On Art and Democracy

Hey all – hope you're doing well. It's been a busy summer, but things are settling down for me, which is finally giving me a chance to do a bit of a writing reset. I've had a good amount of work come out in the last month or so. In case you missed it...

Recent Work

I wrote about the Graham Platner debacle for The Guardian:

According to the New York Times, Platner strategist Dan Moraff, one of the people who recruited him into the race in the first place, compared him to Barack Obama in conversations with Democratic officials in the early days of the campaign. As deluded as that sounds now, it was a telling analogy.

Though it’s not often remarked upon, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the generation of millennials and older zoomers now managing much of the progressive electoral infrastructure, including campaigns like Platner’s, were molded by the Obama era – a period that began when a charismatic candidate with a change message, aided by early social media, managed to upset and upend his party’s establishment in a hard-fought primary.

In 2016, Donald Trump managed a kind of negative-image version of the same within the Republican party, and both of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for the presidency ran on the same theory of change, which now shapes down-ballot campaigns, large and small – with the right message and agenda, a winning background or personality, and the enthusiasm of base donors and volunteers, an outsider candidate can carry the day against the powers that be.

Needless to say, the left has had real successes with this approach, Mamdani among them. But it’s also run many dud primary challenges, and the business of electoral politics – as cynical and hungry for change as voters are – is a good deal more complicated than offering novel alternatives to the status quo.

I also wrote about the Declaration of Independence for The New Republic...

In April 2025, after being shown Trump’s framed copy of the declaration in the Oval Office, ABC News’ Terry Moran asked the president what the document signified to him. “Well, it means exactly what it says—it’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.” These remarks were widely ridiculed; again, Trump’s conduct in office has given many Americans good reasons to revisit and resurface the grievances that inspired the declaration and the American Revolution in the first place. But Trump’s gloss on the declaration was, in truth, fairly similar to what we’ve come to hear from most politicians.

“The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God, that all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity and respect, that all deserve justice and a shot at lives of prosperity and consequence,” Joe Biden said in a 2022 address at Independence Hall. “Democracy begins and will be preserved in we, the people’s habits of the heart—in our character … the willingness to see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.”

Barack Obama similarly contended during his presidency and campaigns that the declaration’s truths were no longer in question. “We, the people,” he said, “declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still.”

It might be reasonably protested that human equality is still not a settled question in America. What the declaration’s history tells us, however, is that the concept of human equality, as professed by abolitionists, slave owners, feminists, chauvinists, communists, and capitalists alike, itself settles very few of our differences. This is partially because the concept of human equality is inert without political commitments and acts of interpretation that put us into conflict with one another. As such, the remarkable thing about the declaration’s place in the American story isn’t the extent to which appeals to it have unified us. It’s the extent to which those appeals haven’t.

...and about experiencing the semiquincentennial in Trump's DC for Flaming Hydra:

For all who may have wondered over the decades what a fascist July 4th would look like in America, we now have an answer. If one didn’t read the hats and shirts too closely, if one happened to miss the hundreds of masked members of Patriot Front parading around town—a performance that took place early enough in the morning that they managed to avoid direct confrontation—the celebration looked remarkably like any other year. Smiling families, hot dogs, and conversations audible in a dozen languages. Even those in lines got to see the flyovers the administration had scheduled throughout the day; there were appreciative oohs and ahs, from children and adults alike, for bombers, fighter jets, and Black Hawks every time they passed overhead. , Having bailed on the State Fair lines, my vantage point was the line for the National Archives; a chance to see the cracked and oozing miniature replica of the triumphal arch Trump intends to build himself in D.C. might have taken several hours of standing in 102-degree heat, but the queue to see the Declaration of Independence was about two hours long at most, expedited a bit for veterans and those willing to donate a designated minimum to the National Archives Foundation. I haven’t risked my life for my country, but I did have $60 to spare.

The historian Pauline Maier once called America’s veneration of the Founding Fathers and documents like the Declaration of Independence  “a functional Catholicism for a Protestant country,” that was initially led by men  hostile to the gilded iconography of the Church. 

“The children of an American enlightenment enlisted the terminology of ‘monkish ignorance and superstition,’” Maier wrote in American Scripture, “and spoke of relics and altars, of saints and canonizations.” It’s an interesting point that holds up pretty well. The morning of the 4th, I caught a clip of 60 Minutes’ Nora O’Donnell touring the Rotunda where the Declaration is kept, which she described as “a shrine.” But no mass I’ve ever attended has resembled the chaotic feel of the place on Saturday—throngs of sweaty parents and would-be influencers pressing into the glass displays to the dismay of harried security guards, phones being held aloft for selfies and photos of children and photos that, whatever their intended subjects might have been, mostly captured other people taking selfies and photos of their children. 

The Declaration itself can’t have looked like much in the pictures. . It cannot be read at all at a distance, and has faded beyond legibility even up close—partly because the State Department, where it was once held, decided to display its copy on a wall facing a window for more than 30 years. The 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, added to the Rotunda in 2024, will probably wind up in better shape; it was in a corner, mostly ignored by passersby, and didn’t appear to have been handled or even looked at all that much in the last century. Then again, I’m not a preservationist. When I left the archives, a fighter jet was doing loop-the-loops in the air. 

I've also been doing some writing on rethinking the politics of promoting democracy for the Roosevelt Institute if you happen to be interested. More to come, here and elsewhere, soon!

Culture

A local chapter of Writers for Democratic Action recently asked me to deliver some remarks on "art and democracy" in commemoration of Walt Whitman's birthday. I thought they might be of interest here, given that they touch upon some of the primary concerns of my upcoming work. Feel free to let me know what you think.