Losing the North: Republican Realignment

People have been asking if we're seeing a realignment of American electoral politics, with Donald Trump  scrambling the campaign map. There are no real signs of that yet: polls show the presidential electoral map unchanged so far, with the Democrats and Republican leading in the same states they carried last time and the time before that. The real story is the realignment that has already happened, without fanfare, over the past quarter-century. This Fourth of July weekend I'd like to talk about Maine and Vermont.

The largest political realignment of the last half century has been the movement of the Dixiecrats, the traditional Southern bloc of segregationist whites, out of their traditional home in the Democratic Party and into the GOP. That realignment took decades, and made uneven progress; some key Dixiecrats, such as Robert Byrd, remain Democrats for their entire lives while other figures, such as Strom Thurmond, literally switch party affiliation over the course of their careers. LBJ famously remarked after he'd signed the Civil Rights Bills that he'd likely signed away the South for a generation, and the results of his re-election campaign a few months later bear him out. (Here I'm going to use 270toWin's collection of historical electoral maps as the perfect digital visual aids.) Although LBJ absolutely destroyed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 landslide, Goldwater carried the five states of the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina), all traditional Democratic strongholds. That switch in party allegiance is all the more striking because those were the only states Goldwater carried except for his home state, Arizona.

But the realignment LBJ had been worrying about had already been solidly underway for at least sixteen years, since Thurmond's rebellion against Harry Truman and run for President on the third-party Dixiecrat ticket in 1948:

As you can see here,  four of those five deep-South states that defected to Goldwater in 1964 had already made an attempt to secede from the Democrats well before the Civil Rights Act. (Thurmond and his followers left the Democratic Party in a righteous rage over Harry Truman's allegedly radical civil rights agenda. That included things like desegregating federal housing projects and integrating the military. Some white Southerners were not only ready to walk but actually in process of walking before Brown v. Board of Education, the Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, and the rest of the classic Civil Rights Movement as we remember it.)

In 1968, there is yet another third-party run by another Southern Democrat, George Wallace, still angry about the Democratic position on civil rights but not entirely ready to turn Republican. In this map you can see some division and indecision: Texas voting Democratic, Arkansas and four of the five Deep South states voting for Wallace, and the rest of the South (including South Carolina) voting for Nixon. But from 1972 on, those states trend solidly Republican, part of Nixon's "Solid South." The South does vote for southern-boy Jimmy Carter in 1976, but abandons him for Reagan in 1980 (with Carter only carrying his native Georgia in the South). And in 1992 another Southerner, Bill Clinton, manages to take roughly half of the Southern States, and holds on to a little less than half in 1996.

But by 2000, even a Democratic nominee from the South can't get any purchase. Al Gore doesn't get a single electoral vote in the South, not even in his home state of Tennessee. From 1976 to 200 we go from the South willing to vote for a Democratic President, but only if he's a southerner, to the South willing to split its vote for a Democratic nominee from the South, to the South voting as a solid Republican wall no matter where the Democrat is from.

That's a striking and extremely important realignment. And it leaves us, by 2000, with our familiar red-state/blue-state battle lines. Each party has its own fairly stable electoral base, with a handful of swing states (Ohio, Florida, Colorado, etc.) in active play.

But I want to talk about a smaller development that we've overlooked. While the Southern tier was migrating to the Republican column, some long-time Republican strongholds have turned reliably blue. That includes what had been the two most reliably Republican states in the nation: Vermont and Maine.

Vermont and Maine have voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate in every single one of the last six elections, from 1992 to 2012. (Current polling, which could change, suggests that it will be seven in a row.) This in itself is not a huge deal, because those states are so small. They have only seven electoral votes between them, the equivalent of Oregon or Oklahoma. (Of course, in a polarized election, every little bit counts.) I'm more interested in Vermont and Maine as bellwethers of changing political coalitions. Since 1992 those two northern New England states have always voted Democratic in Presidential elections. Previously, they almost never did.

Vermont voted Republican in 33 of the previous 34 presidential elections, from 1856 to 1988. That's every presidential election from the founding of the Republican Party until the election of Bill Clinton. The single exception is the 1964 landslide in which LBJ blows out Goldwater. Maine voted Republican in 31 of those 34 presidential elections. The three exceptions are the Goldwater election of 1964, the second Dixiecrat uprising in 1968, and the 1912 "Bull Moose" election in which Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the Republican vote. (Vermont was one of only two states to stick by Republican incumbent Taft when his home state abandoned him.) For 132 years, Maine and Vermont were the two most reliably Republican states in the nation. This map shows how reliable they were: the only holdouts in FDR's 1936 re-election landslide.

One of the striking things about this is that Maine's turn against the Republicans in the Electoral College begins with a repudiation of George H. W. Bush, who is nominally a Texan but actually a prized resident of Maine. (GHWB voted from a hotel address in Houston but owned a home in Kennebunkport.) And then Maine went on to vote against another Bush twice, despite his local Down East ties.

What happened? How did Vermont and Maine go, over the last 80 years, from the most Republican of Republican strongholds to solid membership in the Democrats' national base?

Most of the stories we hear about changing party allegiances focus on urbanization and changing ethnic demographics. States become more Democratic as they become more urban, and as minority populations, especially African-American and Latino populations, grow. All of that is true enough, but none of it explains Maine or Vermont. Those states are still extremely rural. (I have been to Burlington, Portland, and Bangor, and they are all wonderful towns, but none of them will be mistaken for a major metropolis.Neither state has any city with even 100,000 inhabitants.) Furthermore, Vermont and Maine are the two whitest states in the union: Vermont is 94.3% non-Hispanic white, while Maine is a resplendently snowy 94.4% non-Hispanic white. (The two states' shared neighbor, New Hampshire, is 92.3% non-Hispanic white; Vermont and Maine are actually whiter than the White Mountains.) This is not about racial politics, or at least not in the terms we usually discuss it.

One possible explanation is Democratic voters moving to Vermont and Maine from other, more urban Northeastern states, bringing a more general Northeastern liberalism, and Democratic party loyalties from places like Hartford, Boston, and New York. There's at least some truth to this theory; Brooklyn-born Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is only the most obvious example.

But that is not the whole story. People have also been migrating to the Sun Belt without changing its social conservatism. And rural New England's social liberalism is not simply an urban import. The Vermont and Maine Republicans were traditionally socially liberal: not merely moderate Republicans but progressive and liberal Republicans. Remember, the Republicans were originally the civil-rights party, and the Northeast was originally one of their heartlands. It was Maine who sent Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, to the US Senate for four terms.

Those voters don't fit terribly well with the Dixiecrats. And part of what we're seeing is that adding one of these groups to a party means that, over time, the other group will leave. It is basically a counter-realignment, a smaller response to the large movement of the Dixiecrats from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Look at that Goldwater map from 1964 again: Vermont and Maine flip blue when the Deep South flips red. Vermont, which had stuck by every single Republican candidate including Taft. abandons the Republican nominee that the South crosses party lines to vote for.

It's not that anyone articulates this. No one in Vermont or Maine announces, "I won't stay in the party with those Southerners!"  Nobody complains when a national election swings a party's way because a region that usually goes for the other side suddenly goes for yours. Northern Republicans like having majorities in Congress. But northern Yankee Republicans and Southern converts to Republicanism make strange bedfellows, who disagree strongly about the temperature of the bedroom. They have different cultures and different priorities. Their religious histories are different. As the old Dixiecrat bloc has become ascendant in the party, they have come to set an agenda that often leaves the old-school New England Yankees indifferent and sometimes actively upsets them. You can't keep both groups happy, and pleasing the (relative) newcomers means gradually driving the old guard into the other party.

This doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of Republicans left in Vermont, Maine, and the rest of New England. Of course there are. (Maine currently has a Tea Party governor who squeaked through in a four-way race and is currently antagonizing everyone in the state including the lobsters.)  Regions change political allegiance slowly, by fits and starts.  State and local Republicans can still win in Vermont and Maine even if Republican presidential nominees can't, just as conservative Democrats could keep winning state and local races in the South for years after it had switched its Presidential loyalties. (See: Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).) In fact, you can see a surprisingly large number of independents winning statewide office in Vermont and Maine, and to some degree in other New England states like Connecticut. For a while there, Vermont's three-person Congressional delegation included a Republican, a Democrat, and a Socialist Independent.

But I would suggest that all those independent officeholders are part of the region's piecemeal migration from the R to the D column. It's fairly rare for voters, much less career politicians, to switch parties after a certain age; party identity is an identity, too, and it's hard to switch sides. You have some official party-swapping in Northern New England, including some pretty high-profile examples, but you have many more examples where former Republicans simply become independents: disaffected from their original (and in some sense natural) party, but not willing to sign on with the Democrats yet. So you see former Republicans running as Independents, but also former Democrats running as Independents in order to appeal to that body of swing voters who've migrated away from the Republicans but aren't ready to call themselves Democrats. Senator Angus King (I-ME), who became an Independent in the 1990s, won both the governorship and a Senate seat with this strategy.

But you also can see dramatic switches happening in real time: back in 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords, (R-VT), a traditional Yankee Republican, left the party to become (I-VT), caucusing with the Democrats and handing the Senate majority over to the Democrats from the Republicans. Jeffords blamed George W. Bush. (That Bush did not know how to handle New England Republican Senators, despite the fact that his own grandfather had been a New England Republican Senator, tells you how much the party has changed.) But that's part of a larger story, in which the original, foundational base of the Republican Party, the heirs of the Lincoln Republicans, leave (or are driven off) because they can't co-exist with the party's new, post-Confederate base.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Fairy Tale Promises: The Brexit, Conservatives, and Trump

The shocking result of the "Brexit" referendum, with Britain leaving the European Union, has widely been taken as Good News for Donald Trump. He was happy to say so himself, and to attempt to take credit somehow for the referendum's success. And people have been panicking about the danger that Trump's campaign could beat the conventional wisdom just as the British "Leave" campaign did. That danger is probably overrated, as Jamelle Bouie points out: the UK is much whiter than the US, so the angry white vote doesn't carry as far here any more, and we should remember that the Brexit result wasn't really a surprise: "Leave" and "Remain" had been polling neck-and-neck down to the wire, so the 52-48 result wasn't unlikely. But Trump, who led the Republican primary polls wire to wire, is clearly behind in the general-election polls. On the other hand, it's easy to see Trump and the Brexiteers as part of a wider movement: angry nativist populists, hostile to policy experts and welcoming to xenophobes and racists.  That movement won't meet with the same success everywhere, but it's real.

I want to move past the obvious similarities to look at two more important comparisons. Both the American and British situations feature 1) the country's major conservative party tearing itself apart, mostly because of 2) a long history of campaign promises that were never meant to be kept, because the people making them considered them impossible. Let's take these one at a time.

First of all, the Brexit is deeply tied to  a civil war inside the UK's Conservative Party. The "Remain" and "Leave" campaigns were led by rival Tory politicians: the Prime Minister, David Cameron, led the campaign to stay in the EU and Boris Johnson, who has long been gunning for Cameron's job, led the campaign to quit the EU. That would be bad enough, but it's worse: the leaders of BOTH campaigns have destroyed their political fortunes. Cameron resigned his Prime Ministership the day after losing the vote. Today, Boris Johnson turned his expected announcement of his campaign for Prime Minister into a surprise resignation speech. He won't be running for PM, and is resigning his seat. It's like House of Cards, but with lots of twists and drama.

The Brexit vote itself was meant to ward off Tory civil war, with Cameron throwing the referendum out as a sop to fend off both the anti-immigrant fourth or fifth party called the UK Indepence Party, and the Brexiteer faction of his Cameron's own party ... essentially to shut Boris Johnson up. So, that plan has gone as badly as it could go: UKIP and its loathsome chief, Nigel  Farage, have now been empowered, Cameron has lost his premiership, and Johnson has immediately fallen on the sword he used to decapitate Cameron. How did it go so wrong?

It went so wrong because the Brexit itself was a poison pill: easy to campaign for, but a disaster to put into practice. Once the Leave side had won, and Cameron had chosen to resign without triggering the exit (as opposed to triggering the exit and then resigning, which only a fool would have counted on him doing), Johnson and the other Leave leaders were stuck. The Prime Minister who actually triggers the Brexit, who begins the formal process of withdrawal, will be on the hook both for the bad effects that follow, especially the flight of business and banking from London to other European cities, and for the drawbacks of whatever deal the UK hammers out with the remaining European powers.

Here's the thing: Boris Johnson knows the consequences of the Brexit will be bad, and he knows that the deal with Europe won't deliver what he promised. London has become the financial capital of Europe under the current deal, and that becomes impossible if the UK leaves. An enormous amount of business WILL leave the UK, and take jobs with it. Meanwhile, the EU will never allow a country access to its market without both paying dues and (more importantly) allowing free immigration from the rest of the EU. Countries like Switzerland, which have side deals with the EU, have to allow free immigration, so the end to immigration that the Brexiteers promised will never happen without losing access to all that sweet tariff-free trade. BoJo knows these things.

But BoJo and the other Brexiteers publicly denied all of these things. They denounced the (true and totally common-sense) warnings that the Brexit would lose British jobs as "scaremongering." And BoJo began making noises after the vote about how the UK could stay part of the European market, etc. etc. etc. Except it can't without, you know, staying in. So Johnson, who has made his entire career on basking the EU, had no way forward. The backstabbing finale, in which Johnson's deputy from the Leave campaign put the knife to his prospects, was just the inevitable ending.

Johnson has been living for years off a popular (and populist) movement which he knows would be disastrous but which he didn't really think could succeed. It's very obviously that he had no plan for what to do when he won. He didn't plan for the Brexit because he never expected not necessarily even wanted it to happen. It was just a convenient set of talking points to rally a populist base against the party insiders, splitting populist Tories from the party's pro-business establishment, to advance BoJo's career. He was making a set of fairy tale promises.

Boris Johnson has campaigned for years, as both politician and journalist, on a "Let's All Go to Narnia" platform. It's not practical in any way, but it strikes a deep chord with voters and gets them passionately enthusiastic. Even better, it forces Boris's political opponents into the unenviable position of arguing against Narnia, and sounding like passionless, pedantic jerks. No one likes the Anti-Narnia guy. And Boris never had to worry about what he proposed coming true, because it was so far from being possible.

Then one day, Boris Johnson found himself hip-deep in snow, staring dumbfounded at a lamp post. What to do, but crawl back into your uncle's wardrobe and hide?

Here in America, we're seeing a parallel breakup of the Republican coalition, as its populist wing breaks away from its traditional business-oriented policies. Everything Trump promises the crowds would be catastrophic for American business. But the other Republicans aren't in much position to debunk Trump, because they have been cynically feeding Trump's own fairy-tale promises to their base for years now. Trump's border wall is not Trump's idea. Trump has no policy ideas of his own. The border wall with Mexico has been a fairy-tale proposal that various Republicans have hawked during primaries and off-year elections for years. (Sometimes they have called the wall a "security fence" in order to sound smarter, and make the totally unworkable proposal sound like something practical.) I've been hearing about that "build a wall" plan since at least the 90s. No one who made that promise ever had to worry about it happening. And if Trump actually won, he would quickly discover that building the wall would be ruinously expensive and pointless.

Here's the Republicans' real problem. They have a whole batch of fairy tale policies that they've been pushing to their voters for years now. (The Democrats also have some pie-in-the-sky plans that they don't think are achievable at the moment, but the actually think those things could work if put into place. And they have a habit of only campaigning on what they think they can get done in the next few years.) Clinton's policies are things she that she thinks could get through Congress and will work if they do.

"Repealing Obamacare" is a classic fairy-tale promise. It excites the Republican base like no one's business. But the Republicans also know that they can't actually do it, and that doing it would be a disaster. Throwing people off their health insurance is not something you do in office. Likewise, actually banning abortion would be the ruin of the party that does it for decades afterward. That doesn't stop them from campaigning on these fairy-tale promises. In fact, they campaign on them so hard because they know they can't make these things happen. But if they did, it would be a disaster. This is red meat you feed the rubes. The problem comes, not just for a political party but for a whole nation, when the rubes expect you to do what you've promised them.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Clinton: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Eight years ago, in what was really my first few months as a blogger, I opened a post like this:

The most important question to ask tonight is:

Can a woman be elected President of the United States?

I think the answer, at the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign, has to be a resounding "Yes."

No, she didn't win. No, she is not going to be the next President. But it's no longer possible to say that a woman couldn't do it. It is now undeniable that a woman can be a powerful contender for the White House, and that if a few things had gone differently (her campaign strategy; her vote on Iraq) Senator Clinton would have had the nomination.

That was the night Hillary Clinton's first campaign for President ended, with the close of the 2008 California primary.
Last night she proved me wrong and right. I was right that she had paved the way for a woman to gain the nomination and to win the White House. But I did not foresee that the next woman candidate, the first to be nominated by a major party, would be Clinton herself. She has become her own successor, her own political descendant. I wish my mother had lived to see this day.
She didn't go easily eight years ago, and I was in the opposing camp. But I was moved by what she had achieved then, and moved more deeply by her accomplishments today.
In 2008 there were also mutterings that the fix was in, that she had had the race stolen from her by sexism. And then, as now, I thought those mutterings diminished then-Senator Clinton's place in history:

Least of all should her achievement be diminished by claims that the nomination was wrongly denied her, or that it was stolen. It wrongs Senator Clinton, and ill serves the women who will come after her, to imagine her not as the pioneer, the power broker, the master politician that she has become but instead as a victim.

[snip]

Don't tell your daughters that the nomination was taken from Hillary Clinton. Don't tell them that the door to the Oval Office will always be closed, that no matter how well they do they will never get a fair accounting. Don't tell them that even the best candidate, with the best message and best campaign, will always be cheated by sexism, that a woman's best will never be good enough, or that even great women end up as victims. Tell them the truth: that there is a chance for them no matter what they do, that sexism will always have to be confronted and defeated but that it can be, and that while they will have to work harder and fight longer that in the end they will have the chance both to fail and to succeed, to take upon themselves the responsibility for their own defeats and their victories. Do Senator Clinton justice as a woman who made her own decisions, as a historic figure who held much of her political destiny in her own hands.

Tell your daughters that Hillary Clinton ran a great campaign, but not a perfect campaign. Tell them that she was a great woman, but not the last great woman. There was a better campaign to run, and there will be another woman, on another day, to run it.

The next day has come, and the next campaign, and the next great woman in American politics is Hillary Clinton herself. As long as I have thought I have known her, she never ceases to amaze.

History, here she comes.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at Dagblog

Trump and Consequences

This seems to be the week that it began to sink in, even among the people who had bought into the conventional Beltway wisdom: Trump means what he says. And this is Trump, the only Trump there is. He's not going to "pivot toward the general election" like the wised-up insiders have been saying he would. He's not capable of change. Trump is deeply dishonest, but he believes what he says. When he says that if he's elected he will do things that are destructive, illegal, or unconstitutional, we should believe him.

Donald Trump says he would change libel laws so he could punish journalists who make him angry, because that's what he wants to do. He attacks the judge presiding over his fraud lawsuit, because he would like to punish that judge. He talks about using the power of the Presidency to attack his personal enemies, as he sees them, because that is what he wants to do. Anyone who thinks that Trump would not do those things if given a chance is deluding him- or herself.

Up until now, the conventional wisdom among certain journalists, politicians, and assorted hacks has been not to worry about what Trump says, because in time he will follow the usual political script and do what the conventional wisdom expects. (As if Trump has followed the conventional script at any point up until now.) The wised-up types haven't been worried about what Trump says at his rallies because they pride themselves on being smarter than the audience, and Trump's act is so obviously phony that only an idiot would buy it. But they forgot that Trump actually is one of the idiots who buys Trump's act.

Donald J. Trump is suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder. (Disclosure: I am not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. On the other hand, I am not wrong.) That disorder is incurable, and Trump would refuse treatment if it were offered to him. He's a narcissist, and he likes himself this way. But that major personality disorder limits him. He can lie with enormous conviction, and then tell a contradictory lie with the same intense emotional belief a few seconds later. But what Trump cannot do is stop believing in his own lies. He has no sense of an authentic self outside of those lies. He's not a guy who puts on act to bullshit the rubes. The bullshit is his identity. He is the act, and he has no other character to play. So his psychiatric condition makes Trump enormously rigid in ways healthy people would not expect. He can change the details of the bullshit at lightning speed, but he can't change the basic act, because there's no Trump outside the act.

There's not going to be any "pivot" to a more presidential or conciliatory Trump for the general election. He's not capable of that. And if he were elected, there would not be any shift from campaign mode to governing mode. Hell, no. This is not campaign mode. This is Trump mode, the only mode he has. The only difference if he were elected would be that Trump's sense of grandiosity would be rewarded and intensified, to everyone else's danger, because Trump would be even more convinced that he could do anything he wants.

So the media has fed Trump's campaign, because he fits neatly into their crassest and most cynical business strategies. But if Trump wins, he will destroy the American media by attacking press freedom. Actions have consequences. Those who enabled Trump will pay the price, because Trump himself will punish them.

The Republican politicians making the craven decision to endorse Trump are likewise courting the destruction of their own party. I'm not sure what happens to the Republicans after a Trump loss, but I'm pretty sure a Trump victory would mean the end of the Republican Party. This is the predictable consequence of various party actors' actions.

Donald Trump is a liar, but we should take him at his word. If he is elected he will blow up America's foreign alliances, just as he says he would. He will attempt to deport 11 million people. He will run up a massive deficit with more tax cuts for millionaires, just as he promises. And he will bankrupt the country trying to pay for his asinine wall with Mexico, because he has talked about the wall so much that there is no going back. Trump can lie and backtrack, but he cannot bear to be seen backing down. He couldn't build the wall, because it's impossible and impractical. But he also can't not build the wall.

No one should be surprised at how crazy Trump is. He's been telling us at the top of his lungs for a year. But various people have, for their own reasons, tried to rationalize away Trump's obvious break with reason and treat him like a normal candidate. Those people have been extraordinarily reckless, and they have put our country in real danger. Trump should never have gotten this close. And those who have helped him should never be trusted again.

Trump will spend the next five months demonstrating how profoundly unfit he is. He can't help himself. But he will also be establishing, beyond any reasonable doubt, his enablers' unfitness for public trust. And those people had a choice.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

JFK's Birthday

Today would have been John F. Kennedy's 99th birthday. I doubt he would have seen it, even if he had lived out his natural days. He was never in good health. But I grew up with a huge JFK poster in my childhood bedroom, and a little bronze bust of him, the kind banks used to give away, on my shelf. I was born Catholic in Massachusetts in the 60s; Kennedy loomed large in my childhood.

Today is also the end of my 25th college reunion at Harvard. I have been having a great time with my classmates, and it's ending before I'm ready. I feel like I've only spoken to half as many people as I'd like, and only for half as long as I'd like. But at least I got to come; JFK did not live to his 25th. I've been joking that I will soon have achieved two things John Kennedy never managed: going to my 25th Harvard reunion and turning 47. But it's not funny. It's just true.

Fifteen of my classmates are already gone, all too soon. Some I knew and some I didn't. And two of the seven people I roomed with over those years have already passed away. I wasn't in touch with them as much as I would have liked. I wish I had taken the chance while I had it.

Mortality has been on my mind, because of my mother's passing a few months ago. Some of my college classmates knew about her death before this weekend, because of social media. Some old friends didn't know, and I told them over the last few days when there seemed like a reasonable moment to tell them. Others I didn't tell, because the time was never right or because we have never been more than casual friends.

I've grown obsessed over the last few years with the Grant Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study of human aging that tracked 268 Harvard boys over the rest of their long, complicated lives, trying to assess their mental and physical health and growth. They are the worst social science sample possible, so over privileged that they can't be representative. I mean, the guys in that study had a 1 in 268 chance of actually being JFK. But I think about them a lot, because the study illustrates so much about growth in the second half of life, and I am coming to the second half of life. And the Grant Study promises that there is a continuing process of maturation and growth after, for example, a 25th reunion. It is at once comforting and challenging to think that I still have a chance to grow, and to become a better man.

Whether I like it or not, my life is in transition. This week, before I left for Boston, we had a visit from my father and brother at our new house. And I was sitting at my dining room sharing a meal with my family, and Mom wasn't there. It's a new place, and the same old family, but not the same old family. My family changes, and my place in my family changes. There is so much left to do between the middle of life and the end.

The Grant Study also emphasizes the crucial importance of relationships and emotional connections. And perhaps that's why my reunion seems like such a gift. But it is bittersweet to see all these faces for such swift moments, when I want to sit them all down for long, open-ended conversations. And so I guess that's my lesson this Memorial Day weekend: how it all goes by so very, very soon.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog