For the past ten years I have paid close attention to everything Donald Trump has said and done. This is my job—but it is also who I have become. At the school gates, in the office, online: friends and colleagues come to me to explain the latest Trump thing and, perhaps, offer some reassurance. Right now, though, I am on something of a detox.
Together with two colleagues I am travelling around the country for a podcast series on American
For the past ten years I have paid close attention to everything Donald Trump has said and done. This is my job—but it is also who I have become. At the school gates, in the office, online: friends and colleagues come to me to explain the latest Trump thing and, perhaps, offer some reassurance. Right now, though, I am on something of a detox.
Together with two colleagues I am travelling around 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 on the way from Buffalo to Detroit.
On Tuesday there was a risk Daniel would be caught up with—and arrested alongside—the protesters he was writing about. A lot of the work chatter that used to happen over the phone and on email is now in WhatsApp groups, where colleagues with subject expertise share thoughts and marginalia.
I was following his updates from Minneapolis, part of me wishing that I was at my desk rather than on a smooth Canadian motorway. Thankfully our Midwest correspondent remains at large, and he wrote a story on what is becoming the biggest civil disobedience movement in America since the 1960s.
Frenetic real-time updates have become such a common part of today’s political environment that it is easy to forget their novelty. I was reminded of this the following day, when the podcast took us to a township in rural Michigan where a Stargate data centre is planned. If completed, the project would cover nearly 30 (American) football fields. But first, a more analogue version of American politics was unfolding there. Residents, unhappy about the disruption to their farming community, had gathered in a town hall to voice their displeasure to local officials. There were a couple of feet of snow on the ground. It was dark and about –20°C. Yet the meeting hall was packed.
One 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 does happen. But the most satisfying thing when out reporting is finding the opposite of what you expected. I had supposed the meeting would be awkward and maybe even dull, a cross between an episode of “Parks and Recreation” and a seminar on zoning regulations. What I found was residents of the township (population 2,300) who had learned the law and the local ordinances. They were making impassioned speeches to sway their fellow citizens on the township board.
At one point someone quoted something Sam Altman had said about the potential of AI to destroy humanity and asked rhetorically if that was really consistent with the values of rural Michigan.William F. Buckley once said that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard. In fact, the Harvard faculty includes plenty of people you would want making high-stakes decisions on technical subjects. And Buckley went to Yale, so was scarcely impartial. But there’s sense in his observation. When you give people power over decisions that directly affect them, they will inform themselves and become expert. Local democracy works.
Meetings like the one I witnessed in Michigan are taking place all over the country. Meanwhile, Washington is being ruled by a mad, old king. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have left me more worried about American democracy than at any other time in the past decade. It is hard to imagine anything less in keeping with rule “by the people, for the people” than a government whose agents kill American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and then accuse them of being terrorists. Yet sweeping statements about democracy in America need to make room for what I saw in Michigan. To renew itself, the country needs more of that sort of politics. It’s still there if you look for it.
If you have your own encouraging examples of what democracy in America looks like, I would love to hear them. You can write to us at checksandbalance@economist.com.
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