It has been July 4 in America for months
Welcome back to Flux, a twice-weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
It has been July 4 in America for some months. Fireworks. Marches. Talk of revolution, and of liberty and equality. Declarations of had-it-up-to-hereness. And a reminder and resumption of our centuries-long arguments with the compromises built into our founding.
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At the heart of every one of these new or renewed arguments is the sense that our existing government mechanisms for solving deep, abiding problems have proved inadequate or no longer work. And at the heart of that lies the thorny question of the very structure of our representative democracy. Today in GEN, former Obama speechwriter David Litt takes the light occasion of Hamilton, the musical, coming to Disney+ to explore one of the compromises that vexed Alexander himself and that in many ways is the defining crisis of our time: The tyranny of the minority.
“On issue after issue — gun violence prevention; climate change; taxes; responding to Covid-19 or police brutality — the states, as represented in the Senate, are standing between the will of the people and the actions of their government,” writes Litt in “The Future Alexander Hamilton Warned About Has Arrived.” Through the Electoral College and a Senate that gives the same representation to California as it does to Wyoming, which has one sixty-eighth the population, America today is a kludged democracy that no longer enacts the will of the majority.
“Authoritarianism looms, but we are far from helpless in the face of this threat,” writes Litt, who recommends that if Democrats retake the White House and Senate their first order of business must be D.C. statehood, to begin to right the power imbalance in a Senate whose elected Republican majority today represents more than 20 million fewer people than the Democratic minority.
Elsewhere in GEN, Jessica Valenti considers the “two different ideas of American freedom” on display in recent weeks: “While protesters are demanding the freedom for Black people to live without fear of state violence and murder, white conservatives are complaining that their freedom is being infringed upon because they can’t shop at Costco without a light piece of fabric against their face….these two Americas have always been there; but there is something jarring about watching them in tandem.”
So enjoy the day off, the burgers, the moment for reflection. I’ll be staying in as usual, watching the nightly fireworks.
— Garance Franke-Ruta, Executive Editor, GEN
Flux populi: When socialites don’t distance
This is a Cautionary Tale featuring well-intentioned people making poor choices. It is also the tale of a socialite with an Instagram habit who recently held a fabulous backyard soiree during a pandemic. The upside of living on social media is the admiration and envy of your friends. The downside is when your dinner party goes viral. Literally.
Ashley Taylor Bronczek, one of Washington’s social stars, decided to throw a party after the Washington Ballet’s online fundraiser, which she co-chaired….To celebrate the occasion, she hosted a catered dinner for a couple dozen friends in the backyard of her Spring Valley home. It was, by all accounts, a picture-perfect night chronicled on (per usual) her Instagram account. Then Bronczek, 37, was diagnosed with Covid-19, along with a few other guests at the event….
Roxanne Roberts, “The virus didn’t stop a Washington socialite from throwing a backyard soiree. Then the tests came back positive.” (The Washington Post)
Second verse, same as the first
With coronavirus cases now spiking in states that escaped the worst of the first wave, Americans are facing a second round of layoffs — this time permanent. “Millions of American workers are suffering from economic whiplash, thinking they were finally returning to work only to be sent home again because of the coronavirus’s latest surge,” reported the Washington Post. “Stores, restaurants, gyms and other businesses that reopened weeks ago are shuttering once more, and this time Congress appears less inclined to provide additional aid.”
Meanwhile, those who managed to stay employed throughout the shutdowns have a dirty little secret, reports Molly Oswaks in GEN: “Thanks to the shutdowns, they’ve been saving money — some for the first time ever.” With nowhere to go and nothing to spend money on but necessities, she writes, Americans had a record boost in personal income and the U.S. savings rate in April experienced its biggest surge since recording began in 1959.
“While millions are reliant on food banks and unemployment checks for the first time in their lives,” Oswaks writes, “others have found the total shutdown of normal life provided an unexpected and welcome opportunity to climb out from under years of burdensome debt, one canceled dinner and event at a time.”
Buzzkill: The shaky future of cafe culture
“The very emergence of a public was based on people having a place to go to be a public,” Augustine Sedgewick, a historian and author of Coffeeland told GEN’s Max Ufberg in his exploration of the future of the coffee house in an age of pandemic shutdowns. “It was a more free-floating social entity called the public that took shape only after there was a place for it to do so. And the first institutions that nurtured this public were coffeehouses.”
The protracted closures for indoor dining may mean “a death knell for small, independently owned cafés, which typically operate on razor-thin margins” Ufberg writes. Now “communities across the country must wrestle with the question, what do cafés offer us in addition to food and drink? And what do we lose when they close their doors for good?”
One more thing…
Former journalist Isabel Wilkerson, who in 1994 became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, adapted a section of her forthcoming August book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents for the New York Times magazine. This passage sums up so much about our current national predicament — how we got here, and what our responsibilities are now.
“America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation. When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”
