Dems the Breaks
It’s remarkable that a writer with Andrew Cockburn’s progressive ideals would deem a Joe Biden candidacy evil, as in “the lesser evil” versus Trump [“Against the Current,” Letter from Washington, October]. In contrast to his past two Democratic predecessors, Biden’s priorities and achievements are stunning. So is the lack of credit he gets for them. Over the course of his presidential term we’ve seen major infrastructure and regulatory improvements, low unemployment rates, substantial COVID-19 relief policies, provisions to lower prescription drug prices, and persistent efforts to pardon student debt, not to mention his recent advocacy for striking auto workers.
The piece’s companion article, a critique by Walter Karp of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. [“The Revolution of Youth,” From the Archive, October], serves to underscore Cockburn’s naïveté about the insurgents’ appeal. As Karp suggests, a successful campaign calls for more than a passionate messenger and an engaging message; it requires political experience. Neither Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nor Marianne Williamson has governed at any level, let alone won a local election. To be sure, Cockburn shows us (but does not state outright) that this country needs ranked-choice, multiparty voting. But short of that, I’ll take an old politician with a track record.
Roger Jones
Sacramento, Calif.
Cockburn’s despair at the likelihood of a Biden–Trump rematch is understandable; the incumbent president does not inspire enthusiasm, while the prospect of a second Trump presidency genuinely frightens. Primary challenges against incumbent presidents rarely succeed, and the incumbents who survive them tend to lose general elections (just look at Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush). This is why serious left-wing political leaders such as Bernie Sanders are not contesting the primaries and are backing Biden instead. Only pillory-prone gadflies like Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have thrown their hats into the ring.
While Cockburn is right to recognize the presidency as the focal point of American political discourse, his exclusive focus on the race for the White House overlooks the basic structuring condition of American politics, which is our federated polity. That vast patchwork includes many progressive state and local campaigns that will unfold over the next year. These may not attract the attention that a presidential campaign does, but they are the building blocks of political power.
Claire Valdez, a union organizer in Queens, is running for a seat on the New York State Assembly with an unabashedly left-wing platform. If elected, she will join the eight Democratic Socialist members in the state legislature who have already passed bills addressing climate change, tenant protections, and other progressive priorities. Any one of these campaigns could eventually produce the kind of Democratic insurgent that Cockburn is looking for on the national stage—just ask Sanders, whose first elected office was a humble mayoralty in one of our smallest states.
Chris Maisano
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Wait and See
As Rachel Kushner notes, everyday activities—watching movies, walking through cities—become almost prayerlike when we give them our undivided attention [“Learning to Wait,” Easy Chair, October]. She recalls sitting for six-hour stretches “watching light change” in the lead-up to writing her first novel, and I am reminded of the California artist Robert Irwin, who in the early Sixties spent most of two years in monastic solitude, making minimalist line paintings in his stripped-down studio. For Irwin and Kushner, these self-imposed restraints led to a curious kind of freedom.
Historically, attention was the domain of preachers, teachers, and bosses, all the supervisors of conformity, while distraction provided a temporary escape: stealing a little time for pleasure or tuning out the sermon to daydream. But somewhere along the way, business-minded engineers invented ways to claw back our free time by monetizing distraction. The digital age gives this predicament a name, the “attention economy,” though it has been around for at least two hundred years, ever since industrial capitalism created the first mass markets and mass media.
In my book Thoreau’s Axe, I survey the works of nineteenth-century social reformers, spiritual seekers, and writers in America who craved a deeper, more sustained attention—an escape from distraction itself. Some of them took up ancient religious practices, like devotional reading and meditation, while others experimented with new styles of writing. Today, we might likewise turn to slow, demanding works of resolutely modern art that strengthen our attention while straining its limits.
Caleb Smith
Professor of English and American studies, Yale University
New Haven, Conn.
