What I’m Reading After the 2024 Election
In case reading also helps you process
“I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men.” ~ Toni Morrison
After Biden stepped down from the top of the Democratic ticket and Harris became the presumptive nominee (and raised record breaking amounts of money), I let myself hope. Over the last three months, I’ve held onto that hope. I hoped that voters wouldn’t reelect someone who incited an insurrection. I hoped that white women would turn out to protect their bodily autonomy and my own. I hoped that Trump’s increasingly unhinged racist and nativist rhetoric would turn off Latinx and Asian voters. I do not regret being hopeful. Though, I have learned once again that faith in the American electorate is often misguided.
It is not an exaggeration to say that a second Trump administration (especially with Republicans in control of the Senate and in all likelihood the House) will reshape American government and society for decades to come. As I grapple with what this election outcome means for abortion rights, immigrant rights, the war on Gaza, and the future of our democracy and democratic institutions (among many, many other concerns), I find myself turning to reading.
A few weeks ago, Sara Hildreth from FictionMatters (one of my favorite bookish newsletters), posed the question Why do you read? I love this question and I’ve been thinking about it since. There are many reasons why I read, but I want to focus on one particular reason today.
One of my primary motivations for reading is to understand the world around me and its history.
Like most people educated in the U.S., I learned an incomplete and whitewashed world and American history. Since enrolling in my first college-level history class almost fifteen years ago, I’ve been on a journey of unlearning, learning, and relearning what America is and what it is not, how to find hope during dark periods, how to imagine a more just world for ourselves and future generations, and how to organize for our collective liberation.
If there is one lesson I relearn every election season, it is that more people need to be reading for this purpose. It is abundantly clear, for example, that many (most?) Americans do not have a functional understanding of how our complex system of government works. People don’t seem to understand how capitalism works, nor how policy can (and cannot) fix inflation. People don’t seem to understand how the U.S. public education system works and what’s at stake if Trump guts the U.S. Department of Education. (Though, I am on the record as skeptical that his second administration will dismantle the Department.) People clearly don’t seem to understand what the job of the vice president entails. And perhaps, most worrisome, people certainly don’t understand how fragile democracies are, nor how democracies die.
It is not hyperbole to say that the future of our democracy was on the ballot last Tuesday. But voters clearly did not get that message.
Of course, so much of American ignorance is by design. In The Racial Contract, the late political philosopher Charles W. Mills describes white supremacy as necessitating “an agreement to misinterpret the world,” what he refers to as “an epistemology of ignorance.” That reality is on full display in our public education system. By and large, schools do not teach young people about the excesses of Capitalism. Nor about structures of oppression, including racism and misogyny. And perhaps most importantly, public schools are doing a remarkably inadequate job of teaching young people civics and specifically, what it means to be a citizen in a multi-racial, pluralistic democracy.
I am someone who lives and breathes the work of government and policy. (You can read more about my professional background and work here, if you’re curious.) And so today, in lieu of sharing of my September and October reading wrap up, I’m sharing a list of the articles and books I’m turning and returning to in this moment to understand how we got here, what the threats of the next Trump presidency are, and how we can mobilize to build a new path forward.
For the most insightful election postmortems, I am reading everything and anything Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom writes:
Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker: “The fact that the entire nation, more or less, is shifting rightward at least a little, but that men aged eighteen to twenty-nine have moved almost thirty points rightward since 2020. If the 2016 election illuminated the shocking state of white women’s loyalties, the 2024 election has instantly done the same for young men.”
Zak Cheney-Rice in New York magazine: “There will be plenty of Democratic finger-pointing over the next four years, with strategists anguishing over what went wrong and who is to blame. But if demographics are indeed destiny, as many Democrats once assumed, then the GOP has to feel especially good about its standing among men of all races and particularly Latinos — a problem that Democrats will have to solve if they are to have any hope of winning back the White House.”
Kate Manne (a feminist philosopher at Cornell University) in her Substack newsletter: “I am almost more angry at the people who see all this happening, and see more of it coming, and are blithely indifferent. They don’t necessarily want women to go septic and die in parking lots, denied life-saving reproductive care in case it constitutes an abortion—a reality that Trump deliberately and proudly ushered into being. But if that’s the price of a cheaper tank of gas, or being able to afford a bigger house, or run a more profitable business, then they’ll willingly pay it. They are either willfully ignorant or actively shrugging about the fact that the bodies of girls and women were on the line in this election.”
Anne Helen Petersen in her Culture Study newsletter: “This is the adult conversation our children are observing. This is what they will understand about their childhoods: a period when their country clarified whose lives mattered and where power should rest. These truths will be codified in court rulings and legislation that will endure for decades. They will be there in the room every time a woman dies a preventable death or is arrested for crossing state lines to save her own life. This generation will internalize what we have come to understand: that women are worth less. Behave accordingly.”
To understand how the health of our democracy is at stake, Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer in his newsletter Democracy Americana: “Polite society likes to pretend we are having policy debates over taxes, health care, or ‘the economy,’ that the parties ultimately agree on the end goal for America, that they only differ on the best path to get there. But right now, these debates are almost always defined by the underlying struggle between two fundamentally incompatible visions of what “America” is, and who has a right to belong.”
From Dave Karpf in his newsletter The Future, Now and Then: “And, to state the obvious, [a second Trump presidency] will be terrible for everyday people. Women will lose access to medical care. Trans people will be targeted. Undocumented immigrants, and people who look-undocumented-enough-to-the-local-enforcer, face imminent harm. If you live in a community near a SpaceX facility, then Elon will just poison the water supply with toxic runoff. If you live in a blue state and get hit by a natural disaster, the government will withhold support. People will die of this, and the government response will be to loudly insist that they didn’t.”
On what to expect from Trump’s ongoing criminal cases from my Brookings colleague, Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic: “An apparent majority of American voters decided that these charges, the bulk of which speak directly to Trump’s willingness to abuse the powers of the presidency and his refusal to acknowledge that the law might apply to him, were not disqualifying when they made their selection for the nation’s highest office. And now, because of their decision, Trump has won the impunity he so craved.”
And on a slightly hopeful note, this piece from Senator Elizabeth Warren in Time magazine: “We won’t always win, but we can slow or sometimes limit Trump’s destruction. With every fight, we can build political power to put more checks on his administration and build the foundation for future wins. Remember that during the first Trump term, mass mobilization—including some of the largest peaceful protests in world history—was the battery that charged the resistance. There is power in solidarity, and we can’t win if we don’t get in the fight.”
Of course, I also have some book recommendations for you.
First up on my personal post-election reading list are books to help me understand the massive rightward shift of Latino voters—and especially Latino men— to Trump.
Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America by Paolo Ramos. In this recently released book, Ramos reports on the growing rightward shift among Latino voters by examining how factors like tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma have contributed to a consequential political realignment.
Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality by Tanya Katerí Hernández. Legal scholar Tanya Katerí Hernández challenges overly simplified narratives about race and racism in the United States by examining how Latinos can perpetuate anti-Black racism, despite facing racial discrimination themselves.
Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American by G. Cristina Mora. This work examines how diverse Latin American cultures became unified under the "Hispanic" identity category in the U.S. during the 1970s and '80s through coordinated efforts of activists, government officials, and media executives, fundamentally reshaping America's racial and political landscape.
And finally, here are a few books I’ve read (and would recommend) that I have found myself thinking about this week:
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. A very short primer from a Yale historian on how to survive and resist the American turn towards authoritarianism.
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley. A short primer on fascist politics and what they look like in the U.S. today.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Incisive analyses and critiques of our pandemic-era political, social, and economic conflicts, with some especially useful insights about the rise of conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccination movement, and the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people. (I wrote a longer review of Klein’s book back in April.)
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America And Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own by Eddie S Glaude Jr. For insights on how James Baldwin reckoned with the short-comings and failures of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement.
The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills. Mills was a political philosopher who details the history and ideological underpinnings of white supremacy.
The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Philip S. Gorski & Samuel L. Perry. If you want to understand the ideological foundations of Project 2025, the January 6th insurrection, and evangelicals’ ongoing support for Trumpsim, read this book. It is short and so insightful.
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGee. To understand what we lose when we buy into zero-sum thinking about American opportunity and prosperity and what’s possible when we let go of that mindset.