Making the city less car dependent is making the city less expensive for people. - Jamelle Bouie

Donald Trump's false claims of electoral fraud in the wake of the 2020 presidential election were an expression of the idea that only certain majorities are real majorities, that only some Americans deserve to hold power. And while Trump lost and left office, the idea persists. Rather than mobilize new voters or persuade existing ones, Republicans throughout the country have set about restricting access to the forms of voting that helped Democrats win in traditionally Republican states like Georgia and Arizona. In Michigan, likewise, Republican lawmakers want to change the way the state distributes its Electoral College votes to nullify the influence of Detroit on the final result.

The story of emancipation, going really back to the founding of the country all the way to the civil war is very much the story of enslaved Africans and freed blacks taking the initiative to put their freedom on the agenda of national politics. That's especially true during the Civil War. The war, as many people know, it does not begin as a war for abolition. It begins as a war for union. But as soon as the shooting starts, enslaved people are escaping to union lines. They're leaving work on plantations. They're offering their assistance to- to union soldiers as guides, as laborers and eventually as soldiers. And it's those actions that transform the war for union into a war for liberation, into a war for emancipation. And although Juneteenth commemorates those enslaved Africans who were whisked away to Texas to avoid the Emancipation Proclamation, I think it's still an opportunity for us to really think and take seriously the fact that emancipation does not happen without the actions of the enslaved, not just over the war, but really over the course of 80 years.

I think nationally, we have the Republican Party, which sort of doesn’t really believe it can win without changing the rules and, like, kicking people out the electorate. And then in cities like New York and the state of California, you have a party that does not think it can lose. And so that creates its own set of dysfunctions.