FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

What happens when the people we claim to be can no longer be reconciled with the things we’re willing to support?

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a boy risks eternal damnation rather than betray a friend. In Nazi Germany, a teenager risks his life rather than surrender to lies. Both confront a question that now belongs to every American: What do we do when conscience demands that we choose?

With the November 3 midterms approaching, this election is about far more than control of Congress. It’s a reckoning with the cruelty, corruption, and authoritarianism we’ve witnessed—and what our willingness to tolerate them says about us.

From the Mississippi River to resistance movements rising around the world, this week’s essay explores courage, complicity, and the extraordinary power of ordinary people.

History will record what happens next. But first, we have to decide who we are.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

THE RECKONING

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For one extraordinary night, America gave the world hope.

On November 4, 2008, I was on the streets of Paris, covering Barack Obama’s election for HuffPost, and my friend Ralph came with me. Paris was on fire. The French were jubilant. They kept telling me, “This could never happen here.” And I kept thinking: If it can happen in America, it can happen anywhere.

Come back to Paris with me in this audio edition of “Obama’s Big Bang in France.”Remember what it felt like when America inspired the world instead of frightening it. When people everywhere believed change was possible.

We were that America once. We can be again. But we have work to do. 

Get out and vote for Democrats in the midterms.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

OBAMA'S BIG BANG IN FRANCE REVISITED

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Dr. Annie Andrews is one of five Southern Democrats running for the Senate in 2026

WHEN I LIVED in France, George W. Bush was elected for the second absurd time. Our international friends would say, “We can see that Bush might have been elected once, but how could Americans elect him again?” And we would say, “We don’t understand either.” Meanwhile, we wondered: Are Americans really this self-destructive?

Bush had followed the path of Richard Nixon and pushed executive privilege as far as he and his minders Rumsfeld and Cheney thought they could take it—to limit our democracy so the GOP could rule (I use that word intentionally). And, yes, after Bush picked that wrong and vengeful war with Iraq to finish what his daddy didn’t in his Gulf War, and after W. opened detention camps in Guantánamo Bay and perfected war-crime-level waterboarding (which made its inventors filthy rich), and after the warrantless surveillance W. initiated, and the 2008 financial crisis, and the pitiful response to Hurricane Katrina, and much more (he actually did a few good things), a silver lining dropped from the sky: The American public elected a smarter and more accomplished leader—our first Black president, Barack Obama. But could this have ever happened without the two devastating terms of George W. Bush?

Now, the American people face a very similar situation in the coming midterm. We have another incompetent president—this one demonstrably worse—who has upended world order to the detriment of the United States. He has created world chaos by picking a wrong, stupid, unpopular war and instituting debilitating tariffs. The result of that is that all our prices have gone up. Trump and his attack dog Stephen Miller have created an American Gestapo to hunt people down, put them in concentration camps, or send them to countries where they’ve never been.

With support from “Christian” nationalists, Trump is forging a cruel white nationalist nation—a dictatorship—in place of our democracy. And he is institutionalizing racism again. He is taking food from the hungry and healthcare from the sick. He has made a decent life unaffordable for many of us. But his greed to enrich himself, his family, and other wealthy men wouldn’t even have been contemplated by either Bush or Nixon. Paul Krugman just called the Trump Administration the Cesspit of Corruption.

Our silver lining from the Trump nightmare? Trump’s contempt for the American people has presented us with another political opportunity on the scale of Bush/Obama—but this in the House and the Senate, before the next presidential election. And we have no time to waste.

Good women and men across our country have stepped up to the plate, though I will only speak for the South here. Southerners Hallie Shoffner in Arkansas, James Talarico in Texas, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Roy Cooper in North Carolina are running for the Senate. They’re the caliber of leader that gives honor back to Congress and power back to the people.

And apparently Trump is paying attention. On Monday, he went after Annie Andrews by name on Truth Social, repeatedly using an anti-trans slur while promoting Darline Graham. Then today came the other news: The Senate Leadership Fund, the major Republican Senate super PAC, is putting $5 million into South Carolina as an “insurance policy” for Graham. Two recent Republican-oriented polls have the race essentially tied. South Carolina is no longer a Senate race Washington can simply dismiss. But mark my words, Annie’s going to win.

I’ve met Annie four times now. My prediction is that she’ll make us all proud of who we are and what we believe—and she’ll put the people first. I interviewed her last week, and I invite you to see for yourselves her strength, her intelligence, and her strategic thinking. She’s a winner for all of us. And Trump will always be a scumbag.

So get yourselves to the voting booths, and take your friends and neighbors. 

Vote blue. Vote you.

Watch the full interview here.

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Will The Democrats Come Through?

Southern women are running some of the most consequential races in America—and once again, much of the national political world is barely paying attention.

In this audio edition of THE POLITICAL YEAR OF THE WOMAN: Will the Democrats Come Through?, I’m talking about Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina, Hallie Shoffner in Arkansas, Jerri Green in Tennessee—and what these women and their campaigns tell us about Democrats, working people, political power, and the South.

There are a few digressions along the way. Naturally.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

THE POLITICAL YEAR OF THE WOMAN

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More Southern Food for Thought

Summer may be taking its last gasp, but down South, there’s still okra to roast, tomatoes to slice, storms to watch—and Donald Trump throwing tantrums.

Today I’m talking about the things we Southerners wait all year to eat, the memories that come with them, and what else is swirling around us as September comes to an end.

Listen Above—or read THE LAST GASP OF SUMMER.

And yes, there’s tomato pie.

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What if the most important thing we need to remember right now is that we still have power?

A Modern Declaration began with a question I couldn’t shake: What kind of country are we handing to the next generation—and what are we willing to defend?

In this audio, I tell you why I wrote this little book, why I deliberately made it feel like a Revolutionary-era pamphlet, and why I hope people will actually use it.

Buy it. Read it. Carry it with you.

Pass it around. Talk about it. Argue with it. Discuss it around a table. Give it to someone who sees things differently.

I wrote A Modern Declaration because I want us to remember what belongs to all of us: our voice, our citizenship, our right to question power, and our ability to come together and shape what happens next.

I want this book to start conversations.

I want it to bring people together.

I want it to inspire us.

And most of all, I want us to remember:

We still have power.

BUY A MODERN DECLARATION NOW ON AMAZON: CLICK HERE

Prefer to support your favorite local bookstore? A Modern Declaration should be available for bookstores to order through Ingram early to mid-next week. I’ll let you know as soon as that’s confirmed.

Please read it, carry it, share it, talk about it, argue with it, discuss it—and after you’ve read it, please leave an honest Amazon review. Reviews can make an enormous difference for a small independent book.

Power to the people. The midterms are coming.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

WHAT DOES AMERICA STILL PROMISE

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Now Our Minds Are One

That is the Gloria I wanted to write about.

Not the icon frozen on magazine covers. Not the list of accomplishments we all know. But the woman who kept asking questions, kept opening doors, kept connecting people, and kept insisting that hope was not foolishness but part of the work.

I was fortunate enough to spend time with her. Years later, she did something I treasure: she recommended my writing to her own readers. Some of you are here because she sent you.

This is my remembrance of Gloria—of what I learned from her, what she understood about becoming ourselves, and what her life now asks of the rest of us.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

GLORIA STEINEM

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This one is personal for me. I’ve crossed this border. I know something of the landscape and the people who live there. And what happened in Tibet and Nepal—the sudden wall of churning, crashing water and debris, the lives swept away, the devastation left behind—is also part of a much larger story about a warming world, disappearing safeguards, and what happens when we decide that warnings, science, and preparedness are expendable.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

THE TIBET-NEPAL CROSSING

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The Politics of Power

The race is set: Annie Andrews vs. Darline Graham Nordone for the United States Senate.

Darline won South Carolina’s Republican runoff yesterday. Now we get to see what happens when a candidate whose power has largely been handed to her—by Donald Trump, by the Graham name, and by the Republican establishment—faces a woman who has been building power of her own.

Annie Andrews has built a formidable grassroots campaign. She’s persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to vote for her, attracted an enormous network of individual donors, raised millions of dollars, and made Democrats around the country start looking seriously at a Senate race they might otherwise have written off.

And when you meet her, you understand some of the reason why. She has confidence. She has command. She listens. She can work a room, give a hell of a stump speech, and make people believe this race is winnable.

So in this episode, I go back to Lyndon Johnson—one of the great students and practitioners of political power—to ask a deceptively simple question:

Where does political power actually come from?

Darline has powerful Republicans in America trying to lend her theirs.

Annie Andrews is acquiring her own.

Read the original essay, including images and more, on Substack:

ANNIE vs. DARLINE

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Interview with Danish Economist Marianne Thorn

Last week, I republished Marianne Thorn’s piece about what Americans get wrong when they call Denmark socialist. This conversation is a follow-up to that piece—and a chance to go deeper.

Americans throw the word socialism around without understanding what it means. For more than a century, socialism—and, after the Bolshevik Revolution, communism—have been used to scare Americans away from reforms that challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power. Republicans have made that fear a political weapon for generations, from attacks on the New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s racist mythology of the “welfare queen” and right up to Donald Trump today.

But it isn’t only Republicans. Centrist Democrats have used the same weapon against progressives. Robert Reich recently wrote about Third Way, a powerful centrist Democratic organization with deep ties to Wall Street and corporate money, now preparing a $15 million campaign to discredit democratic socialism and defeat progressive candidates.

Which tells you something about who benefits when Americans are taught to be afraid of the word socialism.

For generations, the words socialism and welfare have been used to make Americans fear government, resent one another, and believe that helping other people somehow threatens their own freedom.

But welfare means something entirely different in Denmark.

In this wonderful conversation, Marianne and I talk about the freedom—and the peace—that come from living in a community of citizens who know they will not be financially destroyed if they get sick, lose a job, raise a child, or grow old. Education and healthcare are not privileges reserved for those who can afford them. No child should go to bed hungry. People understand that their well-being is bound up with the well-being of everyone around them.

We also talk about what Americans misunderstand when they call Denmark socialist, how we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as consumers rather than citizens, and why the Danish idea of welfare may embody the Christian values American politicians so loudly claim as their own.

Marianne has also written a follow-up to the piece I republished last week, using some of the questions from our conversation to go more deeply into what life in Denmark actually looks like—not from a think tank or a political argument, but, as she puts it, “from a kitchen table.” You can read her follow-up here.

Marianne is terrific, and this is a conversation Americans desperately need to watch.

My deepest thanks to Marianne Thorn for this generous, thoughtful, and urgently important conversation—and for helping us understand what life can look like when a society treats healthcare, education, food, and basic security not as privileges, but as responsibilities citizens share with one another.

And thank you for watching. If this conversation helped you understand what socialism is—and isn’t—or helped you see welfare, or even freedom, differently, please share it with someone who needs to hear what Marianne has to say.

you can watch the full interview here.

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