No Competition, No Democracy

Breaking down the Supreme Court's Louisiana ruling, the state of our national finances, and why prom season has us worried about a generation that won't dance

Both before and after we recorded this episode, Sarah and I talked about our emotional states. Sarah is struggling with how angry she is. I’m struggling with how sad I feel. We’re both experiencing something like overstimulation and trying to adjust what we can in our lives and work habits to find some kind of balance.

Everywhere I look, I see signs that we’re all a little out of balance. I once read a description of trying to put clothes on a young toddler as wrestling an octopus. That’s about how I feel with the news right now.

The Voting Rights Act and our fiscal health are so complicated, so laden with history and expectation, with emotion and with data that doesn’t always match the emotion. Discussing these things in a way that generates progress takes a tremendous amount of precision and sturdiness. In this climate, it just feels like wrestling an octopus.

Just as I kept putting clothes on my toddlers, I want to keep talking about important issues. Tending to our country doesn’t just happen in the grand moments. It’s more than elections, landmark cases, and legislative packages. It also happens in the moments when we sigh or yell or cry and say, “me, too, friend.” - Beth

Topics Discussed

• The Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act

• The Federal Budget is Ballooning

• Outside of Politics: Prom and the value of leaving our comfort zone

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Episode Resources

• Every Black Republican Is Leaving the House, Erasing Diversity Gains (The New York Times)

• Some Voters Say Congress Is Too Old. These Black Democrats Aren’t Leaving. (The New York Times)

• Why Stocks Keep Going Up (The Atlantic)

• ‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds (The Guardian)

• More to Say About the Voting Rights Act (Pantsuit Politics Premium)

• Opinion | Abundance and the Left (The New York Times)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:29] Sarah: This Sarah  Stewart Holland.

[00:00:31] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we are going to discuss the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and the gerrymandering arms race that this decision just supercharged. Then we will turn our attention to the economy. When President Trump ran for his second term, he promised to bring prices down and get our nation’s fiscal house in order. We’re just going to check the receipts on that, see how we’re doing. Outside of politics, it is prom season and the kids seem to be skipping the dancing. So that has us thinking a lot about the too much structure, too little structure conundrum that lots of parents face, and we’re excited to talk about that.

[00:01:07] Sarah: Are you filled with rage? I’m filled with rage. My friends are filled with rage. This episode is meant to help us process some of that rage. If you have someone in your life that is also filled with rage, maybe you could text them a quick link to this show. Even people who say, I never listen to podcasts. If you say, “I think this might help,” you’ll be surprised what that can do. It might be worth the whole value of the national debt to both of us. So please share the show if it helps you. Share it with someone in your life who you think it may help.

[00:01:43] Beth: Next up, let’s talk about the Supreme Court. Before the Supreme Court weighed in on Louisiana’s maps for this cycle, the maps were already in disarray. We were talking about the maps all the time, and all the places because if you’ll remember, president Trump wanted House Republicans to encourage their state legislators-- and the White House directly encouraged state legislators-- to try to draw the maps in ways that would make it more likely for Republicans to hold on to control of the House of Representatives during the midterms. And Democrats said, well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And so we have seen efforts by both parties in many states to change the maps as quickly as possible before we get to November. Louisiana was scheduled to have early voting begin on May 2nd, but mere days before that the Supreme Court issued an opinion that Louisiana’s maps had to be redrawn.

[00:02:45] Sarah: Well, absentee voting had already begun. Yes.

[00:02:48] Beth: That’s where we were starting. Supposed to start and now Governor Jeff Landry has said, well, we’ll do everything else but not the House and we’ll redraw the House maps and then we’ll figure it out. And he says that like that’s normal, but nothing about any of this is normal. And we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about Louisiana versus Colay today, and what has happened with the Voting Rights Act.

[00:03:12] Sarah: It’s another place where Trumpian politics has erased any semblance of normality. You find stability in elections by long processes without dramatic changes that people can trust. And after almost a decade of undermining our elections and having the president of the United States repeatedly say it’s rigged, there’s fraud, just constantly berate and lie about our electoral system, then you have him come out and say, well, we are going to redraw the map, so we win. That’s what it is. Now these states are coming out and saying with mere weeks, days to go, what we really want to do is eliminate any semblance of representation in places where you have a third of the population are African American. Not to mention last, what was it, two weeks ago there was a story in the New York Times that the Republican caucus will have no minority members. The few they had are leaving. So you’re going to have a party of white people saying, we’re going to hurry, hurry, hurry, to eliminate these majority black districts so that we can win this next election. The layers of incredulity are breathtaking. Breathtaking.

[00:05:13] Beth: Often by the time the Supreme Court gets a case, there are layers of arguments frozen in time embedded in it and I think that’s the case with this one. A Lot of Voting Rights Act conversation assumes that black people in the South are going to vote for Democrats and white people in the South are going to vote for Republicans. And occasionally someone will mention that there are issues in Texas around enfranchisement of Hispanic voters. And then that really kind of muddies the waters because as we have seen over the last few years in particular, demographics are not destiny in terms of politics. A lot of our understanding about who votes for whom and why has been scrambled, especially in the most recent election. I think it’s wild that both parties now are openly disregarding the progress that had been made for independent commissions to draw the districts to try to build trust in the system. And the whole discussion about it sounds like we’ve gone backwards to believing that white people are always going to vote for Republicans and non-white people, especially in the south, are always going to vote for Democrats. I hope that this bonanza, this arms race of gerrymandering, that everybody’s just putting all their cards on the table about, will be enough for people to be fed up and say, we are not going to let you assume that you don’t have to persuade us. We are not going to just show up and vote for the party that has been drawn in this district to win because we still have a choice. And I’m so frustrated that we have made some real I think positive democratic institutional progress around districting and we’re just being taken all the way back.

[00:07:08] Sarah: I think it’s really hard. I was listening to Up First and they were standing outside a polling place and asking members of some of these majority black districts how they were voting, what they were confused and clearly an older gentleman says they’re just trying to take it back to Jim Crow and I want to take that seriously. I think it’s easy to say, we’ve made progress. So put on your Samuel Alito hat and say, of course, it’s not the 1960s. And I think we have not as a country grappled with this. I think you were right in your analysis on more to say that neither Alito nor Kegan grappled with the, well, it’s not that bad, but it’s not fixed. So what does that mean for the Voting Rights Act or our approach to civil rights generally? And also Pete Hegseth’s out here just firing all the black people. So I would love to take serious the progress we’ve made since the 1960s. I have beef with some of the lack of competition in some of these majority black districts. The Times did a great piece on this. How many members of the black caucus have not caved to the calls for a new generation? One of them just died in office, so it’s an issue. They’re not competitive and everybody deserves better. Majority black districts, red districts, there’s no competition. No one has to be persuaded because there’s no competition. We’re looking at it a reality where the few members there are 435 for 330 million people. There’s going to be like two competitive seats. What the hell? That is not democracy. When no one feels like they have to persuade new voters, much less be responsive to their current constituencies because they’re completely safe. I mean, the number of representatives, we are talking a lot about the change of control of the House of Representatives, and ignoring the fact that the vast majority of that 435 don’t have a primary, won’t have a competitor. That is not democracy when you don’t ever have to compete for your votes. And that is true in some of these majority black districts. When you’re drawing them this way, it’s an abomination. I don’t feel represented. Jimmy Cobert doesn’t give a shit about me. Why would he? It’s not close. He doesn’t have a challenger-- he does actually have a Democratic challenger. But I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what we’re doing. And I don’t know how long this can last because I guess we’ll just death spiral so that Democratic states come back and they get rid of their independent commissions and everybody just, goes and goes and goes until either the Republicans have such an advantage that maybe we just cancel elections altogether and they can just serve in them in life seats. I hate to be hyperbolic, but that’s what some of these are anyway. What does it matter?

[00:10:19] Beth: Well, I want to be really clear that the progress I was referring to is in those independent districting commissions, not in terms of our racial progress, which is the argument Justice Alito was. So different types of progress that we’re talking about, and I want to make sure that I’m not conflating those, or that our conversation isn’t conflating those. So justice Alito’s opinion says a bunch of things. He tells us that the question he wants to wrestle with is whether you are allowed to have a government explicitly considering race when it draws districts, given that our constitution said we don’t abridge rights based on race. And so if I give you the strongest version of the conservatives argument, the court here is saying we don’t discriminate for good or for bad. That’s what they did in the affirmative action case too, right? We don’t want anyone making decisions based on race for any reason. And the court has a giant open door to walk through because a few years ago they decided that legislatures can do partisan gerrymandering all they want to. The courts have nothing to say about how districts are drawn if they are drawn based on politics. And they said that in part because state legislatures can consider whatever they want when they draw districts, they can think about geography, they can think about population density, they can think about protecting their incumbents. Everything is fair game. And now the court says last week everything’s fair game. And so unless you can totally disentangle race from the rest of that and show that race is the one thing that was on the mind of the legislature when they drew the district, the map’s going to be fine. And I think that’s where we’re lost because it means that we have no check anymore on partisan control. So when we have a president and we have state legislatures that are totally in lockstep with that president, we don’t have any place to say, wait a second, you’ve gone too far here.

[00:12:24] Sarah: I mean, I think the issue, as I see it, is America doesn’t know what it wants to do about discrimination that is not overt, that is not Jim Crow. Now, Democrats I think for a long time have hesitated or and ineffectually argued that we still live in that era. I feel like that’s the opposing argument. We still need it because everything’s still bad. That’s not convincing to most Americans because that’s not their lived existence. People don’t see overt racism in their everyday lives. And I mean that across the board. I’m not saying that people don’t experience discrimination; I’m saying I think if you pulled most Americans of many different identity groups, do you see overt racism? They would say no. Of course, now the other side of my brain is going, unless you want to go look at the Pentagon or the Trump administration or ICE officials who the Supreme Court gave a green light to pull people over based on their color of their skin. So it’s like I feel schizophrenic. I think that we were making progress and if things weren’t getting better, the problem was changing in a way. The laws were written for one type of problem. The problem changed. But now you can’t even orient yourself policy-wise in that environment because they have drug us back. The video of people saying like, “I was an American citizen. They pulled me over and were like, where are you from, Mexico?” The Supreme Court gave a green light to discriminate and ICE stops based on the color of your skin, overt racism, while issuing this decision. Are you kidding me? And saying, we’ve just made all this progress. So you can’t even orient yourself in a way to say, okay, the majority of Americans understand race relations this way. So we need to make the argument policy wise around this reality because they’re disrupting that reality. And so then everybody doubles down, goes in their corner, and you can’t blame them. You can’t blame them. I feel that way as a woman. Like the pay gap is really tough. It’s not because men are going, “I hate women, I’m going to pay her less.” It’s very complicated and it’s a lot of complicated factors. And also they’re just sexist. And so it’s like a pursuit of a completely sexist agenda. And so you can’t really give some sort of nuanced policy argument because they’re out here acting like it’s 1932.

[00:15:28] Beth: Everything is disrupting the lines that most arguments break down on. I think a big one that just like hangs like a cloud as I’m reading Voting Rights Act cases, is the fact that so many Americans now don’t identify as part of just one racial group. Like our multicultural democracy is a smashing success in that people are in relationships with and having babies with and building families filled with people of many, many different backgrounds. We cannot keep litigating race relations on the terms of the civil rights era in that reality. It’s different. Doesn’t make it irrelevant, doesn’t mean we should never discuss it, or that we should throw away everything that was passed in that era. It means something different is happening. And I think that when you layer in that kind of generational change with an administration that does acts of overt racism all the time through government power in the sharpest exercise of government power with a court that operates in some senses playing a very long game where cases build on each other towards certain results and in other cases really compartmentalizes issues, it makes it hard to have a real conversation about this. I think America needs a real conversation about this. I think we need to sit down and say, do we want a legislature to consider race when it draws districts? Do we want a judge to say to Louisiana, you should have two majority black districts. I think that is an important discussion. I think Congress taking another look at this in light of all of these things would be a really good idea. And I think that the daily outrageous flowing from this administration, and even if you don’t see them as outrageous, just the daily deluge, the fact that Sunday night the president posted just a fire hose of bizarre AI images. We can’t focus on anything long enough to get anywhere serious. We’re kind of in that we’re not serious people place as a nation right now. And so when a decision like this drops, it is annoying to me that we have Republicans going, all right, let’s redraw all our districts to make sure we don’t have any majority black districts. And have Democrats going, well, we’re back in the 1960s. We’re back to Jim Crow. I want to be able to go somewhere real with this, and I feel like none of the circumstances of the moment let us go anywhere real.

[00:18:20] Sarah: I feel like the easiest way to present this to the American public should the next Congress want to, I don’t know, pass a law, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, which is what I would abdicate for, uncap the House, fine with that too, is to just say, do you want competitive districts? Do you want politicians that have to compete for your vote, or do you want them to just waltz into office every two years without having to do anything? Would you like them to actually compete for your vote? Because the percentage of Americans who have representatives competing for their vote is disturbingly small. And so if we want competition, that’s what has to happen.

[00:18:59] Beth: And that’s true when you’re talking about the House of Representatives, but it’s even truer when you’re talking about your local races because in a state like Kentucky where our primaries are closed, it means that people waltz into office all the time. Eleven percent of eligible voters in my county voted in the last primary election. And many, many of our local offices are unchallenged by Democrats. So such a tiny percentage of people are expressing who they want to make decisions about how much you’re going to pay in property taxes. Big decisions that really make a difference for your Household budget and your quality of life. And I do think most people would say, yes, I want them to compete, but they would also say, but I don’t want all the text messages and I don’t want the mailers, and I don’t want somebody knocking on my door on Saturday afternoon when I’m trying to enjoy my life with my family. And so, again, we’re like in this territory where, well, okay, what are we trying to do?

[00:19:55] Sarah: And what infuriates me so much about that this is all coming down around Louisiana. Louisiana has real problems. It has real problems. I read a report today that New Orleans should be considered basically terminal. It will not survive.

[00:20:12] Beth: It’s sinking.  The state is sinking.

[00:20:14] Sarah: It’s a bowl floating in the ocean. Okay? It’s below sea level. It’s a base and below sea level. It will not survive the next 50 years, much less the next 20. Is anyone in Louisiana concerned about that or are they just too busy trying to draw out those districts? It’s infuriating. They have real problems. We all have real problems, but they’re too busy cheating so that they don’t ever have to compete for our votes. I don’t feel represented. I don’t know how to say it anymore clearly. And I think everybody’s feeling that. Like the usage of taxation without representation. The idea that people are like why am I even paying taxes? The distrust of this institution, the nihilism around younger generations, this is not sustainable. This is not sustainable and what I’m so worried about is that we’re just going to keep in this death spiral where it’s like, see, nothing matters. So why am I participating? Well, if I’m not participating then the reinforcement of the power dynamic just continues. And then the people get the feedback that it doesn’t matter and so they don’t participate. It’s this feedback loop that is really bad. And it’s not about authoritarianism or fascism, it’s just about a lack of democratic representation and participation.

[00:21:28] Beth: And I don’t want to contribute to that. I was really upset. I love Justice Kagan’s writing usually, but I was really upset by how forcefully her dissenting opinion said, this will make it where black votes in Louisiana just don’t count. I do not believe that. I believe that our votes count even when they’re not outcome determinative, even when we don’t ever get even close to what we want. And I really want to hold onto that because that is the only path out of the things we’re describing. The only path out of all this is to elect people who will address these problems and who will be brave enough to address some of the structural things that get us here. Open primaries, uncapping, the House the things that we talk about all the time that would, I think, make our races more competitive and make the system feel more responsive to us. So it’s like this hard balance because I want to be honest about what we’re feeling and how frustrating it is and what the scope of the problem is. But I also want to be clear-eyed that the solution comes through this existing system and it still can make its way through this existing system.

[00:22:36] Sarah: If we’re going to discuss the Civil Rights Movement, then we should look to the Civil Rights Movement because they weren’t facing a new Jim Crow, they were facing the current Jim Crow that absolutely locked them out. Their votes did not count, period. They could not vote. And so, I think always a historical perspective to remember that they used a system that locked them out to change the system. They used a system that definitely felt like it would never change to change the system. And I do fear that the way you get that level of activism and participation is just because things get so bad that people cannot maintain any sort of safety, stability, or status quo. And that does feel like the road we are on.

[00:23:24] Beth: And that is an unfortunately apt transition to the next topic we wanted to tackle today, which is our national debt. There’s reporting this week that the national debt now exceeds 100% of our gross domestic product, and that is a threshold that we did not think we were going to meet following World War II. But here we are and there’s no sign of anyone caring about it. And I think what I really wanted to check myself on as we prepared for this episode was the impact of this administration, given that the first months of last year were spent telling us that the government is going to get cleaned up, our fiscal House is going to be put in order. The Department of Government Efficiency was launched with the goal of cutting $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. We have almost nothing to show for it.

[00:24:26] Sarah: That’s not true. We have lots of costs on the other side of it. We have more money spent to show for it.

[00:24:33] Beth: We really do. They kept reducing their goalpost. So they said $ 2 trillion, no $ 150 billion, no, $ 115. They cut 9% of the federal workforce. They keep inviting them back. I was just watching a video of Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary in Congress and a democratic lawmaker was questioning her about the Office of Civil Rights, which is the part of the Department of Education that helps deal with access for students with disabilities. And they kept saying, well, like you fired all of these lawyers. And she was like, right, but then we hired them back so it’s okay. And he was like, but you fired them. You got rid of them. And she’s like, right, but then we hired them back, so don’t worry about that. It’s like, they know this was unsuccessful, so they just want to erase it from memory but it had real cost. It had real cost in that situation specifically; all those cases are way backed up. But that’s happening across the government. Like USAID, there will be so many books written about the fallout of virtually shutting down USAID. And so we’ve spent more instead of less. And I think when you look back at that whole effort you have to say, well, it was never really about fiscal discipline.

[00:25:47] Sarah: No. I mean, we didn’t even spend it. I think spend it is generous. We wasted it. We wasted that money. We also cut revenue. The tax cuts and jobs act reduced revenue by about 2 trillion. The 2025 big beautiful Bill Act is projected to add over 4 trillion to the national debt. So we cut taxes, we wasted money, and then he wants trillions of dollars in additional spending for the military. I never believed that this man who has driven his own businesses into bankruptcy multiple time was going to clean our fiscal House. I just don’t know if people understand how bad it is. I’m not really sure this is being conveyed through TikTok, which is everybody’s favorite way to take in news these days.

[00:26:35] Beth: I think a way to understand how bad it is, is that we are adding about $8 billion a day to our debt a day. 8 billion with a B. It’s the fastest we’ve ever added debt as a country.

[00:26:47] Sarah: He just pretends like whatever he wants to do is fine. They’re not putting any check on him. People are pissed about the institution, so they sure as hell don’t want to pay any more taxes. They don’t feel represented. They’re talking about taxation without representation. I do see more and more articles, commentary about how little the wealthy pay in taxes. I am definitely interested in reexamining the estate tax and the way that you can pass wealth on with literal to no taxable impact. But that’s not going to get it done. That’s not going to fix it. The interest rate goes up. It is what I said to a family member the other day. If everything’s more expensive for all of us, it’s also more expensive for the government. So we are spending more, the interest rates are going up. And everybody, including Chris Van Hollands out here saying let’s cut taxes for everybody. It’s not going to work. The math doesn’t math.

[00:27:53] Beth: The interest on the debt exceeds our defense budget. And I’ve heard Rahm Emanuel propose that we make a law where that can’t be the case anymore. And I think that there’s somewhere to go, at least, I’m glad someone’s talking about that. But just making that kind of pivot isn’t going to do it here because that interest cost will continue to accelerate. And the fact that is happening at the same time that we are abandoning our traditional allies right and left, upending people’s understanding about what American foreign policy is and actively prosecuting a war that is unsupported by all of our allies except Israel. Like those two problems are deeply connected to one another. We would have a debt issue with or without Donald Trump. He did not create this. He is making it worse at the same time that he is making worse some of the levers that we have to try to course correct.

[00:29:04] Sarah: Yeah. We would need dramatic growth. I don’t think you can get there. I disagree with Rahm Emanuel. I don’t think growth is ever going to be enough. But he’s put a huge, huge hurt on that. If the tariffs didn’t do it, the closing of Strait of Hormuz did. I just think that’s a one two double whammy that is going to dramatically affect growth. Not to mention, please don’t forget, the dramatic reduction in our workforce through this over the top immigration policy. You have growth by people working and we are losing population for the first time in our history. How are you going to grow a country with less people? How are you going to grow an economy with less people? That’s not going to work.

[00:29:53] Beth: Well, I think this administration’s answer is AI. That we need fewer workers anyway. And I don’t think that’s the kind of growth that most of the country wants or has any way of supporting and getting excited about. I read this piece in The Atlantic today that was talking about how the stock market feels increasingly divorced from Americans sentiments about the economy and the piece was making the argument that stocks are behaving rationally because the stock market isn’t a measure of the price of milk; it’s a measure of corporate profits. And corporate profits are doing just fine right now. And I thought, man, this is helpful analysis and it also leaves me feeling really bereft. Because if we are going to ask Americans to make the kinds of sacrifices that will be necessary to chip away at our debt, not to pay it off, just to get the interest back to a sustainable place, if we are going to ask people for those kinds of sacrifices, that ask is going to have to be accompanied by a vision that people believe in and that represents what they want living in this country to look and feel like for themselves and their children. And I just see so little of that right now; so little of the possibility of that.

[00:31:18] Sarah: I don’t see any vision or solution to the reality that corporate profits continue to rise and so much of our economy is built on a small percentage of people getting richer and richer and richer. If I read one more article about Disney or car companies or airlines making more and more money off luxury options, I’m going to lose my mind. That is not a real economy. That is not an economy that works for everybody. That is a brittle economic model. And it certainly makes for a brittle democracy where we just hope to extract more and more and more by rewarding people at the very top to make more and more and more, and leaving everybody else to fend for themselves. Be it on healthcare or can you find a car or can you find a house? It is just infuriating. And I do feel like there is this undercurrent of like generational conflict to all this, that the largest proportion of our federal safety net goes to the oldest among us who want to pay less, feel like they’ve contributed their whole lives and now it’s time to rest, and they’re the largest and growing proportion of our population. And so you have all this disaffected youth who just feel like they’ve got the wealth, they’re holding the wealth, what am I supposed to do about it? And then we all sit around and wonder why there’s political violence. People don’t feel like the system is built for them. They feel like it is extractive because it is. And I just feel like this deficit and the fact that someone who cares will just keep collecting your tax dollars, wasting it without fixing the problem is going to send people over the edge.

[00:33:51] Beth: I think a part of why I feel so stuck right now in trying to analyze this problem or just about any other, is that a lot of different groups of people have valid expectations and grievances. So when you look at the federal budget, it absolutely reads like a country that does not care about children. It does. The spending tells the story that we do not care about children and young families. When you look at the situation as a 45-year-old, which I am, I have also paid into social security and would like the benefit of that bargain that I have made with my government, that I didn’t have a choice but to make with my government. And if I had planned my whole life for a retirement, that included a certain calculation that the government guaranteed to me, I would want that money and I’d be mad if anybody suggested that I shouldn’t get it. We do have a growing population of people at the end of their working lives and living in a lot of fear about being able to stay healthy enough to stay in their houses. So that you have this young generation that’s like get out of the houses. And the older generation is like to go where? Because there are not affordable options, especially if you have health issues, which most of us can expect to have at some point in our lives. So we’re not really taking care of anybody. And then here in the center are people our age trying to hold both ends of that in our arms and think about what’s going to happen for us. All legitimate concerns, grievances, complaints. And I think all could be unlocked if we had leadership and not one person, not the magic presidential candidate who’s going to fix everybody, but leadership with some kind of vision to say here’s where we want to go as a country and the kind of economy we want to build. And to do that we are going to have to take a number of steps, many of which we wouldn’t choose in isolation. In isolation we wouldn’t want to mess with the retirement age for social security purposes. In isolation we wouldn’t want to raise taxes on anyone. In isolation we wouldn’t want to mess with the estate tax. But to get where we’re going, we’re going to have to do all these things together. And it’s going to be very hard, and it’s going to be worth it. It’s the gift that we’re going to give ourselves and future generations. To stop having the same arguments. I don’t want to have another election that sounds like cut, cut, no spend, or everybody going spend but on my thing, not your thing. We’re stalled and I feel that we can get unstalled, but we have to have a different discussion. I don’t want to elect any more fighters to Congress. I feel like we’ve been electing fighters my whole adult life and that what they’ve done is fight. And that political dysfunction has been really costly.

[00:36:54] Sarah: If someone came to me and said you’ve worked your whole life; we’re going to raise the age so your kids can benefit from the system too, I would do it. But what is that going to look like? How are you going to sell that to people who are having fewer and fewer kids or no kids at all? How are we going to make an argument about future generations when we have a demographic crisis? How are we going to prioritize kids when there are fewer of them? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

[00:37:23] Beth: And that’s chicken and egg, right? Like one has led to the other. It’s hard to know where to start unraveling it.

[00:37:30] Sarah: I mean, if I am picking up all these threads, I think that the leadership that is needed will have to include a story, a convincing narrative about sacrificing our individual wants and desires and pursuit of a common purpose. The positive force I can find to the sort of bleak conclusion of I don’t know how bad this is going to have to get, is if it gets really bad, we’ll have something to work together on and it’s going to require working together. No one’s going to be able to sell this to a country of 330 million. The best Congress on planet earth, particularly with just 435 people to representing 330 million, is not going to be able to sell this in a way that makes everybody happy. Like every generation, every state, every income level, that is never going to happen. I keep thinking all the time about the Ezra Klein conversation on abundance and the guy that just said we don’t have an answer for every voice is a veto. Progressives have made every voice a veto. People need to feel heard. That doesn’t mean we’re going to do what you want. Every voice should feel heard, but it should not be determinative. But people it’s like the less represented they feel from the government instead of adjusting their expectations to say, oh, shit’s broken, it’s going to be a while, and I’m going to have to personally sacrifice even if I didn’t cause the problem in order to get us on the right track, the expectation is wildly elevated. It’s like owe me something because you fucked up so bad. We’re not getting out of there with this. We’re not getting anywhere with that attitude. We’re not going to save our democracy with the idea of you fucked it up so bad, you owe me more. But I feel like that’s what people want. It’s like, well, you screwed it up now you really owe me. Instead of like we have to find a pragmatic solution, including swallowing some stuff that’s not going to be real exciting.

[00:39:58] Beth: Yeah, and it’s hard again to say like what people? Because I agree with you that you can’t get everybody on board with something. That expectation I think is cultural as much as it’s political because some people’s version of you messed it up so bad is and so I’m out. Why am I going to participate in this system in any way? I’m maybe just going to spend my life trying to dodge the system as much as possible instead of being part of something that helps put it back on track. And I get it. I get why people would feel that way. I don’t know what galvanizes enough people around a vision of government that is willing to confront our fiscal crisis, try to find an economic vision that does the most good for the most people. When I listen to conversations about abundance, sometimes I think, but I don’t know if we have a common definition of abundance. What would abundance look like and for whom? And can that be true for everyone? This takes me back to the gerrymandering conversation because what you said from that Ezra Klein episode is exactly what frustrated me about Justice Kagan’s dissent. You have to be willing to vote knowing that your vote is not going to be determinative of the outcome and believe that it still matters. That’s what this whole thing rests on. I think that if you ask most Americans, would you like this country to be even more divided between red and blue? They would say no. And our leaders right now are taking actions to do that, to make red redder and blue bluer. And so I do hope that all these pressures converging at once will motivate some breakthroughs for us. All right, we’re going to take a hard turn and end as we always do with something Outside of Politics. Sarah, you have experienced prom this year. I’m anxious to hear what your learnings are.

[00:41:55] Sarah: That’s a dream come true. Griffin went with my best friend, Elizabeth’s daughter, Kathleen, who he has grown up with. She wore her mother’s dress. It was just a delight. And I was worried because I had heard and see on social media that kids don’t go to the actual dance. They like dress up, they go to dinner and then they never go to the actual prom. Now they went to the prom, but they came back and said no one’s slow danced. There was like a song and a half of slow dancing. And that makes me really sad. But in a way it makes sense. I mean, when I was growing up, we would have like dances for birthday parties. First of all, we had six dances a year. We had football homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, winter formal, basketball homecoming, morp,, which is prom spelled backwards and casual and prom, six dances, and probably not quite that many in middle school, but probably about three in middle school and then you would have birthday parties. So by the time I got to prom, I had been to so many school dances. Obviously, I knew how to slow dance. Obviously, I knew how to fast dance. Obviously, I had a lot of comfort in doing that. I had a lot of experience in doing that. Griffin had been to one other dance for like 45 minutes and because I made him go to homecoming one year, his freshman year. So I’m sad. I’m sad that the kids are not hanging out and the kids are not dancing. And it’s just wild to me that all these milestones are kind of fading away and what they’re being replaced with is just Instagram pictures. If you’re getting dressed up and you’re just taking photos and going to dinner, then this is just for the gram. I did read on a social media post where people said, like, I did that in high school too. Like we didn’t go to the dance. It was long, back in the nineties or whatever. But I got to feel like that was pretty rare. I never knew anybody who got to college and had never been to a dance. But I got to think there’s probably a lot of kids who show up at college and have never been to a dance at this point.

[00:44:01] Beth: I was not allowed to go to dances until prom, so prom was my first dance.

[00:44:05] Sarah: What do you mean?

[00:44:06] Beth: I mean, my parents did not want me to go to dances. My mom was a teacher. She felt like not good things happened at dances, and so I didn’t go.

[00:44:13] Sarah: You didn’t go to homecoming or anything?

[00:44:15] Beth: No.

[00:44:16] Sarah: Did your friends have birthday parties where there was dancing?

[00:44:19] Beth: No.

[00:44:19] Sarah: Okay.

[00:44:20] Beth: No. So I experienced some of the bleak reality that you were describing even back in the eighties and nineties. I really enjoyed being in college and going to parties with dancing often. I loved that part of being in a sorority. I’m shocked that I was in a sorority, given my history that I’ve just described to you. And I thought it was really, really fun to have dances going on all the time. And I wish that life was like that as an adult. Like, I would like to go to morp. I would like to go to prom. I would like all these things to happen.

[00:44:47] Sarah: Well, are you sad you missed them in high school?

[00:44:49] Beth: I think I am a little bit. It’s hard for me to like-- of the things that I’m sad about from high school, that’s way down my list.

[00:44:55] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:44:56] Beth: But I think it’s healthy to have structured events. I wish that there were more line dancing opportunities in my life. That’s something I’m really going to be looking for as I get older because I love a format that says here’s how to dance everybody. It’s easy. Get in here, do the thing. Not all of it’s easy, but get in here and do the thing together. I think that’s really good for us. I do also think it’s good for kids to get dressed up and go out to eat. I especially love seeing prom kids at not a super fancy restaurant. I try to really go out of my way to tell them how great they look and encourage them. And I hope that lots of adults are doing that because I think it’s a good experience too to be overdressed somewhere and just learn what that feels like and learn the upsides of that because there are a lot of upsides of being overdressed in different places. So I’m happy they’re still doing prom, even if a lot of it is for the gram. I’m happy that they’re going out to eat and I endorse more dancing everywhere because I think it is really good for us. To me, what makes it especially urgent right now is that dancing is such a physical, embodied experience. And if you live a lot of your life on a screen and a lot of your socializing happens via text or Snapchat or whatever, it probably feels extremely vulnerable, even more than it did for us to dance and especially to slow dance with someone. That’s a lot of physical interaction and I think that’s needed and great.

[00:46:27] Sarah: I got my first kiss at the winter formal my freshman year on the dance floor while slow dancing. I understand the concern that not great things happen at school dances. We watched Footloose the night before prom in a prom movie night here at my house. We loved Footloose. Pretty and Pink got a thumbs down, but Footloose was a thumbs up. And it is a great movie. I feel like it holds up in this conversation of we want to keep them safe, we want them to have our values. But I feel like we’ve overcorrected with the teens. I have at several points in my life joke that I’m all but Carey Nation would take an axe to the bars. And also now I’m not talking about high schoolers, but I worry that the drinking rates have bottomed out. I think there’s a reason for humans to form connections with each other and lower their inhibitions have drank for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Like we’ve protected them to the point where they’re scared to do anything, that it’s all anxiety producing because there’s so much pressure because everything’s a performance. One of my kind of beefs as a parent, I told this to a couple the other day, new babies, they’re like, oh, he doesn’t like the pacifier. I said, he’s a week old, he doesn’t know what he likes. I think there’s this sense of like-- and I’m not saying push your kids to do things they hate, although people do that all the time. Like they do have to have some structure and some experiences that of course they wouldn’t sign up for. Let me tell you something, Amos Holland would never try anything new for the rest of his life if I let him get away with it. He would’ve never learned to ride a bike. He would’ve never learned to swim. Like he just has a lot of anxiety about new experiences. And so I’ve had to teach him like, no, you can do it. And it was really interesting because Griffin’s date, Kathleen, goes to a small private school and there is an enormous amount of structure around the dances. So they have like an actual square dance with a line collar and the kids love it.

[00:48:22] Beth: I mean, that sounds so fun to me. I want to go do that too.

[00:48:24] Sarah: It sounds fun. They know what they’re doing and even at their formal, they can’t bring kids from outside the school district or outside their school. They have a dinner and that’s what shows up in a lot of the like movies like in Pretty in Pink. They’re sitting there and they’re having a formal dinner and then they’re going to the dance floor. And at their school they like give them like a little waltz lesson. And there’s like a lot of structure about who you are asking and the upper class boys have to ask different girls and there’s just all this sort of structure and protection, not because we want to bully our kids into our experiences growing up and not because they can’t trust themselves to know what they like and what they don’t. I’m not arguing that. I’m not saying we overcorrect. However, I think when we leave it up to people and especially young kids, teenagers who are trying to figure out life and adulthood, it’s really easy to default to the safe comfortable option. It’s always so easy to just opt out and to support people in opting out. I think people thought I was truly bad for making Griffin go to homecoming his freshman year. He cried on the way there. He didn’t want to go. And then he called me and he said, “This is not so bad. It’s mainly boring.” And I’m like, exactly, babe, that’s what I needed you to learn. Like sometimes it’s not scary, it’s just boring. That’s okay. Listen, sometimes it’s I had a great time. My kids tell me multiple times, “I had a great time. Thanks for making me do that.” I just think we’ve become allergic to making kids try things and especially in social settings because I can’t make that call for every kid. I’m trapped, right? I can’t make everybody make their kids go to prom, but I can’t make my kid go to prom and have a good time if nobody else is making their kids go to prom. It’s like the screen time, right? Putting it on individual parents to cut the screen time is very difficult. And so it’s like we need a cultural shift around parenting and around like the pursuit of supporting them in trying new things and finding the joy in dancing on a dance floor with a bunch of people or slow dancing. I love to slow dance. Like you know what I’m saying? Like there has to be some structure and support as opposed to just support for opting out.

[00:50:45] Beth: Yeah. I find myself in such a weird place because on one hand I can really aggressively argue that kids’ time is too structured right now and that the activities is an arms race of their own and that a lot of things are very off track in that way. At the same time, I observe with my own kids that they really do thrive in situations that are very structured. Like there is a reason that we have all this structure because that is where they seem to feel free in some ways. It’s like the structure does some of that planning, strategizing, ruminating, worrying that is happening in their heads when there isn’t structure there. And so I think prom is probably more important now than it was when I was a kid. And maybe that means that it needs more structure built into it. Like it would be really cool for schools to do dinners on site with like etiquette experts there to kind of teach you like, hey, if you’re invited to a really fancy event, here are some of the things that we do. Not because that’s the only way to be or we’re trying to raise a bunch of aristocrats, but just exposure. Exposure to something else. And then permission through that group norm for everybody to buy in. That’s what I say about every party I host. If you want to come, I really want you to be here, but I need you to commit to the bit. It’s only fun if we’re doing a theme for everybody to be all in on the theme. And I think that’s maybe what that line dancing and what your friend’s daughter’s school is giving them. It’s permission for everybody to commit to the bit, do the thing, and then find a lot of freedom within the structure created for them.

[00:52:32] Sarah: A couple things. I think that with the activities, it’s that the pressure around the activities is because they have been combined or condensed or confused for a social life. Yeah. And there is no social life outside. If you’re on a travel sports team, that’s your social life. And so the socializing and the relationships are connected inevitably to the pressure of the activity itself. My social life as a teenager was not connected to any of my extracurricular activities. Now I think probably some of my friends who were cheerleaders or on our teams would feel a little bit differently than that.

[00:53:11] Beth: Mine was the band for sure.

[00:53:12] Sarah: Yeah. But I was friends with people in choir, but we weren’t going to choir parties. You know what I mean? Like I wasn’t hanging out with just people from the choir. And public school is important for lots of reasons. Certainly for education and certainly for preparation for a career or college. And it makes me emotional. It is one of the most profound, economically diverse experiences of my life. When we’re talking about the ways that we are sorting, which certainly travel sports perpetuate, the prom experiences perpetuate because some people are still getting that experience where they’re sitting down to a fancy dinner and getting that education. But it’s sorted economically. And to me that is really detrimental. It would’ve been detrimental to me as a person. It’s detrimental to our democracy. Like my public school education and the class I grew up in and the bonding we have around these social experiences means that-- I think all the time I have a friend who is a neurologist and I have a friend who was a janitor and they dated in middle school. Where else in American life does that happen? There was no sorting in a real way when I was growing up. And I think all the socializing we did at the dances and outside of class that helped that we bonded. We got to know each other. And it’s not just even in my public school, that happened at my church youth group. We were talking about this recently because we had a reunion among the people in the youth group. And we were talking about my youth group was composed of people at multiple different schools. We could not see each other or hang out unless we came to church. Because there was no Snapchat, there was no texting. Like the way to connect with these people because we did not see them at school was to go to church. And it made me feel this real like flexibility socially. I think it gave me a lot of confidence because as important as my class was to me and as bonded as we were, so many of us went from K through 12 together, I had this other group that knew me in a different way that didn’t see me at school, that I wasn’t defined by my reputation at school. And we hung out all the time. All the time. It blows my mind that teenagers, my kids and their friends, they’ll hang out like once a month. We were hanging out every single weekend for hours a time. Friday night, Saturday night often, and Sunday afternoon. And did some things happen? Yeah. Was there experimentation sexually and other ways? Sure was. But are we trying to prevent all of that? Like we don’t want them to take risks. We don’t want them to make bad choices. We don’t want them to suffer consequences. At what cost? Like at what cost? I don’t know, man. I am worried that they are missing out on this fundamental aspect of how you build who you are and how you understand your place in a community and how you bond and connect and form friendships.

[00:56:32] Beth: I can’t figure out which parts of my wonderings about my daughter’s experiences are like normal. Every generation thinks something about their generation was better than the one that comes after it. My childhood was romanticized compared to yours. And how much is like this genuine fear that I have for them, that is mostly based on the presence of screens in their lives? Because I really do feel like fundamentally their childhood is so different from mine. I had such a difficult realization rereading Little Women that my childhood is more similar to the Little Women’s childhood than to my daughters because of the impact of the internet. So I don’t know what this will look like to them when they’re raising their own children and reminiscing about what worked in their childhood. I don’t know what parts of it will sound really different to me then than they do today. But I do really want them to get to hang out with people and to have a lot of structured hangouts available to help them do that, to help them get out of their own heads. I think they don’t hang out a lot right now in the unstructured way that we did because they don’t know how to do that. Every time I witness a group of kids just hanging out where there’s not a lot of structure, it’s pretty much everybody on a phone.

[00:57:58] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:57:59] Beth: And so the only solution that I know to bring to the table is let’s have some activities, let’s make them fun, but let’s have activities and maybe not all of them fun, maybe some just where you really get the focus of every single person in the room. But offering that structure seems important because without it, I think we just scroll.

[00:58:21] Sarah: Yeah. I think that if you asked my mom, I don’t know if she worried about it the way that we do, but the trajectory was. First of all, she was one of four and I was an only child. Just by default there was less socializing because I didn’t have siblings. So I spent a lot of Saturdays. I’ve been reading some of my teenage journals. I spent a lot of Saturdays watching tv. So it wasn’t the internet, but there was a TV in my bedroom, which she did not have. She did not have as much TV and she did not have it in her bedroom. So there was already the presence of a screen changing the way I spent my time as a teenager compared to how she spent her time as a teenager. I think my mom probably engaged in a lot more creative pursuits. She tells stories about like in the middle of the night wanting a new outfit, so she’d sew a whole new outfit. I don’t know how to sew. And also more risky behavior as teenagers, especially like when she talks about her brothers. I think we’ve pursued safety for teenagers at all costs. And that it’s understandable. Look, I have three boys. I know the statistics okay? I understand that they have not the best decision making capacity that can result in really dangerous situations. We had a wreck this weekend in my community where two seniors were on a side by side. Now I would blame the side by side, not the teenagers. I hate those vehicles. I think they’re incredibly dangerous. But I just think that we have tried to provide a type of structure that prevents all risks for teenagers and that has manifested in their fear of any social risk and a lot of social anxiety, which we also want to protect them from but you can’t. I mean, you can, but it leads to a really jacked up life. Someone’s going to say something mean, someone’s going to hurt your feelings, someone’s going to bully you. Someone might aggressively attack you. I don’t know. It’s risky out there to be among other humans and I just think because we love them and because it’s a scary world we’re trying to keep them safe and think it’s coming at a cost.

[01:00:17] Beth: Well, that’s a long way from dancing at prom, but I do think dancing at prom is really good and important, and I hope that we’ll find ways to encourage kids to be in their bodies and o out of their heads as much as we can and with each other in happy, constructive ways whether that’s at prom or somewhere else.

[01:00:36] Sarah: Well, maybe we just need a steady rainfall of glitter like they have throughout the entirety of the prom in Footloose. And I don’t mean confetti, Beth. Glitter. Raining glitter the entire time. I could not get over it. So maybe we’re just overthinking this. They got to be like inhaling it. I bet Kevin Bacon has glitter in his lungs to this day. Like I’m just saying, maybe that’s just what, maybe we don’t even need a dinner at prom. Maybe we just need a glitter, a rainstorm of glitter to make it magical then people would dance.

[01:01:15] Beth: Whatever it takes I’m on board with, I will commit. If there is a theme I’m going in. So if the theme’s glitter, I’m going to do it. I’ll be there with you. And we appreciate you all being here with us. We will be back with you on Friday with another new episode. Until then, you can find us on Substack. And if you would like to know more about the legal issues in Louisiana versus Callais, I covered that on More to say on Monday. You’ll get Sarah’s Good News Brief on Thursday and the daily headlines every other day. So we hope you’ll join us over there. We’ll see you back here on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

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