murder her, can we call it abortion!!” Eventually, inspired by Christine Blasey Ford, Miller took Evans to court. She won an order of protection that barred him from protesting at the clinic for eighteen months. And yet, among his supporters, Evans had succeeded in raising his profile, and in June 2019 he announced plans to run for the state legislature. He was endorsed by powerful political action committees, including the State Troopers Association. Miller wrote to the group, citing the order of protection as evidence that Evans was unfit for its endorsement. “No one would listen to me,” Miller recalled. Evans won his election in November 2020. In the Trump era, Americans were reexamining features of life that had been all but taken for granted. In the summer of 2018, people took to swapping news clips that matched a recurring pattern—purportedly heartwarming stories of persistence or generosity that were, on closer inspection, camouflaged evidence of broken politics. There was the case of Angela Hughes, a mother in Kansas City who gave birth to a premature baby; her coworkers donated their vacation days to her because her job did not provide paid maternity leave. The story circulated on Twitter, and a British journalist wrote, “As an outsider, this is bizarre to me. Here in the UK, 28 days of paid leave per year is considered the baseline, and maternity pay is a statutory right.” There was a story of Ian Christensen, a six-year-old boy with Type 1 diabetes who was selling pumpkins in Michigan so that he might afford a dog that can detect dangerous fluctuations in blood sugar. Adam H. Johnson, a journalist, called it “completely batshit this story is framed in a positive light and not a horrifying indictment of our healthcare system.” Another commenter wrote, dryly, “You too can make it through hard work and perseverance, and obtain the basics of life!” In November 2018, the gathering forms of backlash to the Trump era converged in a stark political change: Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives, winning forty seats in the largest blue wave since 1974. In Congress, the new arrivals included influential progressives who put immediate pressure not only on Republicans but also on establishment Democrats. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a Democratic Socialist born less than a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Days after her victory, she joined the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activist group against climate change, in a sitin outside the office of Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House of Representatives. Young progressives represented a generation that had come to doubt the central story of how America perceived itself; in their view, it was a system that had failed to stem inequality, climate change, oligarchy, and political capture. They introduced a slate of progressive ideas—debt-free college, Medicare for all, a Green New Deal—and Ocasio-Cortez called for a marginal tax rate of 70 percent on incomes above $10 million. Within weeks, the 2020 presidential campaign was under way, and progressive candidates seized on Trump’s support for the wealthy as an argument for transformational change. Announcing her campaign, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said Trump was “not the cause of what’s broken, he’s just the latest, and most extreme, symptom of what’s gone wrong in America.” Among other changes, Warren was promoting a bill that would allow workers to elect 40 percent of the members of corporate boards; she also called for an annual tax of 2 percent on the wealth of Americans with a net worth over $50 million. Sanders, running again for president, called for restoring the inheritance tax to its level in the 1970s, including 45 percent on estates above $3.5 million, and up to 77 percent for billionaires. The Trump presidency, in its flamboyant embrace of plutocracy and oldschool masculine white dominance, had hastened an acute showdown in U.S. politics over inequality. In other moments, Americans had tended to regard the country’s largest fortunes as a kind of national spectacle and, for some, a source of inspiration. But that mood no longer prevailed. Polls routinely confirmed a survey by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, in which 70 percent of Americans described themselves as angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power.” Activists staged a bus tour of Greenwich called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless,” which stopped outside the homes (or, more often, the walls) of local financiers. They left giant “tax bills,” charging the owners for what the tour’s organizers called “the havoc they’ve wreaked on our economy.” At the time, Connecticut was considering cutting 4,000 state jobs, to relieve a $1.7 billion budget deficit. The activists’ final stop was at the office of Cliff Asness, the libertarian hedge-fund manager who had observed that children in town debated the finer points of hedge-fund strategies. Outside his office, the demonstrators erected a giant inflatable pig chomping on a cigar. Amid that populist outrage, some prominent citizens of Greenwich joined the ranks of business leaders who argued that capitalism needed to change in order to survive. Ray Dalio, who had founded the hedge fund Bridgewater and accumulated a fortune estimated at $18 billion, which made him the town’s richest resident, called income inequality a “national emergency.” I stopped by his office, in a modern complex tucked into a secluded estate akin to a state park. We sat beside a wall of glass overlooking a pond where birds swooped in and out of the reeds. In his late sixties, Dalio was tall and thin, with longish pale hair and a face of expressive intensity. He acknowledged that the full depth of inequality remained largely unseen by many of his friends and neighbors. “That’s true for most Americans who are blind to how poverty and bad conditions are,” he said. “We don’t have direct contact with it. I live in Greenwich, which is a short drive from pockets of poverty in cities like Bridgeport, but the populations are divided by canyons in income and experience.” He was awoken to it, he said, not by protesters or by Trump’s plutocracy, but by his wife, Barbara, who had been a volunteer and a donor in low-income Connecticut public schools. “If it wasn’t for my wife’s close contact with those in Bridgeport, we wouldn’t have any contact with it either, because who from Greenwich goes and hangs out in Bridgeport?” he said. No surprise, Dalio didn’t agree with what he called “billionaires-arebad” political rhetoric. “It’s bad to demonize any group of people,” he said. “Most billionaires are good, hardworking people who made their money by coming up with something that paid a lot. Most aren’t evil bloodsuckers. They play by rules that our legislatures made. If you don’t like what they’re doing, speak with those who wrote the laws. I think that those who write the laws should tax the rich and companies more in order to get resources to help those who are unfairly starved, but that’s just what I think.” The longer we talked, the more I sensed that Dalio was mindful not to sound like a scold. Even among Greenwich billionaires who had awakened to the full implications of inequality, many avoided dwelling on the details of how the finance industry had contributed to the problem—how investors had extracted the last value from ailing industries, or “strip-mined” local news, or used the bankruptcy courts to abandon pension and health-care commitments. At a convention in Greenwich, the hedge-fund manager Paul Tudor Jones urged the audience to recognize that workers had been shortchanged, but he hastened to reassure attendees: “It wasn’t because good people did bad things. It was unfortunately just a natural, unchecked movement.” Alan Barry, the town’s commissioner of human services, told me that he applauded the concern but disagreed with the notion that inequality was unforeseeable. “Stated policies combined to create this,” he said. “Now you’re turning around and saying, ‘Whoa, we’ve got runaway capitalism.’” On the whole, the targets of broad American antipathy tended not to look inward for its source. “It’s all this rapid technological change that results in income inequality,” Peterffy, who had owned the town’s largest estate, told me. “It suddenly increases productivity, and we need fewer workers to produce the same amount of goods and services.” One remedy, he said, is direct payments to citizens, and he has become an advocate for replacing all government benefits with a universal basic income: “It is much, much cheaper to give the people money and not restrict business in any way.” I asked Peterffy, who built a fortune worth an estimated $14 billion, if he thought America could have avoided radical inequality by not permitting people like him to amass so much money. “Well, it would have decreased my incentive to work as hard as I did,” he said. “The number of times I nearly went bankrupt, if I would have had an easier way out, I probably would’ve chosen that.” Not long before we spoke, he sold his Greenwich estate and moved to Florida, which had no state income tax. But, as Sanders, Warren, and others gained attention, some prominent investors sensed that the country was approaching a turning point; if their industry did not begin to acknowledge abuses and imbalances of power, it was courting a harsh reckoning. Not long after the midterm elections, Seth Klarman, a low-key but influential investor based in Boston, told me, “I don’t think it’s too late for business leaders to start doing the right thing for their employees, their clients, and their communities.” And if they don’t? He said, “Somebody’s going to come along and do it for them.” Klarman, the CEO and president of Baupost Group, a hedge fund with $27 billion in assets, was sometimes called the “Oracle of Boston” and compared with Warren Buffett. His book Margin of Safety was a cult collectible; old dog-eared copies sold on Amazon for more than a thousand dollars. For many years, he was New England’s largest donor to the Republican Party. But, ever since Trump had emerged as the Republican front-runner, Klarman had been outspoken in his conviction that Trump posed a grave threat to democracy. In the 2018 midterms, he had donated heavily to Democratic candidates and to organizations dedicated to shoring up the rule of law. He knew some people derided that as “flip-flopping.” But, he said, “I think people who fail to evolve and learn are part of the problem.” It was an unusual acknowledgment. On both the right and the left, Americans often made a curiously similar case that capitalism had always operated by the norms and behaviors that defined it in the early twenty-first century; to many on the left, there had never been a golden age of American capitalism, and pretending there had been was to ignore the sacrifices of those who were silenced; to conservatives, inequality was a perennial outgrowth of creative destruction, a virtue as much as a problem. But Klarman, after decades in the business, was conceding, unabashedly, that standards had deteriorated. “I’m convinced, as an investor, that the world I live in every day has gotten more short-term-oriented,” he told me. Some investors, he said, had become too quick to demand ephemeral fixes that reverberated through society: “Why aren’t you restructuring? Why aren’t you doing a spin-off? Why aren’t you buying back stock?’” Klarman told me, “The pressure on the game changed the game.” It reminded me of Chip Skowron’s plunge into the pressures of the hedge-fund world, where he had to learn fast from those around him at S.A.C. Capital. They had honed their edges, and if he wanted to succeed, he had to compete. In a speech at Harvard Business School, Klarman argued that the business world had tipped too far toward the fixation on shareholder value, preached by Milton Friedman, to the exclusion of other effects. “Does anyone really believe that shareholders are the only constituency that matters: not customers, not employees, not the community or the country or planet Earth?” he asked. He challenged his peers to accept greater responsibility for the consequences of their actions. “It’s a choice to do things that ‘maximize profits,’ to pay people as little as you can, or work them as hard as you can,” he said. “It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions or, alternatively, particularly harsh ones: to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” Klarman’s critiques of Washington and of irresponsible business practices shared a common target: both cultures had come to celebrate winning at all costs. “If we think of free enterprise and democracy as games, a lot of people are breaking the rules and disrespecting the other players and even the game itself. Mitch McConnell is disrespecting the game. Donald Trump doesn’t even know what the rules are,” he said. “Just because you can do something definitely doesn’t mean that you should.” For all its agonies, the Trump era had a clarifying effect: it exposed the poisonous personal ambition that drove so many in Washington, especially the city’s “good Germans” who shuffled behind a president they privately reviled; it punctured the simplistic folklore that decisiveness was more important than expertise, that blindly cutting costs would pare the government down to strength. Most of all, perhaps, it snapped Americans out of the fantasy that apathy on Election Day was a viable option. Trump had unwittingly demonstrated the wisdom of Elihu Root so long ago: “Men must either govern or be governed.” In measurable ways, Trump was embarrassing people into action: in 2003, 70 percent of Americans had said they were “extremely proud” to be American, according to Gallup. By 2018, that number had sunk to 47 percent, the first time it had ever dipped below a majority. The Trump era not only generated antibodies; it also shook the politics of Washington with such force that issues that had been frozen for a generation began to thaw—even if the change was forced, in some cases, by horrific pressures. In February 2018, a former high school student who had professed hatred for Mexicans, Jews, and immigrants, and done target practice while wearing a MAGA hat, opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He killed seventeen people and injured seventeen others, surpassing the Columbine attack as the deadliest high school shooting in American history. Within hours, it was clear that the attack was sparking a different political effect than so many other shootings. Many of the Parkland students, unlike those who contended with day-to-day violence in Chicago, were relatively prosperous and well-connected. They used social media to force the country to view the horrors they had survived. Hiding in a darkened classroom, one of the students, David Hogg, held up his phone and taped a calm indictment of American politics: “Take a stance for human lives,” he said, “for children’s lives.” When politicians responded with the usual thoughts and prayers, the students humiliated them. In a televised town hall a few days after the attack, Senator Marco Rubio stood across from survivors and the parents of dead children. Rubio, more than most of his peers in Congress, had a reputation for smoothness. Even in his twenties, as a local official, he had exhibited such innate promise that one of his colleagues took to saying, “When Marco Rubio speaks, young women swoon, old women faint, and toilets flush themselves.” But now Rubio was face-to-face with a seventeen-year-old junior named Cameron Kasky, who asked, simply, “Would you refuse to accept donations from the National Rifle Association in the future?” Rubio, who had an A-plus rating from the NRA, evaded the question with a favorite dodge: “I will always accept the help of anyone who agrees with my agenda … But they buy into my agenda; I don’t buy into theirs.” The crowd booed, and Kasky pursued him again, and again. Rubio had no escape; he gave a pained expression and repeated his platitudes. Watching the scene at home in Washington, I sensed that the exasperation with Rubio was a sign of a larger despair at the falseness of so many rituals of my city: the evasive pivot, the pallid follow-up question. Rubio, that day, was a portrait of cynicism, as if a computer had been tasked with generating a senator out of bromides and tics and half-truths. I remembered a previous moment when Rubio had been asked, in a routine interview: If you could invite anyone, living or dead, for a beer, who would it be? He thought for a second, as if rifling through index cards, and then solemnly replied, “Malala,” referring to the young Pakistani activist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her advocacy of female education. It was an answer steeped in seriousness, marred only by the vision of him handing a beer to a child who was also an observant Muslim. In a few minutes on television, the students from Parkland had exposed the void at Rubio’s core more vividly than any seasoned interviewer had ever done. In the months after the killings, students organized a series of protests that constituted some of the largest youth-led demonstrations since the Vietnam era. At its core, it was a generational confrontation, in which a rising cohort of Americans pointed their fingers at forebears who had failed to mount serious responses to gun violence, just as they had fumbled the rising threat of climate change. The students joined an increasingly adept political movement for gun control—led, in part, by the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who had been shot while giving a speech. By the end of 2018, states had enacted more than three times as many gun-control measures as the year before. In the midterm elections, gun-control groups outspent the NRA, and they narrowly defeated at least eight incumbents with A ratings from it. By early 2019, the politics of guns were transforming to a degree that is easy to miss from afar. The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives passed a requirement for universal background checks—the first major gun-control bill to clear the chamber in a quarter of a century. Though everyone knew it would not pass the Senate that year, E. J. Dionne, in The Washington Post, called it “the beginning of the end of the gun lobby’s power.” The NRA, meanwhile, was descending into an internal feud over allegations of corruption and mismanagement. Leaked tax records showed that Wayne LaPierre, the top executive, had billed the NRA for $275,000 in purchases from the Zegna luxury boutique in Beverly Hills, as well as another quarter of a million dollars in personal flights and limousine service, to the Bahamas, Florida, Italy, and elsewhere. The details attracted the attention of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who launched an investigation into the organization’s tax-exempt status. As the pressure on it rose, the NRA made increasingly desperate demands for money. For years, ever since attending the convention, I’d been receiving emails with one solicitation or another: “Evan, We Want You Back!” a message began. If I reupped my dues for $35, I could choose from a selection of free NRA-branded merchandise, including an assortment of hunting knives or a camouflage duffel bag. Over the winter, as Democrats gained control of Congress, the messages grew more urgent. In February 2019, I opened a message marked “Save Freedom!… Save Money!… Terrific Value!” It reported, “Nancy Pelosi and her gun-ban majority in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing forward on a sweeping agenda to BAN GUNS and REGISTER gun owners. Angry media elites are flooding the airwaves with their demands for GUN CONTROL—blaming you and your freedoms for the acts of violent criminals and madmen.” On they came, week after week. “Last chance!” another message began. “Offer Expires in 72 Hours!” But it was never really the last chance, and the messages continued. In March, after the New York attorney general filed suit, the NRA’s appeals in my in-box acquired a clearer, more apocalyptic cast. The group had a new enemy, and it summoned its members to turn their combat mindset on the latest political target: Gun-hating state attorney generals are orchestrating a coordinated campaign to bury the NRA under a mountain of frivolous lawsuits … and silence your voice … I don’t have to tell you that these are mustwin battles for us. If we don’t meet these threats head on, our enemies will destroy the NRA, annihilate the Second Amendment and fundamentally transform America—FOREVER. Now more than ever, it’s up to you … me … and the more than 5 million members of the NRA to man the barricades and fight back with every ounce of strength we can muster. As I crisscrossed the country in those years, guns were a strangely unifying artifact of American experience—a feature of life that could be found no matter how far apart people were in attitude and experience. They generated political identities and private anguish; they were either loved or hated but impossible to ignore. The longer I was back in the United States, the easier it was to lose sight of how truly bizarre the phenomenon of regular American massacres was to the rest of the advanced world. In 2019, after mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso killed thirty-one people in a weekend, Japan alerted travelers, much as the U.S. State Department warns Americans heading abroad. The Japanese consulate in Michigan reminded its citizens that the United States was a “gun society,” in which the potential for gunfire was “everywhere.” To many people in Chicago, the reputation for gun violence was exhausting; the basic facts were true, but outsiders seemed too eager to sensationalize it. Jahmal Cole, a community organizer on the South Side, watched a visiting cameraman from a suburban television station survey a block in search of images. The cameraman turned away from a new community garden and a high-performing elementary school, and instead zoomed in on boarded-up houses, piles of trash, and clusters of young men. Cole watched the results that night on television with frustration; the proportions felt reductive and misleading. It was “propaganda created to scare people,” he thought, even as he himself spent his days trying to solve some of the very problems shown on-screen. One afternoon that summer, Cole walked his eight-year-old daughter, Khammur, to a playground. As he often did, he ventured to a neighborhood safer than his own—on this occasion Hyde Park, where his idol, Barack Obama, used to work. As Khammur played on the jungle gym, Cole heard a bang, then another and another. He grabbed his daughter and pulled her to the ground, willing their bodies into the wood chips beneath them. After a moment, it was quiet again. They were unharmed. But moments like that made him crazy, because he knew from experience that memories from that age would linger with Khammur for a long time. He rolled over and tossed some wood chips into the air, trying to persuade her that it had been a joke all along. Cole was thirty-six. He stood six feet, three inches tall, with broad, ropy shoulders and broad hands. He had been a bench warmer on his college basketball team, by his own description, but remained a determined athlete who rarely went a day without running three miles through neighborhoods that many people avoided crossing on foot. It was a posture of willful normalcy; Cole was determined to give his daughters, Khammur and Kennedy, more stability than he had known. His father, Leonard, had served in the Navy and then started using drugs, which tipped the family into chaos. Cole’s mother, Gloria, was a Jehovah’s Witness who took him to church, where he studied the cadence and confidence of the pastors. His father had no interest in church but let him go, “so I wouldn’t be scared to talk to white people,” Cole told me. Cole grew up mostly with his father, who was sporadically employed but joyfully immersed in the art and literature of the Black freedom struggle. They cycled through a series of cheap apartments and motels, where Leonard covered the walls with clippings and posters “like it was the Sistine Chapel,” Cole recalled. Each week, Leonard gave his son an allowance of thirty dollars, but by the end of the month, he was borrowing it back to buy them dinner. Cole developed a stubborn resistance to low expectations. When a guidance counselor told him he should aim for trade school or the army, he ripped a random page from a college guidebook and applied to some of the schools. Cole wound up at tiny Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska. It was a blessing. He joined the basketball team, and though he rarely made it onto the court, the team gave him a chance to travel and it held him to a tight schedule. “My basketball coach taught me, ‘If you’re on time, you’re already late,’” he said. After graduation, he worked odd jobs and partied too much, by his own description. But in 2008, Obama’s victory shifted something inside him: “I started reading his books,” he said. Cole admired the campaign’s use of social media, and he was impressed by Obama’s ability to cut across lines of race and class. “If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would be a Facebook group,” Cole said. In 2009, Cole found a few days’ work carrying boxes and sweeping up in the office of a trading firm, not far from where Santelli delivered his Tea Party rant. He made a point to show up early, which caught the attention of the bosses, who eventually found a permanent job for him in the IT department. Cole felt out of place; the office was almost entirely white, male, and preppy. “They come from all these environments where they sail and play hockey. And then there’s me.” He was fascinated by the founder of the firm, a low-key Minnesotan named Will Hobert. “He’s white. His wife is white. They’re really rich, and they live on the North Side. But you wouldn’t know it because he dresses worse than me,” Cole said. Not long after Cole started, Hobert threw him the keys to his car and asked him to fetch a computer from their home. Nobody had ever demonstrated that kind of trust in Cole, and it thrilled him. Hobert sent Cole for training as a Microsoft systems administrator. It didn’t go well. “I failed,” Cole said. “I went back to him. I was embarrassed. I was like, ‘Yo, I know it costs a lot of money but I never knew what that shit was before.’ He was like, ‘Well, could you do better?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to get some flash cards, and I’m going to work on it with my wife. Put me in school again.’ He put in another ten thousand. Boom, I failed again. But I missed it by like five points, so he put me in one more time. I passed.” He spent the next four years at the trading firm as a Microsoft administrator. But by 2013, his attention was elsewhere. On the side, he had started volunteering as a mentor for juvenile offenders in Cook County. He was startled to discover how few of them had ever spent more than a few minutes in downtown Chicago, even though it was only a bus ride from their neighborhoods. “A kid said, ‘My block is Twenty-first Street.’ Another said, ‘My hood is Roseland.’ I was like, why don’t you all ever say ‘my city’? And they said, ‘Because there’s no Black people downtown.’” Cole’s own biography had persuaded him of the perils of segregation and of the prospects of getting people into worlds outside their own. He conceived of an idea for a community organization. “I wanted to call the program Changing Your Perspective,” he said, “but that would look stupid on a T-shirt. So I called it My Block, My Hood, My City.” Around town, people started calling it M3 for short. He left his IT job, and his old boss agreed to be his first donor. Cole started calling businesses to ask if he could bring young men and women on field trips, or “explorations,” as he called them. Just about anywhere could qualify, as long as it was a new experience. And so they took field trips to a chiropractor’s office, a scuba-diving class, and a waste treatment plant. He also took them to volunteer at a homeless shelter so they could see, as he put it, “somebody whose poverty makes them look like the upper middle class.” As his group expanded, he started to think of it as a “mini city hall.” He took to arranging field trips of a different kind—tours for Chicago cops in Black neighborhoods, led by local kids. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, this is where Dr. King lived when he was in North Lawndale. That’s where he spoke. And this is the block where I live. And these are the best hoagies in the city,’” he said. “A lot of cops don’t know the history of the neighborhoods before they police them, and it also gives the youth an opportunity to speak to a police officer without being arrested. It’s a skill that nobody really has.” Everything Cole did was designed to develop what he called “the muscle of empathy.” On a hot afternoon in the summer of 2019, Cole and I were in the back of a jouncy yellow school bus with a dozen kids on their way to a condiment factory. He had arranged a visit to Select Brands LLC (“Makers of Mumbo Bar-B-Q Sauce”). In the seats around us, young men and women—earbuds in, expressions of dutiful attendance—were slumped in their seats. One way or another, they had been led to Cole, because they were out of the usual rhythms of school; some had been expelled, some had gotten pregnant, others had given up on school because it felt too unsafe to be there. We pulled onto the highway and ground to a halt. All we could see was red taillights to the horizon. An accident had shut down the road. They would miss their appointment. Cole changed plans. For today’s exploration, they would go to a restaurant instead, and try a food the kids had never tasted. He offered them some options—Indian, Thai, Sushi. They settled on hibachi. We pulled into a restaurant, and a waiter laid out the choices. “You’ve got chicken, steak, salmon, or tuna.” To his left, a boy raised his eyebrows and posed a wary question. “It’s going to be raw?” The sushi discussion had made a deep impression. “No, it’s cooked,” the waiter said. “They’ll cook it right in front of you.” Over dinner, Cole told me that he focused most of his work on what researchers called “the disconnected,” young men and women who are at risk of falling so far out of education or the workforce that they might never find a way back in. Like gun violence, disconnection was a growing problem in recent years—especially during the economic torpor left behind by the financial crisis. Between 2007 and 2010, the number of disconnected youth grew by 15 percent, to nearly 6 million Americans—one in every seven young people—and rates were far higher among African Americans. In Chicago, nearly a quarter of all Black young people qualified as disconnected, one of the highest levels of any big city. More than half of the young Black men on the West and South Sides were unemployed. “I go into a school and go, ‘How can I help? Who is disconnected?’” Instead of expecting to boost college enrollment and graduation rates, he focused on other metrics. “Are we boosting confidence? Boosting trust? Reciprocity? Generosity?” He said, “When I tell these kids I’m going to do something, I show up. That means a lot. They are so used to people coming in and out of their lives.” Cole was in an optimistic mood. As in many parts of the country, Chicago politics was at a moment of change. The shooting of Laquan McDonald had altered the city’s political chemistry. The previous fall, shortly before the police officer who killed McDonald was to go on trial, Rahm Emanuel had made a surprise announcement that he was not seeking reelection. He knew politics well enough to sense that his time had come. In a crowded field of twelve candidates, hardly anyone put a bet on Lori Lightfoot—a corporate lawyer and former federal prosecutor in her first run for office. But as the campaign unfolded, Lightfoot caught the tailwind that was blowing through American politics. She represented a sharp break from the history of white male political insiders presiding over Chicago; she would be the city’s first African American woman in the job, and she would also make Chicago the largest American city to elect an openly gay mayor. The sense of a passing era became even clearer in January, when Alderman Ed Burke, the longest-serving member of the city council in Chicago’s history, was indicted for attempted extortion. Burke was accused of shaking people down in order to funnel clients to his law firm; on an FBI recording, Burke could be heard saying that a group of developers who balked at his request “can go fuck themselves.” Burke’s undoing made the mayor’s race a referendum on generations of corruption, white political power, and the crippling imbalances of opportunity and security—what Lightfoot tidily called the “same old, same old.” She ran only a small grassroots campaign, with a straight-ahead message: she was a prosecutor in her bones, someone who could cut the “endless cycle of corruption” and “bring in the light” to an old rusted machine. In April 2019, Lightfoot won in a landslide—a stunning sweep of all fifty Chicago wards. On the victory platform, she stood with her wife and tenyear-old daughter. “A lot of little boys and girls are out there watching us tonight,” she said, and smiled, “and they’re seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different.” She acknowledged that people were frustrated, above all, by the sense that life was locked in place. “We can and will make Chicago a place where your zip code doesn’t determine your destiny,” she said. But Lightfoot’s honeymoon with the city was brief; America’s political mood was too explosive to expect a smooth path ahead. That fall, the wave of strikes that had originated with the red bandannas of West Virginia reached the shores of Lake Michigan. Chicago teachers walked out and paraded through the city in red wool hats and coats, playing recordings of Aretha Franklin singing, “Oh, freedom, yeah, freedom!” For eleven days, students stayed home, and parents scrambled to work and care for them, while negotiators fought over class sizes, support services, and salaries. They finally reached a deal on October 31, after the longest teachers’ strike Chicago had gone through in more than three decades. Neither side was happy, but parents rejoiced. “It was the worst experience ever,” Dominique Dukes, a mother of two kids, told a local reporter. “Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.” By year’s end, the pace of the American inundation—the sheer avalanche of news and scandal and outrage—had become so impossibly relentless that it deadened the senses. In December, Trump became just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached; he had asked Ukraine to “do us a favor” and dig up dirt on Joe Biden. But the outcome was never in doubt—Senate Republicans raced to acquit him—and Americans greeted the trial with an existential shrug. Trump emerged emboldened, and in a state of nervous acceleration. At the beginning of his presidency, he had tweeted, on average, 63 times a week. By the end of 2019, in a single week he tweeted 250 times. It was the “peek-a-boo world” that Neil Postman had forecast long ago —“sensational, fragmented, impersonal”—in which nothing lingered long enough to receive the attention it deserved. And so it was, on New Year’s Eve, when a brief article passed across newswires around the world: the Municipal Health Commission of Wuhan, China, had detected a growing cluster of unexplained pneumonia. The infection did not yet have a name, but it was spreading.