Kerim's Triptych ❧ Public Opinion, James, Nani

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1️⃣ Public Opinion

I have mixed feelings about Peter Shamshiri's article, "The Tyranny of Public Opinion." On the one hand, I agree with his argument that: "If you’re a political party, your goal is not just to know where voters stand, but to know how to move them." Especially noteworthy is the article's use of empirical evidence to support this claim:

In the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, one of the big issues was Social Security privatization. Bush wanted to (partially) privatize, Gore didn’t. Political scientist Gabriel Lenz looked at survey data gathered from voters both early in the election cycle and then again right before the election. He found that initially, there was little correlation between voters’ positions on Social Security privatization and their choice of candidate. By the time the election rolled around, however, the voters had seemingly sorted themselves: people who supported privatization tended to support Bush, and people who opposed it supported Gore.

You might think this makes sense: people saw what the candidates stood for, and then aligned with the candidate who matched their position. But that’s not what happened. The surveys showed that the voters’ choice of candidates generally hadn’t changed. Instead, they had changed their position on Social Security privatization to match their chosen candidate. Not only that, but almost no voters changed their preferred candidate based on the issue. The voters weren’t switching candidates based on their policy positions, they were switching policy positions based on their candidate.

But here's the problem I have with Shamshiri's take: I think he is too ready to take Democrats at their word. They say they are just responding to polls, but are they? Obviously not. There are a number of issues for which the American public is far to the left of the Democrats. For instance, the majority of Democrats support Medicare for All, but Harris dropped it from her platform during the campaign. So that's where this piece breaks down. The Democrats blame polls when it suits them to do so, but ignore them when it does not.

What is particularly galling is that, even when they ignore the polls, they rarely try to change public opinion on issues the way that Republicans do. The Democrats prefer to "manage" public opinion rather than change it, and I think that is a mistake. People don't like to be managed, they want to be persuaded, or (as the article seems to suggest) even to just be told what they should think.

2️⃣ James

I recently finished James, by Percival Everett, which tells the story of Huck Finn from the point of view of his companion, the escaped slave Jim. I first read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a simplified children's edition when I was about nine or ten years old. I remember it because some adult told me that it was a book I would read multiple times in my life, each time reading it in a new way. This idea blew me away. It had never occurred to me (at that young age) that you might read the same book twice, or that you might read the same book in multiple ways. Well, after reading James I immediately went back and read Huck Finn again, and doing so was an entirely new experience.

In a famous essay on Huckleberry Finn, Toni Morrison says that Jim stands in for the father that Huck never had. And she argues that Twain's use of minstrelry allows Jim's character allows to be both a source of paternal love and, at the same time to be under Huck's care, unable to impose himself on Huck the way a real father would. So what happens to that relationship when you reverse the story, as James does? Huck cannot serve such a role for Jim. That's because of the inequality in their relationship, but also because even if Everett can tackle the minstrelry in Jim's character, he can't do the equivalent to Huck. Thus, the reversal gives us an entirely different kind of novel than the original, for better and for worse.

In the original, there are huge stretches of the book where Jim is left on the raft while Huck has adventures on land. In this book, we stay with Jim throughout, allowing Everett to create adventures for him that are not in Twain's original book. One of those tackles minstrelry directly, as Jim is drafted into a wandering minstrel show, where he is expected to play a white person pretending to be Black. The book seems to reserve some of its deepest scorn for the leader of the minstrel show, whose notebook of (mostly) made-up slave songs is stolen by Jim to write his own book in the empty pages.

Language is especially important for Everett. In his book, Jim can actually read. He and other slaves also speak in standard English when white people aren't around. In one scene, he teaches his daughters how to translate their thoughts into the slave dialect their masters expect to hear them speak.

Going back to Twain after this, the minstrelry and Jim's language leap off the page, making it much harder to stomach. Especially the final section, where Tom Sawyer returns and makes Jim's own effort to escape into a form of amusement for himself. After having been in Jim's mind for so long while reading James, it is impossible to simply laugh when he puts up with Tom's antics. But one also gets a better appreciation of the things that make Twain's novel so timeless: the humor, the descriptions of the river, the child-like perspective, and more. James is ultimately an adult novel. There is no way to provide an honest depiction of slavery that is funny and lighthearted. Twain knew this, and resorted to minstrelry to get around it. James seeks to strip all that away.

3️⃣ Nani

Many of you may have heard of an up-and-coming candidate for New York mayor by the name of Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is running an exciting grassroots campaign grounded in issues of social justice that clearly sets him apart from the front-runner, the disgraced ex-governor, Andrew Cuomo. Although Mamdani is in a distant second place, he is closing the gap as more and more people learn who he is and what he stands for. He had to ask people to stop sending him money because they already raised more than the maximum they are allowed to spend on the campaign.

I've followed Mamdani's career for a while now. That's because I'm a fan of both of his parents: the filmmaker Mira Nair (with whom I used to take the same yoga classes, though we never talked) and the scholar Mahmood Mamdani, whose book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism was very influential on my own work.

I first heard of Zohran during his short-lived career as the rapper "Mr. Cardamom." The NY Times had profiled the star of one of his music videos. That's because the video featured the then "85-year-old actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey" as a tough grandma. It is still a delightful video to watch, especially for those who grew up watching Merchant-Ivory films and using her cookbook. Enjoy.

Endnote

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