4 books that helped me cope with life in America this year

Everything is broken and there's beauty everywhere. These authors helped me reconcile those truths.

I followed politics well before I could vote (starting in 2000) and through the Obama and Trump years I consumed some sort of media about national politics on a daily basis. I acknowledge that this is a privilege, but I no longer really follow national politics.¹ Instead, I want to read and write about subjects of awe and wonder, not because I want to ignore the environmental crisis or escape from human plight, but because that wonder is what beats back the defeatism that can easily overtake one person with so little political power.

Since 2020, the books that have stuck with me the most are the ones which explore the intersection of society and individual agency. Because elections distill this conflict to a single point, they make us feel powerless, especially when we’re implored to vote strategically with no regard to our actual values.² We’re left to wonder how this happened, and if there’s anything else we can do. Many Leftist authors wind up concluding their books with a answer to that question: The way we got into this mess is the same way we get out of it; people become powerful by making themselves powerful.

That’s easier said than done, of course—the powerful people who control our government and our economy will not voluntarily return any of the control or wealth that they have amassed. To make matters worse, they have convinced nearly half of the country that they deserve to be in power with a compelling populist dogma rooted in fear. My first recommendation discusses how to attack that dogma.

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If you love getting into paragraphs-long arguments on Facebook, I recommend The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin.

There has never been a better time to get involved in local politics. After the election there will still be many State and Local elected officials who are actually responsive to their constituents. Attend local meetings proposing affordable housing solutions. Write your mayor or even go to a city council or advisory board meeting. Encourage your state government to pass progressive measures, if that’s something they seem remotely inclined to do. I recently learned that Colorado, which is held by a Democratic trifecta, failed to pass a bill limiting fracking during the summer, when the entire Front Range Urban Corridor is subject to the second-worse ozone levels in the country. I hope to do something about that somehow. Whatever local harm reduction we hope to accomplish, we will certainly face backlash, so how do we defeat conservatism?

The Reactionary Mind is a historical study that starts the moment modern conservatism does, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Because it makes sure to faithfully study conservative philosophy it can be a be tough read at times, but if you have the patience, and if you would rather learn a frustrating truth than remain comfortably ignorant, it is worth it. The book is comprehensive in its understanding of the tactics employed by conservatives, which can be frustrating to those of us who are sick of hearing them, but by exposing them as means to an end it strips many supposed ideologies of their rhetorical power. Its thesis is that conservatism is the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back—everything else is just lip service to populism.

Once we’ve made gains in government, we’re still pushing against the seemingly immovable object of Capitalism. What do we do about that? My next recommendation presents some options.

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If you wish Elon Musk would shut the fuck up forever, I recommend Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond.

Be warned—listening to this book might make you want to break shit. Poverty, by America crystalizes our collective anguish at living in a country run by Billionaires. It is outrage turned into a hit list. Collective loss is treated as a crime, and perpetrators are named. I listened to the entirety of this book driving to and during an overnight backpack in Rocky Mountain National Park. On the final stretch of trail, I reached the book’s final thesis, which is that we are all complicit is subsidizing the lifestyles of the affluent instead of providing for the commonwealth by alleviating poverty. His disproving of the idea that immigrants are to blame for our economic anxieties is of particular relevance in this election so I’ve quoted it below for anyone interested:

OVER THE COURSE OF American history, immigrants have served as a scapegoat for our economic anxieties. "The Chinese as a class are a detriment and a curse to our country," reads a newspaper column from 1877. "They have supplanted white labor and taken the bread out of the mouths of the white men and their families." In the early 1900s, native-born white Americans lashed out at Italian immigrants for landing jobs and working hard in them, even resorting to mob violence and lynching to drive them out of town. Conservatives today who cast blame on immigrants for dragging down wages and displacing native workers are carrying forward an old American tradition.

Theoretically, immigrants could drive up a country's poverty rate in at least three ways: They could arrive poor and stay that way, forming a new underclass; they could make the native-born population poorer by depressing wages; or they could overburden the safety net, diluting antipoverty investments. Our foreign-born population has soared over the past half century. In 1960, one in twenty people in America was born in another country. Today, one in eight is. The United States now has more immigrants than any other nation on earth. Could this be why the poverty rate hasn't budged even as antipoverty aid has increased?

Like European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic generations ago, many present-day immigrants arrive poor. If those newcomers and their children remained poor, increased immigration could push up the poverty rate. If this were happening, states that experienced the largest influx of immigrants should have seen their poverty rates climb. Almost half of America's foreign-born population now lives in just three states: California, Texas, and Florida. As those states took in more and more immigrants, did they become worse off? No, they did not. Between 1970 and 2019, the share of the immigrant population increased by nearly 18 percent in California, 14 percent in Texas, and 13 percent in Florida. But over that same period, California's poverty rate increased only marginally (by 0.7 percent), while poverty fell in both Texas and Florida: by 5 and almost 4 percent, respectively. The states that have taken in the most immigrants over the past half century have not grown poorer. In the case of Texas and Florida, they have grown more prosperous.

If poor immigrants have settled in large numbers in California and Florida and Texas without making those states poorer over time, it's because immigrants have some of the highest rates of economic mobility in the country. This is especially true for the children of immigrants. How many of us have met software engineers and doctors and lawyers who are the children of migrant farmers and dishwashers and laundresses? Their collective success is a big reason why heightened immigration has not resulted in more poverty.

But has their success come at the expense of other workers? Do immigrants compete with native-born Americans, driving down wages and pulling more people into poverty? The best research we have on this question finds that the long-term impact of immigration on wages is quite small, and its impact on employment is even smaller. If immigrants competed with native-born workers for jobs, this finding would be head-scratching, even dubious, but immigrants mainly compete with other immigrants for jobs, which means the workers most threatened by new arrivals are older arrivals. For many Americans, wages have stagnated, but immigrants are not to blame.

Undocumented immigration has slowed in recent years. The push factors have waned, thanks to an aging population and stabilizing economy in Mexico, and the push back factors have grown stronger with increasingly militant border enforcement. The politicians who wring their hands about "the border crisis" know full well that the undocumented population peaked over fifteen years ago, in 2007. Yet employers have not responded to a shrinking undocumented workforce by hiring native-born workers at competitive wages. Instead, they have responded by automating their jobs, hiring other immigrants, or simply closing up shop.

Regardless of their impact on the labor market, immigrants could make a country poorer by relying heavily on welfare benefits. But the poorest immigrants are undocumented, which makes them ineligible for many federal programs. Over a typical lifetime, an immigrant will give more to the U.S. government in taxes than they will recieve in federal welfare benefits. Even if the opposite were true, the impact immigrants would have on overall government spending would be utterly, even comically, trivial compared to the stress the American upper class places of the welfare state. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, it’s enough to concede that America’s dismal track record on poverty reduction cannot be blamed on its immigrant workforce.

If has ever occurred to you Capitalism might not be the inevitable apex of civilization, my next recommendation (and I) would agree.

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If you think we should let women run things for a while, I recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

How did we get here? No, like really, from the beginning, how did we get here? Is humanity just intrinsically doomed to repeat history? Is America the next Roman Empire?

Respectively: it’s the Patriarchy, no, and maybe. The audiobook is 20 hours long, and it answers those questions and many more in a very thorough anthropological examination of traditional hierarchies of civilizations. It centers around the dialogue between European and Indigenous leaders, a moment in history best captured in a completely different book:

On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread from the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.

Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness, One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a co-creator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was in exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.

And then they met – the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve – and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick.”

(I just started reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and I’m already hooked.)

The Dawn of Everything similarly deconstructs conventional ideas of what it means for a civilization to progress, but does so using the language and tools of the anthropologists that they refute. It’s simultaneourly a serious academic work and a witty diatribe. It was a refreshing step back in perspective, and a reminder that there is a better way of doing things if we just listen to history.

That’s a good goal to strive for, but it takes energy, and existing in the world we’re stuck with is exhausting. My final recommendation offers support and empowerment for folks who are completely “over it”.

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If you struggle with allowing yourself to relax, I recommend Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond The Clock by Jenny Odell.

Since 2021 I’ve felt like I should be doing something but haven’t been sure what that something should be. Even though her other book is called How to Do Nothing, this is the book that convinced me that it’s more than OK to simply enjoy my surroundings; in fact it’s an act of resistance. Saving Time assured me that I’m not silly to long for a world not centered around profit potential, where I’m not forced to sell a majority of my waking hours to enrich someone else’s life. It disputes that we should strive to optimize every moment of our lives, including leisure time. My favorite passage deals with something that has dismayed me about this election, which is that the DNC seems to no longer think talking about the primary existential threat of our time will win over any voters. I’m afraid that they’re probably right. How do I care about politics, or anything else, when I’m staring down the end of the world? Odell offers this answer:

WHEN WE ALLOW the climate crisis a moral dimension, certain things lost in the haze become clearer, including its relationship to other fundamental injustices. For example, the seemingly utilitarian reasoning of energy companies and investors can be compared to that of the apologists for slavery in nineteenth-century America, who also saw it as an apolitical, economic issue with technocratic solutions. Only by viewing enslaved people as nonsubjects could someone like Henry Lascelles, Second Earl of Harewood, have spoken plausibly of a "progressive state" of "improvement in the slave population" at an 1823 meeting about his West Indian plantations. Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better; abolition was moral, a question of who was a subject. Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object. Plantation owners could not imagine futures without the objects of slavery and, therefore, promoted and funded a worldview in which enslaved people remained objects. This connection is more than an analogy: Multiple scholars have emphasized, for example, the role of plantation cotton in the textile factories that drove the Industrial Revolution.

For a modern subject, there is so much about this historical moment that can seem helplessly convoluted but some things are cut and dried. Whenever I see the future being frittered away in cold calculations; whenever someone says it's ecological and economic but not moral or political; whenever a technocratic framing hides and continues the arrogance of centuries past; whenever the colonized and objectified fail to appear as plaintiff; whenever those who profit fail to appear as defense; whenever I start to lose sight of the horizon and forget why the smoke is there—I play out the argument in my head. It's a complicated subject, says one side. Not really, says the other.

The alternative to saying "this is it" is the idea that this was never it. The trees I saw as a child were not timeless. Like the forests sprung from fire suppression and the question of whether land was a who or a what, I grew up on a false plateau I took for infinity. And until I learned otherwise, all I could perceive was the loss of what was familiar and comforting to me. Now I endeavor to release my grip. To look into the future is to look around; to look around is to look into history-at not the apocalypse coming but the apocalypse past, the apocalypse still unfolding. Observing that the Greek word apokalypsis meant "through the concealed," Washuta writes that "apocalypse has very little to do with the end of the world and everything to do with vision that sees the hidden, that dismantles the screen." Likewise, French feminist poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote that "we need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn't what we think it is." The current meaning of apocalypse is modern; in Middle English it simply meant "vision," "insight," or even "hallucination." The world is ending-but which world? Consider that many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born. Consider that there is nothing a priori about any of them. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that you were not born at the end of time, but actually at the exact right time, that you might grow up to be, as the poet Chen Chen writes, "a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms." Hallucinate a scenario, hallucinate yourself in it. Then tell me what you see.

AND WHAT OF the meantime, where nightmares still happen? The future is not written, but there is the loss that has already occurred, the loss happening now, and that portion of loss that is already locked in. Writing this chapter, there were moments when I felt like I was drinking poison-or, perhaps more accurately, letting several tons of San Gabriel boulders through the small house of my self. I wasn't always sure if the walls would hold.

Grief on this scale can kill the lone mourner-if not physically, then in other ways. It's just another curse of an isolated Homo economicus: What consumers do is buy green, not hold each other and cry. If we've been robbed of "all memory of a past when humans managed to organize themselves in other ways," that must extend to our emotional lives as well: Your problems are personal and pathological, their solutions circumscribed to your own life choices and a couple of self-help titles.

I remember telling two close friends, at a dinner right before the Covid-19 pandemic, that I thought I might be depressed. The way I talked about it, you'd think it was a broken limb, a nutrient deficiency, or even a personal failing, and not the heartbreak of a person existing in a world. "Well, Jenny," one of them pointed out, "there is a lot to be depressed about." The other simply put his arm around me.

The present cannot and should not be borne alone. Grief, too, can teach you new forms of subjecthood. I think of a kind of double-ness, a mutuality with the power to witness and not turn away. That which pulls me through to another day has always been another body, whether that of a friend, a flock of birds in a shrub, or the east-facing side of my favorite mountain. I draw near them, draw from them some kind of something that doesn't quite reside in me. A review of How to Do Nothing once said that I "employ[ed] the annoying term 'bodies'" when, clearly, I must have meant people or humans. But I don't mean "people" or "humans." I mean bodies: double bodies, triple bodies, alliances and amalgamations that can shift and bear the weight, brace the walls. This moment requires that we be pressed together, pressed against the world. Now is not the time to turn your back on the ocean.

Back in September 2020, most of my nightmares ended with me looking at the advance of fire. But there was one notable exception: In one of them, I ran up to a stranger who had a dog with him and asked him for help. He grabbed my hand, and the three of us ran for our lives to a grocery store parking lot. As the fire surrounded us, we stood and watched it together. The world had ended, but the dream hadn't. Now what? I asked.

What now is I’m going to go for a walk or a bike ride, observe some nature, and keep listening to another book. If that sounds like a good idea to you, I hope you’ll consider one of these books.

1. This happened in 2020, when for a moment there were actual progressive movements in response to the labor exploitation and police brutality that we all witnessed. But then the system worked as intended, and protestors who were already traumatized then faced state-sanctioned violence and cultural backlash and the cumulative fatigue proved to be too much. Biden was elected, America reverted to an apathetic Neoliberalism, and I lost my appetite for national politics and swore a hiatus.

2. I would probably vote Green in a ranked-choice ballot, or DSA if they had a candidate. I’ve also seen many Gen-Z colleagues express righteous outrage at being asked to vote for a Vice President who has sent arms to the IDF. To those of us who have been conditioned to voting strategically, and who have a clearer memory of the first Trump Presidency, voting for Harris, which I did, seems like a necessary evil. But it seems to me that we should always, ALWAYS listen to anyone who questions why an evil is “necessary” because if not, then why pretend to care?