Hahrie Han: The Crisis of Democracy

Sometimes answering these kinds of questions is hard because I wear several hats in my job. But most 7-year-olds wouldn’t care about those distinctions so I’d probably say that I am a professor, which means that I get to ask interesting questions about our social and political world, and then work with teams of smart students, colleagues, and organizers (because I study grassroots organizing) to try to figure out the answers. Then, I get to write about what we learn and talk about it to anyone who will listen. And, one of the best parts of getting older is that I’ve also been able to move into positions where my job is to bring together groups of other scholars asking their own interesting questions about the world, and try to make it easier for them to do their work.

Well, I don’t know if it’s surprising, but I will say that my kids like to say that there are three questions we should ask all people to find out what kind of people they are. The questions are:

1. Do you like crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
2. When sitting around a campfire, do you gently toast the marshmallows on your s’mores or burn them?
3. Do people lose your trust or gain your trust? (In other words, when you first meet people, do you assume they are trustworthy until you have evidence otherwise, or do people have to earn your trust?)

My answers to those questions are (1) crunchy, for sure; (2) burn, but I wish I was a toaster; (3) I instinctively trust people until I have evidence to the contrary.

I always have several books going at once. I just finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union because my book club read it. I’m reading Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise because I’m in the middle of writing a book about the way faith institutions in America confront (or fail to confront) issues of race and racism in their communities. I’m also reading Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity because I’m trying to read examples of really great narrative non-fiction. Unlike my previous books, which were more academic, the book about faith and race is going to be narrative non-fiction so I want to learn from other writers.

So many books! It’s hard to pick one. Some books I loved in elementary school were The Great Brain, Harriet the Spy, and A Wrinkle in Time. I loved all things Roald Dahl. Harry Potter was not around when I was a kid, but I’m sure I would have been a fanatic if it were.

Same as the list above about what I’m reading. I’m definitely someone who loves books. I read, and mark them up, and take notes, and dogear pages. When I find a book I love, I like to make it a companion, and I always feel a bit of longing when I finish a really great read. I’ll never again be able to read that book again for the first time.

I’m not sure if I have perfect conditions. I read a lot and it probably depends on whether I’m reading for work or reading for fun. My kids are voracious readers as well, so I do love the times when we’re all sitting around with a good book and each other’s company.

Oh! This question is too big to answer just once. Political science is such a polyglot field that it’s hard to answer that. But I’ll say that lately, three classic books that I find myself thinking about a lot lately are W.E.B. DuBois Black Reconstruction in America, Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and E.E. Schattschneider’s The Semisovereign People. All three are books with tremendous insights about the crisis of democracy that I think we’re facing right now.

Hmm, the most obscure book might be my husband’s grandmother’s autobiography. It’s a lovely self-published piece that provides a lot of family history that we value for our children. I’m not sure if that answers the spirit of your question. When I had more spare time, I used to love prowling used book stores and looking for first editions. I found a full set of first editions of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy once. He is one of my all-time favorite authors (I grew up in Texas) so it was a real find.

In general, I tend to be a boom and bust writer. When I get an idea into my head, I tend to write feverishly to get all the ideas on paper. I throw everything at the wall in the first draft, and then go bust—I put it down for a while. Once I’ve had sufficient distance, I go back and try to edit ruthlessly. As I’ve gotten older and had more demands on my time, however, it’s harder and harder to be a boom and bust writer because my schedule is not flexible enough to allow it. So I’ve been trying to force myself to learn to write a little bit each day.

I’m not sure how to answer the question about how I know a topic can become a book. I think it’s really the question of do I have something to say?

I’m not sure that I can think about a book as isolated from the experience of reading it. Books and experiences are so entangled—in general, it seems like experiences are impactful but books help me make meaning of those experiences. One of the most impactful experiences I have had in my life was losing a full-term baby who died at birth in 2010. 7lbs, 3 oz, and the baby and I were both healthy. It was a fluke event that had a profound impact on me in many ways—one of which was introducing me to a genre of books about grief. It may sound macabre, but I have come to really love grief books. The best ones touch on questions that are at the very essence of our humanity.

I’m not sure that I can pick one that touched me most deeply (because there are so many), but (in the spirit of your previous question about obscure books) perhaps I’ll pick one that is less widely known. Anne Carson has a lovely, unusual book called Nox, that I found myself devouring. She had a brother from whom she had been estranged who died suddenly. When he died, she was asking herself how she should grieve someone she didn’t really know? Nox looks like a regular hardcover book from the outside, but it is actually a box with different mementos, scraps, and notes about her brother. I think it felt resonant to me because one of the hard things about losing a baby is that he died before we ever got to know what kind of person he would be in the world. Yet we still grieved him deeply. Her book helped me work through these questions in a way that was really important at the time.

Hmmm, that raises the question of what the best parts of humanity are. I think showing off to aliens wouldn’t just be about showing off virtue, but instead the beautiful ability of humanity at its best to sit with and hold tension, and appreciate the full complexity of the human experience. So what books demonstrate that? I’ve already mentioned Cormac McCarthy, and I think many of his books do that, especially the Border Trilogy, as I mentioned, and books like Suttree.

And, not to be macabre again, but now you have me thinking about grief literature and I do think that grief tells us a lot about our humanity. I’m remembering a podcast I once heard in which the premise was one question the hosts wanted to pose to all their guests. The question effectively asked guests to imagine a situation in which the world as we know it was somehow obliterated, but you could write one sentence on a small scrap of paper that would float into the next world and be the one relic of information that intelligent life in the future would have as they navigated their own world. What would you write on that scrap of paper? They asked all sorts of people to answer the question, including one philosopher who was emphatic that the sentence she would write is, “You will die. That is all you need to know.” There is a lovely book by an anthropologist named Renato Rosaldo, who tragically and suddenly lost his wife while doing fieldwork in the Philippines. He wrote a beautiful, poetic, meditation on the experience called The Day Shelley Died.

And perhaps a more conventional choice that meets these criteria is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First Century America is a study of people-powered organizations in the United States that have been able to actually win power for their constituents in recent years. The book emerged because my co-authors and I were looking at the data and evidence that increasingly shows a broken link between participation and power in the US. There is a sense in which we have been in a “movement moment,” when so many popular movements have been rising up to influence our politics. Yet, in most cases, despite people’s outpouring, the status quo is the dominant outcome. We wanted to examine cases of movements that were able to buck the trend and break through these barriers. We examined them to see if there were any commonalities that would provide insights into how we build people-powered organizations and movements that are able to achieve the outcomes their people need.

We examine cases of successful change in Arizona, Minnesota, Ohio, and Virginia and show that the most effective movements were the ones that rejected the false choice between idealism and pragmatism, between working inside the system and outside the system, between articulating a bold vision and making political compromises. Instead, by investing in building constituencies that were flexible and committed, these movements were able to win voting rights for the formerly incarcerated in Virginia, pass universal preschool in Cincinnati, push back against the worst excesses of anti-immigration policy in Arizona and lay the groundwork for the state’s historic shift in 2020, and elect candidates willing to articulate a new vision of multi-racial politics in Minnesota.

In lifting up these stories, we hope not only to contribute to our collective understanding about how grassroots collective action works, but also to lift up a vision of politics that puts people back at the center—in a way that grounds people in their own interests, connects them across difference, and helps them become architects of their own future to strengthen our democracy. We are in a moment in the world when so much is uncertain, and this book tells stories about a set of groups that are imagining how we can build the society we all need, and then doing the work to make it so.

I always have more books on my shelf than I have time to read. But here’s one. I have a colleague at Johns Hopkins University who is an anthropologist named Anand Pandian. I actually have not had the chance to get to know him much, but he has a book called A Possible Anthropology that examines how anthropological inquiry can be a transformative practice for helping audiences navigate this time of societal upheaval. I only barely began the book, but then had to put it back on the shelf because other obligations intruded. But from its early pages, I can see that the book is a meditation on the practice of research, inquiry, and writing, as a way of expanding the horizons of our collective humanity. That’s a question I’ve been thinking about in my own head so I’m really looking forward to getting back to it.