ESSAY: America after the fire

It is harder than ever to picture an America beyond this abyss. Here is one vision

Poverty, George Orwell wrote, annihilates the future. Hopelessness does, too. In this moment of violence, enmity, tribalism, and rising authoritarianism, it is hard to imagine an America on the far side of all this. Which makes it all the more important to do so. Yesterday I had a conversation that pointed to a path to getting there.

It was with Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, a vocal progressive who has also long practiced a politics of outreach across rifts.

WATCH: Rep. Ro Khanna proposes a truce between the two Americas

I asked him about the rising tide of civil-war talk: the analogies being made to the 1860s, the sectional politics of redistricting tits-for-tat and inter-state vaccine alliances, the musing about a “national divorce.”

I asked what case he would make to Americans meandering into such thinking that the country is still a coherent shared project.

He first noted that any kind of separation fantasy is foolish in practical terms. This is not the South versus the North. This is you versus people 45 minutes away from you.

There are deeply MAGA areas in California as you move inland, and there are the coastal cities. The same is true in Ohio.

But Khanna then turned philosophical, and what he said rhymed with themes we have pursued at The Ink. That the difficulties of difference America faces now aren’t just obstacles to overcome. They are the project.

What we’re trying to do, and you’ve written about this, is very, very difficult. I mean, we’re genuinely trying to become a cohesive, multiracial democracy with people from every part of the world.

And in this part, the right is correct that 1965 changed the composition of America. It changed it to be not predominantly European. It changed it after [the Immigration and Nationality Act], inspired by Dr. King, to be people from every freedom movement, every part of the world.

That rings true. The way to understand this whole age, I believe, is to remember that America is daring a hard thing. Building a country made of the world is not easy. There are many smoother avenues. But it’s a worthy struggle. And doing the work it requires is edifying, ennobling, deepening.

We are falling on our face because we are jumping high

Khanna went on to frame the challenge of this struggle, in this moment, in this way:

We’ve got a cultural fight of: How do we make room for the new, and how do we respect old traditions?…The question, I think, for our country is how to find that balance.

What he seemed to be reaching for was a synthesis of the MAGA worldview and the progressive worldview, of what some on the right call “heritage Americans” and the emerging people-of-color-majority America. He began to speak of a kind of truce of mutual respect between them that sounded different from what I’ve heard — and certainly from anything in the national bloodstream in this fraught moment.

In Khanna’s vision, the truce of two Americas looks something like this: What MAGA America needs to hear, at some deep level, is respect. Without excusing the racism, misogyny, or disinformation, beneath those things is a crisis of esteem, of respect, of knowing how you fit. As Krista Tippett has said, “Anger is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public.” As a new America is born from the old, is there a way for that emerging America to demonstrate, as Khanna put it, that it “recognizes the contributions, the extraordinary sacrifices, the cultural sacrifices”? He said it can be

as simple as going there and saying, You know what, my family, we wouldn’t have had the opportunities we did if you didn’t help build the steel, if you weren’t in the coal mines, if your grandparents didn’t scale the cliffs of Normandy, if you didn’t help fight the wars, if you didn’t help build this country. And I’m deeply proud of all the things that you’ve done, your family has done, and the rich inheritance both of us have.

But this is not a one-sided truce, and Khanna, of all people, is hard to accuse of pandering to the far right. He brought up Vice President J.D. Vance’s tendency to say, as Khanna put it, We’re not just a nation of ideas. We’re a nation that fought wars. We’re a nation that built culture. Again, the view of heritage mattering, not just the shared ideals that progressives focus on. And Khanna imagined his reply to Vance:

Fine, J.D., but we’re also a nation where culture keeps evolving and allows new voices and allows those new voices to participate in the creation of that culture. How do we find that balance? How do we do that?

To me, that’s the generational task, and it’s a hard task. And I don’t presuppose that it will be a successful task. But if it does succeed, it will be the greatest contribution that any nation has ever made in the history of humanity. So it’s certainly worthwhile trying for it.

After he voiced that gratitude, on behalf of emerging America, for the inheritance more recent Americans are coming into — an inheritance built by Black Americans, white Americans, Indigenous people, and others — Khanna was quick to add:

And here’s how I and my family are trying to contribute to that inheritance.

It’s worth noting that few people talk this way anymore in American life, because you’re at risk of being accused by progressives of being too accommodating of MAGA’s feelings and of white supremacy; and at risk of being accused by the right of trying to lay claim to what is not rightly yours. The synthesis Khanna laid out has no patience for those objections. It is an unapologetically integrated vision of America, in which respect can be paid for what a once-majority-white, minority-Black country did to build a foundation of prosperity and institutions and systems and laws and to open that inheritance up, by democratic choice, to people from all over; and respect can be paid to people from every last outpost of the world, from every faith and first language and back story, striving to make it here and make something of themselves.

And it was to this idea of respect that Khanna now turned, making a connection that struck me then and has stayed with me.

He spoke of the sense of “loss” that predominates in much of MAGA America — a sense of loss that has been debated, studied, analyzed. Khanna didn’t allow himself to be derailed by whether the loss is real or not. The thing about felt loss, if you work in politics, is that it is real to the beholder. These are feelings that, if ignored, quickly become facts. For some, he said, it’s “economic loss, because they don’t feel like their kids are going to have the same life.” As an economic progressive, he is presumably most sympathetic to this dimension of the sense of loss. Then there’s the sense of “a cultural loss, a sense of fear about the change of that culture.” Unlike with the first sense of loss, Khanna may be less interested in trying to reverse the cultural change that has precipitated the sense of loss. But he is interested in empathizing with it.

He made a parallel to the writing of Jhumpa Lahiri, the Indian-American author whose books probed immigrants’ sense of cultural loss (even as many were pursuing their dreams). Just as Lahiri’s immigrant characters grapple with disorientation in a new land, so do many in MAGA America in their own backyard. One is voluntary migration; the other is involuntary transformation. But there are resonances:

We’re often empathetic to immigrants’ cultural loss, right?…Well, what about the experience from the lens of someone whose town has changed culturally and who’s grappling with the same, different version of cultural loss, that it’s not the same culture and it’s a different culture and it’s also combined with economic pain? How do we do that in a way that’s understanding, empathetic, honest?

What Khanna was saying struck me because it connects with so much of what I have seen and heard firsthand in my reporting over the years, but it is making a connection people rarely do. In our facile, tribal national sorting, immigrants are over here and MAGA is over there. (Incidentally, such facile thinking is what prevented too many people from realizing how many immigrants were moving into the MAGA column in 2024.) What Khanna was suggesting is that cultural loss, the sense of displacement, even at times having your material conditions improve while your sense of where and how you belong suffers — that these should not be thought of as happening either to these people over here only, or those people over there. They are happening to people over here and over there. Immigrants experience this sense of loss for their reasons. And people who have lived on the same accustomed earth for twenty generations can experience their own sense of loss, not because they have moved but because the ground below has — the economy, the demography, the mores, the authority.

We have one political movement that has fully committed to mining the resentments and the sense of loss of an older, whiter, more Christian section of the country; we have another that champions the colorful new country pushing its way out. What if, Khanna seemed to be asking, we could find in those stories undetected rhymes?

The woke and the still-waking

“Those are some of the things that I’ve learned,” Khanna said, speaking of his conversations with voters on the left and right. “They don’t fit on a slogan or a soundbite. But I think that kind of work is important for us to rebuild trust.”

I agree. And while they may not fit in a soundbite, I thought they very much fit here.

---

---