Rooted in the Particulars of Place

The Sunday Night Reader for 5/1/22

May 01, 2022

United

It wasn’t pretty, and it was far from unanimous. But, this week, the Democratic party in Utah opted to back Evan McMullin in this November’s race against sitting Republican Senator Mike Lee. McMullin is a former long-time Republican staffer and CIA officer who is running as an independent.

He left the party after Trump’s nomination and ran a protest campaign for president in the 2016 race. More than a “I don’t like the way Trump tweets” Republican, more than a never-Trump Republican, McMullin bolted, stayed gone, and has spent the last six years coalition building. (Lee, meanwhile, was part of the team inventing election fraud claims, cooking up alternative slates of electors, and encouraging the nation to give Trump and the January 6th insurrectionists a “mulligan.”)

“We have got to take a stand as Utahns,” McMullin said at the Democratic state convention, where it took wrangling to get him a chance to speak and where he did so for about a minute over the boos. “I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or an independent or a Republican or a member of the United Utah Party, this is a line that cannot be crossed, our right to hold our leaders accountable and to vote for or against them and have a peaceful transition of power is essential for liberty and justice in America. We cannot compromise on that, and we must all be united to defend it.”

Evan McMullin at the Utah Democratic State Convention last week. Photo by Katie McKellar for the Deseret News.

I’ve learned my lesson on trusting Republican centrism. If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that most sane Republican politicians are far from willing to stand up for anti-authoritarian principles and are ready to go to some really dark places to keep their seats.

But I’m a fan of McMullin, and I’m a fan of this move.

In places where strong, progressives can win, Democrats shouldn’t mess around. They should jump at the opportunity to elect fresh people who better reflect where the party is today rather than entrenched Clinton-era triangulators. In places where Democrats, much less progressives, obviously cannot win — like a Utah senate race — it’s time for something different. A cross-party, anti-authoritarian bloc is sorely needed.

It’s troubling how few conservative politicians are willing to get on board with that, whether as a Republican like Liz Cheney or as an independent like McMullin or as whatever it is Adam Kinzinger is cooking up. If a Democrat can’t win, if a politician is willing to take the heat and threats of violence, if a conservative is willing to risk their ability to get things done on Republican policy in favor of democracy, progressives should be ready to make common cause. Read more.

Messy

Representatives Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna, both surely progressives, are also thinking about how Democrats make room for pro-democracy Republicans without giving away the store. In an interview with NPR, they talked about how difficult that is.

“What people say about the Democrats is, you guys are too big and disorganized and chaotic. And what's the message and all that? I hear all of that. I agree with all of that,” Raskin said. “But that is democracy. We are the party of democracy, and it's messy. We are not a religious cult. So we're going to work it out. And we want people to come and join us and to be part of this big, sometimes messy conversation, but the conversation that's actually moving America forward and making progress for the people.” Listen to the interview.

READI

The statistics in this story about a University of Chicago study of a community-based gun violence prevention program are incredible. Let’s skip right to the incredible part:

“The recently completed trial tracked some 2,500 men in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods and found that men who participated in an intensive, 18-month program called READI Chicago were nearly two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a shooting or homicide and nearly 20% less likely to be shot or killed themselves than a similar group of men that weren’t in the program. Those are all significant declines considering a third of participants had been shot at least once before enrolling, and had an average of 17 arrests on their rap sheet.

Participants were recruited by outreach workers and community members, or targeted from a list of high-risk Chicagoans generated by an algorithm that weighed their recent arrest history and violent incidents involving them or their social networks. Results were even better for the men who were referred in by outreach workers, with shooting and homicide arrests dropping nearly 80% and shootings and killings by almost half…

The READI study was a randomized trial — comparing men who enrolled in the program against a control group of men who were turned away from the program — making it the first of its kind to evaluate a large group with the same statistical rigor used to evaluate medical treatments.”

Lots more details in the article about the rigor of the study. But let’s repeat the incredible part: Men with an average of 17 arrests — one-third of whom had been shot at least once — were two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a shooting after taking part in a 18-month gun violence prevention program. Read more.

The Community of Where You Live vs. the Community of What You Like

Jay Caspian Kang put together a nice piece on the loss of regional voice. A bit on the navel-gazing side, a bit hard to encapsulate, but worth a read.

“The people who will make the art of the next generation now find one another online and can collaborate from their bedrooms, which can make for better, or at the very least, more finely curated work. If, for example, you have only five kids in your high school who play the drums and each one is bad in his own way, chances are your band is going to have a bad rhythm section.

This isn’t a problem online — you will either find a suitable drummer or you will just use a drum machine. Your music may sound better and you might find a larger audience, but you’ve also replaced the community of the place where you live — with all its boredom and angst — with the community of what you like. The latter will always have an abstract quality because it’s not rooted in the particulars of a place…

Art is simply better when it comes out of these lived contexts. It matters, for example, that Mavis Staples, Lou Rawls and Sam Cooke all went to the same elementary school in the South Side of Chicago and that many of their classmates came from families who carried Southern musical traditions up north during the Great Migration. It also matters that they grew up in the shadow of Mahalia Jackson, who they could see perform in a nearby church.

When things are that specific and need little to no introduction, they feel alive and relevant in ways that transcend the local contexts in which they were created.” Read more.