Your Summer Books Issue (I) + Joe Manchin, Explained + Juneteenth Perspectives + NYC election endorsements + glorious music you don’t know but should
In today’s issue
Our summer book recommendations, Part I
West Virginia organizers explain Joe Manchin for the rest of us
A few perspectives on the meaning of Juneteenth today, from Annette Gordon-Reed, Dorian Warren, and Davin Phoenix.
Our NY endorsements: Rank Maya Wiley #1 (see Deepak’s piece in The Nation making the case for Maya here and please don’t rank Yang or Adams!), Rank Brad Lander # 1 (see John Nichols superb piece in The Nation here) and vote for Alvin Bragg for Manhattan DA (see our friend Anurima Bhargava’s passionate and convincing piece making the case below).
Magical music by Yasser Tejada y Palotre & a fab new release by Mike Mangiaracina
The Platypus Summer Book Recommendations (I)
The book recommendations cover wide terrain, from politics to economics to emotions to spirituality (and a little sci-fi!), as one might expect from a newsletter focusing on “Justice, Joy, & Ideas.” (We’ll send a second set of equally worthy recommendations in a couple of weeks). Drumroll, please!
Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for Fair America. On January 6th, while driving back from Georgia — and interspersed with interludes of NPR reporting and Christian talk radio — I finished listening to the audiobook of Our Time Is Now, read by Stacey Abrams herself. The juxtaposition of the double victories in Georgia and the unfolding horror in Washington with Abrams’s analyses of the promise and perils of our political moment — particularly her prescient chapter 9, “Populism and the Death of Democracy” — cemented her status in my mind as the person we progressives most need to listen to. Her book is a manual for activists, lawmakers, and lawmakers-to-be, detailing how the grassroots transformation of Georgia, which Dem insiders once wrote off as unwinnable, can be replicated across the country. (Harry)
Zack Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Carter’s intellectual biography of the British economist who revolutionized the field and established a new paradigm arrives just as neoliberal orthodoxy is beginning to falter. Despite Keynes’ aesthetic elitism and political naivete, the radicalism of his thought shines through, notably his internationalism and his insistence that the point of economic policy is to free people from drudgery and to enable real freedom. Deepak now plans to read about Joan Robinson, Keynes’ less well-known (and more radical) collaborator and successor.
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History. Don’t let Rutger Bregman’s gift for storytelling and clear exposition fool you. Humankind is a profoundly important intervention in the age-old debate about human nature that underlies so many of our political differences. Bregman makes the case that humans are far kinder than we’ve been led to believe by the so-called “veneer theory,” which asserts that just beneath the surface of civility, we are self-interested brutes. He debunks staples of social psychology such as Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on authority and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment as well as the dark vision of William Goldman, whose novel Lord of the Flies imagined boys stranded on an island descending into murderous sadism. Bregman’s discovery of an actual case of shipwrecked boys (reported in the Guardian) is a powerful rebuke to Golding’s pessimism — in reality, they took care of each other. Other chapters highly relevant to our current historical moment include critiques of stop-and-frisk policing, mass incarceration, and monotonous schooling as well as lessons from South Africa and Colombia on how to deal with domestic terrorism. Bregman suggests that society premised on the belief that “most people are decent and kind” would produce institutions radically different from our own, and his book is a clarion call for reform.
adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us –and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice.
brown is among the most original and important activists writing today about social change. Her very brief book dispenses with the noxious critiques of “cancel culture” by right-wingers who want to avoid accountability. She takes a Black, feminist, and queer perspective, asking the crucial question of how the way we treat each other within movement spaces does or doesn’t prefigure the world we seek to build. (We also highly recommend brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds).
Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest. These incredibly imaginative, dense, and gripping novels set across galaxies and centuries are extraordinary. (These are the first two books in a trilogy).
Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. This landmark collection from twenty years ago features essays from academics studying a variety of social movements. Contributors explain, among other things, how shame motivates right-wing evangelical organizing against rights for queer people, how shame inhibited the LGBT community’s movement mobilization against AIDS for six long years — from the first case to the first ACT UP meeting — and what specific techniques the civil rights movement and East German democracy movement used to overcome justifiable fear in the face of brutal violence and repression. Organizers will find the case studies useful and provocative.
Arnie Graf, Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing. In this must-read book, Graf illuminates the principles of organizing using stories and examples from his experience in Baltimore, San Antonio, London, and Boston. The book makes it clear why certain fundamentals – such as deep listening, building relationships, prioritizing recruitment, investing in the growth of grassroots leaders, developing a sound strategy to win, and understanding your opponents – are eternal. Informed by a rare depth of humanity and span of experience, the book should be required reading for every up-and-coming activist, especially in an age in which these principles are out of fashion.
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. This is among the most extraordinary history books we’ve ever read. Grandin shows how the frontier myth shaped American culture and society and how the end of that myth – represented by the replacement of the frontier with the border wall in the country’s imaginary – is a momentous development signaling a whole new set of political horizons. Operating from a framework of racial capitalism, Grandin explains the way in which American individualism is inextricably tied to whiteness, the relationship of state and non-state violence against people of color, and the centrality to our nation’s history of the genocide of Native Americans and continuous border violence against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans (poorly understood by many of us east coasters). It will change how you think about the current incarnation of white nationalism and authoritarianism. In a fascinating exchange on H-Diplo, Grandin responds to criticisms of the book and elaborates on his thesis.
Jamila Michener, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics. This blockbuster explains how our federal system, which gives wide latitude to states in setting Medicaid policies, results not only in widely unequal outcomes for poor people based on where they live but also reinscribes racial hierarchies and often diminishes political engagement by low-income people of color. As half the states reject enhanced unemployment benefits, this book points to the urgent need for a national set of standards and rules rather than a racist patchwork of abusive safety net programs. (Michener’s podcast interview about poverty with Ezra Klein is also a wonder.)
Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives. Odets saw hundreds of clients as a therapist during and after the AIDS crisis. He explains how the trauma of early-life rejection in the family and the AIDS crisis have shaped the internal lives of three generations of gay men, laments the fragmentation of today’s gay community, and shows how distant the preoccupations of some of the modern LGBT movement have been from the harsh realities still facing young gay men. This astonishing book also recovers rejects the “we are just like you” formula of gay politics to insist on a distinctive sensibility, way of being, and the unique contributions that gay people have to make to the world – including offering new models of human relationship.
Davin Phoenix, The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics. In a year of pandemic, economic crisis, and a looming authoritarian threat, The Platypus became interested in the topic of emotions. Progressive politics are often a pretty heady and cerebral enterprise, but most of what actually changes things happens in bodies and through emotions. This brilliant and original book explains how race structures not only the emotions we experience, but how we respond to them – why for example anger motivates white people to vote, but often motivates Black people and other people of color to vote less but march more – and why fear is demobilizing for all groups, except Asian Americans.
Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying. When acclaimed Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche furtively left his comfortable monastic life to go on a four-year wandering retreat, he experienced poverty and suffering, and came close to dying — experiences that changed his understanding of both life and death. George Saunders wrote, “This book has the potential to change the reader’s life forever.”
Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir. Solnit reflects her early development as a writer and a feminist, living broke in 1980s San Francisco in the teeth of the AIDS crisis. She connects the dots between pervasive gender-based violence and the systemic exclusion of women’s voices. The memoir also talks about sources of joy and inspiration – books, city life, and a gay community that modeled alternative ways of being human including new forms of gender relations and new models of family life.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. First published in 2016, this incredible book documents the intertwined history of neoliberal economics and structural racism and illuminates how the failures of narrow electoral strategies to deliver real change in the lives of working-class and poor Black people created the conditions for the emergence of the country’s largest social movement. Taylor explains why the fight against police violence is the leading edge of a broader movement for racial and economic justice.
Reading Recommendations: Joe Manchin, Explained
Check out this fantastic piece in Newsweek by West Virginia organizers Katey Lauer and Rae Kelsch, “Joe Manchin’s Game.” It places the power broker senator in the politics of his state (rather than in beltway machinations). Changing his behavior depends, they argue, not on astroturf lobbying campaigns, but on changing the center of gravity of West Virginia politics. A fascinating read and a mini-clinic in good political strategy. Also a nice clip here of longtime organizer Stephen Smith (who mounted a fantastic campaign for WVA governor!) about the need to build that alternative to Manchin’s political machine.
From Lauer and Kelsch:
Over the last few decades, as Manchin has consolidated corporate power (financiers and corporate lawyers are his most reliable donors), the Democratic Party of West Virginia has become the Joe Manchin Machine (his cousin is the current state chair). This arrangement has served Joe (and his donors) quite well. For the people of West Virginia, it's been a disaster. . . .
Along the way, Manchin accumulated enough clout to relegate the traditional power brokers to the sidelines. The joke in West Virginia is that Manchin talks to everyone. And listens to no one. He cares as much about what his constituents want as the ballplayer cares about the handmade sign being waved in the nose-bleed section. Traditional advocacy and social media campaigns are burnt money.
This is by design. As coach and star, Manchin is free to run his own game. Here's how that game is played:
It starts with Manchin coming out as a "no" on every major Democratic agenda item: stimulus, minimum wage, HR1. The list can and will go on. He's in the headlines for three weeks saying: No, I won't vote for that.
Next, inevitably, he counters with a more moderate position: Well what about reduced stimulus checks? Well what about a lower minimum wage increase? Well what about some small changes to the filibuster?
Finally, having weakened the original proposal, he usually votes in favor. . .
There's only one way to move an establishment politician like Manchin: you have to challenge him on the field. In his 30 years in office, Senator Manchin has only stood up for working people three times. Every single time, he first faced a direct local threat to his power that forced him to act.
Reading Recommendations: Juneteenth
Acclaimed historian and native Texan Annette Gordon-Reed has a great piece in The New Yorker about what Juneteenth has meant to Black Texans. And this review of her new book On Juneteenth in Texas Monthly by Angela Ards is excellent. From the Ards review
On Juneteenth ultimately meditates on the double consciousness of being both Black and Texan. How, Gordon-Reed asks, can Black Texans be proud of their home state when “the stark reality is that the interests of the men most credited with envisioning Texas and bringing it into being were most often antithetical” to Black interests and hopes? “What does this mean for Black Texans thinking of the Texas past?” To answer these questions, this consummate historian suggests that we neither remember nor forget the Alamo but instead remember the people whose “boundless dreams [of freedom] took flight” before we were born, before they themselves were free, who taught us to imagine a better future and demand absolute equality despite those who would deny both. Remember Juneteenth.
These tweets by Dorian Warren and Davin Phoenix and this piece by Jamila Michener demand substantive delivery to redress injustice, not just symbolic recognition of historic harms.
New York City Political Endorsements
Deepak wrote an op-ed in The Nation explaining here why you should rank Maya Wiley #1 for Mayor (and NOT rank Adams or Yang at all!).
John Nichols wrote a fantastic endorsement of Brad Lander for NYC Comptroller in The Nation – you should rank him #1.
And we’re passionate too about Alvin Bragg for Manhattan District Attorney (not a ranked-choice voting race). Our friend Anurima Bhargava wrote this magnificent piece about him on Facebook:
For all my friends in Manhattan: honor this time by going to the polls and early voting for Alvin Bragg for Manhattan District Attorney. The election is this Tuesday, June 22, and early votes can be cast today through Sunday.
From the moment I met Alvin more than a half lifetime ago, I have waited for him to run for office. He is among the finest men and finest attorneys I’ve been privileged to know in my life.
Alvin is the leading progressive and most widely endorsed candidate for Manhattan DA. From the The New York Times, Amsterdam News, Color Of Change, Planned Parenthood NYC, SEIU, The Arena, dozens of local Democrat organizations across Manhattan to Preet Bharara, Congressman Jerry Nadler and Charles Rangel, Zephyr Teachout, Gina and Harry Belafonte, Gwen Carr (Alvin is representing Eric Garner’s family), and Christine Quinn to name a few. Plus beloved Questlove and John Legend! And perhaps most importantly every single person I know who has encountered and worked with Alvin — including at the NY Attorney General’s office where he managed a 1500 person staff, to all of us who went to college and law school and worked to uplift communities with him - are supporting him with every fiber of our being.
As the Data for Progress poll showed this week, the only chance progressives have to win this election is to rally around Alvin. Sadly, the other current frontrunner has revealed where her values lie - she is self financed to the tune of many millions of dollars a week (including dropping 8 million to buy up the election in these last 10 days alone), Wall Street and Republican backed, and has turned to pushing a harsh and falsely negative campaign against Alvin. As a decades long advocate for survivors of sexual and domestic violence, I have experienced directly and first hand the support, dignity and worth that Alvin has accorded survivors - and all the women around him. I am infuriated by her suggestions otherwise.
Alvin served as Chief Deputy Attorney General in New York, and launched the probe of the Trump Foundation, cracked down on tenant harassment, and led investigations of police-involved killings.
To his incredible judgment and integrity, and strategic and managerial experience, Alvin brings his lived experience as a son of Harlem - where he has always resided with his family and where he has been impacted firsthand by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
As DA, Alvin will do what he has always done: repair divides and address disparities; demand justice for those who have experienced domestic, sexual and racial violence; deliver one standard of justice for all; and focus on cases – like unlawful gun sales by licensed firearms companies who flout the law – that actually make us safer.
Alvin is the one we’ve been waiting for. As the New York Times concluded “Mr. Bragg brings the experience, the nimbleness and the moral compass Manhattan needs. He deserves your vote.”
This is not a ranked choice vote like the NY city races, so cast your vote for Alvin.
Delights and Provocations
New York is coming back to glorious life - with unbelievable and electric energy on the streets. Your monotreme correspondents revelled in a concert by Yasser Tejada y Pelotre, who played African-rooted Dominican folk, fusing it with everything: R&B, funk, jazz, and rock in a glorious, raucous celebration.
In his solo project, Mike Mangiaracina has recorded a brilliant new 5-song EP as Waxwing called “around again” that touches on the experience of living through lockdown, and the glimmers of optimism that are popping up as we reach our second springtime under Covid. It’s introspective, reflective, and altogether beautiful. We highly recommend it!