Harris and identity, flirt canvassing, rallying the dudes, and more
Wrapping up the week's posts for August 4, 2024
It was another huge week in American politics, and here at The Ink as well as we kept you supplied with our analysis of the most consequential developments in the rapidly developing Democratic presidential campaign and the forces on the right struggling to deal with the new tactics developing out of the rebirth of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s bid.
But mostly, it’s been a week of identity politics old and new. Movement organizers and Democratic campaigners have been putting a new spin on their outreach attempts and mobilizing white women — and men — as identity groups rather than an undifferentiated majority. Meanwhile, on the right, we’ve seen the rebirth and redeployment of some familiar, painfully racist old tropes from the right as Trump tried to recapture birtherism and question Kamala Harris’s very American dual heritage, somehow suggesting that she couldn’t be both Black and Indian, or claim multiple cultures as so many of us do each day.
To help you make sense of it all, we present some of the best interviews, essays, and discussions from this past week at The Ink — the kinds of essential pieces we send each week to our paid subscribers.
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In case you missed it
We talked to journalist and podcast host Liz Plank about her new breakthrough in political communication — call it “flirt canvassing.”
I've just been talking to men and I've been going to particularly male-centric spaces or environments. I went to a tailgate at a Phillies game in Pennsylvania. I went to a day club in Arizona. I'm basically going to swing states, I'm going to male environments where men are there to just hang out and not talk about politics necessarily. And I start talking to them. Yeah, I do some light flirting. I'm not misleading them necessarily. I am single, but I'm definitely there to connect with 'em and talk with them. And then I end up talking to them about politics, talking to them about who they're voting for, what's important to them. At the Phillies game, my goal was to talk to them about Project 2025, because it's a 900-page document on purpose so that most of us don't end up having the time to read it.
We attended the White Dudes for Harris call — and talked to organizer Ross Morales Rocketto about what it means to organize white men and why masculinity can’t be left to MAGA anymore.
The reason is to rally around Kamala Harris. But the even deeper meaning to it is that we need to create space for folks to join our tent and get to learn about us and understand what we're really about.
Because if you look at the polling over and over and over again, people say they like our ideas, but they don't like us. They don't like us. And that's a real conundrum. And so we have to create space. And I've addressed this a bunch of times, but it makes people really uncomfortable to talk about white men. And we don't have a muscle for it on the left.
We took on Donald Trump’s misunderstanding of race (and of America) and unpacked Kamala Harris’s very American set of multiple identities.
Harris went to Howard University, an historically Black college, and has identified as both Indian and Black all her life. She had the unusual childhood situation of being raised by an Indian mother who, having divorced Harris’s Black father, nevertheless invested great effort and intention in exposing Harris and her sister, Maya, to the Black community and Black tradition and thought, as Harris writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.
Author Anne Applebaum told us about the new authoritarians, why they’re linked by an interest in kleptocratic extraction shared set of grievances rather than ideology — and how to fight back.
First of all, we live in a time of great chaos and division and change, chaos in the information sphere, when people's lives are being transformed by the internet, by social change, by demographic change. The world looks very different now than it did in your childhood 50 years ago, or the town that you grew up in doesn't resemble at all what it used to be.
When you live in times like that, you have people who begin to want things to slow down and to stop. And that’s the appeal of someone who says, "I'm going to get everything under control again for you."
Despite Trump’s attempt to turn the conversation on himself at the NABJ conference, it was very much Kamala Harris’s week. And we dug into the question of what it means for Democrats to finally own the discourse, and play in the culture.
No longer is Donald Trump driving the public conversation. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention to pretty much any news outlet, the Republican campaign is mostly playing defense or catchup, for once, struggling to get over vice-presidential pick J.D. Vance’s tall stack of gaffes, or dealing with the torrent of mockery sparked by the recognition that the best way to talk about MAGA is to point out exactly how weird it is, how totally out of step with American life its candidates and advocates are.
A reenergized Democratic Party is getting more pressure from big donors who fear real change (and the survival of Biden’s most progressive programs). We asked why the Party — and Americans in general — puts up with donor demands.
But why do we let corporate leaders define what’s “anti-business” or what’s good for America in the first place? Why do we allow billionaire donors to draw spurious connections between the interests of giant firms and the impact on regular American bank accounts? Do we really want the amoral inclinations of business titans — happy with whoever allows unfettered consolidation of corporate power — to drive Democratic politics?
Democrats finally realized what it was that bothered most people about MAGA Republicans, J.D. Vance, and Project 2024 — it’s creepy. Republican leaders and their plans are just weird. And they decided to call it out where they saw it. We heard from you about whether you think the strategy is working.
The label has a lot going for it. How else to describe the folks who are obsessed with birth rates and whether or not women have children? Who want to erase reproductive freedoms and outlaw contraception? Who think library books and drag queen story hours threaten the future of America? Who want to keep tabs on women’s ovulation and restrict pregnant people from crossing state lines? Who promise radical fundamentalist followers that they’ll fix things so they won’t have to vote anymore?
With LeBron James leading Team USA at the Olympic Games in Paris this week, we talked to author Hanif Abdurraqib about There’s Always This Year, a memoir and tale of his love for his native Ohio, told like a basketball game and framed by the story of James as a local icon and prodigal hero, and on a deeper level a tale of how sports and place make meaning in America.
I think so much of my interest is as someone who does not necessarily want to leave where I love. Columbus, Ohio, where I live, I love this place — what does it mean then to not try to transform this into a place where people can capital-M make it? Which is, I think, what a lot of cities are trying to do.
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