Crazy shit mostly doesn’t happen to me, at least not the fun kind. But somehow this week I got to rant about elections and hope to young people in the company of a formative mentor of my youth (and some folks way yonder fancier than me). Hope in the middle of History is hard sometimes and I’ve never been a glass is half full kind of person. Crazy shit is the new normal, and at least sometimes it’s beautiful.
Thirty years ago this fall I was in the first semester of my last year of college and I signed up for a history seminar with a new professor. I was already an American History and Ethnic Studies major, my advisors were set, my thesis underway, but I needed the history seminar and she was the one teaching it. Her name was Sharon Ullman. I don’t remember the exact title of the class, but it was a combination of methodology and study of marginalized populations and it flipped a switch in my brain. I liked history, but until then it was static—transcribed in the rearview mirror. Professor Ullman made it relational, a lens to observe the present, and comment on the future. History wasn’t just writing up and critiquing the past, it was sorcery: we were summoning demons with Michel Foucault and binding them with meticulously collected first person narratives of soldiers and sex workers.
I tried to turn my second semester into a pretzel so I could take another seminar with Professor Ullman but couldn’t swing it. She made time for me anyway, taking me on as a sort of informal third advisor, talking through my thesis with me, and giving me what I experienced as frank advice that respected me as an academic thinker in my own right, some of which stuck. For example, she said the United States wasn’t actually one country, but several disparate ones that didn’t work well together. And, when I showed up with a new source book for my thesis she said, “Philosophers. They always think they’ve figured out something new, when the rest of us got it a while ago.” For a hot second, she almost made me think of becoming a history professor. She made it seem cool. Not just because she was cool, in the sardonic way of certain queer academics, but because she clearly liked what she was doing. She sternly warned me that law school was Some BS. It was.
Our paths didn’t cross again. I left a crochet coaster in her mailbox once at Reunion. It wasn’t until the last few years when we connected on the BookofFace that I started thinking of her as “Sharon” and not “Professor Ullman”. But sometimes, when I turned my social media into a banshee wail of rage about the Constitution, fascism, race, and gender, I could feel the distant sonar ping of my senior seminar syllabus. Then Wednesday we met for dinner in Philly, because I had a conference and she was free and lives in the City. We had a lovely dinner talking about the world and things, and how yes, in fact the United States is not one nation and we wish we wouldn’t see it fall to bits just now, thankyouverymuch. She remembered a thing about me I did not: my own description in the moment, thirty years before, of my brain stretching, illustrated with a handgesture and a scritchyscratchy noise. We talked about a panel she was moderating, as part of the Project for New Media and Politics at Bryn Mawr. This is her last year teaching and it would be her last panel, with some regular speakers (journalists, political scientists, other academics) talking about the election.
I spent Thursday in my conference, vaguely contemplating trucking out to campus, deciding I was too tired, wanting to see the college, feeling the train was a bother, etc. Back and forth until the last minute and I thought, “okay I’ll sit there and live tweet the panel talking about important stuff.” I stepped off the Bryn Mawr train for the first time since perhaps my 10th college reunion. The walk to campus seemed shorter than I remembered. The cool fall air on my skin and the lamplit sidewalks were exactly as I remembered, but without the background angst that coiled through my early adulthood. I arrived at Sharon’s office in the gothic Old Library, as I used to, and she said, “I just lost two panelists! You in?” Thus I found myself in the lecture hall where I had sociology and history lectures, and watched foreign films, facing a bunch of students who looked shockingly familiar, despite the fact they were all born 10 or more years after I left. They included the daughter and the niece of a couple of my classmates.
There I was, an off duty civil servant, family care advocate, and irregular freestyler of history and society, on a panel with Will Bunch, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer and multiple distinguished academics: Matthew Kerbel, Vice Provost and Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, Carol Hagar Professor of Environmental Studies and Political Science at Bryn Mawr (the legit sub from the bench). It’s like being in a band in college and getting asked to sit in with Metallica or something. It was a blast.
The theme of the talk was obviously “Democracy on the Ballot” because if we don’t get this one right, we may not have another election. People are going to war against the polls and counts anyway. The battle will rage into January. It’s not just democracy on the ballot, it’s a livable planet, it’s our bodies if we’re women, or trans, or queer, and it’s the notion of competence in government itself. I talked about the close election in Oregon, to that last point (and yes, I made sure to qualify “opinions my own, etc”). I learned stuff about polling, “modeling the electorate”, and cool analogies like the Red Tide versus the Blue Undertow—thanks Prof. Kerbel! Will Bunch has been covering culture and politics since the 1982 midterm election, and talked about the unpredictability and intensity of this election, including in Pennsylvania where there’s a rabid Christian Dominionist running for governor. There’s nothing like the terror of a pro to discomfit an amateur. Prof. Hagar talked about the intersections with the rise of fascism in the EU and the way Europe is scrutinizing the election.
Nothing in our life times is like the moment we are in, and it is exhausting. A million people dead in two years from a poorly managed pandemic, the complete loss of guiderails around what it is acceptable to say in public, the power-at-all-costs mentality, a one-term President who still holds massive influence over his party. The chaos erodes our ability to process the enormity of events like the January 6 insurrection, the true magnitude of which is still developing. Midterm elections normally bring out the people dissatisfied with the party in the White House, and everyone else naps. This midterm reflects all of the non-standard factors above, plus Dobbs, which early analysis shows is bringing out women voters. Kerbel discussed the off cycle special elections, like Kansas voting in favor of reproductive health. I could tell he and Bunch both were being cautious, not wanting to come down on the side of doom, laying out a few crumbs of optimism, but explaining layers of unpredictability: conservatives tend not to respond to polls, anticipated recordbreaking voter turnout, anticipated violence, women and POC reporting out in high numbers in the early voting, etc.
The students asked about the rise of extremism. Several of us talked about the rise in racism and Christian nationalism generally and in the military. I have members of my extended family who I think would not realize being called a Christian nationalist is not a compliment. They would probably realize being called a white nationalist is not a compliment, but I suspect them of secretly thinking it a righteous thing to be. Sharon pointed out that as part of the 20 year war in the Gulf and South Asia, we have a generation of these people coming out and going into law enforcement, locally and nationally (e.g. the Border Patrol). While there are “low information voters” who think a congressional inquiry into Hunter Biden will lower gas prices, there are lots and lots of people for whom racism and gender totalitarianism are favored objectives in this election. It’s not an incidental outcome of their counterfactual understanding of economics.
One audience member asked, how can we have hope? I listened to the other panelists talk about the odds and the outcomes. No one was willing to come down on whether we keep the Senate and/or the House, but either or both are possible. And Sharon pointed out the history of social transformation in this country is slow, but it happens with persistence. We are in the middle of it and it is hard to see. Things may be harder before they get better. As I listened, I looked at the students in their sweatshirts and jean jackets, a couple taking notes, hair in messy I’m-studying-go-way mode. I can barely remember what it was like to be them, they are so new they glow. They look like unfurling maple leaves, translucent and fragile. But their shine is also sharp. They are knives of fresh steel being tempered in the same fire I was. As it so happened I was the last to speak, after the other panelists noted Sharon’s service to the New Media project and panel, in this her last year of teaching. This is (pretty much) what I said:
Four hours ago I was sitting in my hotel room after a full day of meetings thinking, “I want to go…but…it will be about the elections, which will stress my shit out. And I’m tired.” But it was like Taylor tower was calling me, sending a signal through my lantern tattoo, pulling me out towards campus. [show BMC tattoo to youngsters] I am going to literally cry here, which will be a giant cringe. Hope is personal to each of you. What works inside of you is specific to you. But it is also collective. Hope is in relationship, because we are a social primate. I like looking out and seeing my troop and yelping at them. It is your connection to your people that will get you through. I got here and found myself on this panel with Sharon, exactly 30 years after I was in the first class of students she taught here. And I’m so happy to be able to have that perfect circle. And I look out at all of you, so close to the age of my own children, sitting in the same seats I sat in, and I feel hope. You are what gives me hope.
I did cry. And I do have hope.
ACTION
John Fetterman: the Senate candidate for Pennsylvania, who stands to lose to the oiliest, snakiest of snake oil salesmen because he has a speech impediment as a result of stroke. Meanwhile, the Republicans are running a man in Georgia who can’t talk because he actually can’t think—Support Raphael Warnock to try to prevent that.
Stacy Abrams – GA Gov candidate and one of my original touchstones for competence and its symbolic and practical place in American politics
Tim Ryan – Running for Senate in Ohio against poser JD Vance, who traded on his family’s suffering and impoverished roots to make a ton of money, and then moved off to be a Coastal Elite. He’s carpetbagging Ohio with tech billionaire money
Catherine Cortez Masto – running to keep her Senate seat for Nevada. There’s some scary shit happening in Nevada around local elections infrastructure. She needs to win, and win unambiguously.
Prop 3 – The Michigan ballot measure to protect reproductive health, liberty, and privacy
Family Forward Action – Oregon’s little community organizing engine that could. They will be out hitting the streets for Tina Kotek and multiple pro working family candidates in Oregon.
Mike Franken: the retired Admiral running against Chuck Grassley in Iowa. This is a long shot, although the polls are surprisingly close. Iowa government is basically entrenched agri-facism. An Iowa friend said the only way Grassley could lose is if he’s dead, and maybe not even then. But my hatred of the Senators who rammed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett up our skirts runs deep.
rage. creation - joy 