N.S. Dolkart's Blog

I had a great time recently sitting down with Mike Hardman, journalist and author of Heartman: A Memoir, about my trilogy. Moments later, we swapped roles and I interviewed Mike for my show about town politics, episodes of which you can view by searching for “Stoughton Politics with…This Guy” on the Stoughton Media Access Corporation’s YouTube page. It’s been a great ride hosting a politics show on local access television, but it was also tremendous fun talking about my writing!

My social media feed is at war with itself right now over whether it’s okay for people to celebrate the murder of Brian Thompson, a rich and powerful man responsible for the management of a company that has inflicted—and continues to inflict—untold misery on the general populace. While that battle rages, I’ve been trying to put my finger on my own ambivalence over this question. If I agree that the celebration of political murder is horrible—and, despite the killer’s muddled politics, the murder itself was very political indeed—then why do I find the lecturing over this one to be so tedious and missing the point? What point exactly could the assassination-is-bad camp even be missing?

I think, for me, it’s that despite the willingness (at least at first) to make a folk hero of the killer, despite the occasional expression of glee at the now shattered untouchability of the CEO class, what I’ve seen has not been, at its essence, a celebration of death. It’s been a collective sharing of painful memories and painful present circumstances, and, yes, of anger, acknowledging what UnitedHealthcare and the broken American healthcare system at large have meant to those Americans (nearly all of us) who have struggled with them. I have seen people saying “we shouldn’t celebrate this,” and others saying, “our pain is too great to expect us to find empathy for those who have inflicted it,” and it’s hard for me not to think that both are right.

It’s important to note that this has been a countrywide and nonpartisan phenomenon: the collective outpouring of hatred for UnitedHealthcare has been present everywhere from the bluest corners of Bluesky to the comment sections of Ben Shapiro’s YouTube segments. Like the killer himself, the politics of Team Folk Hero are muddled at best. And what else can you expect, when our healthcare system, and United in particular, has preyed upon Americans with its own brazen glee for the better part of all our lives?

What I’ve seen online has reminded me most of a shiva, the Jewish funerary ritual where for seven days after a death, the closest relatives of the deceased receive daily visits from their communities: to allow them to pray the Mourner’s Kaddish, to save them the work of preparing meals for themselves, to prevent feelings of isolation and loneliness, and to share stories and memories about the deceased. Sometimes the stories are sweet or funny, and sometimes they are painful; the goal is to remember together who this person was to us, both the positive and the negative. The sharing of these memories allows not only the family but the whole community to process what has happened, and to comfort the family not merely with food and company but with shared experience and validation.

I think it is a mistake to see the hordes of people sharing stories of how UnitedHealthcare made their lives worse, and come to the conclusion that what we’re witnessing is a celebration of murder. What I’m seeing is story sharing, and validation of each other’s pain and anger at a system designed to crush us for profit. I’m seeing relief that people aren’t alone in these feelings, that someone else also saw this as the existential crisis it is, enough to take drastic action. I’ve seen hope (misguided, in my opinion) that the C-suite class will find the fear of assassination enough of a motivating factor to reprioritize their companies’ goals towards a more humane system, and I’ve seen bitter comments about how other murders have been either celebrated or ignored without ever triggering a backlash of media scolds. How, if our children go to school terrified that they’ll be shot to death, why shouldn’t CEO’s feel the same at work? Or, if the public lynching of a Black homeless man on the New York subway ended with no negative consequences for the killer, and indeed a growing folk hero status for him on the right, why should the killer of a man responsible for so much death and misery face any worse consequences?

I have no answers for such questions. Only memories for sharing, and ears for listening.

“And are you still writing?”

The short answer is yes! The past year has been a remarkably productive writing year for someone with no additional publication credits. I’m still working on my MG novel (the potion heist is on pause for a little while so that I can return to it with fresh energy), but most of my writing has been on other, shorter projects: poetry, bad prose sequels (for fun and birthdays), and an opera libretto! I started writing the libretto for a child-friendly fantasy opera in March (think of it as a silly sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream), finished a first draft in April, took some time to find a composer with whom to collaborate, and am now happily in the process of workshopping revisions with the talented Jonathan Gilbert (who, despite the particularly good name for a librettist, is a composer). I’m very excited to hear my songs come to life!

And also to finish the MG novel, which I’ve promised myself (and my daughter) I’m going to do before New Year’s. See me go!

Hey, remember that time the RNC did a big post-mortem after losing what they thought was a very winnable race? The polls turned out to be off by a bit, overstating their strength, and they had also managed to convince themselves that the polls were significantly understating their strength, which was very embarrassing, so they did a big review of what went wrong and concluded they’d been too openly racist, xenophobic, and narrow-minded to win national elections anymore, and would have to moderate their positions if they wanted a hope of ever winning again.

Then their voters ignored them completely and squeaked out a victory with the most openly racist, xenophobic, bigoted and narrow-minded campaign anyone had ever seen.

Four years later, at the height of a pandemic and with the economy cratering around them, they ran even harder on those themes and lost, again pretty embarrassingly. Four years after that, with an unpopular Democratic incumbent and an economy that feels worse than it looks on paper, they ran even harder on their favorite but extremely unpopular grievances, and won again. 

Now everybody is demanding the Democrats soul-search, self-flagellate, and move rightward on [insert commentator’s pet issue here]. Never mind that under Biden they did move rightward on immigration, they utterly ignored trans rights in their campaign, while their opponents have been passing law after law to make trans life impossible in this country, and that there was no daylight between their “get back to work” COVID policy and the GOP’s. Surely what’s needed is a Democratic Party that’s more tolerant of bigotry and xenophobia or whatever else some commentator thinks they ought to change about their policy platform.

Folks, if swing voters cared about policy platforms, they wouldn’t have repeatedly swung for a candidate whose policy positions range from meaninglessly vague to utterly deranged, then swung away, and then swung back. If they cared about candidate quality, they would never have swung for a candidate who utterly failed to control the campaign narrative, was trounced in every debate except that one where his own hilariously bad performance was overshadowed by his octogenarian opponent’s even worse one, and spent the last week of his campaign insulting a vital up-for-grabs voting bloc. And if swing voters just really, really loved racism and xenophobia? They’d have swung for Romney too!

I think we need to finally admit to ourselves that swing voters are the kinds of people who pay next to no attention to politics, don’t see their votes as reflections of their moral or ethical values, and vote based almost entirely on how they feel their lives are going, and who’s been in charge while their lives have gone that way. This means Democrats also have to reassess the elections Democrats have won, such as 2008, 2012, and 2020, and recognize that Obama didn’t win his first election by a landslide because he was a generationally great politician, or because racism in this country is over, he won it by a landslide because he managed to become the Democratic nominee in a year when the incumbent president was a Republican with a cratering economy. He won reelection not because he did a good job framing Romney as a rich bastard out to take your job but because the economy had significantly improved on his watch. Biden didn’t win in 2020 because the country was done with Trump and his shenanigans, he won because people were losing jobs to the pandemic and Trump was the guy in the oval office at the time.

This might sound like I’m saying LOL nothing matters, structural forces will determine all election results, and, well…almost. There is no question that the Harris campaign’s ad buys and turnout operation was phenomenal and made a difference—the election just didn’t turn out to be close enough for it to make the difference. The vote in most of the country seems to have swung by about 6.7 percentage points toward Republicans from 2020 to 2024, but in the seven swing states it swung by an average of only 3.1. That’s ads, rallies, and “ground game” yielding a massive 3.6 percentage point difference! It would be a mistake to look at that and say, “guess all our individual contributions of money and time didn’t do jack.” They did have an effect, and that’s why candidate quality (and Harris was a great and energetic candidate, and Trump was an unfocused and incoherent one) does matter at the margins.

The trouble is, it’s only at the margins. What matters the rest of the time is mostly outside a party’s control.

It’s hard for very political people—and all commentators are very political people—to acknowledge or even believe that most of the things politicians do, swing voters won’t notice, care, or give them credit for. But it’s just unquestionably true. The kinds of people who decide national elections by drifting back and forth between Democrats and Republicans cycle after cycle, when the parties and what they stand for are so dramatically different, are the kinds of people who just don’t notice or pay much attention to whether the government just made gay marriage legal or abortion illegal, increased the military budget or slashed it, ended wars abroad or started them. They care whether their lives feel like they’re getting better or worse, and then they give the incumbent party credit or blame accordingly.

Republicans ignored their 2012 post-mortem, and it doesn’t seem to have done them any harm whatsoever. Democrats should do the same: ignore any post-mortem that says they’d be more popular if they changed their policy positions. Swing voters don’t care. If our disintegrating republic weathers the next few years well enough that Democrats ever return to power, they need to take this lesson to heart and pursue every one of their goals as if nobody’s watching and the *only* question is “will this make people’s lives better or worse?” Don’t ask whether it’s popular or will win or lose you an election, ask whether it’s the right thing to do and then wrangle the votes to get it done. Yes, even if it’s guns. Yes, even if it’s trans rights. Yes, even if it’s truly radical environmental policy. Yes, even if it’s finally finally taking a leftward turn on immigration. And while you’re at it, take a page out of Republicans’ books and seize as much power for your constituents as you can get. Voting rights, DC statehood, court reform, the whole nine yards. If people are criticizing you for losing political power, maybe do some work to make your power more durable, ya know?

It’s not that voters will reward you for it. It’s that they won’t fucking care.

A recent Facebook interaction reminded me of the weirdly common argument that free public services aren’t free because we pay for them with our taxes. This strikes me as very silly pedantry.

When Ben & Jerry’s has Free Cone Day, nobody gets confused and thinks the ice cream and cones are produced and distributed at no cost to Ben & Jerry’s—we all understand that the ice cream is free to the customer at point of sale. The same is true of free public services: they are free at point of sale, not altogether unpaid for. Whether they’re being paid for with tax increases, by cutting other expenses from government budgets, through tariffs or sales of public lands, is completely immaterial to the question of whether they’re free at point of sale, which is what literally everyone means when they talk about free things. To pretend otherwise is to step into an alternate world where Free Cone Day is a misleading and confusing proposition, rather than an intuitively simple concept.

Ben & Jerry’s pays for Free Cone Day with its regular year-round prices, so it’s effectively subsidized by everyone who buys their ice cream. But if I went around insisting that Free Cone Day wasn’t free because regular customers are paying marginally higher prices year-round, people would call me a weird pedant. Which, I mean, yes.

Tomorrow is our 15th wedding anniversary, so today I share a poem I wrote Becky last year, when we’d just celebrated our 14th and I was already looking ahead to this year because that’s the way my mind works.

To the beautiful woman who dislikes my love poetry

For what is a love poem really,

you asked me once,

if not a secret ode to its author’s

cleverness?

And I had no answer

—and have none still—

except that I did not want to read you

someone else’s poem, 

squawking “ditto!” like some trained bird,

or try to prove you wrong 

with verses so devoid of cleverness 

that you would read them and tire of them

without thinking to accuse me of self-admiration.

But I have come to understand 

what I think you meant:

that clever love poetry is an unacceptable contradiction.

A love poem is for expression, not wit,

or else it is a self-love poem.

I should not be frightened of this revelation.

For fifteen years and more, 

I’ve told you I love you every day

without a hint, a shadow 

of eloquence.

I have repeated myself continually

and been embarrassed by my simplicity

but by all accounts (or the only account that matters)

it never bored you. 

II.

When you didn’t leave—abandon 

the handbag on your chair 

on our first date and 

climb out the bathroom window 

to escape a situation too good to be real,

I started to think maybe it was me who would go

that this bus would crash 

or an undetected illness 

—this headache?—

would drag me away 

because how could the universe permit 

for me to be this happy, this long?

But this universe, it wasn’t written 

by cruel authors

giving us what we’ve learned to expect.

It is guided by the indifference, the injustice 

that tortures, that crushes, that randomly

lets me live 

this happy.

And if I get to be with you, in this place,

by God, I’m going to write you love poems.

III.

This is my daily experience:

I awake, and silently debate 

whether to kiss you awake 

when you deserve to be left alone to sleep 

but also deserve to be woken with kisses

every day of your life.

When I blurt out my admiration,

morning and night

and sometimes in between,

(but not as often as it strikes me,

for it strikes also when I am alone

and frequently when we are in company)

you smile so shyly, as if embarrassed to be this loved.

It charms me every time

(I go on loving you shamelessly).

Every night I feel the need 

not merely to tell you what you know I feel 

but to express it

—which I cannot ever really do,

least of all when you answer “I love you too”

in a voice that has clearly earned sleep,

and tells me my stammering can surely wait.

Between these bookends of my day 

I usually manage not to text you 

love notes while you’re working,

but if a client cancels 

and there’s no child looking over my shoulder, 

all bets are off.

IV.

I began this poem

the week after our fourteenth anniversary

while you read Mary Oliver and Barbara Kingsolver,

and have struggled

every day since, to decide 

whether to show it to you now or save it 

for our fifteenth.

You do not like surprises 

and I do not like waiting to show you anything (least of all my heart)

but I have told myself, for now,

that it is incomplete 

and that I ought to wait until it’s finished 

—as if my thoughts on the loving of you 

can be finished before I am.

We will see how long I hold.

It has been a ludicrous seventeen months since I last posted here, but I wanted to alert you to the fact that I’ll be attending Readercon in Quincy, MA on July 13th through 16th, 2023. This is my first year as co-chair of programming and not merely an attendee, so I hope that you will come and enjoy our many incredible programs, whether they feature yours truly or not. Please do check the conference’s code of conduct and masking policy, as the masking policy is strict in order to protect vulnerable attendees. It would be a delight to see you there!

Note: I wrote this blog post in 2016 after Silent Hall came out, and then it sat in a drafts folder for six years, gathering metaphorical dust. My life changed drastically in 2018, and I am now a stay-at-home dad with the occasional tutoring gig, so in theory the desk at home is a reality these days. And yet, as the pandemic and some ill luck slowed my writing and publishing career to a trickle, I find myself in need of the reminder that my childhood dream wasn’t to publish two books a year and make lots of money, it was to see my books in stores and know that somewhere out there, readers were loving them.

A few weeks ago, a coworker of mine told me a wonderful story. His eight year old daughter was flipping through his copy of Silent Hall and suddenly exclaimed, “N.S. Dolkart signed this for you?”

“Yeah,” my coworker said, amused by the awe in her voice. “Well I work with him.”

Her response was an even more awed, “You work with N.S. Dolkart?”

I’ve been thinking about that response more and more lately, especially when I’m tempted to be self-deprecating about my writing career. To this girl, the knowledge that I worked with her dad at the nursing home didn’t make me lamer. It made her dad cooler.

Like many writers, I grew up idolizing my favorite authors, imagining their distant genius and hoping to someday be like them. I imagined sitting at a desk the way my father did at home (he and my mother were a two-person software migration company for many years), creating beautiful and exciting stories out of the wealth of my imagination. And then some other kids could read my books and go, “Wow, this is so good. This guy is my favorite author.”

That childhood vision included both an assumption and a goal. The assumption: being an author involves sitting at a desk in your home in the middle of the day, writing great books. The goal: having other people read my stories and be as bewitched and inspired by them as I was by my own favorites.

Amazingly, foolishly, tragically, adulthood and the realities of the publishing industry have managed to flip my childhood assumption and goal. Being someone’s favorite author is all well and good, the thinking goes, but people have too glamorous a picture of what happens when your novels get published. You don’t get to sit at a desk in your home being brilliant and creative all day; you go to work like everybody else, come home hungry and exhausted, and have to somehow sneak in your writing time either before bed or way early in the morning. If you’re me, that means getting very little sleep and catching lots of colds. I’ve got one right now, in fact.

So now the desk at home is the goal, and getting people bewitched and inspired is the prerequisite. The adult world says, “Good for you, getting published! Are you making much money?” People don’t ask you to tell them about the cool things that happen in your next book (spoilers and all that, you know) – they ask how your sales are going.

And the reality is that although I hear my sales are pretty decent, that desk at home is still a far off fantasy. And so, despite myself, I fall into adulthood’s trap of judging my artistic career by the money it makes, deeming it a disappointment until some point in the distant future when I’ll be able to support my family merely by writing people’s favorite books.

But my friend’s daughter is right: it’s really freaking cool that I’m a published author, and that’s in no way diminished by the fact that I have an unglamorous day job. Who cares if I don’t write my books during daylight hours – I’m writing books, and people are reading them! I’m living the dream!

I have had total strangers leave reviews on Goodreads thanking me for getting them back into reading again. Does it matter that they only bought one copy? That I likely netted less than a dollar on the transaction? Hell, no. My childhood dream didn’t involve royalty structures.

Passover is still a couple months away, but I was thinking about the Four Children this morning, and specifically about the Wicked Child and the Wise one. I have spent much of my life identifying the Wise Child with more ritually observant Jews and the Wicked one with a sort of New Atheist arrogant secularism, but this morning it occurred to me that the Wicked Child’s question doesn’t actually imply that he’s less observant than the parent. On the contrary, the Wicked Child’s question represents attitudes of distancing and separation that are universal, whereas in this framework the Wise Child can represent a desire to be fully included.

As most Jews are more than aware, in more ritually observant circles there is a tendency to look at more liberal Jews and their services with contempt and ask, “but if you’re not going to do things the Right way, isn’t your observance essentially meaningless? What does any of this even mean to you?”

A quick reminder: you’re instructed to punch the Wicked Child in the teeth.

After that, you are to make the point that YOU, and not he, have been redeemed. He chooses not to identify as your fellow Jew but as a superior one, a more enlightened one, one who is separate from the community, and so he cannot share in its redemption. To put the message in more forceful and profane terms: either we’re all Jewish together, or he can fuck off.

Compare this to the Wise Child, whose question is not about the inherent worth of the seder but about the how of it all. This child doesn’t ask why you don’t just give up if you’re not doing things up to his standards, he asks, “ok, how do we do this?” He wants to be included in YOUR seder, and to do it right by your standards. You are instructed to include him and teach him your ways.

As always, we should see ourselves in all four children: in the Simple one’s wonder; the Unable-to-Ask child’s need for someone else to start the conversation; in the Wise child’s desire to be included and up to speed; and in the Wicked one’s urge to dismiss others and their benighted ways. This year, I submit that it doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum of ritual observance when it comes to the lessons of the Four Children, only your approach to the community of the seder. Some of my favorite Wise children have been outsiders who became Jewish later or not at all, who approached our rituals and our culture with interest and respect. Some of my least favorite Wicked children have been me.

I think what a lot of us have been struggling with recently is the question of how a country that reelected Barack Obama could have come so close to also reelecting Trump — or, conversely, how a country that very nearly reelected Trump in the midst of outright social and economic catastrophe could also have reelected a Black dude with a middling economy not even a decade before. How could a country that was “always this way,” that always had so many people willing to throw away democracy and lives and the economy in order to keep white supremacy in the White House, have also reelected Obama in 2012? It seems impossible for many of us to imagine that Obama’s America and Trump’s America are not only the same place, but also by and large made up of the same people.

Trump’s overt racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and overall vulgarity have proven to be a remarkably effective turnout operation for white voters, even without all the ballyhooed micro targeting that was supposed to be able to sway close elections. This undeniable fact raises many disturbing questions. If we were always this country, if the deep wells of white supremacy that Trump “activated” were always there, does that mean that Romney could have won in 2012 if he’d only been more racist? If he’d only been a brazen, vulgar, Trumpian figure rather than an avatar of the old school genteel white patriarch, would that have won him the White House? Even worse, could Trump himself have beaten Obama if he’d run in 2012? After all, Obama ’12 only beat Clinton ’16 by 60k votes total, whereas Trump ’16 beat Romney ’12 by over 2 million.

The answer, I think, is no. The Trump path to victory in 2016 was not open in 2012, even if you disregard the influence of Comey’s shenanigans, WikiLeaks dumps of Russian espionage, the differences between Obama and Clinton’s relations with the media, and so on. Why? Because in 2012, Shelby County v. Holder hadn’t happened yet.

A person could be forgiven for thinking of voter suppression as a thing the left has always complained about, that has always been with us, and therefore something that has barely changed over the years. Such a person would be wrong. The 2013 Shelby County decision opened the door to a new wave of voter suppression the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the ’60s. Since that decision, states have been free to close hundreds of polling places, often without warning, to impose new voter ID laws even as they close DMVs, and to purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, a policy the court officially condoned in 2018’s Husted ruling. The Republican Party’s brazenness in pursuing a whites-only electoral strategy owes everything to these decisions.

Much ink has been spilled about negative partisanship over the last few years, with commenters right and left agreeing that Donald Trump has had a particularly polarizing effect on the electorate, jazzing up both his base and his opposition, culminating this year in the highest-turnout election in living memory. In 2012, the last time a Democrat won Florida, it was not unreasonable for Republicans like Romney to worry that going full racist would end up turning out more voters against the GOP than for it. The famous “2012 Election Autopsy” urged national Republicans to abandon the politics of white racial grievance, arguing pretty reasonably that a party that went 1 for 6 in the presidential popular vote was not on a sustainable path (it’s now 1 for 8).

But the Court came to the rescue and provided a different path to victory: doubling down on voter suppression. If you can rally and radicalize your own base while keeping half the people you turn off from ever reaching a polling booth, brazen white supremacy stops being such an automatic loser. In 2016, in a perfect storm of Russian interference, sexism in media, meaningless but scary-sounding FBI announcements, and high third-party margins, it was just barely enough to eke out an electoral victory amid yet another popular vote loss, this one a loss by over 2 percentage points and over two and a half million votes. This year, even with record suppression and the unprecedented gutting of the US postal service, it wasn’t enough.

This is not a victory lap. With a 6-3 Supreme Court and no guarantee of a Senate majority, the Suppress Your Way To Victory path remains, and with it, despite all demographic change, the Rally Racist Whites path. If you think demographic change is bound to overcome legalized voter suppression, I’d encourage you to look up the demographics of the antebellum South. It’s not enough to have the majority on your side, you need the law on your side too. Until we can change the structure of our voting systems, or at least guarantee that they won’t get even worse, the Trumpian path to power will remain. If we can return our small-d democratic infrastructure back even to 2012 levels, that path will almost certainly disappear.

To return to the original question, was white America always this open to racism and demagoguery? Yes. Most certainly. Was that always a viable path to conservative victory? No.

So, have we seen the last of the Romney/Ryan genteel racist? Considering all the genteel racism even on the other side of the aisle, I doubt it. But I suspect that with another Romney-style presidential candidate, Republicans’ white rural turnout problem would return in full force. After Trump’s loss, future Republican candidates will have to reweigh the risks and rewards of relying purely on white supremacy and grievance politics. Or, as famous Twitter personality dril would put it: