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“She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ and helped to develop critical race theory, now her life’s work is under attack by Washington’s war on ‘woke’. As her memoir is published, the legal scholar explains why she’ll never stop speaking truth to power
When Donald Trump returned to office in January last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A raft of other orders mandated the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) personnel, offices and training across the federal government. Federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid or eliminate, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. All of which has amounted to 40 years of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work being literally and deliberately erased.
For decades, the 66-year-old legal scholar has been naming things that powerful people would prefer remain unnamed. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise. Around the same time, she was one of a group of African American scholars who created the framework that came to be known as “critical race theory”, which sought to examine how racism is embedded in legal systems rather than simply enacted through individual prejudice. Now, Crenshaw’s ideas are being contested like never before.
“Unfortunately, I did see this coming,” she tells me over a video call from the California offices of the African American Policy Forum, the thinktank she co-founded. We are calling to discuss Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, but the conversation soon shifts. “The fact that they are targeting this … it is because they understand the power of these ideas, the power of this history.” Behind her, posters reading “History repeats when we forget” and “The freedom to learn is the freedom to live” hang alongside shelves of critical race theory texts and Black history books the likes of which have, in some states, become politically radioactive.
What makes the intensity of this backlash striking is how recently Crenshaw’s work entered mainstream public consciousness. Until a few years ago, ideas such as intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely within the domain of legal scholarship, academic debate and activist vernacular. It wasn’t until 2020, when a loose coalition of conservative activists, media figures and politicians began elevating them as political flashpoints, that they were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this snowballed into all-out war against “woke”, with critical race theory as its ultimate bogeyman. It became a byword for liberal overreach, a catch-all for everything that was wrong with the US in the eyes of the conservative right.
“Trump jumped on a bandwagon started by a few rightwing propagandists, claiming that intersectionality and critical race theory were anti-white, anti-male and anti-American,” she says. “Fox News amplified this, and within weeks, these ideas were mentioned more than they had been in the previous four decades.”
Crenshaw, true to form, is not shy about naming what she considers to be the problem. “One of the keys of fascism is control of the nation’s narrative,” she says. “That, alongside creating a group of people that are legitimate targets of exclusion – an us and them – allows for the autocrat to be seen as the embodiment of the essential nation. And in the United States, we come prefabricated for that dimension of fascism to set into our politics.
“Why is it that so many white Americans are willing to continue to vote for a president that is demolishing democracy, so long as he’s willing to affirm them effectively as true Americans?” she continues. “Because of the idea that those over there are different from us. They don’t really belong. That is the way fascism works.”
It is clearly in Crenshaw’s DNA to confront injustice, as is evidenced in Backtalker, which chronicles her journey from witnessing inequality as a child to challenging entrenched power structures in law, academia and politics. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes. “There is BS that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second‑class status as the price of belonging sickens me.”
Born in Ohio in 1959, on the verge of the civil rights movement, Crenshaw grew up at a time of expanding yet restricted possibilities. She watched that tension unfolding in real time, in the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr on television, and in discussions around the kitchen table, where her parents, dedicated anti-racist activists, treated politics as a daily practice. “As a Black child, I had early inklings that differences would matter in my life, even if I couldn’t name them,” she says.
Crenshaw at home in New York. Photograph: Lelanie Foster
One such inkling came when her family moved to the predominantly white suburb of Canton, Ohio. “When we arrived, there were children playing everywhere,” she remembers. “I was excited.” But almost overnight, the children vanished. Neighbours treated the new family as intruders and shouted slurs when they walked by; an estate agent knocked on their door urging a quick sale.
Perhaps the most formative incident came when she was five years old, and was the only girl in her all‑white class who was not given the opportunity to play the princess, Thorn Rosa, in a school performance. “Thorn Rosa marks the stirring of my nascent awareness that my colour and my girlness were linked,” she writes.
“You push that doubt down until something happens that forces it open,” she tells me. “You realise that how others see you will shape your experiences. And that realisation is traumatic.”
What mattered, she says, was that those moments were not dismissed. “I credit my parents for taking them seriously,” she says. “They refused to minimise what I experienced, even as a young child. That affirmation was freeing, it told me my feelings were grounded in reality and gave me permission to understand them.”
It was tragedy that would, in many ways, become the making of the young Crenshaw. She was eight years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968 – a before-and-after moment in her life. The following day, young Black activists in Canton directed schoolchildren to the local church for a hastily organised memorial service. Crowded into pews, everyone was silent when the activists asked if anyone had anything to say about Dr King. No one moved. It was Crenshaw who broke the silence, exhorting the crowd not to let his death be the end of the freedom struggle. “We pick up where he left off,” she recalls saying. “We continue to walk in his footsteps. They can’t kill his dream for us – not if we won’t let them.”
Further devastation followed. A year later, her father, an apparently healthy 34-year-old, died suddenly, leaving the family reeling. Not long after, her older brother Mantel was shot and killed while at university. The circumstances were never fully explained, and justice never came. She writes of that period with unflinching candour: “Happiness was dead.” These losses left an indelible mark, sharpening her awareness of the unevenness of justice in a world already structured by racial and social inequities.
Crenshaw arrived at Cornell University in 1978, to a campus shaped by the afterlives of civil rights struggle and Black student organising. It was there that she entered into a relationship with a fellow student that became physically abusive. In one incident, he beat her and tried to throw her from the window of her 10th-floor dorm room.
“We were eye-to-eye when he threw the first punch,” she writes in Backtalker. “Pressed out of denial, I woke to the fact that he was going to beat the daylights out of me.”
What followed unsettled her understanding of community more profoundly than the violence itself. Rather than rallying around her, many of her peers – fellow Black students and friends – closed ranks around him. To involve authorities, they told her, would be to expose a Black man to a system already predisposed against him. The implication was that her suffering as a woman should be subordinated to a broader racial solidarity.
“The way that sexual violence against Black women has long been justified – framing us as unlikely ever to say no to any sexual encounter – you can know this historically, but then when you experience it interpersonally, you have to grapple with the fact that more people in your own community will come to the defence of your abuser than you,” she says. “It really presses the question of ‘what is solidarity supposed to look like?’” she continues. “What does it mean to defend the ‘we’, when that ‘we’ often excludes me?”
Crenshaw returns to that question – of the instability of “we”– again and again. From arriving at Harvard Law School and being called the N-word on her first day, to being directed to enter the university’s exclusive Fly Club through the back door because she was a woman – the Black male friends she was with, rather than challenge the slight, urged her not to make a scene. What she would later call “asymmetrical solidarities” revealed themselves in practice: loyalty expected but not returned. “I cannot bring myself to ride or die for a politics that won’t ride or die for me,” she writes of the incident.
In legal terms, the problem came into focus when Crenshaw came across a 1976 case in which an African American woman was denied the ability to bring a discrimination claim against her employer on the grounds that the law could recognise race or gender, but not both at once. Her experience – specifically of being discriminated against as a Black woman – fell through the cracks and the case was thrown out of court. In 1989, Crenshaw identified this form of compound discrimination and gave it a name: intersectionality. Around the same time, she was part of a group of scholars developing what would become critical race theory, a broader attempt to understand how racism is a structural part of the legal system.
It is a lesson that would resurface, years later, in a very different arena. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the language of “we” returned with renewed force – this time, as a promise. For many, Obama’s election felt like a rupture with the past. But for Crenshaw, it quickly raised a familiar question.
“I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime,” she says, of that initial hope after Obama’s victory. “It felt like a miracle. My mother and I celebrated together on the phone – I was dancing on a table at Stanford and she was doing the same in her retirement facility. For her especially, it was a dream come true.”
But symbolism, Crenshaw suggests, has limits, particularly when it is used as a substitute for structural change. She found his reticence to address racial injustice head-on frustrating. Very quickly, the terms of Obama’s political viability became clear.
“He had been framed as post-racial, beyond these issues,” she says. “And that framing became a constraint on what he could say and how directly he could address racial injustice.”
Even when Obama did address racial inequality more explicitly in his second term – most notably after the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 – the focus, she felt, remained narrow. The White House’s response, My Brother’s Keeper, was launched as a nationwide initiative to expand opportunities for Black boys and young men. Its intentions were widely praised. Crenshaw was not convinced, and she took the administration to task directly.
“What was being discussed – Black boys and boys of colour– while important, came at the expense of girls,” Crenshaw says. “Black girls and girls of colour were suffering many of the same issues.”
Through the African American Policy Forum, she launched the #WhyWeCantWait campaign, calling for the programme to be expanded to include girls and young women of colour. Prominent Black feminist leaders and advocates including Brittney Cooper, Barbara Arnwine, Lisalyn Jacobs and Fatima Goss Graves threw their support behind it. An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 women and girls, urged the administration to realign the initiative with the principles of inclusion and shared fate that had long underpinned struggles for racial justice. The groundswell widened further with a second petition backed by high-profile white feminists including Gloria Steinem, V (formerly Eve Ensler) and Jane Fonda.
Crenshaw was invited to the White House to discuss the initiative, but the encounter only underscored how little space there was for the argument she was making. She recalls being interrupted by Obama’s chief of staff, who, she says, incredibly, told her she perhaps didn’t understand the meaning of intersectionality. Afterwards, she found herself shut out of the administration.
“It was uncomfortable to find myself outside the flow of support,” she says. “I never liked being at odds with my community. But if speaking out means sometimes being at odds with people I love, well, so be it. I still love them. I hope they still love me.”
More recently, though, the backtalking has not been against people she loves. The whiplash between the 44th and 45th presidents – the cautious optimism of Obama and the aggressive rollback under Trump – made that unavoidable.
Since 2020, the backlash has metastasised, Crenshaw argues, into an all-out assault not just on ideas, but on the very existence of Black people and women in positions of authority. “Our very presence in power is treated as preferential treatment,” she says. “This narrative of reverse discrimination has been central to the attack from the start.”
In response, she has not retreated but doubled down on her work with the African American Policy Forum, mobilising coalitions, supporting grassroots activists and amplifying voices that challenge the distortion and erasure of race and gender in public life. She continues to insist that the frameworks she helped build are necessary for understanding how inequality operates today.
This febrile political climate has brought a rising tide of political violence into everyday life in the US. The 2021 Capitol Hill riot, the assassination attempts on Trump, the 2025 targeted killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. I ask her whether her physical safety is now something she worries about. She demurs.
“There’s a long history in this country of using the threat of violence to keep people under heel,” she says. “The civil rights movement succeeded despite that terror. One cannot ignore that history. One cannot think that those forces that are willing to break this country rather than share it, don’t have descendants who won’t carry forward the same ideas.
“So yes, it’s a reality, and of course I take steps to be safe,” she continues. “But that is the cost of backtalking to the forces of autocracy.”
Middle East crisis live: Palestinians vote in first elections since outbreak of war; Israel strikes Lebanon despite ceasefire
“Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are voting in local elections, the first since the Gaza war began in October 2023. The elections feature candidates aligned with Fatah or running as independents, with no Hamas-affiliated lists. The White House has shifted its strategy towards sustained economic pressure on Iran, hoping to fracture its leadership and prevent a new consolidation of power.
Elections taking place in the occupied West Bank and also central area of Gaza
Local elections begin in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Palestinians cast ballot in West Bank and Gaza in first elections since outbreak of war
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the central area of Gaza are casting ballots today for local elections in the first vote since the Gaza war.
Over 1 million people are eligible to vote, including more than 70,000 people in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah area, according to the Ramallah-based Central Elections Commission.
Local elections begin in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
An AFP journalist visiting stations in the West Bank said turnout was low this morning, with the elections commission reporting a turnout of 15% so far.
Most of the electoral lists are aligned with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party or feature candidates running as independents. There are no lists affiliated with Hamas, which controls nearly half of the Gaza Strip.
The Fatah party is the driving force behind the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the latter of which governs the West Bank in a tense partnership with occupying Israel and is deeply unpopular among Palestinians. Many in the West Bank continue to face relentless settler attacks, with two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, killed on Tuesday after Israeli settlers opened fire near a school in the village of al-Mughayyir.
Today’s vote is the first Palestinian election to be held since the Gaza war began in October 2023.
Nearly eight weeks after Donald Trump launched his assault on Iran, the White House has shifted from a strategy of shock-and-awe bombardments and leadership decapitation to a plan of sustained economic pressure as it tests the will of a regime practiced over decades at wars of attrition.
Since the negotiations stalled, the White House has begun to shift its messaging to say it is willing to wait to strike a more durable deal with Iran – despite the growing economic toll inflicted on the world economy by the closure of the strait of Hormuz. The reason, senior officials have said, is because the joint US-Israeli strikes were so successful that they have fractured Iran’s leadership and prevented a new consolidation of power.
“Don’t rush me,” Trump told reporters on Thursday when asked how long he was willing to wait for Iran to respond to the US’s latest ceasefire proposal. “We were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years. We were in Iraq for many, many years … I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”
Reminded that he told people in the US that the war would end in four to six weeks, Trump added: “Well, I hoped that, but I took a little break.”
The whiplash of Trump’s diplomacy – as well as the growing cost of the war – has unsettled career officials at the Pentagon and state department, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as well as foreign allies who increasingly view the US as a destabilising force.
The White House’s latest strategy coalesced earlier this week during a meeting of Trump’s national security team – including Vance and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state: continued economic pressure on Iran to open the strait while waiting for Tehran to provide a unified response to US offers for a ceasefire deal.
But the lack of a sustained strategy to end the Iranian war – and in particular to address the closure of the strait of Hormuz – has convinced US allies that the White House is running out of ideas to manage the threat from Tehran.“
“President Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict, including moving deadlines and red lines, is revealing the limits of his deal-making abilities. Despite his reputation as a master negotiator, Trump’s approach to Iran has been characterized by confusion and a lack of a clear plan. This has led to increased prices for oil and other goods, impacting voters’ perceptions of his economic policies.
What moving deadlines — and red lines — in Iran means for America’s leverage.
Trump’s True Deal-Making Abilities, Revealed
What moving deadlines — and red lines — in Iran means for America’s leverage.
President Trump, the self-proclaimed master of deal making, is struggling to end his war with Iran. This week, the contributing Opinion writers E.J. Dionne Jr. and Robert Siegel reunite with the Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada to discuss the confusion caused by Trump’s foreign and domestic policies, the power of political memoirs, and whether a bill in Virginia could upend the Electoral College.
Trump’s True Deal-Making Abilities, Revealed
What moving deadlines — and red lines — in Iran means for America’s leverage.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Robert Siegel: I’m Robert Siegel in conversation about politics, once again with my fellow Times Opinion contributor, E.J. Dionne.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Always great to be with you.
Siegel: And returning to join us is Times Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada.
Carlos Lozada: Happy to be back.
Siegel: Great to see you. This was a week when a deadline came and went. It was a deadline Donald Trump set in the war against Iran. Rather than resume attacks on Iranian targets, Trump declared a continuation of the cease-fire until, in his words, Iran’s “leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Well, not only did Trump keep military action on hold, he also delayed Vice President JD Vance’s departure to take part in diplomatic action. An Iranian spokesman declared Trump’s extension of the cease-fire to have no meaning, which squares with news that two container ships were seized near the Strait of Hormuz by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps navy.
If you find this confusing, join the club. We start very far from the straits here, on the home front with this question: Has the war in Iran, and the economic shocks that it has brought, taken the measure of the self-proclaimed “master artist of the deal” in the White House? E.J., you go first. Are we seeing the limits of Donald Trump’s ability to spin his way out of political trouble?
Dionne: Indeed. I mean, the template for Trump’s ability to spin, to lie, to intimidate, to distract from any problems was set when he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. At least with his supporters. But it’s very clear that there are some things that can’t be spun.
One is people’s own perceptions of their own economic circumstance. Trump was elected with a promise to, on Day 1, bring down prices. And he sent a strong message that this was going to be a central purpose of his administration. And he’s done, you could say, exactly the opposite of that. The tariffs, whatever their long-term effect will be, clearly increased rather than decreased prices.
And now this war has increased prices for oil and, therefore, lots of other things. And voters are noticing that. And no matter what he says about affordability being a word invented by his opponents, people see that. And when you are as ill-prepared for this war as Trump clearly was — when you expect your enemy to fold instantly, and win as easily as he seemed to win in, as he won in, Venezuela — you are not prepared for what we face.
And when you’re looking at these negotiation attempts, it really underscores how this is the CliffsNotes presidency that just doesn’t take detail seriously. When former President Barack Obama negotiated the deal with Iran, there were all sorts of people there, including physicists, like theenergy secretary from my hometown, Ernest Moniz. Here, you got a real estate guy, his son-in-law and the vice president.
And the last thing I want to say, about what people are noticing about the recklessness in this administration, is also connected to cruelty. There was a really powerful piece in The Times this week, that I urge folks to read, by Elisabeth Bumiller and Eileen Sullivan about what the wreckage of the U.S.A.I.D. means for the lives of people there. And not to mention for American interest in the world, and for vastly increasing the suffering of the poorest people around the globe. If you wanted to throw a hand grenade at American respect and influence around the world, you’d wreck the U.S.A.I.D. just like that. And people are seeing all of these things.
Siegel: Carlos?
Lozada: Yeah. One thing I would add: This whole notion of Trump as the master deal maker, as deal maker in chief, it’s all part of a long-running Trump mythology that was part of “The Art of the Deal,” part of “The Apprentice.” I think that what we’re seeing now, very clearly, in the second term is the limits to his deal-making prowess, especially internationally.
You mentioned how he was going to bring down prices on Day 1. He was also going to end the Ukraine war in a day, remember? Like this was something he said more than 50 times on the campaign trail. His trade deals have been all over the map, in part because the tariff policy has been all over the map. And the Supreme Court has put limits on his ability to do that.
Sending JD Vance the first time around for a day to negotiate is theater. You can’t conclude negotiations on such an array of complicated issues in one day. I agree; I don’t think Trump has the attention to detail, the patience, frankly, for arduous negotiations that lead to a real deal.
I think he wants to save face; he wants to say that whatever he gets was better than the Obama deal, and he wants to get out as soon as he can.
Siegel:You wrote recently about a phrase that Trump has used to describe progress in the war: It’s “on schedule,” or it’s “ahead of schedule.”
Lozada: Yes. It’s a remarkable thing. He used it right away at the very beginning of the war in early March. He said to CNN that the war was “a little ahead of schedule.” Then, in mid-March, he said it was “very far ahead of schedule.” And then, in a cabinet meeting toward the end of the month, he said it was “extremely, really, a lot ahead of schedule.”
Right? And so this is a tick of Trump’s real estate days, when he would always brag that his construction projects were under budget and ahead of schedule. But building is one thing, a war is something else. It feels like a very transparent attempt to project a sense of competence, of control.
If there’s a schedule, then there must be a plan. And if we’re ahead of schedule, then the plan must be working. Also, a schedule implies an end date, which is very important for a leader who promised to not embark upon endless wars. It seems silly to have to say it, but wars do not progress on neat schedules, especially when it turns out your enemy is more capable than you imagined, and when your partner has different objectives from your own.
So, you see the president making threats with timelines and cease-fires that come and go, and get extended till the schedule, the time frame, is sort of meaningless. He’s not really trying to manage a war; he’s trying to manage the news cycle, manage the markets, and hold on to his fracturing coalition.
Dionne: No, that was an excellent piece. And you also, by the way, wrote one of the best pieces of exegesis of “The Art of the Deal,” some time ago.
Lozada: A long time ago.
Dionne: Yeah, but it still lives. One thing about what Carlos said that’s so important is this time thing. We have gotten so inured to Trump constantly saying, “wait two weeks,” “wait three weeks.” And it’s his way of: Where there’s a problem here, if I push it down the road, people might not remember it then, and I can kind of get by that.
Wait two weeks, wait three weeks with a war, absolutely doesn’t work. And now, instead of being a way to push a problem aside, it’s a way to underscore that there is no plan and there is no easy way out of this.
Siegel: Well, let’s move on to this past week’s election in Virginia. Voters there approved a plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps, so as to possibly shift as many as four seats to the Democrats. This is the same scheme that California voters had already approved. And this was all a response to Trump’s urging Texas and some other Republican states to redraw maps that would add to the Republican total.
E.J., which is more noteworthy, the fact that Virginia approved this plan, or that it did so by just a little over 51 percent of the vote? A good deal less than what Abigail Spanberger polled when she won the governorship a few months ago.
Dionne: Yeah, I don’t think anybody was surprised that this vote was closer than that. First, the polls had been very clear going in, and what you really had were Republicans overwhelmingly against the new lines; Democrats overwhelmingly for them; and independents who had voted — given Spanberger — a decent vote, were uneasy about overturning the lines. So, that wasn’t shocking.
I think what was so interesting is a lot of the Republican advertising did not make the case for Republicans. They quoted Spanberger and Barack Obama — who were leading supporters of yes on this, of overturning the lines — things they said in the past about the cost of gerrymandering. So now Democrats fill the airwaves with Obama saying, “Vote yes on this, because we need to go after Trump.”
I think it shows that Democrats would like to have no gerrymanders anywhere, and they introduced a bill to have national standards outlawing gerrymanders. But when you have Trump threatening like this, they said we can’t — I am so tired of “you can’t bring a knife to a gunfight” metaphors, but that’s what you’re hearing out there.
And I think they’re right. They can’t just let Republicans gerrymander, and sit back and say, “We’ll lose five seats here and seven seats there.” So they said no.
Siegel: After the win, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries praised the Democratic Party in a statement, saying: “When they go low, we hit back hard.” Carlos, how do you like the new “When they go low, we go just as low” Democrats?
Lozada: I’m not crazy about the new look. I understand why they’re doing it.I understand the logic, why they feel they have to. Republicans did it in Texas, and who knows, they may do it in Florida. The Democrats feel they can’t unilaterally disarm, right? And Jeffries, of course, is riffing off the famous Michelle Obama line “When they go low, we go high.” And that was from the 2016 election, which the Democrats went on to lose, right? So they’re tired of getting kicked around, of the knife to the gunfight metaphor.
That doesn’t change the fact, as they seem to recognize, that gerrymandering makes our democracy less democratic. Gerrymandering allows politicians to pick voters, rather than the other way around. The House has always been the more representative part of the American legislature compared to the Senate. That is eroding with something like this. I will cite no less an authority than the great E.J. Dionne, who, in a column four years ago, complained about the antidemocratic nature of the Supreme Court’s Rucho v. Common Cause ruling. When the court said that we can’t get involved in stopping political gerrymandering, I completely agreed that it was antidemocratic.
I think this may be perceived as a defeat for Donald Trump in Virginia, but I think it’s a victory for Trump’s style of politics. And I think we all lose with that result.
Dionne: You know, I don’t entirely agree with that. I do dislike gerrymandering. I do think it’s antidemocratic. And one of the reasons that I disliked that court decision so much is that the court had the power to say that representation should be representation.
And they could have set certain standards for the nation, where we wouldn’t have these fights. We wouldn’t have Trump going down to Texas, and Democrats then going to California. So, yeah, I would much prefer a world like that. But I think the other question about the, if you will, Jeffries versus Michelle Obama quotations — which is exactly the way to cite it — is that tactically, I think Democrats are all in on doing whatever they need to do to win.
Then there’s the moral question, and it did strike me that when Eric Swalwell was accused of sexual misconduct, the whole Democratic Party pretty much said, “You’ve got to get out of the race.” There wasn’t a pause there; there wasn’t a “let’s look at the facts.” Now, granted, that doesn’t always happen in these, but it was an interesting moment where Democrats decided they’re going to go all in on tactics, but there are certain things that will hurt them if they don’t stand up against what they perceive as moral lapses and the like.
Siegel: I’m going to take note of something else that happened recently in Virginia, just briefly. Governor Spanberger signed a bill by which Virginia joins the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. That’s a movement to get states with a combined majority of electoral college votes — that’s 270 — to pledge those votes, not necessarily to the winner in their state, but to the winner of the national popular vote. And if you add Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to those of the states that had already signed on, they’re up to 222. This is a long shot, but a possibility, if it turns into a Democratic wave year, that there could be enough states involved to reach 270, which would upend the Electoral College or reduce it to a ceremonial function.
E.J., you wrote about this back in 2007. Is it conceivable to you that this could happen?
Lozada: We’re citing all of E.J.’s old columns.
Dionne: Exactly, I’m being held accountable here. Two things on this that I think are important: One is how we have lost our constitutional imagination. We used to update the Constitution regularly.
The framers envisioned us updating the Constitution. Heck, in the case of the Electoral College, they updated it really fast after it blew up in the 1800 election. And it’s become almost impossible to amend the Constitution for various political reasons. And I hope we get back to a time — you know, as recently as the 1960s, we had a number of changes to the Constitution that were passed — and I hope we get our constitutional imagination back.
Because I think the Electoral College is an extremely outdated and, again, undemocratic way of choosing a president, I welcome this Interstate Compact. That’s why I wrote about it when it passed, way back when Maryland joined it.
Do I think it’ll happen? I think it’s still a long shot. You need a number of states. You probably need a Democratic trifecta in a number of these states. These states commit themselves, require their electors to cast their votes for the winner of the popular vote. And if you get 270-plus, if you got a majority of the Electoral College committed to that, then we have direct election of the president.
I think it will be litigated and litigated and litigated, even if they get there. So I’m not yet confident it will get there, but I really appreciate it, because it is reminding us that there’s no democracy in the world that has such a jury-rigged system of picking a president.
Siegel: Carlos, it strikes you as a clever workaround, or a suspicious end run around the Constitution?
Lozada: If you like the compact, it’s a clever and necessary workaround. If you don’t, then it’s an end run on the Constitution. And so, I recently read Jill Lepore’s new book, called “We the People,” on the history of mostly failed efforts to amend the Constitution. And how difficult it’s become to do that, as you say. The bar is high in a logistical sense, but also almost impossible to meet in a country that’s so polarized and so closely divided.
The last time that the United States came close to getting rid of the Electoral College, to changing the way that we pick the presidents, was before I was born. The House approved, overwhelmingly, an election by popular vote in 1969, and it failed in the Senate. I share your concerns about the Electoral College, the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College.
This feels a little gimmicky to me, and I can see a million ways in which it can go wrong. What if one state reneges under some kind of political pressure? What if the popular vote nationwide is very close? Does that trigger a nationwide recount everywhere, or is it a recount in just a few states, the way it might be now?
Also, it feels pretty partisan, right? You mentioned it would require a Democratic wave. E.J., you mentioned the Democratic trifecta it would need to make this happen. Somehow, I imagine that if Al Gore and Hillary Clinton had each won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, Democrats might be talking about the sage wisdom of the founders in establishing this system. And I don’t know that all these states would be so eager to embrace the compact.
If it happens, I hope that it would be a step along the way to actually really amending the Constitution, rather than a permanent substitute for that kind of amendment.
Dionne: I would much prefer an amendment, obviously. Democracies all over the world — France, notably — elect their presidents by popular vote. I mean, if they can do it, we can do it.
But that 1969 case you raised is really important, because one of the unfortunate things right now is an issue that wasn’t entirely partisan back then. So, yes, it would be nice if this issue, which ought to be about democratic accountability, could become bipartisan or nonpartisan again. But we don’t see that coming anytime soon.
Lozada: Yeah, unlikely.
Siegel: Well, on to something else. Our not quite literature conversation. One of the signs of spring in years like this one ——
Dionne: None dare call it literature?
Siegel: None dare call it literature — is the blossoming of books by would-be presidents. Times like these, with no incumbent able to run in the next presidential election, can probably eliminate unemployment among ghostwriters for months, if not years, to come. I’ve read two of the books that are out: One by the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, “Where We Keep the Light,” and the California governor, Gavin Newsom, “Young Man in a Hurry.”
Shapiro comes off as a suburban Everyman, big Obama supporter who shares Obama’s passion for shooting hoops, and prides himself on listening to people who didn’t and won’t vote for him. And if he were nominated, he would be, I think, the kind of Democrat who would seek broad support and deal with Republicans, and wouldn’t be a Bernie Sanders progressive.
He is also Jewish, and quite observant. His Jewishness could make this interesting, because this is a time when it’s widely believed that there is an increase in antisemitism in the U.S. He was in the governor’s mansion when it was firebombed.
To contrast the Shapiro book with Newsom’s book, which is very much about family and about his grandparents and his divorced parents, and his aunts and his uncles, Shapiro writes this: “We didn’t spend much time with our grandparents. Both of my parents had strained relationships with their parents and families.” That’s it for the grandparents. That’s it. That’s the only mention they get. That would be like two chapters, or three chapters, in Gavin Newsom’s book.
About halfway through his book, Newsom explains this obsession with family. Which is the sense, in San Francisco, that many regarded him — because of his family’s closeness to the family of J. Paul Getty, of the Getty Oil Company — that he was regarded as the fifth Getty son, that his successes might be seen as having been driven by Getty wealth, not by his own. And he writes, at one point, that if he’d stayed in business with one of the Gettys, that could have robbed him of his “hard-earned story, a theft that would become one of the very reasons for writing this book.”
Carlos, you’ve slogged through more of these books by would-be presidents than I think anyone I know.
Dionne: Maybe anyone on Earth.
Siegel: Why do candidates write these books?
Lozada: I think a lot of them feel they have to write this dutiful campaign memoir, even when they really don’t especially want to do it. As you say, they’re often ghostwritten, they often have these painfully generic titles, like “Looking Forward,” “The Truths We Hold,” “American Son,” American fill-in-the-blank, right? “American Journey,” you know. Why do they do it? It’s a chance to sanitize their lives and their records, and place themselves in the most favorable and electoral light. It’s also an opportunity, as you described with Gavin Newsom, a chance to try to knock out whatever the prevailing criticism of them is.
If Gavin Newsom gives off this sense of perfect-haired rich kid, then he tries to change that perception in this book, as you just explained. It’s also a publicity exercise. They get booked on TV and on podcasts and on live events to talk about the book. So they get to tease the presidential run.
For the publishers, it’s like a lottery ticket, because these books often don’t sell well, but if your candidate happens to become the nominee, or happens to win the presidency, then the book becomes a best seller. Now, those are very few and far between, and instead you have remainder piles everywhere, with “Courage to Stand” by Tim Pawlenty. Those books that really don’t make it.
Dionne: God bless Tim Pawlenty.
Lozada: No offense to the great state of Minnesota.
Dionne: I think it’s really good that we are the first people to cover one of the most important contests in America, the book primary, because this happens cycle after cycle. And I actually want to defend these books, because I think they can be very revealing, even sometimes to the detriment of the candidate, if they are completely empty. And you’ve historically had some interesting ones. Just one of the ones that I’m looking forward to, that’s coming out at the end of May, is Chris Murphy’s book, the senator from Connecticut. It’s not clear whether he’s running for president. It’s called “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.” And it’s a real argument that combines populist economics with a serious look at loneliness and social isolation and the breakdown of community. And I think it’s going to spark an interesting debate.
You also had people jump the queue. Pete Buttigieg had a very interesting book, “The Shortest Way Home,” that I liked. I reviewed it back then. It came out just before the 2020 election, which was actually a good idea, because he wasn’t known by anybody. And it proved to be a pretty good introduction, to go to Carlos’s point, and sold a lot of books when his campaign took off.
If I can just very briefly shout out three really important ones, historically: John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” written while he was a senator. It was debated, how much did he write? How much did the speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, write? But he created a phrase that entered the popular lexicon.
Richard Nixon’s “Six Crises.” Yes, I’m going to stand up here for Richard Nixon. It was a very interesting look that was quite candid about moments, relatively speaking, that we’re dealing with. Self-serving book, but a relatively candid look at six major moments in his life.
And the one that really paid off for the publishers — Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” which wasn’t a best seller. And then it took off.
Siegel: And it’s a good book. You’ve mentioned there is a downside risk. You can write a book that harms you, and one recent example of that would be Kristi Noem’s book, “No Going Back.”
Lozada: Yes. So, the journalist Michael Schaffer ——
Siegel: Leave out shooting the dog. If you write a book, that would be one of the rules.
Dionne: Never ever do that.
Siegel: Right.
Lozada: Well, the journalist Michael Schaffer wrote an article in Politico about that episode, and he said that the rule of political books should be, first, do no harm. That is the No. 1 rule, and usually they are harmless.
I completely agree. I’ve made a living out of mining these books to find the unintentionally revealing detail that they often do. Now, what Kristi Noem did is admit that she shot her dog — not just shot her dog, but shot her dog out of anger and embarrassment, and then proceeded to shoot her goat because the goat was right there. And she had never liked the goat either, you know? So it turns out these books can be harmful. They certainly hurt her chances for vice president, which was something that was vaguely in the air at the time. Though it did give us a sense of how thoughtlessly and callously she would serve as Department of Homeland Security secretary. So that proved useful, for at least this reader.
Siegel: Are there any actual upsides? That is, can we cite someone whose campaign was aided by a book?
Lozada: So, if Michael Schaffer’s was to do no harm, my rule of presidential memoir writing is that the closer the book is to your time in office, whether before or after, the worse the book is. And the further removed it is from your time, the better you tend to write it.
There are three great books, to my mind, that certainly have aided, if not the campaign, then the place in history of the writers. One is “Dreams From My Father,” as you said, E.J. And the other is the personal memoirs by Ulysses Grant.
Siegel: Ulysses S. Grant, yes.
Lozada: He wrote a beautiful memoir that really didn’t even address his time in the White House. In fact, reading it, you would never think that this guy was a politician.
And the last one I will mention is by someone who could have made a living as a writer instead of a politician. That was Jimmy Carter.
And my favorite of Jimmy Carter’s books is one called “An Hour Before Daylight,” which is a memoir that he wrote 20 years after the White House, about growing up on his father’s farm in Georgia during the Depression. And really, all three of those were far removed from their political aspirations and from their time in office, and I think that made them better.
Siegel: Well, on that note, we come to our traditional last question, which is: Let’s set aside politics and wars — what brought some joy into your life since we last met? And E.J., why don’t we start with you?
Dionne: Well, I actually want to stick to books, because I was thinking about this — the joy that continuators have brought to my life. Now, who are continuators? I happen to love popular fiction mysteries and thrillers. And when a successful writer dies, there are still lots of fans out there who love the series, who love the characters and want to stay with them. And publishers, and often the families of these late authors, realize that people still want to read these books. And so, for me, keeping those series alive has been an awesome thing.
Anne Hillerman is a good example. She is the daughter of Tony Hillerman, the author of the great Navajo series, which are beautiful books about the Southwest, about Navajos’ spirituality. Tom Clancy, “The Hunt for Red October.” This may be the most successful continuator franchise. He’s got a regiment of people, or in his case, I suppose it would be a crew, since it’s mostly naval — a crew of people keeping him alive. One of my very favorite sets of mysteries are Rex Stout’s, “Nero Wolfe,” about the enormous detective who lives in a brownstone in New York City. A writer called Robert Goldsborough was his continuator. I discovered Rex Stout through his continuator, and then gobbled up all the rest of the books. So thank you to these folks for keeping a tradition alive and for entertaining an awful lot of us.
Siegel: And I would just say John le Carré’s son has contributed ——
Dionne: I was going to mention that one. So thank you.
Siegel: Carlos?
Lozada: I love that you brought up the continuators, because it reminded me of my favorite novelist of all time, the late Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away last year. The greatest Peruvian novelist, a Nobel laureate. And in his Nobel speech, he talked about how the first stories he ever wrote were continuations.
Dionne: Oh, wow!
Lozada: As a little boy, he didn’t want these stories that he loved to end, so he just kept writing.
Dionne: Bless you for lifting up my popular fiction case into something truly profound.
Lozada: I’m going to bring it right back to where you were, because — and we did not plan this — one thing that we do, as a family at home, is we read together. We might read over dinner, someone reads aloud and we get through a lot of stories that way. But I’m going to mention one that we read recently, which gave me a lot of personal joy. When I was a kid, my parents would get those abridged, condensed books from Reader’s Digest, right? You know, like four mini novels in one hardcover.
Siegel: I remember those.
Lozada: And there was one by Dorothy Gilman, who was a very popular spy novelist. She wrote these novels called the Mrs. Pollifax novels. And it was this northeastern elderly woman who was somehow involved with the C.I.A., and was a spy. She wrote a book, Dorothy Gilman, called “The Tightrope Walker.”
It had all sorts of murder and politics and sex and corruption. And when I was maybe like 12 years old, I just thought this was the greatest novel in the world. But it had never occurred to me that there was a fuller version of it, and that it was out there in the world. And I just thought of it a few weeks ago. And so I ordered it and I got the full one, and that became the story that we read. So it was a chance to have this great communal experience with the kids, but also a throwback for me to finish the novel that I’d never fully read when I was in middle school.
Siegel: Well, I’m going to put in a word for basketball. I delighted in watching a game — I really didn’t care about either team. But watching Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4-inch player who is redefining the game of basketball, took me back to being a kid, seeing Wilt Chamberlain play as a rookie in Madison Square Garden. A guy who was changing the game of basketball, not only the biggest man on the court, but the best athlete on the court.
And I was so thrilled with the way Wembanyama was playing in this game — in which his team beat the Portland Trail Blazers, as they were expected to — that I tuned in, a few nights later, to game No. 2, just at the moment when I see Wembanyama sprawled on the ground, and being taken off or running off to the locker room to be treated under the concussion protocol. And it just reminded me what a risky thing it can be, to be a professional athlete, and how quickly you can lose it. I don’t know when he will come back, but he’s great.
Lozada: He’s an extraordinary talent.
Dionne: Thank you. I love that. The notion of watching excellence and innovation like that in sports go together. It’s really an amazing thing,
Siegel: Well, thanks to both of you once again. Carlos Lozada, E.J. Dionne.
Dionne: Thank you, Robert.
Lozada: Appreciate it.
Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro and Isaac Jones. Video editing by Arpita Aneja. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins, with support from Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT“
