Midterms in the Wake of Political Violence

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This will be the election of the caravan.

Two weeks before the midterm elections, President Trump is rallying Robert.

The president is insisting once again without any evidence that unknown Middle Easterners as well as criminals are in a caravan of

you know I think that blue wave is being rapidly shattered the American voter you have a lot to consider so much on the line

you just heard President Donald Trump's closing play for the midterm elections immigrants immigrants immigrants in the first nationwide electoral referendum on his administration and the GOP-led Congress Americans face a choice with massive ramifications and their decisions to vote, not to vote, how to vote come amid a shocking spree of political violence, an ugly showdown over who should be allowed to vote, and of course, an active investigation into the run-up and aftermath of the last American election.

With all this, what will Tuesday's vote mean?

And what happens after?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

Here in DC in the studio this week, it's just me and Kevin Townsend, our producer, but we are connected remotely with two of the sharpest journalists covering American politics.

Calling in from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is our staff writer, Emma Green.

Emma, so glad you could join us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Thank you again for taking the time.

And calling in from San Antonio is our staff writer, Adam Serwer.

Hello, Adam.

Hey, thanks for having me on.

And thank you for joining us also.

So we're talking about Tuesday.

The stakes of this election that's going to happen on Tuesday have been incredibly high for the past two years.

But in these past few weeks, it feels like those stakes have just been ratcheting up in this brutal way.

There's already all of this weight and rhetoric and division piling onto this election.

The president has been riling people up with dire warnings about this caravan slowly journeying through Latin America.

Packages with explosive material were sent to critics of the president, and then 11 people massacred at worship in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Emma, you've spent the past few days in that Pittsburgh neighborhood, and your piece on the aftermath of the shooting was just heart-wrenching.

The folks that you're around are in mourning, I imagine, and I imagine their thoughts are probably predominated by both the 11 people they've lost and the healing, hopefully, of the survivors.

Is Tuesday's election in the air at all there?

I have to say, I haven't had a conversation with anyone who explicitly has said midterm elections got to change what's happening.

You know, I'm rooting for this and that senator.

At the protests yesterday that were a response to President Trump's visit to Pittsburgh, which was controversial, there were people who shouted things like, vote, vote, vote, who seemed to be making an explicit connection to what happened to them and to our political climate and, you know, called for action and change as part of that.

I just think people here are reeling.

It is so soon after what happened in Pittsburgh.

I mean, we forget that in the media because news cycles move so quickly and we assume that we have the full story in just a few days, But the process here of healing is going to be so long.

And this is only just beginning.

The funerals are still happening today.

This week, people are sitting Shiva, which is this mourning ritual in Judaism where people stay in their houses and get greeted by visitors and

essentially

wear clothes.

They don't wash their clothes.

They sit on a low stool and they just mourn.

And that's what's happening here:

mourning.

Yeah.

Adam, you are much closer than I am at the moment to our southern border.

You're in San Antonio.

And I'm curious there, what is on people's minds as you walk around?

How is Tuesday,

what is the meaning of it in San Antonio right now?

Well, I would say that compared to, say, Washington, D.C., people are not

as preoccupied with the midterms.

But, I mean, Bayar County is a is a pretty deep blue island in a sea of red.

I mean, when you walk around here, you see a lot of

beto signs, beto t-shirts, uh, beto stickers, uh, and not just, you know, and not just people you you might expect to be Democratic voters.

I've seen a lot of old white guys wearing beto t-shirts, for example.

Um, but I think

you know,

I'm not sure anybody knows what's going to happen on Tuesday because there are so many variables.

You know, after 2016, when Trump beat expectations by taking several typically blue states by a very small margin, I think people are wondering: is something going to happen at the last minute?

You know, is the polling that shows Democrats ahead correct?

Is the polling that shows Republicans ahead in some instances undercounting

a Democratic midterm electorate that usually sleeps in these kinds of races.

And I think the truth is, we really don't know.

There are just so many different things.

There's so many different things happening

that we're really just not going to be certain what

the actual mood of the country is until we get to Tuesday.

Yeah.

We

often talk about elections

as being

about voters' referendums on the issues issues that affect their day-to-day lives.

And there's this

sort of stark dissonance between

that version of the election and what the decision to vote or not to vote and how to vote on Tuesday means,

that it is voters weighing in on the issues that are meaningful to them.

And this other universe in which

these events, this kind of cataclysm of violence and warnings and fear,

this the migrant caravan, that those are catalysts, that it is this kind of palpable terror and fear driving people to or away from the polls.

And I'm curious, Adam, how do you think issues, are conventional issues on people's minds as we approach this election?

Or are we dealing with something different?

Yes, they are.

And it's a real problem for the president because he doesn't have a record to run on.

He promised everybody a great health care plan that was going to cover everyone.

Instead, he tried to essentially cut Obamacare in a way that was going to leave millions and millions uninsured.

He cut his own taxes and that of the richest people in the country.

His people can't campaign on that.

And what you've seen instead is that Republicans have been lying about their position on the most popular element of Obamacare, which is coverage for

ban on discrimination against people with preexisting conditions and health insurance.

And Trump keeps saying, oh,

we're going to protect those people.

But in fact, his administration is suing to remove those protections and will repeal them if his party retains control of both houses of Congress.

Now, the president has actually tried to make this not about issues in the technical sense, like

about policy issues.

Instead, he's made it a referendum on himself and on American identity.

And he's done that by making immigration the issue in a way that I think is

not just divisive, but empowering of people who hold extreme views on race.

And you can see that with his characterization of

the migrant caravan, which is weeks away from reaching the United States, if it ever does,

sending, we have more American troops at the border now than we do with Syria.

You send the military to kill the enemy.

That's why you do it.

And Trump has been making it very clear to his base that

these people who are fleeing violence or trying to look for a better life

are like an invading army.

He said he just sort of made up something about the caravan beating back the Mexican military in some sort of

great military clash.

He made it sound like, you know, the Iraqi army was fighting ISIS.

And he's doing it on purpose because he wants to freak people out to make sure that his base goes to the Poles.

And I don't know if that's going to work.

I don't think any of us know if it's going to work.

But I think if it does work, it really says something about where the country is.

And if it...

crashes and burns, I think that also says something.

But, you know, as I said earlier, this is not like a real issue.

It's It's a

these people, if they get here, they will either have a case for asylum, most will not, and the government will adjudicate that, and most will be turned away because they don't,

you know, they don't have a legitimate case for asylum, and that's it.

There's no national emergency.

And I think what you see, I think while the president did not make this man an anti-Semite, he didn't make him pick up a gun,

he was obsessed with the caravan as a threat to national security because he was listening to the president's language and he believed what he was hearing.

I think to that point, extremists resort to violence often as in some ways a counterpoint to the democratic system, as a way of suggesting implicitly even that the franchise, the vote, democracy is not a legitimate answer to their issues and that

violence is the only legitimate answer as an alternative.

Aaron Trevor Brandon The president does that all the time.

Right.

I mean, that's, I mean, this is not a problem that the Army solves.

And he's sending the Army because he wants to send the message that these people are the enemy.

And the fact that he recently, I mean, and earlier this week, he said, you know, he told Axios he was

thinking of quote unquote, basically overturning the 14th Amendment with an executive order, which would be absolutely unconstitutional.

But unfortunately, the Supreme Court has a history of basically ignoring what the 14th Amendment says when it comes to the rights of people of color.

But that

decision, I mean, that is a decision that is aimed squarely at the racial anxiety that helped elect a president, which is this is a country that

has a growing population of people of color.

And there are a lot of people in the white majority whom that makes nervous.

And what he's saying is, don't worry, we're not going to let these people outnumber you.

Instead, we're going to create a class of stateless

sub-citizens who

don't have any rights at all.

There's almost nothing as blatantly expressive of the president's idea that American citizenship is a category that should be rooted in race than

his declared intent to overturn the amendment to the Constitution that was forever supposed to remove any question about whether you have to be white to be an American.

Aaron Ross Powell, but I guess in the context of political violence, of politically motivated violence,

and

we are still just

reeling from this massacre and

also

explosive material that has been sent to critics of the president in the week leading up to that massacre.

And

Emma, I'm curious, from where you stand, do you think that

the

attack on Saturday is pushing people towards or away from the democratic process?

I'm not sure I really know how to answer that, in part because I think the

scene that we've seen here is one that is unfortunately not new in America.

There have been distinctive elements of this shooting in Pittsburgh.

I wrote about the way that Jews mourn and bury their dead and how distinctive that was for trying to give dignity to people who have died and to bring a process around that grief.

But in other ways, it is a reminder of what we saw in Parkland.

It's a reminder of Sutherland Springs where a church was shot up.

There are so many instances in our recent history of a shooting like this that

it's almost hard to say whether this is going to be the moment that somehow transforms our political process.

Unfortunately, I think everything we've seen before indicates that it's not.

I will say though that I see evidence, not just here in Pittsburgh, where I am now, but in all sorts of reporting that I've done and other people have done, that these attacks have galvanized people who previously didn't consider themselves political or who did consider themselves political, but who have become

either differently opinioned on a certain issue or more radicalized on certain issues, especially gun control.

And the kind of political movement that we saw, for example, after the Parkland shooting of people rising up against gun violence, I do think is going to be a big theme in the midterm elections.

So in that way, I think that this tragedy, just like so many tragedies before, is going to be an inflection point and a coloration of a lot of people's votes this midterm election.

This was also an attack on a religious community that is overwhelmingly liberal.

So I think, you know, there's,

I think it's sort of hard to say,

you know, these people were, for the most part, were already not going to vote for Trump.

And I'm not sure that this

necessarily alters that but I do wonder if

other people who are not Jewish, who are not

liberal, conservative, or reform Jews,

who saw this and saw the way the president handled this

are going to think that he handled it poorly and are going to vote on that basis.

On the other hand, what we've seen over and over again is that there's a lot of people in the country who think that when the president is criticized that the media is being unfair and are galvanized from the other side.

So again, I think we're not going to know where the country is until Tuesday.

And I think it's extremely difficult really to take the temperature.

Just adding to what Adam said, one of the themes that I've been thinking about here, especially watching the protests last night against President Trump's visit to Pittsburgh, is this gap in analysis, even among people who might identify as liberal or democratic, but certainly across the country, in how people think about violence like this, whether they think about the gunmen who came in and shot up this synagogue as being the act of a lone crazy person,

or whether they see it as part of a systemic network of political rhetoric of empowered groups of white nationalists and anti-Semites.

You know, I think We saw this this week with Sarah Huckabee Sanders talking about President Trump having Jewish American children, grandchildren, being very supportive of the Jewish American community, really seeming to experience real rage.

In her analysis, I detected this idea that the president himself is not an anti-Semite, or at least she's claiming the president himself is not an anti-Semite.

And I think she and a lot of Republicans might say, I don't see the systems thinking that you all see, that what he's done has helped to facilitate a culture of hatred or has empowered a fringe group.

I think that's maybe one of the major breaking points in our political culture right now is seeing those systems or not.

So we actually have polling on this.

I mean, like the Public Religion Research Institute recently did a poll on this.

And there is a large portion of the country who thinks this.

I mean, again, it's so hard, right?

Because after 2016, we learned a lesson about being extremely careful with public opinion surveys.

But, I mean, I think for Jews, it's not just a matter of like systemic violence

in the sense of like the Parkland sense, like people can get guns too easily and then they can use them to commit these crimes.

I think I have not spoken to any Jewish person who does not see, and I am myself Jewish, I haven't spoken to anybody who does not see what happened

in Pittsburgh as part of a larger continuum of anti-Semitic violence that has been going on for thousands of years almost.

And maybe that's just

my particular Jewish-American bubble.

But I do think that

what Emma's talking about as far as is this different from Parkland, I certainly think that American Jews look at it differently.

I'm not sure.

I think she's right that we don't know if other people do.

And I guess the question that I'm trying to

ask around is what is Tuesday a referendum on exactly?

In the different scenarios that could happen on Tuesday,

one of the ones that is at least probabilistically likeliest is a sort of split decision that

Americans

vote to

perhaps keep the Senate in Republican control and vote to

enshrine a Democratic majority in the House.

What would that scenario mean?

What would it mean for it to go either of the other two ways?

Well, so I think,

you know,

I think it's actually hard to interpret what, I mean, even if there's a Democratic win right in the House, is that going to be because of because

the American people were turned off by Trump's campaigning on white identity politics?

Or is it going to be because they're freaking out about health care and they don't want to lose it?

If the Republicans keep the Senate, is that really going to be a reflection of public opinion in America as a whole?

Or is it a reflection of a map where Democrats are playing defense

in states that went for Trump in 2016?

There's so many variations of how this can go

that,

you know, I think in some sense, whether people know it or not, they are voting in a referendum on everything that Trump has done for the past two years.

But that might not be why,

what's motivating their vote in the end, if that makes any sense.

Yeah.

What are the variables that you're looking to to answer those questions after Tuesday's results come in or as they come in?

I think turnout is a big question.

I have been doing some reporting recently on low turnout areas of the country.

I was in Arizona last week in the congressional district that relative to the citizen voting age population has the lowest voter turnout in the country in 2016.

And just trying to understand why it is that people don't get involved, why they stay home, why they feel that politics is

alien from or irrelevant to their lives.

And

if we see on Tuesday, Wednesday that there are huge turnout from young people, more from suburban women, more from Latinos, more from people who have traditionally been marginalized, that to me will be some sort of sign.

I think similarly, it's very possible that for all the hype and expectation and

reading of the tea leaves that we political reporters are paid to do, that we're going to see a midterm election that ultimately is as uninterpretable as Adam says, which is there could be a lot of causes for the different outcomes.

And also, if we see voting patterns that are similar to the past, who knows what to make of that?

And so I guess I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job here or get myself fired as someone who

provides valued analysis.

But I do think that what we have to look for are changes in patterns of who is motivated to be a part of this process.

And from there, try to understand within their local context, their state, their district, and maybe their country what they might be reacting to.

Yeah.

So I think there's one thing, one metric we can look at, and that is, do the Democrats only overperform in blue areas or do they overperform in red areas that went for Trump last time around or typically go Republican.

And I think that is the one metric where you can see whether the president's political style and his substantive approach to politics and to running the government have damaged his standing in the communities that put him in office.

I think that's the one place we can look to really find

what we're looking for in terms of what does this election mean.

Yeah.

I think to both of your points, actually, the question of who doesn't vote is as interesting in some ways to me as well as

what we see from who does.

One of the many issues that's been in the water in the past few weeks and the temperature has been rising on has been the question of voter rights.

In Georgia, there's a governor's race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp, which might be the starkest referendum on voting rights that we've seen, at least in recent American history.

How much of an effect, Adam, do you think that

the limiting of who has access to the franchise is likely to have on Tuesday's election?

Aaron Powell, I think it's going to have a big impact.

I don't know that

restricting the electorate in this way is going to

grant the Republicans the results that they're looking for, but I absolutely think it is one of the most disgraceful things that's happening in this country.

If you look at what's happening in North Dakota with the Republicans passing a law that deliberately disenfranchises thousands of Native Americans because those voters put Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkemp over the top last time, if you look at the sheer number of votes that have been purged by Brian Kemp, who is the Georgia Secretary of State who is running for governor and who's now presiding over this election,

and who has largely purged African American voters.

This is a

return to a disgraceful practice in American history, which is attempting to restrict the votes of people of color as though they are not equal participants in our democracy.

And it's just absolutely shameful.

I don't know whether it works, whether it's going to work, but to me, it doesn't matter

if it doesn't work,

because the moral dimension is still there.

This is wrong.

It's wrong what they're doing.

And America will forever remain a flawed democracy as long as it's possible to simply target a particular demographic group and say, we're going to keep them from voting.

And the Supreme Court says, yeah, we're okay with that.

Aaron Powell.

You've both spent a lot of time with conservative.

voters and Emma, I think you've put a special focus on testing out how some of the way that the messages that are covered by the media are landing among conservative communities.

How do you think that conservative voters especially are interpreting?

How does

this battle over voter rights

We have polling on this that we did with the Public Religion Research Institute, which was fairly incredible

for showing that basically there are these two different

worlds that Republican and Democratic identified voters live in in terms of what issues they think matter, what issues they think are true, whether the things that the media reports on are actually things that they believe, voter rates was one of the chief among these issues.

This is something that

wildly, disproportionately matters to Democratic voters and is something that Democrats think is real and is happening and affects the outcome of elections in the country.

And by and large, Republicans don't think that this is a very important issue or don't believe that it's happening at all.

So, I think on this particular issue, there is not a ton of attention paid to it or perhaps credence given to it among Republicans.

I think that could be attributed to a lot of different things.

I think, first of all, in conservative media circles, this certainly isn't something that's covered in the way or to the extent that it's covered in mainstream media or in progressive liberal press.

And the second thing is that, in general,

and this is maybe too general, but in in general, the techniques that we see used around the country to move people off of voter rolls, to change at the last minute the location of polling stations, to pass laws like the one that Adam said that have the effect of disenfranchising large populations, to take maps of legislative districts and draw them so they look like a Roshak ink block test in some sort of squiggly line.

In general, those policies tend to benefit Republicans.

And so it may feel more like an on-fire issue for Democrats than it does for Republicans, in part because this is one of the reasons why Democrats have found it difficult to have much electoral success in recent years.

Aaron Powell, well, if you read conservative media, they're actually convinced that there are no elections that Democrats win that are legitimate.

They're only won through fraud.

So

they're primed to believe that any restriction

on the franchise is legitimate because it's preventing Democrats from cheating.

That's how they understand these things.

Aaron Powell, let me come back to this question about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.

This is one of these closing appeals that the president has been making to his base, to his supporters,

to signal that, hey,

I am looking at restricting who not just who gets access to the franchise, but who actually

gets to be an American citizen in the future.

I'm playing a long game here.

I'm thinking, I'm looking at the executive order.

My lawyers are telling me that there's some workarounds with the 14th Amendment.

And if I can issue an executive order that would change the practice that has been enshrined in our Constitution for a long time,

the law that says that someone who is born in America is an American citizen.

And is that appeal effective to the president's supporters or to conservatives more broadly?

I'm sure that the president's supporters like anything he does.

I don't know whether it's going to help him,

maybe it's going to get more of them to the polls.

I don't know.

Maybe it's going to turn off some people in the center or maybe they actually agree with him.

But what I do know is that this is not, I mean, it's simply not something.

You cannot rewrite the Constitution with an executive order.

Now, he can issue the order and it's going to be challenged and it's going to go to the Supreme Court.

And historically, what the Supreme Court has done on a lot of, I mean, after Reconstruction, the Supreme Court, which was largely made up of guys who had been appointed by the Republican Party, which was then the party of abolition,

carefully wrote black people's rights out of the Constitution.

They did it with clever wordplay.

I mean, you see the president today,

or in some cases, not so clever wordplay that is just blatantly interpreting the language in the opposite of the way that it is meant to be interpreted.

Today he's saying, subject to the jurisdiction doesn't apply to illegal immigrants.

Well, obviously, illegal immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States because otherwise, if they weren't, you can prosecute them for crimes.

It's an absurd argument.

But the Supreme Court has taken absurd arguments before and said, well, given the climate of politics in this country and the fact that we're only taking away these rights from black people, it's not going to be, you know, we can live with this interpretation.

And in doing that, I mean, the entirety of Jim Crow's society after Reconstruction was essentially sanctified by the Supreme Court's decision to ignore the 14th Amendment.

Could the conservative-controlled Supreme Court today do something similar?

I really have no doubt that they could.

Whether or not it's an effective political play, again, I don't know.

We'll find out on Tuesday.

So let me ask you both a question about legitimacy.

Emma, do you think that if there is a resounding quote-unquote blue wave on Tuesday, if the Democrats make significant gains in the House and possibly even the Senate, do you think that that result will be accepted as legitimate among conservatives?

It's so hard to tell in part because as Adam has alluded to, I think we're at the point now, sort of if we think about the epistemology of the public sphere, the way that people access knowledge, there's such a divide in the truth that people are willing to accept and the sources that they're willing to get it from.

And we have seen, demonstrated, that there are fringes of conservative media that are unwilling to accept things that are just patently true and election results could very well rank among those.

You know, in general, I think most people will probably see a blue wave if such a thing does come to pass and take it as a call to action and it will galvanize yet another round of politics and it will play out the way that our political system plays out, which is serving to fracture, make alienated from one another, and tribalize our population even more than it already has.

So we'll see.

But I think it's a possibility.

It's very hard for me to grasp actually.

And I'm saying I don't know a lot in this conversation, which I hope is okay.

I think that's actually

a good idea.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know either.

I just, I'm saying I don't know because I find it very difficult to get my hands fully around this problem that we have in American society right now, which is clearly present and seems acute, but difficult to measure, which is people live in vastly different truth realms that cannot be reconciled.

And the degree to which that reaches even the most basic functions of a democratic society, i.e.

being able to peacefully accept the transfer of power through elections.

It's just, it's not clear to me.

And not knowing, I guess, is maybe a little bit disconcerting.

But also, I guess that's what our jobs are as reporters is to try to figure that out.

Adam, do you think

if there is

a murky result or a red wave on Tuesday, do you think progressives would find that result legitimate, given what we've talked about concerning voter rights, especially?

I think the vast majority will find it legitimate, yes.

But I think there will be a vocal minority which is going to be further radicalized by that kind of result.

Emma, what will you be watching for on Tuesday and what should listeners pay attention to?

I think at the broadest level, we're watching to see whether the blue wave will actually materialize or whether it's just wishful democratic myth-making.

I was in Arizona last week and was with Kirsten Sinema, who has managed to wrestle the Senate race there to at least a very, very close dead heat.

So we'll see, for example, if people like her are able to take their seats.

You know, the other thing that I would say in a broader sense is whether the hype around politics right now is real.

I think a lot about the segment of people in this country who do not care about politics or don't want to participate or can't participate.

people who live in a different universe than political reporters do, who breathe and eat and sleep politics.

And I am interested in this question of who is going to show up at the polls, who is going to take responsibility for defining the future of the country.

Is that going to be markedly different than the past?

So I just, I wonder if we are in that kind of changing, pivotal political moment that people talk about so often, and whether that will be expressed by who shows up on Tuesday.

Thank you.

And thanks to you both again for talking through some big mysteries in an incredibly fraught moment.

And with that, we're going to take a break.

Stick with us, and we'll be back with our closing segment, Keepers.

At L'Oreal Group, we reached 97% renewable energy for our sites at the end of 2024, and we aim for 100% by 2030.

This is how we create the beauty that moves the world.

I'm going to turn to our closing question keepers, in which I ask our listeners and our guests what they've heard, read, watched, listened to, experienced recently that they do not want to forget.

Emma, what would you like to keep?

I have spent a significant amount of time this week in Pittsburgh.

The experience that I think will stay with me for a long time

is spending three hours on Sunday night inside of the Pittsburgh Morgue, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office, where the bodies had been transferred after the shooting.

There's a Jewish tradition of guarding bodies before they're buried to make sure that you're respecting the body and also to sort of be guide to the soul of that body, which sort of stays connected to or close to the body, Jewish tradition says.

So I sat in a room in the morgue where volunteers came on the hour rotating through in a cycle and read psalms for the people who had died before their bodies had been released to the funeral homes.

And it was a really moving experience, a testament to the way that a community cares for everyone and its dead, and also

the way that sort of ritual can come in and be a guide in a moment that's unfathomable.

So that's what I'm taking away this week.

I'll say again how great your piece

from the synagogue from Pittsburgh was, and I will recommend it to our listeners.

I think often after tragedies, there's a kind of collective instinct to tunnel into the life of the murderers.

And I've never, I've never personally understood it because the story of the people who survive and the journey that they go on is one of the most fascinating to me.

And I think your story captured that so beautifully, Emma.

So thank you for it.

Adam, what do you want to keep?

So I deliberately chose something completely frivolous because I knew that this was going to be a very serious episode.

So my keeper, and I'm late to this, is

internet show called Zach Morris's Trash.

And it's basically like eight to ten minute summaries of old Saved by the Belle episodes that illustrate in

incredible detail just what a sociopath the star of Save by the Bell Zach Morris is.

And when you watch it, you're like, wait, especially if you're like

an older millennial like me and you watch the show when you were a kid, you suddenly realize, wow, this this was a really bad person who did really bad things.

Anyway, so

that's my recommendation for this podcast.

I can co-sign this recommendation.

It's a great show.

I feel like just to give a sense of the flavor of it, we should

read a few episode titles, including The Time Zach Morris Gave Himself a Homeless Girl for Christmas, The Time Zach Morris sold swimsuit photos of underage girls, the time Zach Morris made a girl in a wheelchair feel terrible.

He should be in prison.

Zach Morris should be in prison.

I think we can all agree on that.

I think that is something that could possibly unite America.

No, it can't.

It can't.

That's sad.

So this week we're shuffling around the order and we're going to play the listener keeper right before mine.

So here is a sweet keeper from Mary Joe.

I am an immigrant from the Philippines.

Our generation were faced with the dictatorship of Marcus, and I understand

what it is to fight against the populist

and what the prevailing mode is now in the U.S.

Anyway, my keeper is

I finished my garden for this year and I have just planted some bulbs in preparation for 2019.

It also means wishing the Americans a very good year

and may you have the boring political life of the Canadian.

Okay, from your Canadian neighbor, we are the Beavers.

We wish you the best.

That was a lovely benediction.

Thank you again, Mary Joe.

And actually, I spent some time in our garden last week.

I was on vacation.

And my partner and I used the time to have a staycation in our neighborhood, DuPont Circle in Washington.

And we pretty much kept a very strict ceiling on the amount of time that we spent with the news.

Instead of reading the news, we walked around the neighborhood, Mr.

Rogers style, and we met folks who run the stores around the corner.

And we looked up all the monuments around us and figured out who they were honoring.

And we had friends over, and we ate out at all of our local food joints.

And Brian tended to his garden, and we just kind of lived this idyllic neighborly week.

And it was so vivid, and present, and human, and nice.

And

then

I kind of plunged into the ice bath of news on Saturday.

And it was bracing, to say the least.

But

I found myself thinking about the survey, the Hidden Tribes survey that had been passed around

in the previous weeks

that

surveyed thousands of Americans and sorted them into these categories with these

two kind of very politically motivated

groups on the margins, these two minorities

on either end.

Most folks, most Americans in this middle area,

either conservative leaning or liberal leaning,

but generally less engaged with politics and the frenzy, not really feeling the political situation at the fever pitch that I think a lot of us are.

And

after

my week, mostly away from the news last week,

it just stuck with me

how much the difference between whether someone was on the edges of that survey, the if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention part of the conversation, and the folks who are in the middle of that survey, the folks who

the authors of the report

construct as the majority of America.

The biggest difference between those groups is actually just that the folks in the middle are paying less attention.

They're not up in it all the time.

They're not plastering memes on vans and

driving around, shouting out how crazy things are getting.

They are

living some version of this life.

They are tending to gardens.

They are

walking around their neighborhood saying hi to people, hopefully.

It was an important reminder, I think, for me and hopefully for us

of

just what a world there is outside all of this.

So I don't want to forget it anytime soon.

Adam, Emma, it has been

an illuminating, if not conclusive, conversation.

Thank you both for joining us.

Thank you for inviting us.

Thanks.

It was great to talk to you.

And likewise.

Once again, that'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

Thanks as always to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our wonderful podcast fellow Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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