On this page you’ll find notes arising from American Futures project that Deborah and James Fallows have had underway, with some appearances on Marketplace radio, since 2013. Their full archive is here.
Two days ago I mentioned the welcome news that the Maine Maritime Academy, which John Tierney had written about extensively as part of our ongoing American Futures coverage, had been recognized yet again for providing very high career-earnings value to its students, at a low cost.
The context for this was our also-ongoing discussion of the importance of “career technical education,” once sneered-at under the title of “trade schools” or “vocational ed,” as one of the promising steps we’ve seen around the country with potential to offset at least some of the relentless pressure toward a polarized rich-and-poor society.
Now, a reader who once taught at another maritime academy writes in to say, “Hey, wait a minute.” His point, as you’ll see, is not that there is anything wrong with Maine Maritime itself but rather that the “value added” in higher salaries comes from legislatively protected earnings for merchant seamen.
There are some obvious comebacks to this case, most of which I’ll save for later installments. One I’ll mention now is: this is a demanding and potentially perilous field, as demonstrated long ago by John McPhee in “Looking for a Ship” and very recently by the El Faro tragedy, in which 5 MMA alumni were among the 33 mariners who were lost. And again, the reader’s complaint is not with the school but regulatory regimes more broadly. It is sort of like saying that medical training doesn’t “add value” to graduates’ earnings, since under different payment systems doctors would make less money.
More on these fronts later. For now, the reader’s response on Maine Maritime. He begins by noting that the 15 schools that got perfect 100 scores in a recent “value added” study included several maritime academies:
Looking over the list, all the maritime academies are represented. Since they all seem to get the top score of 100, there is nothing special about the Maine academy. [JF note: actually, at least two state-run maritime academies did not get a top score. Still, the reader’s point is that this type of school seems over-represented.]
I used to teach at the US Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point, NY. It is true that students who graduated did get good jobs. But I think this is really an exceptional industry, one in which the Federal Government has acted in several ways to improve the earnings of it’s graduates.
Merchant Marine jobs are highly protected by the Jones Act from any foreign competition. Their college tuition and all expenses are covered by the government. [JF note: This is true at the US Merchant Marine Academy but not at Maine Maritime, whose students are responsible for their own tuition and costs.] The maritime jobs the students fill are highly unionized, and there is limited competition since only the graduates of the maritime academies are allowed to fill them by federal law. There are several laws which protect those jobs from automation. For example, all ships must take on a certified pilot when entering a harbor.
Frankly, my students [at USMMA] struck me as particularly unambitious. The school’s unwritten motto was “2.0 and go”. That is, the students just needed to eke out a C average to graduate, secure in the knowledge that there would be a decent-paying union job waiting for them at the back end. I did not see more value added at the school than at the several other schools I have taught at or attended.
The high income of these students upon graduation is the direct result of federal intervention and regulation on their behalf. If anything, it suggests that the solution to inequality might be from more federal intervention and regulation. Of course, the economy as a whole pays for this regulation. As a small example, the Jones act has helped destroy the economy of Puerto Rico. and forced shipment of oil by rail by making coastal transit so expensive.
I’ve asked our friends at Maine Maritime Academy, and other involved parties, for their reply.
Over the weekend I mentioned the new video by our friends at the Bitwise tech incubator in Fresno, California, which exemplified the gritty spirit — “You think we’re losers? Well just watch” — that we’ve admired and described about the city.
I asked Jake Soberal, co-founder with Irma Olguin of Bitwise, how the video came to be. Here’s his answer, and after that two other notes about its tone and approach.
Jake Soberal writes:
As to the back story, it's a neat one. For some time we have been planning for a very grand opening. Our belief is that Bitwise South Stadium is a technology hub of global significance. Its opening demonstrates the credibility of our burgeoning technology industry--to locals and the world at large. With that, the grand opening had two aims: (1) celebrate how far tech has come in Fresno, and (2) inspire it to go even further.
The 1,200 people in black tie, wonderful food and drink, great live music, and fireworks certainly contributed to that. However, we wanted to make sure that there was something lasting; an anthem of sorts.
So we hired local filmmakers Gordon Howell and Pat Dill to create this video to serve exactly that role. They put together the storyboard, filmed everything you see, wrote the spoken word poetry and music playing behind it, and pieced it all together; they're a super talented duo.
The video was played on the big screen the night of the event, and then released online on Thursday. So far it's doing exactly what it was designed to do….
It's really amazing to be a part of what's happening in Fresno right now.
We're fond of saying that in Fresno Geeks are fixing America's most broken city.
***
Two extra notes. One reader noticed that the video was similar in tone to another I had said I’d loved. That was Eminem’s famous “Imported from Detroit” Superbowl ad four years ago, which I saw via online stream (over VPN) in our apartment in Beijing and then immediately felt homesick. Here that is, followed by Fresno’s.
Detroit:
Fresno:
***
Now, as a bonus, the Selected of God chorus of Detroit that both sang the background music for the Eminem video and sang for Ben Carson’s campaign announcement.
I realize that I am becoming a sucker for places and cultures, like Fresno and Detroit, whose theme is: OK, you want to look down on us? That’s just fine, go ahead and feel smug, because then you’ll be all the more surprised and unprepared when you see what we can do.
It’s an intellectual vulnerability on my part, but there could be worse ones.
Two days ago I mentioned that a “Fresno reborn” video had a similar tone and toughness to the famous “Imported From Detroit” Eminem/Chrysler ad from the 2011 Superbowl that was an early sign of rebound of the auto industry and its iconic home city.
A reader who knows both places writes to emphasize other connections. This reader is Rick Jones, who grew up in Detroit but now lives in one of the most fashionable parts of prospering California.
The first connection involves one of Fresno’s best-known contemporary figures. This was the late poet Philip Levine — son of assembly-line Detroit, former Poet Laureate of the United States, long-time teacher at Fresno State.
Philip Levine, at the time of his selection at U.S. Poet Laureate in 2011 (AP photo)
Jones says of Levine:
While most of his poems are staged in Detroit (this is an example), they evoke the Fresno of today equally well.
He goes on to spell out the link, playing off my earlier comment that “I realize I am becoming a sucker for places and cultures, like Fresno and Detroit, whose theme is: ‘OK, you want to look down on us? That’s just fine, go ahead and feel smug, because then you’ll be all the more surprised and unprepared when you see what we can do.’” Jones says:
I am a winemaker that lives in Napa but works with wineries in “the valley,” a label all of us in our profession use to name the big area between Sacramento and Bakersfield with Fresno at its center. [JF note: aka The Central Valley or the San Joaquin Valley.]
I also grew up and spent the first 18 years of my life in Detroit. While I live in the middle of glamorous Napa, every time I go to the valley I feel like I'm going home.
I think you're a bit hard on yourself, when you suggest your admiration for these formerly forlorn and neglected places is merely sentimental.
If the American idea or dream or project, or whatever we are calling it these days now is to have any meaning, that meaning resides in Fresno and in Detroit as much, if not more than in Cupertino or Boston.
Obviously I agree, and am trying to learn about, and tell the story of, how and whether that dispersed and less glamorous dream may take shape.
Here's the back story: In our American Futures reports from Down East Maine, my wife Deb and I wrote about the (obvious) importance of the seacoast in the region’s past and future, and John Tierney wrote specifically about the achievements of the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.
Maine Maritime Academy seal (MMA)
Last week Maine Maritime was honored (again) as a leading “value added” institution, raising its graduates’ earnings. A reader wrote in to dissent, on two points. First, he said the high earnings were an artifact of unusual legal protections for the merchant-marine industry (summed up as “the Jones Act”), which sheltered it from world competition. Second, he said that when he was teaching at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, he thought the students were mediocre and under-motivated.
I answered on the first, main point by saying: that’s not really a rap against Maine Maritime. Merchant shipping is a perilous activity — as it happens, five MMA alumni were among the 33 people lost recently on the El Faro — and if the earnings are “unnaturally” high, that’s not MMA’s fault. It would be like saying that medical schools didn’t really raise their graduates’ earnings, since under a different medical system doctors wouldn’t be paid as much.
Today I got a note from the president of the Maine Maritime Academy, William J. Brennan, in fuller response to the reader’s letter. Here it is, with a few explanatory notes inserted:
***
The reader’s view is unfortunate and contrary to my view of Kings Point [the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy] and its cadets, which in my experience, is a great college with wonderful students. But this federal academy, as you point out, is much different from Maine Maritime Academy, which is a state institution, attendance at which requires students to pay tuition, unlike their Kings Point counterparts.
His comments about the Jones Act are particularly misleading as cabotage laws of this nature have been used by countries around the globe for hundreds of years. [Cabotage laws restrict transportation activity within a country to that country’s own carriers.] Essentially the merchant marine is no more or less regulated than virtually all other industries in which graduates from the other colleges ranked highly by the Brookings Institute [the survey in which MMA got a top-tier score] pursue their careers.
His comments about the union are also incorrect as there is no union requirement that I’m aware of stipulating that a member must be a graduate of a maritime academy. Indeed, there are a number of union members who achieve their merchant mariners licenses through the so-called “hawse pipe” via which a mariner works his or her way up through the ranks based on time at sea and the development of the necessary skills required by the United States Coast Guard. He also implies that all graduates of these academies enter a union; however, Maine Maritime Academy’s placement data refutes that statement. Of our principal marine license track graduates over the past three years, less than one third joined a union.
And finally, the experience with unmotivated students the individual refers to does not reflect the experience at Maine Maritime Academy. Of all the public institutions of higher learning in the State of Maine, we have the highest persistence rate, the highest retention rate, the highest graduation rate and our average GPA of current seniors who will receive an unlimited license in marine engineering is 3.21. In my experience, these students are focused and driven to succeed. Our job at the Maine Maritime Academy is to help our students become successful here so that they can be successful in their careers and hopefully in their lives.
Dr. William J. Brennan
President
Maine Maritime Academy
Stuart and Emily Siegel, of Ajo, Arizona, at their wedding this month at the Sonoran Desert Conference Center in Ajo. Photo by Margaret Collins, from her flickr collection.
Early this year my wife Deb and I filed several reports from the genuinely startling and inspiring small town of Ajo, Arizona. Ajo is far away from pretty much everything except the spectacular Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Also nearby, for warplane fans, is the Barry Goldwater bombing range just to the north, as described here. Just to the east is the large tribal land of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and there is a big Border Patrol station to the south of town.
A century ago, Ajo was the site of an enormous open-pit copper mine. Thirty years ago, the mine closed suddenly, leaving a gigantic (but interesting!) lunar-surface-scale crater as a landmark but removing most of the town’s economic reason for being.
Over the past ten years, indefatigable teams of activists, artists, entrepreneurs, dreamers, and volunteers and others have set about rebuilding and reviving the town. Deb told part of their story here and here, and I compared it with some other small-town, arts-based revival efforts in the United States and China here. Seriously, if you didn’t read this earlier report by Deb, please check it out.
The centerpiece of current efforts in Ajo is the new Sonoran Desert Conference Center, a combination resort / retreat / meeting place / educational center being built in a beautiful, architecturally striking former school, shown below.
Sonoran Desert Conference Center, photo by Emily Siegel
Around the same time Deb and I arrived in Ajo to see the center and the town, a young couple from the northeast, Emily Raine and Stuart Siegel, were also getting their first look at the area. Initially this was for them just one more “hmm, it could be interesting” stop on a see-America wanderjahr they were calling their Big-Ass American Adventure. You can see Stuart's Tumblr chronicle of their travels, and Emily’s essay on 10 Things to Love About Ajo after they had been there for a while. Here is a picture taken when they drove us to the airport in Gila Bend.
Although this had seemed merely an interesting possibility when we first met them, Emily and Stuart ended up signing on as at-least-for-now residents of Ajo and directors of the new conference center. And earlier this month, they were married right there. You can see one photo above, and many more at a flickr collection by their friend Margaret Collins. More than 100 friends and family made the trek from the rest of the country, and Emily and Stuart marshaled extensive support from local friends in Ajo, including the high school band. As Emily wrote after the ceremony,
The phenomenal food by the local postal worker and police dispatcher who moonlight as caterers...that gorgeous bouquet and boutonniere by the local flower shop/funeral home...the retirees that drove us to and from the ceremony in their classic cars...the saguaro cactus chuppah that the deputy sheriff who does woodworking helped us make...the dozen or so Ajoites who led activities for guests on Saturday morning (yoga! gardening! beer tasting! meditation! historic walking tour! hiking!)...the AJO HIGH SCHOOL BAND playing at the ceremony...it was a pretty amazing small-town desert wedding!
(In case you’re wondering: No, Ajo has not been a traditional center of Jewish weddings or Jewish life in southern Arizona. During its mining heyday, the working population was a mixture of Anglo, Latino, and Tohono O’odham and other tribal families, and the main religions were Catholic, various Protestant denominations, Mormon, etc. This ceremony was one more aspect of Ajo’s renaissance.)
Here is how Stuart and Emily looked earlier this year, as the conference center was still undergoing renovations and they were still making wedding plans:
(Rene Cloutier)
We were delighted to hear of the wedding and sorry not to be there ourselves. We send the bride and groom — and their community — our heartiest congratulations. We’ll look forward to congratulating them in person. If you’re looking for a place to stay in the southwest, consider the Sonoran Desert Conference Center — and say hello to the directors for us. People like them, deciding to give their best to a new place, often against the odds, have made us feel better, when there is a lot to feel bad about.
Craig Scharton (right) in 2014 at his Peeve’s Public House in downtown Fresno. With him is Oscar Fuentes, who was the beer buyer for Peeve’s then and now has started his own brewery.
During our visits to Fresno, in California’s Central Valley, over the past two years, my wife Deb and I have made regular stops at Peeve’s Public House, on the downtown Fulton Mall.
Initially this was because the proprietor, Fresno patriot and publican Craig Scharton, was the first person to argue to us (at a chance meeting elsewhere in California) that tattered-looking Fresno was worth serious attention as a city turning itself around. After heavy initial skepticism, we became convinced. You can read the summary version of why we changed our minds here, or the full chronicles here. On return trips to Fresno we kept going back to Peeve’s because we liked the beer, food, and atmosphere there. And increasingly we came to respect its role as a civic center, in a part of town very much in need of such a thing. Here was the event board on our first visit:
The Fulton Mall area where Peeve’s has been an anchor and outpost (it’s one of the few businesses now open at night) is in the middle of a mammoth construction project, whose details you can read about here. In the long run, the overhaul is meant to spur downtown Fresno’s revival. In the short run, it’s yet another challenge for the businesses already there.
Members of Fresno’s “Downtown Academy” at Peeve’s last year, courtesy of That Fresno Blog.
Last night Craig Scharton put up a long post on Peeve’s Facebook page, saying that conditions had darkened and he flat-out needed more customers if he was to stay open. Here’s the “action” section of his post:
This is an unusual plea to our community of customers. Transparency has been a core value of mine (and therefore Peeve’s Pub). I don’t know if this will work or not, but I know that we don’t have any chance unless we try.
We need about 2,500 extra customer visits in the next month or two. That means people who haven’t tried us yet, come on down. We need occasional customers to make one extra visit, or maybe people who had a bad experience to give us another try. Or it means bringing a friend or two with you or ordering boxed lunches for your next office meeting.
If one-fifth of the people who like us on Facebook do this, I think we’ll survive.
I have no connection to Scharton except as a recent friend, nor to Peeve’s except as a customer. But if I were in Fresno, I’d be voting with my dollars to help it survive. People of Fresno, over to you!
Update Here’s an informative account of menu and beer changes at Peeve’s, by Bethany Clough in the Fresno Bee.
… please come to the first American Futures conference at the University of Redlands, on Friday evening, January 29, and Saturday during the day. You can find agenda and sign-up information here.
Glamour shot of the University of Redlands, where the conference will be held
At the conference, my wife Deb and I will be discussing what we have found in our past two-plus years of traveling around the country for our American Futures project — which will also be the subject of a cover-story package, with articles by both of us, in the forthcoming March issue of the magazine. (Subscribe!) One of the themes of that presentation is how much more functional American governance and civil-society seem at the city-by-city level than they do, at the moment, on the national scale.
At the conference, mayors whose strategies and records we’ve chronicled in this project will speak about what they’ve done, how they did it, and what lessons can be gleaned from, and applied more broadly, from the stories of their towns. They will include Rusty Bailey, mayor of Riverside, California; Don Ness, who recently completed two terms as mayor of Duluth, Minnesota; Ashley Swearengin, in her second term as mayor of Fresno, California; Nan Whaley, beginning her third year as mayor of Dayton, Ohio; and Knox White, who as mayor of Greenville, South Carolina, since 1995 is the longest-serving mayor in that city’s history.
Plus at least one and maybe more Bonus Mayors! And a session on GeoDesign at the Redlands-based software company Esri, one of our partners in this project.
I can tell you first-hand that these mayors all have very interesting personal and civic stories to tell. You’re likely to keep hearing about them (and not just from me) over the years. If you’ll be in the vicinity, please check out the site for more info and come by.
Last two iterations of the cover for our upcoming issue.
Next week a cover story whose writing and editing has tied me up for quite a while, and whose reporting has engaged my wife Deb and me over the past few years, will come out in print and on line. (Subscribe!)
Just now Darhil Crooks, creative director of the newly crowned Magazine of the Year, described the process by which he came up with a very nice cover image — plus the interior layout of the story. You can read it here. One of the great satisfactions of magazine journalism is the coming-together of many different kinds of imaginative talents and sensibilities. Part of Darhil Crooks’s genius is being able to move from an editor-level grasp of the argument and tone and ambition of a written story, to the right photographic, layout, illustration, cover-design, and other graphical means through which the message can be conveyed and enhanced. It’s like a good words-and-music combo, in that the pairing seems “natural” or even “inevitable” once you’ve heard or seen it, but (in my case) I could never have imagined it before knowing what the design team has figured out.
As a preview to the piece, here is the “dek,” the summary on the opening page:
Most Americans believe the country is going to hell. They’re wrong. What a three-years journey by single-engine plane reveals about reinvention and renewal—and about how the Second Gilded Age might end.
And here is an intermediate passage on the rationale behind this venture:
There is a high-toned tradition of road trips as a means of “discovering” America, from Lewis and Clark and Tocqueville through John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and William Least Heat Moon (whose Blue Highways made its debut in these pages). Apart from other obvious points of contrast, our project was different in that rather than going by car (or wagon, or pirogue), we’ve gone from city to city in our family’s small single-engine propeller airplane, a Cirrus SR22. This was a decision made for convenience, for beauty, and for edification….
The beauty comes from the privilege and unending fascination of watching the American landscape unfurl below as you travel at low altitude. At the dawn of powered flight, a century ago, it was assumed that writers and painters would want to become aviators, and vice versa…
A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America is mainly road—after all, that’s where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the strip of intense development along the California coast.
It’s also full of features obvious from the sky that are much harder to notice from the ground (and difficult to pick out from six miles up in an airliner): quarries at the edge of most towns, to provide gravel for roads and construction sites; prisons, instantly identifiable by their fencing (though some mega high schools can look similar), usually miles from the nearest town or tucked in locations where normal traffic won’t pass by. I never tire of the view from this height, as different from the normal, grim airliner perspective as scuba diving is from traveling on a container ship.
More to come about the magazine piece, and some new online accompaniments, next week. That is what will keep me busy over the weekend.
Update: Please read on for a new photo contest concept.
Loyal readers of Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, for many years part of our Atlantic online family, know and miss its “The View From Your Window” feature. Here’s a wonderful post by Andrew from ten years ago, when the first few photos were trickling in. During Andrew’s time with the Atlantic, TVFYW became the basis of a very popular contest, which lasted through the remaining years of The Dish.
Chris Bodenner, now the impresario of our Notes section, was one of the stalwarts of the Dish team during its Atlantic era and afterward. He has proposed an updated “The View From Your Airplane Window” feature, in keeping with the emphasis on “the aerial view” you see quoted above.
Shots from airplane windows were an occasional part of the prior TVFYW feature. We’d like to concentrate on collecting aerial shots only — from small planes and airliners, from helicopters and airplanes, from altitudes high enough to reveal large-scale geographic patterns and low enough to display surprising neighborhood or city-planning details.
Chris will be back next week to explain more about the concept and structure of the feature and the contests. (For instance: do drone shots count? Argument for: they can be very interesting aerial views. Argument against: no window. Which naturally raises the question: are windows really necessary? What about views from wing-suits, or hang-gliders, or balloons? Chris will figure all this out.)
In the meantime, please begin sending him any relevant photos, with identifying info— when, where, how, and what’s interesting about what we’re looking at. You can find Chris at hello@theatlantic.com.
***
Furthermore on the aerial-view theme, here’s another look at our upcoming cover, this time in motion, courtesy of the Atlantic’s photo whiz Alan Taylor:
Over the Snake River, approaching Lewiston, Idaho, last June. (Deborah Fallows).
Last week I mentioned that one theme of our ongoing American Futures travel had been the distinctive view of America available via low-altitude flight.
Andrew Sprung, of the Xpostfactoid blog, writes in response:
Serendipity: Yesterday evening I read your little ode to seeing the country from small-plane altitude, which for sure stirred some longing. Then a few hours later I read this fictional account in Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge of a 72 year-old woman, "who'd never been alone on a plan before," on a flight from Maine to NYC in a plane "half the size of a greyhound bus":
“The pilots, as well— both looking twelve years old with their unworried brows— had been kind, in the easy way they’d asked Olive if she’d mind sitting toward the back for weight distribution, before they climbed into the cockpit, closing the steel door. A thought unfolded before her— their mothers should be proud.
“And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats— then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water— seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son’s life.”
Seems like you could relate.
Indeed. Had not read this book but have now ordered it.
Even more than usual, the non-football aspects of The Big Game, from Lady Gaga’s great national anthem through the choice of ads, were more interesting than the defense-and-turnover-dominated struggle on the field. Still, great defense, Broncos!
I have to mention in this space an ad that caught my eye. It was one of the Doritos series, and I’ll bet anything that it was shot in a grocery store I mentioned last fall. That store would be Gerrard’s Market, at the corner of Center Street and Cypress Avenue in Redlands, a small town in inland Southern California and one of our American Futures stops.
Gerrard’s is notable for having the most overwhelming (ie, “best”) selection of craft beer I have seen in any grocery store anywhere. Take that, Whole Foods! Take that, any upscale place! The beers are housed in a large new section of the store called The Cave, which you can read about here. I got a glimpse of The Cave in the background a few seconds into this ad.
I feel pretty sure about this guess, on 30 seconds’ evidence, because Gerrard’s was the neighborhood grocery when I was growing up (alas, before The Cave). Thus I recognize the placement of the palm trees you briefly glimpse, from having walked past them a million times. In local life in D.C. you frequently run into politicians. In local life in SoCal, you have a higher-than-average chance of seeing neighborhood buildings in B-roll for TV shows or ads. An episode of Perry Mason was shot at the University of Redlands when I was a kid. Talk about glamor!
Update I see from the Redlands Daily Facts, my first-ever journalistic outlet, that the spot was indeed filmed at Gerrard’s. Phew! Here’s an earlier Facts photo of one corner of The Cave at Gerrard’s:
The end of my current story in the magazine, on “How America Is Putting Itself Back Together,” explores the contrast between what I’m describing as healthy civic society at the city-by-city level, and the bitter dysfunction of modern national politics. We’ve been reminded of the latter once more by the reaction to Antonin Scalia’s death, and the tone of the GOP debate last night.
How can that gap possibly be bridged? Well, I tried in the article. One theme: because people know that national politics is hamstrung, they have found ways to ignore or work around it. And soon I’ll be writing more about some of the presentations at a very useful “Mayor’s Conference” in Redlands, California, that I mentioned here.
For now, I offer another explanation — a long note from a reader that I’m quoting in near-entirety, because I think it touches on some interesting themes.
This reader grew up in what was then an Eastern Bloc country, came with his parents to Brooklyn as a child, and now lives and works in California. He ties the civic “we’re in this together” themes we’re talking with to the ups and downs of some of the presidential campaigns. Over to him:
I wanted to let you know how much I believe [that what we have been describing] is a truth about the country. Because as I was reading the article, I was thinking about my friends and family and I couldn't stop thinking of people who were doing the kind of work you're highlighting.
From my friend who left a major city to go to the southwest and has become heavily involved in all manner of theatre arts, community building, tutoring children and adults with speech disorders. To my mother-in law who grew up in a town in Illinois and worked to organize its sister city events, food festivals, girl scout troops and more while being a public administrator despite her national politics being different to my own. Thank you for writing about a country doing its civic work together.
I know one focus of your article so far is how people operate outside of national politics, what life looks like for ordinary people who have to live in places instead of speculate about them. However, in the context of national politics, I've actually been thinking about the framing of campaigns and speeches.
***
I think one thing that is lost now in discussions of the 2008 campaign is how much of the then Senator from Illinois' focus, in speeches, was on the audience. That is, 'this is the moment we've been waiting for', 'yes, we can' and 'I can't do it alone.' The prominent theme of sustained civic responsibility appeared also again in 2012 in 'you didn't build that' which was a fractured point but meant to address community bonds, that we do not all fail or succeed all on our own. That we have the capacity to foster each other's success, that we can be culprits in each other's failure and especially in the material conditions of the vulnerable, that our individual success does not automatically translate to a success in our moral obligation to others in a society.
Looking at 2016, I've read more than a few speeches. I think as people search for why, for example, a Jewish Socialist from Vermont is successful, I don't think it boils down to a message of hope or a promise of material returns.
I think it boils down to being a campaign that as it has developed, is in its structure not framed around a candidate, but around civic engagement. That is, from the "#votetogether", the use of "we" in place of "I" or "me", the "not me, us" or "not him, us" and the calls for "political revolution."
When you look at the populism of the Republican side as currently represented by Trump, it is very much "I", in the sense of 'our country needs a truly great leader.' Beyond that, it's populism is framed much more like that of an army than a civic society.
The 2010 and 2012 campaigns had a lot of "we're going to take this country back" which is not the same thing as working "together." It's very much 'be a member of my army.' Whereas, with the Sanders campaign, when the candidate describes material conditions, it is very much almost like it doesn't have to be him there saying it. What he asks, what he emphasizes, where power is centered in the language of the campaign, is with supporters. So they're not asked to find a solution in "Bernie Sanders" they're asked to find a solution in themselves.
To the extent people are being asked to hope, they are being asked to hope for themselves. I think that appeals to people and lends also to a personal nature of a primary in terms of insults or hurt, because people then are not defending candidates, but themselves.
This is framed differently in the Clinton campaign. The sense of civic responsibility and duty, the societal frame, is still there. The sense of obligation to each other. But the weight of power in the language of the campaign is in a different place. During the concession speech in New Hampshire, Senator Clinton had the following exchange:
“What is the best way to change people’s lives so we can all grow together?” she said. “Who is the best change-maker?”
“You are!” people in the audience shouted.
I think, more than anything, the current divide in the framing of the Democratic campaigns and something people do not appreciate in the nature of the pitch. The Clinton campaign, in its core framing, is about the competence of Secretary Clinton, about the record of Secretary Clinton, about the political capacity of Secretary Clinton as being the best possible person, the strongest candidate, to deliver outcomes in the current political climate.
In the Obama 2008 campaign and in the Sanders campaign, the "you are" would be said by the candidate to the audience. That's the piece of the message they share. That's how they address the core of power, responsibility and leadership, by leaving it not with the candidate, but with the people supporting them, letting them just not the candidate's fitness, but their own. I have many, many friends who are supporters of Secretary Clinton and the friends that are supporters of Senator Sanders would still vote happily for Secretary Clinton.
What I've found though is in my friends that support Secretary Clinton, they often are disappointed by the metrics of competence given to the Sanders campaign, and they focus on Sanders the candidate, the ways in which they are lacking and they wonder why other people can't see it, why people assume he'll be able to maneuver around an obstructionist congress. And I think a big thing they miss is the extent to which the Sanders campaign is not framed the same way as the Clinton campaign, not framed as Senator Sanders achieving these things or giving these things to people, but people delivering these results for themselves. It's framed so the question is not 'do you believe in Bernie' but much like the Obama campaign, 'do you believe in us?'
So it's not the candidate, not how they measure up, but how the individuals, these members of the public that share the same concern, how they square up and whether they believe they can participate in the civic experiment of collective action, of democracy, of these changes that are happening in the lives of people all around the country who are building something for themselves and for each other.
I think the biggest thing the Democratic Party will have to reconcile, as it pursues not only the general election, but frankly, the idea of sustained engagement, regardless of the nominee, is these two messages and whether they can be made to co-exist. Everyone in the party ostensibly agrees about our obligation to one another, our desire to build a civic society together. What's happening in this primary is that two things that are not in opposition to each other, leadership and the power and capacity of the public, are artificially placed against each other because of the framing of two respective campaigns in competition. But the Democratic Party cannot do without either, without either the frame of leadership or the frame of public action and engagement….
I also read the wonderful poems and prose Deborah Fallows shared from the high schoolers in Mississippi. Those kids are wonderful and reminded me of my own great experiences and that of my friends in public school programs with teachers who cared deeply for us and had more ambitions for us than we knew to have for ourselves.
Thinking back on the note I sent and the work you're doing, it did make me consider the extent to which President Carter had work to reconcile the two elements of leadership and broad civic engagement. The stories in the malaise speech feel in some ways like before pictures to the stories of recoveries you're writing about now. This is the sort of work it feels like President Carter was speaking to and envisioning, the sort of engine operating outside of and beyond the nightmares that tend to be conjured up in our national politic.
One of the founders of the successful and stylish Loll furniture company, at the the headquarters in Duluth. The company’s story is one I describe in the magazine article and talked about today on CNN.
This morning I was on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on CNN, talking about the project behind my current Atlanticcover story. A YouTube version of the full show is here; a one-minute out-take, in which I talk about why some people decide to make Duluth (above) or Redlands the center of internationally successful enterprises is here. A podcast is here.
If you go to the full-version video on YouTube (don’t yet see official CNN version), “Fareed’s Take” on the Sanders-budget controversy is for the first five minutes, then Thomas Friedman until time 10:15.
I talked with Fareed Zakaria from about 10:30 until about 21:00. The discussion is about vocational training, manufacturing startups, immigration, and whether a second age of reform is in view. In the final 90 seconds I make my best “here is what it all means” case. After that, you have the actually famous people on the show! They are the Indian magnate Mukesh Ambani and actor Shah Rukh Khan.
Before closing with another shot of Duluth, here is a note from reader Ron Davison that captures some of the impression we are trying to convey:
When I began business travel about 20 years ago, I would often come back home to San Diego so thankful that I didn't live in the place that I'd just visited. Now, as often as not, I leave a place feeling a little wistful about not getting to live there, or at least to spend more time.
So glad to see something that seems to describe the country I work in rather than the one that shows up on TV.
More of the Loll office in Duluth. The point in the article and the interview is that this resembles something you’d expect to see in San Francisco or Seattle, but it’s in northern Minnesota.
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While I’m at it, here is another look at a great short documentary that the Atlantic’s video team shot in Mississippi:
