Heather McGhee's book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together wants to help us think through the funny math that shapes how Americans understand their political interests. Whether we focus on economics, immigration, or even individual rights, the answer requires a variable that rarely makes it into the calculations when asked to show our work.

The Sum of Us starts with a moment most of us recognize. Donald Trump won the presidency with the help of what we believed was a socially conservative party. So-called values voters came through for a celebrity who took pride in making up his own rules. McGhee turned this puzzle into the premise of her book. McGhee wants readers to consider that this event points to troubling political behavior that has been with us for much longer than gilded escalators and red caps.

She describes the bigger problem:

The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds.

The Sum of Us is about this fundamentally different story and how it has shaped American political behavior for decades.

The Missing Variable: Belief in a Racial Hierarchy

The book capitalizes on a powerful example— the public pool. Through these once cherished public assets, McGhee invites the reader to see the problem that pre-dates 2016 election results:

When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of 'the public' becomes conditional. It's often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they'll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.

So, elegant public pools that once occupied the center of community life become battlegrounds for equal rights. As that fight continued for decades, public pools became harder and harder to find. These once public spaces now exist as the domain of private clubs, neighborhood associations, or personal backyards.

While grand public pools may have faded from memory, most readers have some experience with public spaces being a tricky proposition. It's possible today to witness a fight for local funds to maintain the few remaining public pools. Vox tells this story in one of their short videos documenting lesser-known episodes in American history, "The forgotten wade-ins" that transformed the U.S.". The last few minutes of the video are especially compelling. Vox interweaves black and white images from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s with today's fights over who belongs in the neighborhood pool.

As a child, I grew up with a giant public pool at the center of life in a small midwestern town. I wasn't very old when we moved, but I had heard everything was bigger in Texas. I was so disappointed that their public pools failed to live up to the hype. Decades later, Heather McGhee helped me understand why.

The Sum Of Us then moves from public pools to show how limited ideas of the public good shape policies around housing, education, environmental policy, and economic programs. From the pool to the rising cost of higher education, McGhee makes clear that a radicalized "Zero-Sum Hierarchy" has costs for all of us.

Getting Results: Talking about the Public Good

If you still earnestly spend your time trying to correct fake facts online, let this be the book that persuades you to stop. That tired political game isn't just a waste of time; it's a distraction from the public conversation we have postponed for too long. To start to reclaim what we have lost, we have to talk openly about our competing ideas of the public good.

When we engage that question, we work to hold one another accountable for our answers to the questions McGhee highlights—who belongs and who deserves. We can not afford to allow those answers to lurk in the dark any longer.

Those beliefs have made zombies of our country's best ideas. The racialized logic makes inequality comfortable; It even seems inevitable. As McGhee says:

The antiquated belief that some groups of people are better than others distorts our politics, drains our economy, and erodes everything Americans have in common, from our schools to our air to our infrastructure.

The costs mount throughout the book. Each story follows the same plot line as public pools. When a public good could be reserved for the use of a white public, the government invested in public spaces and progressive policies. The American people who had access celebrated these investments as proof that the American Dream could be made real. However, once policies expanded to include non-white members of the public as beneficiaries, the story changed, and public support for these policies started to disappear.

McGhee identifies a willingness to "go without" as state governments start limiting their spending on higher education and tuition costs go up. In this regard, we can see the cost of enforcing the racial hierarchy in the amount of student debt carried by American families of all backgrounds today.

In the book's final act, when everyone is looking for solutions, McGhee tells readers that color blindness offers no relief.

Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.

In some ways, this insight explains why we have difficulty understanding the relationship between voting behavior and individual interests. The working assumption is that there is a limited set of variables— an economic benefit, a specific policy for relief, or a deeply-held belief. We never discuss how ideas about race and identity— who belongs and deserves to benefit— change the math.

The solution requires confronting what McGhee calls "a root belief," a way of thinking embedded in the laws we pass and the policies we enforce. She writes:

The great lie at the root of our nation's founding was a belief in the hierarchy of human value. And we are still there.

What would color-conscious solutions look like? Here she turns to the work of john a. powell (who doesn't capitalize his name). With "targeted universalism," we would identify our policy goals and decide what benefits we want all Americans to receive. From there, we would "take into account the varied situations of the groups involved." McGhee offers her own formulation of the solution in clear language:

We need leaders who see color, who recognize the profound impact social hierarchies have had and continue to have on our national well-being, and who create new visions for how we can recognize our American diversity for the asset that it is.

Targeted universalism uses a formula that could work to center the American Dream in our policymaking decisions.

Being Part of the Solution Set: Advocating for Color-Conscious Policies

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is a book that will change how you see policy debates in American politics. McGhee also offers a language we can each use to make color-conscious policies feasible.

Race matters in any question about voting behavior. McGhee shows how it has limited our ideas of the public good too. That means we are all paying the cost as any notion of the public good gets smaller and smaller.

That formula makes us all losers no matter who wins the next election.

The blogosphere represented a new space where everyone could exercise their public voice. Instead, we have what might be one of the most powerful marketing platforms ever created.

While we all have access to more information than ever, our platforms operate with incentives to get "clicks." They gather our attention and sell it. As a result, all of our ideas about a bright and vigorous democracy never had much of a chance.

Cat memes rule. Democracy drools. Or something like that.

We could use this version of events to say that the technology is working against us. We know, of course, that this is only partly true. They are tools. We, the people, do the clicking, so the problem hides in how we choose to use the technology.

The healthy democracy we imagined with rigorous web-enabled public deliberation has given way to a frayed and frazzled people wandering an information wasteland.

• Algorithms provoke emotion-laden engagement, prioritizing the most provocative content.
• We build our profiles by collecting and broadcasting our personal interests, now branded as "likes."
• These profiles become our identity, a carefully managed signal of who we are.
• Everyone has a personal brand to manage, making our online time very "me" focused.

Despite it all being digitally mediated, this situation sounds like the democratic nightmare Plato outlined in his Republic. He first describes democracy as the fairest regime, "just like a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues." But, unfortunately, that splendid regime is short-lived. Democracy comes undone through the "liberation and unleashing of unnecessary and useless pleasures."

The public good has always had a tough time competing with a torrent of self-interested individuals. Democracy gives way to tyranny. The pursuit of unnecessary and useless pleasures distorts the whole enterprise.

Of course, the Internet makes it easier than ever to find better models for our online habits. Search results sometimes yield interesting combinations. In this case, a proposition called creative democracy finds a helpful partner in stories of London coffeehouses.

The combination can help us imagine using today's technology to develop better democratic habits.

Creative Democracy and the Price of a Cup of Coffee

On his 80th birthday in 1939, philosopher John Dewey prepared a speech advocating for something he called "creative democracy." He described this democratic vision as "a personal way of individual life." Dewey supported his call for creative democracy with a dreadfully provocative proposition:

"Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions, we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projects, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes."

When we complain about the inaction of our institutions, should we consider holding ourselves accountable for their ineffectiveness? For Dewey, the remedy for addressing failing institutions requires us to look at the health of our democratic habits.

Dewey suggested that the first mark of a democratic way of life is a "generous belief" in the potential of every individual, "in their possibilities as human beings." We have to demonstrate a shared belief in what "We the People" can do.

As our ideas about one another diminish, our institutions begin to suffer too. What would the daily life of these democratic people look like? A coffeehouse in 17th Century England.

That's an era when coffeehouses became hubs of civic life. Democratic habits formed in these spaces through routine encounters with other community members. At the communal table in the neighborhood coffeehouse, everyone had the opportunity to talk through what they were thinking. Concerned citizens found freedom in those public spaces—freedom to think, speak one's mind on recent events, and transform any news story into an open inquiry.

That last part explains why King Charles II tried to shut down the coffeehouses in 1675. The most powerful man in English politics, the monarch, perceived a threat in these public spaces where people could freely discuss the ups and downs of political life.

These coffeehouses were also known as "penny universities" because anyone could join the conversation for the cost of a cup of coffee. The stories of these civic spaces include long communal tables "strewn with "every kind of media" and a greeting for new arrivals, "What news have you?" Coffeehouses were a microcosm of public life, marked by interaction and shared knowledge. In "The surprising history of London's fascinating (but forgotten) coffeehouses," published by The Telegraph in 2017, Dr. Matthew Ward wrote:

Listening and talking to strangers - sometimes for hours on end - was a founding principle of coffeehouses, yet one that seems most alien to us today.

The habits Dewey prescribed as creative democracy look like a description of what we might call coffeehouse civics. Central to both his scheme and the imagined scene at the communal table is the "free play of facts and ideas." This free play becomes self-corrective in the long run through the regular practice of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication. What habits make creative democracy and coffeehouse civics possible?

• Gathering to discuss the news of the day
• Exercising our individual capacity to participate in free inquiry and to think together
• Sharing a belief in the capacity for all to exercise intelligent judgement and respond to free inquiry with commonsense
• Practicing amicable cooperation, or "approaching disputes and controversies as opportunities to learn from one another"

That sounds like the digital life we imagined when the Internet was new.

For a more democratic digital life

The civic-minded amongst us have tried to make our time on social media reflect our commitment to public deliberation. Whether we knew the term or not, we repeated many of Dewey's ideas to explain creative democracy. We imagine that we have the technology to:

• Create spaces for people to raise awareness for public problems and to learn about perspectives and places they may not connect with otherwise
• Build a network of people to deliberate over public questions, making an inquiry of claims to the public good and showing their work
• Generate social capital by working together to address public problems;
• Making some part of our online time "we" focused

I have experienced spaces like these at local coffee shops. Sometimes we enjoyed a new shop, so the regulars were easy to spot. I could enjoy watching plans come together. At other times, a group adopted a schedule and a spot to respond to a specific call to action. Good conversations can still happen in our local coffee shops.

In 1791, James Madison imagined that, "whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments" would work to bring us together. His essay on public opinion, printed in the National Gazette, argued that good roads, commerce, a free press and "a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people" would work to unite us. We would find ourselves able to connect with another despite the expansiveness of the new country's territory. We would use these connections to promote and support the ideas the best reflected what we understood to be in the public's interest.

When Madison looked towards the future, he dreamed of a more creative, constructive, and democratic people too. Let's imagine we can use today's tools to be the people he believed we could be.

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) returns to this term so much that Doc Brown, circa 1955, responds:

"There's that word again, 'heavy.' Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?"

The interplay of the past, present, and future in a single timeline makes for a good movie. However, when it comes to the world we live in, we struggle to take the future seriously.

In his 2013 book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery diagnoses the problem, "people have a hard time linking their actions to costs far in the future." He calls it "presentism," and it works like this:

"The cognitive error that may have more influence than any other on the shape of our cities is known as presentism: we let what we see and feel today bias our views of the past and future. This commonly expresses itself as a tendency to assume that the ways we think and act will not change as time passes."

We are blind to change even as it happens in front of us. We can't see future costs, so we discount them. Montgomery says this adds up to "a perfect calm of inaction."

And yet, these changes creep closer and closer, in time and space.

When I Googled "climate change near me" today, I found the climate projections my city government uses for planning and a 2019 headline announcing, "Austin Makes Top 10 List of U.S. Cities with the Greatest Increase in Hot Days.". The concern motivating that report was "Extreme Heat: When Outdoor Sports Become Risky.". Sports, y'all. We're not talking about hurricanes hitting island nations an ocean away. Texas has a total of five cities on the list that also includes—Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Lafayette, Miami, and Savannah.

The future has found us. If that list of cities still feels comfortably distant from you, the Environmental Protection Agency has a one-pager on the impacts for each state available here.

In Elizabeth Kolbert's book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, she tells the stories of people working today to shape the future. They work to improve the odds, species by species, and shape better outcomes for all of us.

Ruth Gates, a marine biologist, plays a leading role in the book once Kolbert turns her attention to understanding the threat coral reefs face. Leading the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in 2016, Gates also pointed to our inability to see change over time and its consequences:

"I'm a realist... I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed. A lot of people want to go back to something. They think, if we just stop doing things, maybe the reef will come back to what it was."

The other scientists Kolbert talked to who hoped to preserve the Great Barrier Reef understood that their success would be, "at best, a diminishing thing—a kind of Okay Barrier Reef."

There is no going back. In another passaged, Kolbert adds that Gates eventually described herself as a futurist:

Really what I am is a futurist. Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural."

The nature of the future, what the natural world and daily life will look like, changes each day, whether you see yourself as a realist or a futurist. We engage the problems we have created when we think like a futurist and ask, "what can we do to shape the future so that it is better for our having been here instead of worse?"

When we call for climate action, approaches that emphasize shame, fear, and sacrifice will never work. On this point, Montgomery wrote, "Not even a world-class guilt trip will move us." Instead, he recommended solutions that emphasize self-interest.

The most viable solutions will serve us and slow the pace of climate change. We're all looking for a win-win.

The good news is that these solutions are easier to find and more affordable than ever. During the pandemic, we subbed in several of the Zero Waste items listed at Full Circle Home for the paper products that became hard to find.

Fewer trips to the grocery store? There's nothing heavy about that, and we're not going back.

—Shellee

"I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one."

    —Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Reading List

On Tuesday this week, President Biden used the word "genocide," which made all kinds of news. It was reported as a gaffe in some circles and evidence that he was "getting out ahead of his own government" again. The remarks prompted a response from other world leaders. French President Emmanuel Macron said he wasn't sure that this "escalation of words serves the cause."

So, what's at stake when world leaders use the word "genocide?" How is that different from the broad agreement about "war crimes?"

Start with the definition and the response it requires. "As leaders debate 'genocide,' a growing focus on atrocities in Ukraine" (The Washington Post) tells us that:

"Genocide is defined as the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular ethnic group or country with the aim of destroying that community."

A UN convention would require signers to "prevent and punish" genocide. Created in 1948, the Genocide Convention has now been ratified by 152 Member States (Map of ratifying members available at the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect)

Try to see the difference between ordinary acts of violence against civilians and acts of genocide. Yeah, this one is tough, but it's central to understanding why the use of this word has so much weight. Vox starts with the definition but then looks at the work of "independent genocide watchdogs" and at least one Ukrainian-born scholar of the Holocaust who was skeptical about using the term.

Read "Is Russia committing genocide in Ukraine?" by Zack Beauchamp. He lends insight into why this question is unlikely to be answered anytime soon:

"In the post-Holocaust world, people committing genocide rarely provide 'smoking gun' proof of their thinking — a written-down order or meeting record detailing a plan to exterminate the target group. Instead, scholars and war crimes prosecutors pore over a repository of data — ranging from interviews with victims and perpetrators to satellite photos of the killings — to make their most educated guesses. Even with the benefit of hindsight, these methods can be frustratingly inconclusive: There are still tremendous debates over historical cases of mass killing, and even the adequacy of the Genocide Convention definition itself."

Other stories to watch as they continue to develop include reports that Russia is using forced deportation and operating "filtration camps." Read "Russia or die" from CNN.

Writing for BBC News, Laurence Peter tells us, "It is an internationally-recognized abuse of human rights for a warring party to deport civilians to its territory. His article, "Russia transfers thousands of Mariupol civilians to its territory", includes maps and satellite images of a possible camp.

For Believing in Democracy

Scientists are doing their best to get the world's attention. They are calling the effort "Scientist Rebellion," and described their effort this month as the "largest scientist-led act of civil disobedience."

Over 1,000 scientists took part in demonstrations across 25 different countries. There were lab coats, oversized scientific papers, arrests, and emotional appeals.

A model for living well and sparking a climate revolution. NASA scientist Peter Kalmus made one of those emotional appeals that went viral. Standing next to a sign that reads, "We are nature defending itself," Kalmus said, "We're not lying. We're not exaggerating. This is so bad that we're willing to take this risk." His op-ed ran in The Guardian the day after his arrest. In that essay, he refers to a book he wrote to share how he reduced his own emissions by 90% and that his effort "turned out to be satisfying, fun, and connecting."

The title of Kalmus's book: Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution. Greta Thunberg also has a book in progress, an "Ultimate Guide to Climate Change" that will include contributions from novelists, scientists, and activists.

A good reading habit is easy when you have a good book to read. So if you have vowed to read more or to read differently this year, now is the time to build a list that will keep you reading throughout the year.

Of course, an excellent place to start is to look at the lists of books our book-savvy friends shared at the end of the year. In this post, I want to improve on that model. I will reflect on the reading list I completed last year but use it to build the list of books I want to read next. One question will guide both efforts—how did (or how might) reading this book change how I see the world?

The question is new to me, but it reshaped how I reflect on the books I read. This question, plus the insights I've gathered over the past year, will guide my selections for this year's "To-Be-Read" list.

I borrowed this question from Ezra Klein (I've reflected on his book Why are We So Polarized and the question it proposes here). He asks every person he interviews to recommend three books that have influenced their thinking. Now that I have made this question part of my reading practice, I understand why reading 52 books in 52 weeks didn't work for me. Even if I crossed the finish line with the right number of titles, I suspect many of the books had little influence on my thinking. I had reading to do and to quantify.

I  prioritized a quick read or an easy one over an impactful one in years past. I approached the task differently in 2021, so I can share more. I write as I read throughout the year too. Sign up for our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter to see this year's list take shape.

Here's what I read in 2021 and what I learned about the difficult work of finding a good book to read.

Find a good book to read by adopting a purpose or mission.

Of the twenty-two books I read in 2021, five were titles selected by the local "Raise the Roof" group on Meet-Up; They call themselves "a book club with issues." They read non-fiction titles that connect to a relevant public policy question or current controversy.

In the first year of the new presidential administration and the year after record-breaking numbers of Americans showed up for Black Lives Matter protest, the Raise the Roof Book Club read:

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century* by Timothy Snyder
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Cullors and Asha Bandele
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Even this short list reflects the usefulness of participating in a book club, especially one focused on public questions. With a claim to being relevant to the moment, this list prompted me to revisit titles and make time for others that had lingered on an imagined pile of books to read someday. For example, I had been reluctant to read the much-hyped How to be an Antiracist. Once it made this list, I read it, and my criticism of the book is now more substantive and considered.

I would still recommend When They Call You a Terrorist over Kendi's book. Cullors story and worldview are central to understanding the fuel and fury of the Black Lives Matter movement. I know that "antiracist" is not the banner I will carry in public life. However, I think the concept is helpful for the work each of us has to do as thoughtful and moral individuals.

With the Raise the Roof book club in mind, I also read relevant titles that I might recommend to the group. Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom is a title I never persuaded the group to pick up. The book deepened my understanding of the experience of Black women, especially in academia, but it isn't a title I would recommend more generally. This looking ahead for the book club is also why I pre-ordered How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across Americaby Clint Smith. That's a book every single one of us should read.

Smith's book and Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together are two books I started recommending before I finished reading them. I wanted to talk with someone and reflect on what I was reading.

These two titles also define my focus for the reading list I'm building for the new year. I know there's much I still don't know about the long arc of inequality in the United States. Too often, we discuss these factors in the past tense. Yet, McGhee and Smith make clear that these same forces shape our political ideas today, including our pandemic response, what we could do, and what seemed to be off the table.

There's also no escaping a concern for the state of our electoral politics. So, five titles on my list this year that align with my civic mission include:

1619 Project: A New Origin Story created by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land and
Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

My 2020 Reading List: It’s Short and Has Issues

My 2020 Reading List is Short and Complicated A difficult year made my reading goals impossible so I asked a different question. This is the season to post your 2020 reading list. If there’s one habit that was made for COVID-life, it’s reading. Socially distant by

PoliticolorShellee O’Brien

Find a Good Book to Read that Minds the Perspective Gap

When I look at the total of my 2021 reading list, it's clear that I learned from some badass women this year. I know that I grew more than tired of the conventional take on American life. Today, I'm less willing to believe that we can assume a policy or project has considered other perspectives when the perspective central to any project is the same-old, same-old.

My reading list was one way I worked to mind the gap. I started 2021 by reading Our Time is Now by Stacey Abrams and finished the year with Ashley Ford's Somebody's Daughter In between those titles, I learned about Charity Dean, once the Assistant Director of the California Department of Health, through The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis. I also listened to Symone D. Sanders, a Senior Advisor and Chief Spokesperson to Vice-President Kamala Harris, through her book No, You Shut Up: Speaking Truth to Power and Reclaiming America.

I want every young woman I know to read Sanders's book, and I have re-told the story of Charity Dean many times. This subset of books helped me continue to press forward even as everything about our political life seemed upside down and backward.

Sometimes we all need a reminder that the work has always been about persistence. Three titles on my list this year will make sure I continue to see our shared problems through perspectives different from my own include:

Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Dog Flowers: A Memoir by Danielle Geller
Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings

Find a Good Book to Read by Asking Questions

I sometimes need to read to "get away from it all," too. Perspectives from far away places and fiction both fit this bill. Fiction is a minefield, though. I appreciate recommendations from friends, but I will need to ask a few follow-up questions before picking up a new book.

Being selective, I read four works of fiction this year and enjoyed them all. The two books I would most recommend, however, reflect the value of the follow-up questions.   Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi and The Overstory by Richard Powers both made it onto my reading list after someone answered the question, "What did you like most about how the story worked?" Since this is not a usual question, responses often included thoughtful reflections on the author's craft and how the reader experiences the story.

Transcendent Kingdom is a book that reflects why a good fiction read can hold its own on any civic-minded reading list. Her account of a Ghanian family who moved to Alabama traced the tension and difficulty of finding a life in the United States that failed to measure up to the dreams carried here from faraway places.

Quitting the idea that I needed to read fifty-two books this year made it possible to pick up The Overstory by Richard Powers. The story cultivates a shared knowledge that includes elements of botany, art, history, family, protests, and human relationships. This book made it possible to imagine climbing to the treetops and looking down at the world and its problems.

This part of my 2022 list is still under construction.

Two Good Books to Read for 2022

All signs point to a new frontier in our political culture war—Critical Race Theory. For this reason, I already know two books from this list that I will recommend over and over again. The work of Heather McGhee and Clint Smith reflects what an honest reckoning with race and inequality would look like if that were our objective.

If you have not already read How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across Americaby Clint Smith, commit to reading it next. At the end of another book, Smith interviewed the author, and she gave the most compelling reason to read Smith's book. Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody's Daughter, described How the Word is Passed as an incredible act of weaving the past and the present together, so it's possible to see them both at the same time. Smith shares these interwoven stories of the places he visits—Jefferson's Monticello, Angola Prison, Galveston Island, and New York City. With this in mind, you will find the echo of the past is deafening in the stories of today's school board meetings.

Heather McGhee then comes through with an example of how we could discuss our most persistent problems if we could disentangle them from our old ideas about race. In her book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, she starts with a tangible example of how we all lose when racism clouds our policymaking. McGhee explains that public pools were closed to avoid integration and that the Supreme Court even upheld this strategy. The Court decided in Palmer v. Thompson "that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm."

That's how McGhee arrives at her conclusion, racism robs the public and harms us all. What kind of solution is that? There is too much at stake to let a debate over what is or isn't Critical Race Theory overwhelm the public dialogue we need about the racism of our past and present. These two titles will help you resist the less public-minded distractions.

A Good Book to Read Can Start Something

The question at the top of this post makes all the difference. When we ask how a book might shape our view of the world, we give our reading list purpose and direction. It also works to put the titles into an imagined conversation or our own course of study.

The books start to hang together so that the list reflects more than any single title. The questions that concern us most provide an image of who we are and who we hope to be, both as individuals and as community members. When you find yourself starting conversations with the ideas in a book that will empower many to take action, you have a good book and a cause to support.

That's a book that provides a bridge to engagement, and that's the superpower we set loose when we share a good book.

Repetition can engender attachment and affection but it can also hollow out an idea that was once meaningful.

In her book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson offers a beautiful statement about the African American experience of the mid-20^thCentury, how it re-shaped the country and continues to influence us today. She chronicles the lives of three individuals, from the harsh details of the lives they decided to leave in the South to their final reflections on the lives they were able to make for themselves in the North.

Wilkerson selected three stories, those of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, to represent the more than six million African Americans who migrated from the South between 1920 and 1970. Six million people! She expertly demonstrates how this migration changed the South as much as it did the Northern cities where whole communities of southern blacks relocated.

The author's beautiful language helps the reader see the dissonance these Americans experienced and to understand it didn't end with their arrival in the North:

Many people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things. Tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself.

The phrase "white flight" has become so familiar that it hardly conveys anything thought-provoking, but Wilkerson makes it a proper horror story. A story Ida Mae's family likes to re-tell about the vanishing house will shock you. I was so angry I had to stop reading. It took 30 years but Ida Mae's family had finally saved enough to buy a three-story brownstone in a nice neighborhood where her children could comfortably raise their families. They were proud. It looked like the American Dream, the dream she and her husband had for themselves and their children when they left sharecropping, had finally arrived. The day after they moved in, however, a house across the street disappeared. THE WHOLE HOUSE! As the white families left, the whole character of the neighborhood changed while a lifelong accomplishment for an entire family was eroded away.

Wilkerson's novel itself is as inspiring as the stories she tells about Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. She brings this "other" version of the American Experience out of the shadows to be seen:

By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.

This quote doesn't just tell you about the book. It reveals the perseverance present in the three stories and the ambition of the author to make real those long fights of everyday life. The stories become so real that you will wonder if you could have done it.

The stories become so real that you start to see the people engaged in this struggle today. The American Dream is a good story, but it overwrites real stories. Wilkerson’s book helps us see these stories, and refuse to forget them too.

Politicolor is an act of resistance in this regard. Few of us here resemble this trend. Most of us always have a book we’re reading. We have a shared belief that reading is a critical civic habit.

We have no plans to quit sharing book recommendations or talking about the brilliant things we read. However, these headlines about reading suggest we should talk more about the trend we are doing our best to resist.

The Trend to Leave Books Behind

In 2018, The Washington Post put the latest numbers in the context of all those that had come before them:

The National Endowment for the Arts reported in 2015 that “the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent.”

Pew Research and Gallup had both presented results showing that “the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014.”

In September of this year, Pew Research published their latest findings, “Roughly a quarter of American adults (23%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.”

Some of us still consider ourselves readers but admit that we don’t read like we used to. It’s not hard to imagine that our gradually shrinking reading habit makes it a little easier for bad information to travel faster and easier than it should.

We have to read like it is a civic responsibility, a habit that sustains democratic life.

The Civic Duty to Keep Reading

We tell young people that “reading takes you places.” With a good book, you can see the world. But, reading can also help us understand the moment we are in, the challenge we face, or how a proposed solution might work.

For this reason, our reading habits reflect our civic life too.

Through the pages of a book, we can imagine worlds that we can’t see and connect with the people there. Reading helps us stay connected to the arc of time, the longer story arc of American democracy.

When we read, we step away from the firehose of information available online today and participate in knowledge sharing. For this reason, Dana Gioia added a concern for our civic life to his preface to the 2005 Reading at Risk report from the National Endowment for the Arts:

“More than reading is at stake. As this report demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life.”

Our reading habits build a capacity to see the relationships between ideas, people, and places. The perspective and understanding we find in the books we read equip us to disrupt the worst tendencies of our past. We start to see innovative approaches to the future.

A Civic Duty to Read Exercises Good Habits

Learning from the experiences of others

Reading is a way to learn from people, cultures, and events that we will never encounter anywhere else. A reading habit that includes a diverse list of authors makes it possible to see the world again through someone else’s eyes.

Neil Gaiman tells us that “Ideas—written ideas—are special.” When we witness these written ideas, we see the history of humankind. Written ideas make it possible to:

“Transmit our stories and our thoughts from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human.”

We need to read to understand who we are.

Shaping our perspective with deliberation and purpose

Some titles make it possible to get lost in another place or another time. The longer we spend in these distant places, the more we wonder what we would have done. A good reading habit also deepens our understanding of our own values, priorities, and strategies for problem-solving.

Scott McLeod writes about how comics work. In a discussion of how different comic styles work, he offers a comparison that’s useful to consider here:

“Thus when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face— you see it as the face of ANOTHER. But when you enter the world of the CARTOON—you see yourself.”

A movie, a TV show, your favorite YouTube channel, or even the nightly news presents other people’s stories. You consider what they did and why. When we read, we invest ourselves in the story. Sometimes we imagine ourselves to be part of the story. Sometimes we recognize personalities or situations we have known.

We need to read to challenge what we think we know about ourselves.

Exploring and discovering more about what we know

Reading a book requires us to step away from the firehose of information gathering. This reprieve makes it possible to participate in knowledge sharing instead.

In a 2008 article for The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr borrowed a concern from Richard Foreman, a playwright who observed that the pressure of information overload had created “pancake people.” Connected to an ever-expanding network of information via a Google search, we become people who are “spread wide and thin.” The title of Carr’s article asked, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and allowed many readers to suggest that today’s technology is the problem. Carr addressed his call-to-action to readers, not software developers. He asked us all to reclaim the tradition of carrying our own “complex, dense, and ‘cathedral-like'” knowledge of the world.

A well-written book can transform even ancient history into an open inquiry. When we make an inquiry our own, we can appreciate the complexity of a problem and linger longer over the details. We may even find ourselves imagining that we are in a conversation with the author or particular characters. We get to practice looking at the world in a whole new way.

We read to look closer at the foundations of what we know and how those foundations were made in the first place. We read and marvel at the architecture of what we know.

The Best Reason to Keep Reading like it's a Civic Duty

Standing against a disheartening trend might be enough of a good reason to read. Preparing a good defense against “pancake people” also sounds worthwhile. But, the best reason to keep turning pages is that reading is the ultimate act of thinking together.

When we read, we see people and events that we thought we knew and see them with either fresh eyes or a beginner’s mind. We hear voices from beyond our own limited experience too.

A healthy democracy requires certain habits of mind. This makes reading as necessary to us as exercise.

Conventional wisdom suggests that Donald Trump is one of the best things that ever happened for cable news. Every day had a new story, and we were told that their ratings went through the roof.

I avoided cable news and vowed to never turn a single page in a book about the man, his administration, or anyone who now wants to tell us how they worked on the inside to save us all from certain doom. For this reason, I nearly skipped How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

This book, however, is the book to read if you want to know what we should be talking about instead

No Post-Mortem for American Democracy

Published in 2018, How Democracies Die earned a lot of attention. Barack Obama included it on his list of recommended books for the year, and The Washington Post named it one of the year’s notable books. I listened to author interviews and realized Levitsky and Ziblatt had a perspective on the problems that nagged me well after the 2016 election.

How Democracies Die does not offer a post-mortem as much as a diagnostic tool. Levitsky and Ziblatt offer a framework for directing our public attention to the questions that matter in evaluating the health of our democracy. The questions focus on democracy, not one man’s presidency.

Let’s Talk about Preventative Care for Democracy

Rather than avoiding all political conversations, I now want to talk about two concepts that take a lead role in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book. They make clear that supporters of democracy need to champion these ideas—mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.

When we lament norm-breaking behavior, we assume that we are concerned about the same norms without ever naming them. This approach limits the effectiveness of those convesations. How Democracies Die can help us fill in the necessary details. For mutual toleration, we want to reinforce “the idea that as long as our rivals play by constitutional rules, we accept that they have an equal right to exist, compete for power, and govern.” We can center concern for a healthy democracy and opt-out of promoting behavior that has hastened its decline in other countries.

Taking a close look at the idea of institutional forbearance will help us look beyond the Oval Office. Instead of personalities or genius, we have to consider our institutions and the expectation that they will avoid “actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit.” The diagnosis sounds as severe as I feared, but Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us that the condition is reversible. They write, “Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy.” We need to make these failures and the risks they carry part of the story when an officeholder runs for re-election.

“Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves.“  —excerpted from How Democracies Die by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Let's Get American Democracy the Attention it Needs

When we call for a volley of “return fire,” we become part of the anti-democratic forces at work across the country. But, with Levitsky and Ziblatt’s work in hand, we can transform those disparate conversations into productive calls to action. Now, instead of lamenting the norms that have been toppled, we can call out by name the norms we want to support. We can step into that role of a vigilant citizenry, a role James Madison imagined would be vital.

Levitsky and Ziblatt have provided the mission briefing for that role. We are resisting the calls to participate in the diminishing and dismantling of democracy. We know what to guard against, and we will not let the paradox of democracy surprise us.

How Democracies Die is a survival guide. We need to work through it together.

“The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”  —excerpted from How Democracies Die by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Our First Color Salon: Recalling a Human Capacity to Do Good

One evening of good conversation provided the remedy for cynical ideas about what lies ahead.

Our digital lives make it so that information washes over us all day, every day. People announce when they decide to quit social media and disconnect for any period of time. We have to devise a plan not to watch all the stories develop in a never-ending scroll of updates. We need to protect time to think.

An evening of deliberate thinking proved to be more refreshing than the usual social media detox. We started the evening as skeptics. An evening of thoughtful conversation restored our faith in humanity.

We developed an event called a Color Salon so we could make time to think together. As a model, we looked to the European Enlightenment’s intellectual salons, but we had doubts that it would work via Zoom. About a dozen concerned citizens gathered to try it anyway. You can also read more about our general plan for these conversations.

We wanted to spend more time with big ideas, which make the whole project of living in society work. Political or is a community committed to developing our color sense:

“In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”

—Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

There were moments when we talked over one another and awkwardly negotiated who would speak next. We still enjoyed an evening of shared insight with lots of laughter and smart fun too.

Framing the Discussion about Humanity 

For the evening, we made an inquiry into humanity itself. We shared a focus question and a couple of short excerpts in advance of our virtual salon.

We gathered around the question, “How does human nature make self-government necessary and difficult?” To guide our thinking, we had the voice of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In his speech, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” King said:

“Another thing in this movement is the idea that there is within human nature an amazing potential for goodness. There is within human nature something that can respond to goodness.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience”

This passage also included a collection of classical thinking on the human experience being one of a “disturbing dualism.” Humans have a capacity to reason and do good as well as a capacity to give way to passions and do evil. These ancient ideas turned out to be the crux of our conversation.

For a more contemporary read, we turned to Dr. Ibram Kendi’s essay, “A Battle Between the Two Souls of America.” In November 2020, Kendi wrote:

“There is a divide in America between the souls of injustice and justice: souls in opposition like fire and ice, like voters and voter subtraction, like Trump and truth.”

—Dr. Ibram Kendi, “A Battle Between the Two Souls of America” (The Atlantic)

Will Harris joined us from the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and he started the conversation by challenging the very idea of this dualism. He pointed to Aristotle’s Politics and argued that we join political societies to be more human. Together, we do more good than we do as individuals. In community, we have the capacity for a type of goodness that none of us can do on our own.

“When we come to the final and perfect association… we have already reached the city [or polis]. This may be said to have reached the height of full self-sufficiency; or rather we may say that while it comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life.”

—Aristotle, Politics

The project of humanity is to increase goodness. There is no need either to escape or to instruct our passions. We join societies to be more human, to promote goodness.

We aligned our evening to the color yellow (humanity) in Harris’s seven-color model of political order. He asked us to consider what comes to mind when we see yellow—happiness, the warmth of the sun, a brightness or cheery disposition. Few of us would respond with “cowardice.” We first see the potential for good.

Can we tune our ideas about humanity to these ideas too?

Looking Again at the Size and Shape of Human Capacity for Goodness

In rejecting the idea of a dualism inherent in the nature of man, Harris rejected the partiality and corrupting forces it accommodates. The group assembled started to think about today’s problems of tribalism and political polarization. What can bring a people so divided together in the shared pursuit of anything? We wear party identities and wrap ourselves in team colors like fervent sports fans.

Harris made quick use of the example. He said that this is proof that we can put on this kind of partiality for a moment, with familiar roles and consent of everyone participating, and then take it off. We can return to thinking of what is best for the wholeness of humanity and not just our tribe.

One member reflected that he enjoys going to a game and seeing friends sitting side-by-side in opposing jerseys. We know how to think in both partial and total terms at the same time. One mental model does not preclude the other, and it does not have to be permanent.

Our evening turned into a celebration of what is amazing and wonderful about humanity. We reflected on what good humanity has done and could continue to do. Instead of human nature making anything necessary and difficult, we started to consider how failures in other domains of our political lives escape notice. We write off the idea of doing better because we have accepted this idea of dualism and the difficulty of human nature.

We write off failures with the idea that someone is “only human” or that “men will be men.” We could instead use our understanding of the full capacity of humanity to demand that we do better.

“I enjoyed that people were more relaxed and willing to engage in the discussion and ask questions. I was able to walk away from the experience with a new method to discuss humanity in my classroom.”

—Shannon

We reflected on what it would mean to look at humanity, see its potential and its flaws, and still see something of wonder. This proposition took the conversation to unexpected places, like considering how Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and other literature reads like a love letter to the human race. With its flaws and all, the human race still turns itself to doing what good it can, to promoting goodness in the world around them.

This first Color Salon proved to be the perfect remedy for putting the last year behind us. We want to do it again and would like you to consider joining us. One evening of a good conversation made it easier to wake up the next morning feeling a little less cynical about what lies ahead.

“I loved turning over in my head how to make my thoughts more colorful. How does humanity and nature lay the groundwork for being a good citizen? I love getting to find my questions in groups where it’s safe to experiment.”

—Matt

We’ll save you a seat at our virtual table.

With our first event now in the books, we are now in the mode of “taking reservations” for our next event.

Sign up here so we can send you all the details about our next Color Salon.

You don’t have to wait for our next Color Salon to join our effort to develop our color sense. 

Join a community that believes in the power of thinking together.

We designed our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter to help you tune your attention to the questions, ideas, and good work of a political life worth sharing. Subscribe to get a copy and let us know what you think.

We will never share your address or any other information without your permission.

January 6th: There’s No Writing it Off as Un-American

We’re all asking “What happens next?” That’s the wrong question.

This question leads us to talk about the Biden administration and what it will take to return to normal. It’s the wrong question.

Reporting on the mob in the U.S. Capitol, Al Jazeera published the headline, “America is Coming Undone.” Robin Wright included this perspective in her piece for The New Yorker, “What does America’s revolt mean for everybody else?” She lists reactions from authoritarian leaders (gleeful), America’s allies (appalled), and ambassadors from around the world (heartbroken). These perspectives all imply ideas about what happens next.

Wright refers to a “European diplomat” who suggested that we have to do more than merely calling this episode “un-American” and trying to move on. The diplomat offered, “what happened today is the result of what happened before,” and warned that the attack “will have an impact on all democracies.”

With the world’s attention on the viability of democracy itself, we have to turn our attention to questions that help us see the work ahead of us, not just the next administration. We have to resist questions that allow us to think we can simply put this behind us.

We have to stop saying, “This is not who we are.”

To understand what is happening today, we have to talk clearly, maybe more clearly than ever, about what happened before. Near the end of the day on January 6th, Dr. Bernice A. King, daughter to MLK, Jr., posted:

“We need to stop sayng ‘This is now who we are in America.’

Indeed this is not who and what the United States should be, but denial won’t make the injustices and inhumane ideologies less so. We can’t change without the truth.”

—Bernice A. King, “Be A King” or @BerniceKing on Twitter

Reflecting on the same event, David Remnick wrote in The Yorker, “Was Charlottesville not who we are? Did more than seventy million people not vote for the Inciter-in-Chief? Surely, these events are part of who we are, part of the American picture.”

Repeating familiar phrases like this and focusing on the next administration’s ability to return to normalcy mark out a path to forgetting and hoping for the best. With a deliberate focus on that question of what happened before that brought us to that moment, we can do better.

It’s an odd proposition—to look backward to see how to move forward. Let’s turn our attention from the stories of the individuals who joined the mob and consider the ideas some journalists have presented for us to consider as a collective people.

Questions We Need to Ask

Can Joe Biden Make America Great Again?

by Finton O’Toole

published January 16, 2021

Can President Biden turn the national conversation towards confronting the “hollow promise of the American Dream” and lead a new awakening of real equality? Or, as Finton O’Toole wrote in The Guardian, “Can Joe Biden make America great again?

The Inaction of Capitol Police Was by Design

by Kellie Carter Jacksn

published January 8, 2021

Are we willing to confront the “double system of justice?” Historian Kellie Carter Jackson reminds us WEB DuBois used this phrase to explain the color lines in our policing, “which erred on the white side by undue leniency and … practical immunity.”

‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start with Trump

by Jamelle Bouie

published January 15, 2021

Can we transform the uncertainty of this moment into willpower for confronting antidemocratic strategies that have persisted in our politics? Jamelle Bouie reminds us that these antidemocratic strategies didn’t start with Trump.

A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling

by Kevin Roose

published January 20, 2021

Can we reach the disaffected Americans who responded to conspiratorial thinking and became part of a movement that undermines trust in democratic institutions? Kevin Roose tells the story of one “meme queen,” her Facebook page, and her sense of purpose.

Standing at a Fault Line with Better Questions

We used the pages of The New Yorker Magazine to learn from an international perspective in November. They had published a video titled “The American Bureau,” and it prompted us to ask, “What are we learning about American democracy?” A reporter for NOS in Holland, Arjen Van Der Horst, appears early in the short video and says:

“It feels like America is at a fault line. Like this is an end of an era.”

—Arjen Van Der Horst, reporter for NOS in Holland

Now we can see this fault line for ourselves. We can feel how uncertain and unstable democracy is, even in the United States of America. To resume our idea of ourselves as a model to the world, we need to work together and create space for the questions listed here. We have to start the conversation over what happened before and commit ourselves to carry those lessons into our plans for what happens next.

If American democracy is something you like to keep an eye on, you might appreciate our newlsetter too.

Join a community that believes in the power of thinking together.

We designed our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter to help you tune your attention to the questions, ideas, and good work of a political life worth sharing. Subscribe to get a copy and let us know what you think.

We will never share your address or any other information without your permission.

My 2020 Reading List is Short and Complicated

A difficult year made my reading goals impossible so I asked a different question.

This is the season to post your 2020 reading list. If there’s one habit that was made for COVID-life, it’s reading. Socially distant by design and no mask required. Like so much else, reading was harder for me this last year too. I read, but not a lot, so I thought I would hang back and watch as everyone else celebrated crossing the finish line with impressive numbers of books read. 

These long reading lists usually function as a sort of final answer to the question, “What did you read this year?” With fewer titles to share, I looked at my list with a more open mindset. I wondered what else it could tell me about the year we are all eager to put behind us. 

So, let’s start with the fact that I read 26 books. That’s half the number I read in 2019. My reading habit became so disrupted and sporadic that I also stopped tracking the titles of books I finished. When these posts started showing up on social media, I didn’t have a list of titles or a grand total.

A Short List Leads to  a New Question

Working like a detective on a cold case, I reconstructed my reading list for the year. I looked at piles of books in my office, near the couch, and tucked away in the bedroom. I logged into my account at the public library. As I considered what books I would recommend and on what terms, the way I thought about my list changed too.

My list starts with When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele. I read the book in January, and it shaped everything I understood about the months ahead—George Floyd’s murder, the protests, and the calls to defund the police. The issues are not new to me, but it made a difference to have access to Khan-Cullors’ perspective as police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement became the story everyone followed. This book didn’t just change how I understood the problem; It changed what I expect to see in the solutions we take seriously.

“Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that there are years that ask questions and there are years that answer them.”

—When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele

What Did I Read that Changed the Way I See the World Today?

As I looked at the rest of my list, I started to look for other titles that left an indelible mark on my thinking about the work that lies ahead in 2021. I know I’m carrying them with me like the “Book People” in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

In that famous title where all books are banned, the Book People hide outside the boundaries of the city and preserve books by memorizing them. Without these memories, the knowledge of these books would disappear forever. There are passages from When They Call You a Terrorist that I will always remember.

This passage, for example, reflects what the book helped me see as real.

“We agree there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not live, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitue one that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.”

—When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele

What I mean by “real” is that this understanding is fundamental to solving any problem in this space. I know this book is why I can no longer tolerate the mention of a few bad apples in law enforcement or the personal responsibility of those detained. My mind shifted from being queasy over slogans like “defund the police” to forcefully defending the position whenever someone challenges it.

Now, thinking about the books that managed to live on in my mind despite a difficult year, another book stood out immediately.

I waited too long to read Tara Westover’s book, Educated: A Memoir, published in 2018. As a result of this book, I could see the purpose, resolve, and identity embedded in each decision to stand by bad information.

The part of this book I will remember comes from Westover’s experience of a single moment in a single college course. Through a presentation of the images and history of the Civil Rights Movement, Westover realized that she knew those names and events as part of a completely different story. Her family did not celebrate the gains in social, political, and economic power presented in her college course. They saw these same events as threats to order and stability.

At that moment, Westover saw worlds collide. She could see the constraints of an ideology that had shaped and limited everything she thought she knew. I marveled at how she articulated the dissonance, even when describing what she decided to study as a result:

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world.”

—Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Westover helped me see just how big the ask is when asking someone confront one of these world-shifting misconceptions. This realization changed my idea about how to respond to an election cycle full of disinformation. I did not waste time wrangling over facts that were knowable to those who wanted to know them.

When possible, I tried to understand the commitment to bad information as an expression of identity. Sometimes this approach prompted a more empathetic exchange with the potential to bridge the gap eventually. Sometimes it helped me opt-out of the frustration that came with wholly incomprehensible political debates on social media.

I needed that kind of “Get Out of Jail Free” card to protect my political willpower through this year’s presidential election.

What Did I Read that Changed the Way I See the World Today?

These two insights about how my reading list helped me stand my ground this year also align with the one book I have recommended over and over again. With a new question shaping my review, I knew that Why Are We So Polarized? by Ezra Klein was the most important book I read in 2020.

If the extreme partisanship of our politics leaves you with your own case of vertigo, make time to read this book. Klein presents an inquiry of his own that will help you understand that our present difficulties mark more than a single moment. The solution we need, the solution we have needed for decades, will not magically materialize for us once we put a single year behind us, or even a single presidency.

The question Klein uses to introduce his inquiry appeared in our February newsletter focused on managing despair. He asked, “What if, in 2016, nothing unusual happened at all?”

Thinking that we have never experienced politics like this before prevents us from seeing what’s required to resolve the issues dividing us. Like asking someone to see the misconceptions they hold close, addressing our polarization is a rocky and challenging proposition:

“We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.”

—Why Are We So Polarized? by Ezra Klein

It’s a strange kind of optimism that comes with this insight into our political life.

Klein’s book is an empowering read. When every headline carries the threat of normalizing unprecedented behavior, I struggled to figure out what I could do. I wrestled with feeling powerless as events unfolded.

Why Are We So Polarized? provided the context I needed to consider the whole trajectory of democracy in the U.S. These problems have been with us all along. Life in a democracy has never been easy, and we have never fully realized the principles we celebrate. We have vital work to do in the days ahead, but the ground has not shifted beneath our feet.

My 2020 reading list, as short as it was, helped me see that better questions light the way forward. They require us to insist on better answers than we have accepted in the years past.

You don’t have to wait until the end of the year to learn more about the books that will be on this list. Titles like these show up in our newsletter throughout the year.

Join a community that believes in the power of thinking together.

We designed our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter to help you tune your attention to the questions, ideas, and good work of a political life worth sharing. Subscribe to get a copy and let us know what you think.

We will never share your address or any other information without your permission.

Quotes to Think By: Dr. King and the Need for Creative Extremists

What principles motivate our extremism?

What can we make of a world on fire? That question gave shape to a recent Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter. There was another question in the background—What do you see when watching the images on the news today?

The newsletter reflected on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s account of being “powerfully afraid” while he was growing up. His work and that phrase continue to come to mind as our cities respond to protests and calls to abolish or defund the police. The newsletter included excerpts from his book, Between the World and Me, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Read that newsletter here.

Dr. King has a prescription for moving forward. We risk losing a significant opportunity when we get stuck in a debate over the words we use to advocate for the policies we need. Writing from the jail in Birmingham, Dr. King made an appeal for extremism:

“The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

…The nation and the world are in need of creative extremists”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

We risk a lot when we dismiss extremism that makes us uncomfortable while supporting the extremism that’s familiar and commonplace. The question of the moment should look beyond the accusation of extremism to consider what fuels these acts. Where we draw this line of acceptable extremism and unacceptable extremism can tell us everything about the health of our democratic ideals.

That’s how Dr. King saw the work decades ago too:

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream…

Bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.“

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

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Quotes to Think By: Tom Nichols and Our Coming Unmoored from Facts

The danger in being dangerously uninformed

Uninformed people elect uninformed leaders. Shaming people for their inattention or lack of information doesn’t do much to help them see the dangerous consequences. 

The danger is a disconnect, but maybe not the one you imagine. The threat begins with our coming unmoored from fact but becomes fatal by disconnecting us from the shared project of democracy. 

In his book,The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols writes: 

“Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.“

—The Death of Expertise: by Tom Nichols (2017)

When we are dangerously uninformed, we see choices without considering the consequences. Tocquevilled warned us that democracy would work this way. He suggested we would trivialize the past and dismiss the future. The work of sustaining a “very stable” democracy requires working together to connect the causes, choices, and consequences of the day’s news. 

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This question comes by way of a recent book by Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized. The introduction introduces this question through a conversation between two political scientists. Klein shares the conversation in the introduction titled, “What Didn’t Happen.” Klein came to Larry Bartels, a political scientist, with every theory he had about what happened in 2016. There’s no reason to repeat those theories here.

Klein describes conversations with Bartels as having “the harrowing quality of feeding questions into a computer that doesn’t care if you like the results.” Once Klein quit rattling off theories, Bartels asked:

“What if nothing unusual happened at all?”

Bartels then shared what he saw hen he looked at the data. He explained that 2016 didn’t look like a “glitch… It looked, for the most part, like every other election we’ve had recently.” This conversation is the set up for Klein’s book. 

The horrifying answer to the question about 2016 and the necessity of Klein’s work come into shocking relief in passages like this: 

“The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a weight so heavy that it can take an election as bizarre as 2016 and jam the result into the same grooves as Romney’s contest with Obama or Bush’s race against Kerry. We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability”

—Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein (2020)

Read Norman Ornstein’s review of the book for The New York Times: “Why America’s Political Divisions Will Only Get Worse,” and notice how the whole system might be biased toward geography rather than people.

Klein’s book asks readers to consider the toxic systems that make results reliable even when important variables seem to have gone random. If you enjoy considering questions like these, you might also enjoy our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter. 

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Since the beginning, thoughtful political observation has happened by way of big questions. What makes a question big? It’s something like the theory of relativity. From one angle, the question looks as simple as asking what time it is, but the answer requires looking at everything we thought we knew from a different perspective.

We end up considering life, the universe, and everything. That’s how a civic perspective works for us too. We can see more. One question leads to another, and the search for the answers transcends the limits of one’s individual experience.

Aristotle’s question, “what is good government?” is this type of question. It sounds easy.

To answer that question, however, Aristotle traveled from one Greek city-state to the next collecting observations to inform his answer. Whether or not we can cite his language, his work continues to influence our idea that good government includes the participation of the people in the pursuit of what is good for the many.

Even that answer sounds simple enough. Someone has surely made a meme of it. This answer still took careful study and observation of the many different ways humankind has attempted to live together in society. A good question helps us see beyond a simple answer. A good question requires us to keep thinking.

Looking for answers that transcend our own individual experience

When we stay longer with questions, we build our civic muscles as citizens and take on the essential work of civilized life. This kind of activity, let’s call it an inquiry, also helps us earn our status as political animals. That’s another concept borrowed from Aristotle.

He determined that our capacity for language and reason separates us from other animals. These abilities make us “political animals” because we have the ability to “declare what was advantageous and what is the reverse.” Political life then comes into view through this perception of good and bad, accompanied by our ability to participate in making things good.

“…it is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with other animals, that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and other similar qualities; and it is association in these things which makes a family and a city.”  —Aristotle’s Politics (1253a7)

Using language and reason to evaluate the answers and share “how we know”

Following Aristotle’s example, our inquiry would include asking:

• What is good?
• What is evil?
• What is just?
• What is unjust?

And then there’s the follow-up question: How do you know?

When we engage in questions like these, we engage in political life, and we do so in a way that requires thinking together.

Asking follow-up questions and participating in an ongoing inquiry

There is one quote from Aristotle that animates our work more than any other. When it comes to understanding our communities, Aristotle said, “they come into existence for the sake of mere life, they continue to exist for the sake of the good life.”

What if we as a people are no better than the outcomes we make possible in our communities?

With a more civic perspective, political life is the work of asking these questions, searching for answers, and shaping ideas for doing better.

Aristotle also set the terms for recognizing good government. He described it as “the form of government… in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happy.” When we exercise our civic perspective, we’re turning the questions of today’s politics, whatever they might be, to concerns of good government and the good life.

“The good in the sphere of politics is justice; and justice consists in what tends to promote the common interest.”  —Aristotle’s Politics (1282a14)

How to Cultivate a More Civic Perspective

Let’s create more opportunities for everyone to practice a civic perspective by:

1. Looking for answers that transcend our own individual experience

2. Using language and reason to evaluate the answers and share “how we know”

3. Asking follow-up questions and participate in an ongoing inquiry

4. Thinking together on making it possible for us all to act best and live happy