Indivisibles,

Welcome to the monthly Leah and Ezra newsletter, where we take a step back and talk about what we’re grappling with.

This monthly letter is fully dedicated to a book you need to read -- The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, former head of Demos (and a founding member of Indivisible’s board!).

Heather spent years analyzing how racism has been used to strategically divide Americans, what racism has cost us all, and what’s possible when we refuse to be divided. Her book opens with a simple, haunting question: “Why can’t we have nice things?”

The drained pool

At the center of Heather’s book is the story of public pools in America. You may know -- I certainly didn’t -- that we used to have a network of thousands of enormous, beautiful public pools across the country. These community institutions were often built with public investment during the New Deal. For decades, they were reserved for white people. As desegregation progressed, cities and towns overwhelmingly made the choice to fill in, abandon, or privatize the public pools rather than allow them to be shared with Black people.

This is, first and foremost, a story of anti-Black oppression. But it’s also a story about what racism costs everyone. It’s a story about how our political imagination has been limited, because for generations, so many of us white people have chosen to go without rather than to share.

Drained pools are everywhere - and that suits the rich just fine

Once you’ve heard the story of the drained pools, you start to see it constantly in American life. You feel it in the things we don’t have -- a real social safety net, universal health insurance, good jobs, childcare, or eldercare.

You hear it in the racially coded appeals that Republicans and some Democrats (hi, Joe Manchin!) used to dismiss, undermine, and often successfully destroy the idea of universal programs. You see it in the racist attacks that regularly form the center of the Republican message.

Because, as Heather notes, this doesn’t happen accidentally. Racism is weaponized, and stoked, and used strategically to undermine the possibility of public goods or cross-race solidarity. Someone benefits from hollowing out public life. When the public pools are drained, or the public schools are gutted, the rich get to keep their taxes low. When faith in government and collective action is destroyed, corporations can rake in profits, evade regulations, and crush worker power.

The drained pool of democracy

At Indivisible, we think a lot about why our democracy is under threat and what could make it truly inclusive and functional. Heather’s book offers a historical frame for the arc that we’re living through.

Our democracy is young. It began not in 1776 but in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act, which finally guaranteed, at least on paper, the right for all to vote. The lost era of bipartisanship, so often fetishized by pundits in Washington, was rooted in the exclusion of whole classes of people from the halls of power. It’s a lot easier to agree on things if everyone at the table is a rich, white man. Now that those halls of power are a bit more diverse, voices that had long been excluded are being heard -- and not everyone’s happy about that.

As our democracy becomes more diverse and more representative, there’s a backlash, just like the backlash to desegregation. Our first Black president faced a rise in white grievance politics, first in the form of the Tea Party and then in the rise of Donald Trump. And over the last decade, there’s been an effort -- through voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, packing the courts, and most shockingly, a literal violent attack on the Capitol -- to enshrine minority rule.

Some people -- specifically, some white people -- would prefer minority rule, if they’re the ones whose group will remain represented in power.

This may sound overly dramatic. Unfortunately, it’s not. Look no further than what happened in the Senate this week, where Republicans filibustered the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They are, quite literally, opposed to the successor to the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- the very law that made us an actual democracy.

In other words, the fight over our democracy right now is a fight over whether to drain the pool or share it. We can have a democracy. We can have health care, public goods, and a government that works for us. We can’t be naive about the power of racial grievance -- it’s the central force in American politics (and our political campaigns, policy solutions, and strategies have to reflect that). But we have joined across lines of difference in the past to make our country better before, and we can do it again.

A multiracial democracy with a government that works for all of us is possible in this country; in fact, it’s on the horizon. We have to fight for it.

What can you do?

Well, it’s Indivisible, so first, we’re going to tell you you need to call your senators and tell them to end the filibuster so we can pass the Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

Then, let’s pass those game-changing policies that improve peoples’ lives and show them they have more to gain from solidarity than division. That’s the Build Back Better Act, and now that Congress has passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF), we need to complete the Biden economic agenda by moving Build Back Better forward. Tell your representative and tell your senators that you want the Build Back Better Act passed now -- no more excuses, no more delays.

And of course, you should read The Sum of Us. It’s incredibly rich, and, perhaps even more precious in this moment, it’s deeply optimistic. It will give you a sense of not only what’s at stake, but also the good things that are possible if we come together and build solidarity and some of the ways that people are trying to do that work right now. It’s also just a great read -- I finished it in about 24 hours. Read it, give it to your friends, and try out some of the frames that Heather uses, and see how they work in your own life.

In solidarity,

Leah Greenberg
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

P.S. -- It’s not a monthly newsletter without a picture of Zeke, our 1-year-old! Here we are trick-or-treating together as Calvin, Hobbes, and Susie Derkins.