Weekend Reading

I’ve often said that the Constitution was designed to prevent America from realizing its founding ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But that’s an incomplete story, as made clear in University of Pennsylvania constitutional law professor Kermit Roosevelt’s underappreciated book, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story.

Anat opened this week’s show with a recap of her essential new piece, “Don’t Make the Argument.” (Big thanks to Anat for stepping in solo when I had to arrive late, and for navigating technical issues with the chat with her usual grace and good humor.) Her piece argues that every time Democrats have been advised to go quiet on something, it has backfired — and that only saying the thing, out loud, over years, can actually move the ground towards the change we need.

This week’s “Meeting the Moment” featured our dear friend and former Research Collaborative colleague, Jiggy Geronimo, whose work on narrative strategy and the surveillance state is as amazing as her name. We discussed her important new piece on Substack about how to get our comms to break through in the modern information environment — which pro-democracy progressives spend a lot more time talking about than actually doing.

Anat calls Doran Schrantz — the longtime former leader of ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, and the current founder and project director of the Organizing Lab — “your favorite organizer’s favorite organizer.” Our conversation with her on this week’s “Meeting the Moment” reveals why.

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Esosa Osa, the founder and CEO of Onyx Impact. Before founding Onyx, she was the former deputy executive director at Fair Fight Action and senior advisor on Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign. Esosa founded Onyx Impact with a clear mission — nonprofit research, media, and technology dedicated to amplifying Black voices and protecting Black communities in an era of deliberate, accelerating propaganda.

For nearly two decades, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative has been one of the most effective voting rights and democracy organizations in the country — so of course the Trump regime decided to target them for political persecution. On June 11, FBI agents raided OOC’s offices with guns drawn, interrogated people for hours without legal counsel, and showed up at the homes of staff and volunteers to intimidate them and even question their underage children.

This week Anat and I sat down with Rebecca Solnit, talking about her new book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Solnit’s core argument is that we’ve lost our baselines — that most people have no real memory of how dramatically the world has changed for women, queer people, immigrants, and Indigenous communities, and without that baseline, you can’t see what the fascist MAGA backlash is actually trying to undo.

There’s been plenty of debate, and plenty of jokes, about the incomplete autopsy of the 2024 election released by the DNC. In this week’s “Meeting the Moment,” Anat and I took a look under the coffin lid (so to speak) to reveal why these kinds of autopsies exist in the first place. I’ve been professionally involved in every federal election since 1976.

I had a great conversation with Rick Perlstein yesterday that I’ve been wanting to have for a long time. Rick’s four-book series chronicling the rise of the American right, from Goldwater through Reagan (Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland), is the most comprehensive historical account of, to use his metaphor, how the right-wing storm gathered.

Anat and I were joined this week by Stasha Rhodes, who has been leading coalitional efforts to defend democracy since long before most people realized that it needed defending. Most recently, she’s been focused on the Roberts Court specifically through her work at United for Democracy. She just published a beautiful piece about Callais and her family history in Louisiana that you all should read: “The System My Grandfather Deserved: Our Political System Isn’t Broken.