After John Kerry’s failed presidential run in 2004, Democrats didn’t just double down on cities — they basically behaved as though building and maintaining power in cities was the only strategy going forward.
The Urban Archipelago theory argued that American cities were strongholds of progressive thought, and rural America had become an underpopulated conservative wasteland. The future, therefore, would be written in the city and those policies would emanate outward to other parts of the country.
Plenty of great policies erupted from the Urban Archipelago strategy: marriage equality, the $15 minimum wage, enhanced worker protections. The 2008 and 2012 electoral maps, which saw Obama winning handily even in traditionally purple states, seemed to indicate that Democratic cities could light the way for American politics. The few Democrats who won high-profile offices in rural states, like Montana Senator Jon Tester, were basically treated as weird anomalies.
But all at once in 2016, the weaknesses in the Urban Archipelago theory became obvious. Donald Trump won the presidency while losing the popular vote by an overwhelming margin, the Republican Senate maintained a stranglehold on the legislative process, and Trump and the Senate began packing courts with conservative judges.
The partisan divide between rural America and urban America has never been wider, even though rural America has never needed progressive economics more.
America’s farmlands and small towns have for decades been plagued by a host of interrelated crises…
We’ve all seen the mind-boggling charts demonstrating how income inequality has expanded to unprecedented levels in America since the late 1970s. We know that this ever-growing divide between the wealthiest one percent of all Americans and the rest of us was the result of a systemic trickle-down economic framework of tax cuts and deregulation promoted by conservative groups. (If you need a refresher, I wrote about the origins of that conspiracy earlier this summer.) So we know what happened to ruin the American economy, and we know who committed the heist, and why they did it.
But the funny thing is, not many progressives really understand much about the economic system that was in place for most of the 20th century. We know that up until the late 1970s, an ever-growing number of Americans were included in the economy — though of course racism and sexism held too many of our neighbors back from fully participating.
We know that tax rates for the wealthiest Americans were high in post-war America, and that investments in our infrastructure were at unprecedented levels for most of the last century. But the mechanics of that American prosperity — the philosophy behind why the economy worked as well as it did — have been largely forgotten.
In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, David Goldstein credits economist John Maynard Keynes as “without a doubt, the most influential economist of the first three quarters of the 20th century. It was his ideas that guided the policies of the New Deal and essentially defined American liberalism,” Goldstein said.
In the episode, Goldstein interviews Zach Carter, the author of a new bestselling book titled “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.” Carter wrote the book to help demystify and add nuance to Keynes’s life and work.
While most Econ 101 classes simply, and truthfully, identify Keynes as “the economist who argued that governments should spend money during recessions to help pull the economy out of the doldrums and get employment moving again,” Carter said, much of the nuance and understanding of Keynes’s story has been forgotten as the neoliberal trickle-down crowd has taken hold.
Keynesianism, Carter argues, was “more a way of looking at the world than a specific set of policies or policy tools.” Keynes “was a social thinker, a philosopher, and a statesman whose intellectual project was concerned with the great problems of his day. And those problems in particular were World War II and the rise of authoritarianism all over the world of the 1920s and 1930s.”
At a time when authoritarianism and nationalism is on the rise again, Carter’s framing of Keynes as someone who sought to use economics to “prevent war and heal societies that have been torn apart or put under strain” seems more timely than ever…
At the end of May, Ada’s Technical Books co-founder Danielle Hulton made a remarkable announcement: Ada’s would be taking over operations of local minichain Fuel Coffee. By any metric, buying three neighborhood coffee shops in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse is a bold move. Even more surprising, though, was Hulton’s announcement that the three Fuel locations will also become small indie bookstores, with each eventually carrying roughly 1,000 nonfiction, fiction and children’s titles.
Fuel Coffee seems like a wise investment no matter what the business climate. Owner/founder Dani Cone expanded Fuel from one location in 2005 to three beloved neighborhood hangout spots in Wallingford, Montlake and Capitol Hill. (Cone is keeping 10% of her stake in Fuel.) But conventional wisdom would argue that opening three small neighborhood independent bookshops in Seattle in the year 2020 is, to put it gently, a little bit of a risk.
Luckily, Hulton has never paid much attention to conventional wisdom.
When she and her husband David founded Ada’s 10 years ago, she had no bookstore experience, but coming in fresh proved to be a strength. While many new bookstores flounder around for a few years before honing their stock and discovering their audience, Ada’s almost immediately found its own rhythm as a scientifically focused bookshop, cafe and STEM community hub. Three years after it opened, the store expanded from a tiny annex at the end of Broadway to a lushly renovated house on 15th Avenue East, where it has thrived ever since.
“Ada’s is what I want to exist in the world, and I’ve gotten lucky that other people want it too,” Hulton explained on the phone in a recent interview with The Seattle Times.
With Ada’s firmly established, Hulton had been looking to expand into new businesses. When Cone asked if Hulton and her husband would be interested in buying Fuel back in January, they were enthusiastic about the opportunity. One statewide lockdown and two massive quarterly plunges in GDP later, Hulton found herself in charge of four independent bookstore/coffee shops and a staff of 20 bookseller/baristas…
Is it sacrilege to admit that I prefer Zadie Smith’s essays to her fiction? If you asked me to identify Smith’s most admirable qualities, the clear and precise thinking of her non-fiction work would be at the top of the list.
Thankfully, there’s very little end-of-the-world-ism in Intimations. Instead, Smith does what she does best, reflecting on the smallest details of the world remade by coronavirus: the way people interact, the noises that have disappeared, the language that people use. The closest Smith gets to End Times squalor is an essay hinging on President Trump’s March statement that “I wish we could have our old life back.”
Instead of blood and thunder, we get nuance and delight. Smith compares our willingness to keep working through the early days of the lockdown “like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on.”
Smith compares the thought of carrying on small talk in the middle of all this to a meme of Mel Gibson talking normally to a hyper-gory Jim Caviezel in full costume for the bloodiest moment of The Passion of the Christ. She wonders how “all that prior abundance fit[s] into this new habitat.” She doesn’t make grand proclamations for the human race, just notices how we settle in the dust of this weird new world.
Intimations isn’t a heavy lift or a shocker. Most of its essays will likely be repurposed and absorbed into future editions of Smith’s essay collections. But for right now, it’s a visit from a friend a time when you most need it—a calming acknowledgement that, yes, the world has gone sideways, but we’re still here.
Last weekend, we passed a milestone moment in the 2020 election cycle: We are now less than 100 days away from Tuesday, November 3 — Election Day. In normal years, this would be the time when the general public really starts tuning in to the messages both parties are running with, familiarizing themselves with the candidates, and deciding who gets their vote.
But just as it has with every other aspect of our lives, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown everything we know about politics into disarray. It’s possible that voters, already familiar with Biden from his years as Obama’s vice president and well aware of President Trump’s COVID-19 response, have already made up their minds. Or it’s equally possible that the electorate will be rocked by a series of surprises that will change the foundations of the race between now and November.
Two things we do know for sure as we head into the home stretch of this never-ending presidential campaign season: first, people need to vote on Election Day; and second, coronavirus won’t disappear between now and then. Just as an economy is stronger when more people participate in it, a democracy is stronger when more people’s voices are heard. So how can we ensure that the people are heard, at a time when simply going into a busy public space is dangerous?
The coronavirus pandemic has made it almost impossible to operate the arts venues where people tend to gather and linger: galleries, arts education spaces and bookstores were all closed for months. For Ballard’s Push/Pull — a combination of outsider art gallery, small-press bookstore and education space — COVID-19 could hardly have been more devastating.
Director Maxx Follis-Goodkind says 2020 has basically been cursed from the start for Push/Pull: “There was major construction on the street for all of this year up until just a few weeks ago,” she says. “So we were already struggling and trying to figure out how to reach more people and establish different revenue streams.”
It’s not like it’s ever been easy; you don’t create an underground arts hub to get rich. Push/Pull was founded by Follis-Goodkind and her now-husband, artist Seth Goodkind, as a stall in the Greenwood Collective communal arts building. In Push/Pull, she says, “we wanted a space that was about art and illustration and comics and printing, encompassing the entirety of an artist’s career.”
A couple times an hour, a tiny swatch of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting flashes across my Twitter feed, courtesy of an automated account called @Bruegelbot. Bruegel’s paintings—and here we’ll just refer to him as “Bruegel,” setting aside the other painters with the same surname—are notoriously busy, packed with tiny figures going about their business in nearly every square inch of the painting. @bruegelbot is valuable because it removes the context of the painting; without all the business and busyness of Bruegel’s work surrounding them, I can better appreciate the details for themselves.
This tiny swatch of a painting has enough dynamic action in it to fill a painting on its own:
Of course, the too-muchness of a Bruegel painting is the point: you look at a Bruegel painting to feel overwhelmed, to hunt for the proverbial Waldo who will imbue your perception of the painting with a purpose. My focal point of a Bruegel painting will always, necessarily, be different than yours.
I stumbled across a perfect description of the seemingly random way details in a Bruegel painting latch onto your attention in “Heart Museum,” the sprawling lyric essay that opens Durga Chew-Bose’s collection Too Much and Not the Mood:
A Bruegel print hanging in our home was essentially my jackpot. I mined that peasant-wedding scene so intently that elements of its narrative details, like porridge bowls, the lip of a jug, that pureed Bruegel red—like tomato soup from the can—and a child in the foreground licking a plate, all belong to my memory’s reel. It’s the merging that occurs from housing a mental archive instead of contending with the sound of parents who were speaking to each other in a strained tone. Of momentarily acquitting myself of childhood grievances: of all the birds we hear in trees but never see, but know are there.
The word “narrative,” there, is key. Bruegel, to me, feels like the writer’s painter—though perhaps that could be colored by the fact that my introduction to Bruegel came in Michael Frayn’s comic novel Headlong, about the discovery of a lost Bruegel painting. But the stuffed locations and cramped characterization of Bruegel’s work are undeniably novelistic, and I believe that if a novelist like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy could paint, their paintings would be like Bruegel’s: packed with human drama, as full of as much as they could realistically cram in before everything fell apart. The painting revealed at the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser novel Bluebeard must at least superficially resemble a Bruegel, because it’s a painting that basically contains everything the book had previously mentioned.
Bluebeard instilled in me the realization that most writers would be terrible painters. I worked at a newspaper for years, and listening to writers try to explain how the art department should illustrate their latest book review always led to blush of embarrassment. Often, the writers would unintentionally describe a hackneyed political cartoon from the early 1900s: “Maybe they could draw, like, Lady Justice standing in one corner and then over on the other side we could have soldiers and in the middle there could be a bunch of orphans standing and staring accusingly at the reader? But the reader won’t know they’re orphans, so maybe they should have a big ‘orphans’ label on them? And then in the sky is a general creeping sense of menace, with claws and fangs…”
A writer would never trust to a single picture what a thousand words could do. But I suppose that’s their job.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruegel lately because I recently read Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels, a profusely-illustrated memoir-essay by Toby Ferris. The book’s conceit is, to put it kindly, a bit precious: at the age of 42—precisely half his recently deceased father’s age—Ferris sets out on a worldwide journey to view all 42 of the existing Bruegel paintings, in part because Bruegel died at the age of 42.
The premise is a bit like a bad high school algebra problem: a writer having a midlife crisis is on a train going west at 42 miles an hour, which is the same age his father hit midlife while on a train going east at 42 miles an hour, so what artificial quest can the writer choose to toss a narrative around this astonishing array of meaningless numerical coincidences? But thankfully, Ferris doesn’t make a big deal of sticking to the numerology laid out in the book’s promotional copy. Instead, Short Life is a rambling travelogue, an opportunity to see a small stretch of the world through Ferris’s eyes, magnified by the lens of Bruegel.
Ferris writes beautifully about the circumstances in and around Bruegel paintings. He’s the rare art historian whose prose can compete with its subject, in terms of sheer imagination:
When will the last Bruegel painting disappear? They are fragile. Which one will it be? And what about records of his paintings, his existence? Will his name vanish along with the last painting, or will he, some Apelles of a forgotten history, a forgotten Europe, persist as myth, the JPEGs flickering out on servers one by one, corrupt unreadable binary representations of long-forgotten cult objects?
Still, Short Life feels a bit like a comedic road trip film, with Ferris driving and Bruegel, the silent agent of chaos, riding shotgun. They play off each other in ways that seem to escape Ferris.
He observes that “Bruegel painted outsiders” including “beggars, peasants, children…at swim in a turbulent social sea.” It’s a striking observation because Short Life is a product of unobserved luxury: Ferris gets to travel in style, visiting large museums and reflecting on George Eliot in some of the world’s most beautiful locations. One can almost picture Bruegel wanting to stop to talk to a destitute woman at the side of the road, while Ferris turns up the radio and ever-so-slightly presses down on the gas pedal until the opportunity has passed.
To be fair, Ferris does occasionally come close to recognizing the Odd Couple-ness of the pairing: “I have just come from Prague, where summer is at its glorious height in the Lobkowicz Palace. But it is winter which underpins all of Bruegel,” he intones.
Ultimately, Bruegel proves to be an uncomfortable partner for an interior journey explained in a book-length monologue. Bruegel rejects interiority; he’s bursting to be social, running toward large crowds of people with his hands spread wide.
Perhaps that’s why Bruegel has remained so firmly stuck at the front of my mind for the whole of 2020. In the middle of the quarantine lockdown in April of this year, Bruegel scenes were basically unthinkable—all those bodies packed together so tightly, breathing and screaming on each other with no concept of personal space. Coronavirus would frolic through a Bruegel crowd like a happy puppy.
And then, as the later days of May arrived, the crowds came back, in the form of Black Lives Matter protests around the world. Even with the necessary masks on all those faces, Bruegel would probably adore the chance to paint the people taking over the streets with such unfettered energy, throwing statues of monstrous men into the sea and taking back public space that for too long had been ceded to politeness.
This is the central question of 2020: how do we as humans fill space in the world together, in a way that we all can survive? The answer can be found in most Bruegel paintings: by being messy and joyous and complicated and overwhelming and, most of all, human.
Even if you don’t know Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s name, you’ve likely heard him speak. In January of last year, you probably saw a viral video on social media of Bregman speaking truth to power in front of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bregman’s speech, in which he told an audience full of CEOs, royalty, and heirs that if they really wanted to do good in the world, they should “stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes,” made him an instant celebrity.
Bregman did the requisite TV and podcast tour to explain why rich people should pay a lot more in taxes, and then he went silent for a while. Now, he’s back making headlines with a surprising new book. On the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein asked Bregman to sum up the book in a few words. His response?
“Deep down, most people are pretty decent,” Bregman announced.
You might not expect a notorious bomb-throwing firebrand to follow up his big sensational activist moment with a manifesto about human kindness and cooperation.
Bregman admits that the premise of his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful Historysounds like “it’s not really a threat to anyone,” but he explains that “it’s a really subversive idea if you really think it through, because throughout history a more cynical view of human nature has been used by those in power to legitimize power differences and hierarchy.”
In the late 1970s and very early 1980s, Capitol Hill was one of the few neighborhoods in the country where LGBTQ+ people could largely live out of the closet. To the young people moving to Seattle from more regressive parts of the country, the area around Broadway — with its openly queer arts organizations and its vibrant nightlife — felt practically utopian. (LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning, with the + denoting everything along the gender and sexuality spectrum.)
For those transplants, Capitol Hill seemingly had it all: restaurants, arthouse movie theaters, dance clubs, drag shows, alternative media. But after they lived there for a month or two, they’d start complaining about one particularly noteworthy hole in the fabric of the community: Capitol Hill needed a really good general interest bookstore.
When Michael Coy moved to Seattle in 1981, he wanted to fill that need…
I’m old enough to remember that, when Democrats were passing the Affordable Care Act through Congress, Republicans argued that they were tampering with the greatest healthcare system in the world. The argument I saw most often in comment threads and on cable news, if I recall correctly, went that a free market healthcare system made room for untold innovations in the medical space, taking care of more people with better, more efficient healthcare than in any other nation on Earth.
It’s pretty much impossible today to claim with a straight face that the United States has the best healthcare on the planet. If you Google “greatest healthcare in the world,” the first result is an article about the most developed public healthcare systems in the world which helpfully explains, “The US ranks 15th.”
The free market hasn’t kept pricing down, either. The New York Times recently caught one Texas firm charging over $2000 per coronavirus test. After the Times investigation, the firm lowered their charges to “just” $300. And some hospitals have charged patients $400,000 — or even over one million dollars — for lifesaving coronavirus treatments. The coronavirus pandemic has also put the lie to the idea that the American employer-based health insurance model is a good idea. As soon as businesses had to lock down to flatten the curve, nearly 27 million Americans lost their insurance, at the time when many of them needed it most.
