Kamala Harris takes charge, what the Olympics mean, wage theft: Weekend reads for July 27, 2024
Kamala Harris takes charge, what the Olympics mean, wage theft: Weekend reads for July 27, 2024
Some links worth your time this weekend
This week has been, above all, about Kamala Harris, as her candidacy has reinvigorated the Democratic campaign in a way that hadn’t seemed possible in recent weeks and made it clear to millions of Americans that come November they have a real choice about what kind of country we’ll be living in.
We’ve been spending most of our time tracking that shift, so many of the readings we’ve collected below (as we do each weekend for our paid subscribers) focus on the possibilities ahead for a Harris presidency. We’ve also collected some of the best pieces we’ve found this week on other matters, ranging from the Olympic Games to climate action, to the politics of land art, to the prevalence of wage theft. We think all of these pieces of writing are worth spending some time with this weekend, and we hope the articles we’ve collected inspire and entertain you, and even give you some hope for the future.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
In case you missed it
We dug into the conversations we’ve been having all year to come up with a list of ten strategic imperatives for the Harris campaign.
Much of the day-to-day press coverage will inevitably focus on the horse-race questions at this moment. We at The Ink have been interested in a different question in recent months, which is how a pro-democracy movement can win the era.
We’ve been asking some of the smartest people around, people with the ability to step back and draw on history and scholarship and first-hand experience to provide a bigger vision for a progressive future contending with authoritarian demagoguery.
Today, we bring you ten vital strategic imperatives for the newly minted Harris campaign, drawn from these conversations.
We talked to philosopher Judith Butler about why authoritarians have declared war on gender, what the possibilities are for a freer world, and why they think young people are on the right track in building that better future.
Well, I don't think you can have a world of gender freedom, equality, and justice for men, women, and other genders or for any number of people without having economic justice and freedom and equality, without having a successful decolonization of the world, the places that are still being colonized, without fighting for the Earth and its regenerative and reparative capacities because all these gendered people are living on that earth.
We saw Kamala Harris’ first campaign rally — and we were impressed to see her embrace the kind of messaging we’ve been hoping to hear from a Democratic candidate for a very long time.
Harris also did a great job of framing the two visions as forward versus backward, past versus future, but then, again, she made it about us. You have the choice between going forward and backward. You decide what kind of place we are. Simple, sharp, clear, empowering of us.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild told us about her new book, Stolen Pride, what she learned interviewing in Appalachia, and what she thinks Kamala Harris’ campaign needs to say to rural Americans.
She should get out and around. I think it could do a lot of good, but by talking to individual people and telling their story and saying, “We're the party that has brought you Build Back Better. We're actually doing this.”
And I think in a way, the tragedy is that the Democratic Party has had some excellent bills and is doing a lot of good things, but not getting any credit for it because there wasn't any recognition of the emotions going on and having gifted people speak. So I think Kamala should get 30 surrogates going around the country into red states.
Towards a Harris administration
Harris and reproductive freedoms
Unlike Biden, she’s been direct and enthusiastic: A POLITICO comparison of their remarks on Florida’s abortion ban, for example, revealed that while Biden mentioned the word 'abortion' twice, Harris used it 15 times—sometimes pairing it with the phrase “Trump abortion bans.”
That’s the other thing Harris has done remarkably well: reminded voters that it’s Donald Trump who got us into this mess to begin with. At the kick-off of her speaking tour, Harris laid into the disgraced former president for saying he’s ‘proud’ of overturning Roe. [Abortion, Every Day]
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