📣 Hear Ye, Hear Ye: It’s Your BookWag!
The D.C. Desk Campaigns for Normie Politics. Plus: New Reads from Dennard Dayle, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Catherine Lacey, and More...
Dear Wags,
Over the past few days, we’ve been thinking about the power of polite society. By that, we mean the enormous influence wielded by ordinary people who share mainstream values. Your handheld agitation device suggests those values have collapsed, and civilization has descended into an ugly clash of warring factions. It’s not entirely true, but it serves those who monetize conflict and use it to amass power. That’s where our version of polite society comes in: those with a shared sense of civic responsibility, not some caricature of fussy elites.
Here at Wag HQ, our main mission is to delight you; plenty of other venues specialize in partisan agitprop. But alongside champagne and caviar, we try to serve higher values—ideals that transcend picayune, polarizing issues: fairness, individual rights, and the rule of law. We may argue vehemently about the hot buttons lighting up social media feeds, but we’d like to preserve the right to agree to disagree.
The information ecosystem has famously different incentives. As a result, Western civilization has become unmoored from deeper values and addicted to cheap digital provocation. We’re witnessing what happens when brainrot infects opinion-makers and the corridors of power. If you endlessly endorse outrage over civic values, you sever democracy from its foundations and reward theatrical tantrums. If the goal is to restore civic order, reengage polite society.
By that, we don’t mean everyone gets a haircut and says please and thank you (though it would be awfully nice). We mean that worthwhile social movements cannot succeed without engaging the broad middle—the tens of millions of conventional non-activists who, as it was once famously put, work hard and play by the rules. These taxpayers mow their lawns, mind their own business, and are turned off by extremists. They tend to share the same essential values and are disturbed by the lurch away from them. When that enormous cohort is moved to action, change follows.
It is difficult to message that constituency while wearing a balaclava. On that, the historical record is clear: Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth—suddenly the woman of the moment—studied protest movements over the past 100 years and found that nonviolent ones are twice as likely to achieve their goals as militant uprisings. You don’t need to get lost in the stacks at the Kennedy School to grasp that. Just ask yourself: Would you rather be in Poland or Libya?
Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule,” which posits that a nonviolent movement needs that share of a nation’s populace to succeed, has become a meme among anti-Trumpists. She’s not claiming it’s a magic spell—if nearly 12 million Americans were to oppose the administration, it would still have plenty of passionate supporters. Still, such movements prevail by bringing as many people on board as possible, including deserters from the fragile coalitions that prop up autocrats.
If estimates are right, around 5 million people participated in No Kings demonstrations over the weekend, making them one of the largest protests in U.S. history. They were peaceful, flag-waving affairs attended not just by the usual suspects but by a broad cross-section of polite society. Still, to meet Chenoweth’s threshold, a much larger share of the population will need to join in sustained opposition to Trumpism. It must transcend base activism and reach the apolitical and disaffected. Organizers emphasized patriotism and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to appeal to those who rarely, if ever, march. Successful democratic movements endure because they work their way into the mainstream.
There is ample evidence that violent movements do the opposite. Bellicose factionalism splinters societies; chaos bolsters authoritarianism. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did far more to bring change to Argentina than the Marxist groups the junta used to justify its repression (groups that, in any case, weren’t fighting for democracy). The last wave of campus protests seemed designed to bait Middle Americans with incendiary rhetoric. That may have felt righteous to a handful of aspiring Rosa Luxemburgs, but it hardly served the country.
The engagement of a diverse, polite society changed attitudes and policies during the civil rights era and the Vietnam War. Performative radicalism in the same period provoked backlash. A truly inclusive, nonviolent movement requires discipline, leadership, and mainstream appeal to check the fringe. The woolly character waving a hammer-and-sickle flag will inevitably show up at a march. The rest of America—including the business class, law enforcement, and the military—must begin to recognize aspects of themselves in crowds they don’t join. If that assemblage is as big as possible, brick-throwers get pushed to the edge, and kids and grandmothers get their faces on camera.
Best case, this is a slog, made harder by seductive, siloed information systems that run interference. The platforms that empowered reactionary populism are unlikely to be the places that defeat it. Persuasion requires exposure, risk, and face-to-face relationship-building in the tangible world, not more TikTok videos. It also requires unmasking, both literal and metaphoric, to make clear that those who push back against a regime are not chaos agents, but a big tent of upstanding citizens across a range of beliefs: members of polite society who’ve simply had enough. Zealots of any ideology can shift the Overton Window, but it’s normies who ratify change.
Opposition to Trumpism isn’t a blanket endorsement of a sclerotic Democratic Party, which has limped through the past five months. The same weekend millions marched, many of the country’s most powerful Democrats were in the Hamptons for a billionaire’s wedding. Next stop: the Bezos nuptials in Venice. If you think that vibes with the national mood, the country you live in must be Monaco.
For change to happen, there must be a groundswell from below, producing new leaders who speak with authenticity to the heart of the country. Their emergence could compel more cynical politicians to follow constituents into coalitions that genuinely serve the public interest. For opposition to MAGA to truly succeed, the crowd must begin to include those who have turned away from the Democratic Party in recent years—Americans who either voted for Trump or sat out the last election, fed up with the status quo. Polite society includes far more than the educated classes.
It’s a tall order, but the weekend’s events suggest a shift in public sentiment. After a day of nationwide protests, the White House claimed 250,000 attended the military extravaganza for Trump’s 79th birthday—but reports suggest a much smaller, subdued crowd. It rained on his parade. Maybe the weather’s changing.
Yours Ever,
M.V. Fenwick
Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
Huneven captures the shagginess and drift of 1970s Northern California in her evocative fifth novel, which opens in that lost era. The summer before his freshman year of college, Ellis Samuelson escapes to Bug Hollow, a remnant of hippie culture in the redwoods. But early in his stay at the ramshackle commune, Ellis dies, leaving behind a pregnant girlfriend. His parents, laid-back Phil and uptight Sibyl, and his sisters, Katie and Sally, spend the next few decades trying to make sense of it all. A rich array of survivors—drinkers, swingers, worriers—populate this drama (sharp-edged Sibyl is especially well-drawn), which explores both the evolution of a family and the region that shaped it. Spoiler alert: the commune becomes a high-end spa.
— Marion McPherson
Midnight at the Cinema Palace by Christopher Tradowsky
Whatever they do to San Francisco, you can’t kill its magic. Tradowsky’s charming debut captures the City as it was in the ’90s—during the final days of the terrible gay plague, but before tech took hold. Walter, an out but not worldly Midwesterner fresh out of college, falls in love with a magical place, finds a delightful posse of friends, writes a screenplay, and looks for love in the foggy hills. These wayward Gen Xers share cocktails and a love of old Hollywood movies; their wit and irony will make anyone who remembers those lost years pine for a time machine. Like Armistead Maupin before him, Tradowsky has written a love letter to a singular, beguiling place.
— Mona Ramsay
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