Time For the 28th Amendment

How old were you when you discovered that the right to vote isn’t protected in the United States Constitution?

Like most Americans, I studied the Constitution, in different ways and different forms of depth, through high school, into college, and later in various books, seminars, and media deep-dives throughout my life. Teachers and commentators gushed lovingly over how the 15^th Amendment extended voting to former slaves, the 19^th Amendment gave women the vote, and the 26^th Amendment gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote.

All of these are good. But they establish that the government cannot withhold the right to vote based on certain protected categories. Not once does the Constitution state who does have the voting franchise; the issue remains airy-fairy and undefined. And I didn’t know that until I read Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority, which I read when I was 49. Only when they pointed it out did I realize this information was missing.

Throughout much of American history, the question of what makes someone a “real” American has loomed large. The Philadelphia Convention of 1789, which drafted the kernel of our current Constitution, was dominated by slaveholders, who wanted their human property counted on the Census, but didn’t want slaves having any vote. These White male aristocrats, whom we dub the “Founders,” handled the problem by punting it onto the states.

As you’d imagine, this created a patchwork of standards. States have, at times, made land ownership a criterion—which created problems when rising industrialization pushed more Americans into cities. Old-fashioned bigotry encouraged many states, overtly or covertly to disenfranchise Black Americans, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned it. Since the Shelby County ruling, states have competed to find innovative new ways to make voting harder.

Many attempts to increase the voting franchise are doomed to fail. Because less populous states, which skew conservative, gain a tactical advantage from the status quo, many common suggestions, like ending the Electoral College or disestablishing the Senate, are non-starters. The Constitution sets the threshold for amendments so high that, in times of bitter polarization like we have now, changing the system is unlikely at best.

But I propose that it’s politically possible to start with something simple: just establish that American citizens have a right to vote, irrespective of state laws. This has multiple advantages. It will set the default for American voting as “opt-out,” rather than the current “opt-in.” It will capitalize on the American fervor for treating everyone equally, since setting a standard baseline of simply letting people vote is, facially, completely equal.

With that in mind, I propose a movement to pressure our lawmakers to create a 28^th Amendment. Since I’m not an attorney or Constitutional scholar, I don’t want to create a binding text for such an amendment; that exceeds my skills. But I propose the following as a starting point:

1. All persons who have been born citizens of the United States, or who have been naturalized as citizens under the standards of this Constitution, and having achieved no less than eighteen years of age, shall have the right to vote and to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the states in which they reside.

2. All persons who have the voting franchise under the standards of this Constitution, but who shall reside outside the United States for military deployment, lawful students studying abroad, citizens working abroad under a lawful visa, or for any other reasons which Congress shall protect by legislation, shall be permitted to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the most recent jurisdiction for which they were most recently resident.

3. The Executive Branch, under terms which Congress shall set by legislation, shall maintain a permanent roster of lawful registered voters in the United States, and shall take responsibility for maintaining the currency of that roster, and shall protect the voting rights of all persons who have the right to participate in the electoral process in the United States.

We voters can pressure American lawmakers to rally behind this straightforward, facially neutral action statement. Sure, I know anti-democracy activists like Peter Thiel exist in America, but I believe they’re controllable, while our system remains tractable to public pressure. We can organize to pressure our lawmakers to support this change by threatening them with the shame of being seen as anti-voting.

This won’t solve all of America’s problems. But it will at least get all Americans involved in the problem-solving process.

The First and Last Days of Scottish Witchcraft

C.J. Cooke, The Book of Witching

A calamity has occurred on an uninhabited island in the Orkneys, in Scotland’s sparsely populated far north. Three teenagers reenacted a pre-Christian ceremony, with all the cocksure enthusiasm of teenagers; but it’s ended with one teen dead, another maimed, and the third missing. Now the adults around them must reconstruct what happened, because a malevolent force nobody’s yet seen may have something to profit from the catastrophe.

C.J. Cooke, a sometime university professor, has gained renown for her intensively researched, historically themed dark fantasy novels. This is no exception; not many horror novels include a works-cited page. For this volume, she delves into one of Scotland’s darker episodes. Even by witch trial standards, Scottish trials were notoriously brutal, a revolting mix of Christian piety and state-sanctioned torture which extracted confessions through truly appalling means.

In 2024, Clementine Woodbury struggles to understand the events that stranded her daughter in a Glasgow burns unit. Once lively and free-spirited, Clem’s daughter Erin has grown moody and secretive since becoming a teen mother. With Erin under sedation in a sterile room, Clem can’t ask direct questions about her mysterious injuries, so she takes her granddaughter and commences a freelance investigation. She isn’t prepared for the secrets she uncovers.

Parallel to Clem’s investigation, Alison Balfour stands accused of witchcraft in 1594 Kirkwall. Though the accusation carries whiffs of religious paranoia, Alison quickly realizes the truth: she’s a pawn in a powerful dynastic struggle for control of the Orkneys. Her confession, or lack thereof, will determine which rapacious aristocrat will control Orcadian government—though either outcome will be disastrous for ordinary smallholders like her family.

Cooke’s balance between these two narratives asks important questions. What debts do we moderns owe for injustices performed centuries ago? And what obligations do we bear to future generations? Alison Balfour realizes quickly that she can’t prevent her own unjust death; she can only determine what consequences her death brings upon others. Clem can’t pinpoint what caused her family’s sufferings, but clearly something dark lingers in her heritage.

C.J. Cooke

Though marketed as a “thriller,” this novel’s contemporary portion more resembles an amateur sleuth mystery. While the police struggle to fit Erin’s grievous injuries into their pre-written crime narrative, Clem assumes responsibility for uncovering what happened to her daughter. If this means scrambling into Scotland’s enigmatic, impoverished north to confront a secretive cabal, she clearly considers this an acceptable price for a truth she might not like.

The historical portion, meanwhile, is explicitly political. Orkney suffers under a government that rules by stoking fear among the population, retaining power by convincing the population of an even worse enemy. Alison knows she can’t win this battle. Therefore she’s forced to redefine victory according to what keeps her family and her people alive. Cooke reconstructs a poorly documented time of paranoia, recorded only through state and religious propaganda.

Therein, Cooke tacitly acknowledges something often forgotten in histories of witch hunts: they weren’t the flexings of invincible empires, eager to demonstrate their power. Witch hunts happened after the church-state hybrid began losing unquestioned authority. Alison Balfour’s execution happened a generation after the Scottish Reformation, as the Stuart monarchy clung to dwindling authority. Witch hunts are the superannuated flailings of a broken empire already in retreat.

In this, Cooke shows an aristocracy terrified of its people. Patrick Stewart, Second (and last) Earl of Orkney, sought the church’s benediction because he knew the people already organized against him, that the trade guilds that built his palaces were also hotbeds of insurrectionist intrigue. The Earl and his retinue yearn for unquestioned power, but the very fact they must resort to such extremes proves they’ve already lost the people’s devotion.

Alison Balfour works as a peasant healer among people who survive in nature’s bounty; but palace intrigues and state paranoia drag her into early modernism. Clem Woodbury trusts medicine, modernism, and police technocracy; but she’s forced to delve into her lost heritage and forgotten bloodline when modernity can’t answer her questions. Both women discover truth hiding in secretive corners, that nothing’s ever as simple as the official narrative would claim.

Cooke creates a story of nuance and complexity that rewards multiple levels of reading. She uses the markers of paperback thrillers, and on that level, one could read this book casually, like any other beach novel. But Cooke also asks questions about heritage, responsibility, and power, which don’t yield themselves to easy answers. Especially in Europe, where aristocratic paranoia still casts a long shadow, is the past ever really gone?

One Foot in Bakersfield, One Foot in the Future

Dwight Yoakam, Brighter Days

Dwight Yoakam’s best music, especially his hits from nearly forty years ago, has always striven to make him sound older than he really is. His 1986 breakthrough single, “Honky Tonk Man,” was a cover of a 1956 Johnny Horton barn-burner, and his best work always strove to sound like Bakersfield, 1960-ish. But sounding older means one thing when you’re thirty; how does he maintain that strategy now at 68?

This, Yoakam’s sixteenth studio album, is emphatically not timeless. Yoakem stages a deliberate callback to his own neo-traditionalist roots, appealing for those who think history has gone badly and want to fix its errors. He channels the twangy, backbeat-heavy Central Valley country music that made him famous. In doing so, he attracts an audience who probably shares my assessment that country music went cockeyed somewhere around 1996.

Despite this, Yoakam avoids the modish cynicism that often accompanies older artists recording nostalgia bait. He’s remarkably optimistic, even on the more melancholy tracks, his expressive sadness often transitory. Perhaps this reflects the two pulls on Yoakam’s artistry: he’s always been artistically (and often ideologically) conservative. But since last recording, he became a father for the first time, at a mere sprightly 63.

So his sound remains retro, but he has a pointed hope for the future. The album opener, “Wide Open Heart,” has the aggressive chomping chords that made both country and rock sound so distinctive in Southern California in 1960. But it’s a love song, full of “She’s all mine to love” and “Come on let’s get it done.” Except it’s love for his carefully restored, chrome-plated street racer car.

Because yeah, Dwight’s old, but he’s young enough to care. This album brims with red-hot emotions for whatever gives Dwight hope enough to keep moving forward. Many seem dedicated to his wife, Emily. (Despite several high-profile relationships in the 1990s, he never married until 2020.) Others are dedicated to music, touring, and a cover of the Carter Family classic “Keep On the Sunny Side,” an ambiguous nod to spirituality.

Dwight Yoakam

The sound remains retro, certainly. He loves crunchy acoustic-electric guitars supplemented with a heavy marmalade of Hammond organ, sounding like something the Wrecking Crew would’ve mass-produced sixty years ago. Most songs maintain a steady 4/4 or 4/6 time; you could line-dance to even the album’s slowest, most navel-gazing tracks. “Can’t Be Wrong” opens with almost the same chords Yoakam used on “Please Please Baby” in 1987.

Yet notwithstanding that conservatism, Dwight sees a brighter future. “A Dream That Never Ends,” with its Laurel Canyon vocal harmonies, implies, despite its title, that love isn’t infinite, and somebody might leave—but he insists he’ll keep believing anyway. “If Only” dreams of what could happen if we shed our carefully constructed cynicism, and includes the eminently quotable line: “If only you’d choose love, love would choose you.”

“California Sky” is perhaps Yoakam’s  most thoroughly engineered track here, with its Tex-Mex guitars and slight nod to fatalism. “Hand Me Down Heart” is exactly what you’d expect from the title, a lament for the suffering he’s previously endured. But instead of surrendering to despair, he presents his heart as something capable of healing, worthy of redemption. Second chances are real in Yoakam’s world.

You might mistake Yoakam’s title track for a love song, with its unifying Tom T. Hall riff, but he wrote it for his son, who closes it with half-gibberish lyrics. “Brighter days are what you promised me,” he sings: optimistic, but with implied consequences if the promise falls through. “Bound Away” laments the touring musician’s life, like CCR’s “Traveling Band,” but with the recognition that “I’m trying to come home, I’m trying to land.”

At nearly an hour, this album runs almost twice conventional LP length. Despite the vinyl revival, Yoakam knows he’ll mostly be streamed or downloaded, and isn’t circumscribed by physical limits. This gives him freedom to play generously with composition and arrangement. Though he doesn’t do anything revolutionary—no Mike Oldfield half-hour experimentation here—he does plumb the full depth of his conservative ethos.

Listening to this album, we’re aware we’re hearing an artist who hasn’t had a Top-40 hit since 2000, and no breakout smash since 1993. His entire career is a nostalgia circuit for aging fans who need reminded why we embraced him so aggressively nearly forty years ago. Yet within that limit, Yoakam expresses an optimism his 1990s recordings sometimes forgot. Dwight’s old, yes, and so am I, but he reminds me that we both still have a future.

Hanging Onto Hope While Everything Around Me Is On Fire

Back in the 1980s, my father used to collect aluminum cans as a form of exercise. In those days, people regularly just chucked cans, food wrappers, and other litter out of moving car windows. Anyone old enough to personally remember the Reagan era will recall that American roadsides, especially urban roadsides, were consistently choked with post-consumer waste.

So my father would take a lawn-and-leaf bag and go walking aimlessly. The walk gave him necessary low-impact exercise and time to clear his head. And he knew it was time to start home when the bag approached full of the aluminum cans he collected. He would take the full bags to the local recyclery for cash, and use the proceeds to take us kids out for burgers.

After eating, he insisted we dispose of our wrappers correctly.

Once upon a time, American attitudes toward waste were, by today's standards, appalling. A New York PR professional coined the term “litterbug” in the 1940s, but the notion that post-consumer waste was “disposable” created the persistent idea that we could just pitch waste anywhere and trust the Lord to handle it. And way too many of us just did. Part of America's anti-urban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s referred to the trash on every street and sidewalk.

I was too young to understand when things changed, but they did. In the early 1990s, my dad's walks took much longer, and our burger runs became less frequent. At some point, he started coming home with his bag only half-full. Around the time I finished high school, these walks stopped being worth the effort for him. He stopped carrying the bag with him, and he walked much more predictable, programmatic routes.

That was a loss for Dad, of course. His litter-collecting ambles had been an important part of his exercise regime since before I was born. But even he acknowledged that it was a net good. He couldn't find recyclable litter because fewer people were creating litter; more people accepted that they had individual responsibility for the common good. And streets were far cleaner.

Such changes in public morality don't happen in a vacuum. A combination of public education, media campaigns, and changing local laws overpowered the notion that litter was a “victimless” offense. The more people who accepted their responsibility for clean streets, the more pressure on those who dragged their heels. Eventually the momentum became irresistible.

Not that nobody tried to resist. Some people absolutely insisted on their right to litter; some still do. When I was in college, the campus conservative student group sold t-shirts with a disfigured recycling symbol and the logo “Environmentally Unsafe And Proud Of It!” They turned their sloppiness into a political status and a social identity.

Yet the very fact that they did so proved that they were just fighting the tide, and they knew it. Even while wearing that t-shirt, I watched several of them throw their food wrappers in the trash, and their soda-pop bottles in the recycling. The shirts had a brief, voguish popularity, then vanished as the wearers realized they didn't look brave, they looked like dickheads.

We saw similar fates for other once-popular actions: smoking, for instance, or driving with ethylated gasoline. Or racism, or hating on LGBTQ+ populations. These were once commonplace to the point of being bland, then they became agitated political positions, then finally identities. Because the more obvious it became that these were unsustainable behaviors, the more momentum built against them.

As I write, we're witnessing rapid reversal on some of these positions. The incoming administration has passed sweeping revisions that empower racists, homophobes, and irresponsible environmental attitudes. It's easy to think that, because these actions have government approval, it's impossible to stop them.

But I take comfort in their militant aggression. The administration has to fight so viciously because they know they don't have the momentum on their side. I will admit that losing government support for a more just, more responsible society is a massive setback. But they're fighting so hard because, fundamentally, they know they're losing.

Please don't get me wrong. Victory is far from a forgone conclusion. If we get discouraged and squander the energy, we will lose momentum. To win, we need to keep standing up for a just society and a broad, inclusive definition of citizenship. But I still believe the weight of history is on our side. Victory is ours for the demanding, as long as we remain mindful of the moment.

Jump, Jive, and Wail Against the Machine

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 53
Thomas Carter (director), Swing Kids

Imagine a world where a group of relatively well-off White teenagers adopted the culture, dance, and trappings of Black musicians. The teenagers pretend this adoption is apolitical, and their subculture is merely fun. But the racially segregated, authoritarian state sees this White embrace of Black culture as tantamount to treason. So they use vaguely written laws to force kids into mandatory social retraining. Some kids resist this conversion; others can’t.

Screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman and director Thomas Carter presented this movie in the Reagan/Bush I era’s immediate hangover. Their intended commentary on recent events was particularly unsubtle. This perhaps explains why critics greeted this movie with ambivalence; Roger Ebert, a dedicated acolyte of ars gratia artis, particularly hated it. Yet in subsequent decades, its commentary has become only more relevant, its message more prescient.

Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and his friends admire the freedom and authenticity of American and British pop culture over Germany during the ascendent Reich. They cut a rug in unlicensed dance clubs with music first recorded by Black and Jewish artists like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. As often happens with new youth subcultures, their rebellion includes petty crime. Peter gets arrested, and sentenced to join the Hitler Youth.

The opening act really emphasizes the Swing Kids’ desire to avoid politics. The overwhelmingly White subculture simply yearns for the liberty they perceive in minority cultures, blind to the ways oppression shapes that culture. The Swing Kids refuse to take sides even as Germany begins the march to war. This even though many members are of conscription age: they’ll almost certainly be expected to carry arms for the authoritarian state.

After Peter is forced to join the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, shortened to HJ), his fellow Swing Kid Thomas (Christian Bale) also joins, in a show of solidarity. They pursue a double life, keeping up with HJ ethics of athleticism, nationalism, and militarism by day. At night they don their flamboyant British suits and dance feverishly. They insist they can maintain that dualism, until the moment they can’t.

Their friend Arvid (Frank Whaley), who is Jewish-coded, plays a mean jazz guitar and admires Django Reinhart. Arvid makes bank playing underground clubs and basement dances. But in an autocratic surveillance state, it doesn’t take long before HJ thugs come calling. A back-street beating breaks several bones in Arvid’s hand, rendering him unable to play. Stuck alone in a shabby loft, Peter and Thomas must decide which side they’re on.

l-r: Frank Whaley, Christian Bale, and Robert Sean Leonard in Swing Kids

Feldman and Carter exaggerate the Swing Kids’ moral trajectory. Their early insistence on political innocence is so overwhelming that you initially wonder whether they’re deliberately deceiving themselves. But that willful ignorance gives way quickly. Thomas, surrounded by constant HJ propaganda, eventually starts to believe it. Peter, dragooned into government atrocities, goes the other direction and prepares for a confrontation.

This deliberately didactic theme didn’t help with critics. The movie’s gut-punch arc of moral specificity led some to disparage it as a meaningless weeper designed for children; Ebert, near his death, included this movie among his list of worst movies ever. Undoubtedly, it guides viewers with a heavy hand, and fears that its mostly young intended audience won’t get the message unless it’s heavily signposted.

Yet as educators and activists feud over how exactly to teach that audience about the war, this movie has gained second life. Its aggressively sentimental approach to the lessons the characters learn—especially Peter—reflects the betrayal students feel when they realize the history they’ve learned has been thoroughly whitewashed. Yes, this movie is unsubtle. But so is the discovery of the depths of cruelty humans repeatedly achieve.

It also forces the intended audience to examine itself. Just as Hamburg teenagers pinched Black swing culture, Memphis youths stole Black rock’n’roll, and Oakland kids filched hip-hop. In every case, White kids pretended their cooptation of Black culture was apolitical, that their use of the signs and signifiers of rebellion were party-time fun. White kids love Black culture, but generally need jolted to recognize the forces that shaped that culture.

One can question whether the Swing Kids subculture actually accomplished anything. Doomed resistance movements, from Wat Tyler’s rebellion to the Order of the White Rose to the Woodstock generation, are generally more celebrated after the battle is over. But in a conformist, autocratic state, the Swing Kids movement reminded its participants that they needed, ultimately, to answer to their own consciences. That’s one thing the state can’t take away.

Today’s world can stand to learn that lesson.