I have paid close attention to what Donald Trump has said and done over the past ten years. It’s my job—but it’s also who I am. At the school gate, at the office, online: friends and colleagues come to me to explain the latest Trump thing and perhaps offer some reassurance. Right now, though, I’m in something of a detox.
I have paid close attention to what Donald Trump has said and done over the past ten years. It’s my job—but it’s also who I am (representative photo)Along with two colleagues I am traveling across the country for a podcast series on American Democracy at 250. More on that in due course. As a result, while my colleague Daniel Knowles was following ICE around Minneapolis this week, I was taking a shortcut through Canada en route from Buffalo to Detroit.
There was a risk that Daniel would be caught—and arrested—on Tuesday because of the protesters he was writing about. Many work chats that used to be over phone and email are now WhatsApp groups, where colleagues with subject expertise share thoughts and insights.
As I followed his updates from Minneapolis, a part of me wished I was at my desk instead of on a Canadian highway. Fortunately our Midwest correspondent is still around, and he writes a story about what is becoming the largest civil disobedience movement in America since the 1960s.
Frantic real-time updates have become such a common part of today’s political environment that it’s easy to forget their novelty. I was reminded of this the next day, when the podcast took us to a town in rural Michigan where a Stargate data center is planned. When complete, the project will cover about 30 (American) football fields. But first, a more analog version of American politics unfolded there. Residents, unhappy about the disruption to their farming community, gathered at a town hall to express their displeasure to local officials. There were several feet of snow on the ground. It was dark and about -20 degrees Celsius. But the meeting was packed.
A knock on journalists is that they decide what the story is before they go to a place and then look for things to confirm it. No doubt that will happen. But the most satisfying thing about reporting is finding the opposite of what you expected. I thought the meeting would be awkward and even dull, a cross between an episode of “Parks and Recreation” and a seminar on zoning regulations. What I found were residents of the town (population 2,300) who learned the laws and local ordinances. They were making impassioned speeches to woo their fellow citizens to the township board.
At one point someone quoted something Sam Altman had said about the possibility of destroying humanity and asked if that was really compatible with the values of rural Michigan. William F. Buckley once said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty. In fact, there are plenty of people on the Harvard faculty that you’d want to make high-stakes decisions about technology. And Buckley went to Yale, so was hardly neutral. But his observation makes sense. When you empower people over decisions that directly affect them, they will inform themselves and become experts. Local democracy works.
The kind of meetings I saw in Michigan are happening all over the country. Meanwhile, Washington is ruled by a mad, old king. The murders of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti worry me more than at any other time in the last decade about American democracy. It’s hard to imagine anything less with a “by the people, for the people” regime than agents of the government killing American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and then accusing them of being terrorists. Yet a sweeping statement about American democracy must make room for what I saw in Michigan. To renew itself, the country needs more of that kind of politics. If you look for it, it’s still there.
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If you have your own inspiring examples of what democracy looks like in America, I’d love to hear them. You can write to us at checksandbalance@economist.com.
