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April 1, 2020
David Daley's Playlist for His Book "Unrigged"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
David Daley's book Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy is a smart and important text about righting the United States, and offers surprising optimism in dark political times.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"... an uplifting survey of grassroots efforts to make American democracy more inclusive ... Daley’s wit...and clear explanations of electoral processes make the book accessible to political neophytes as well as experts. This optimistic appraisal of the political scene will strike a chord with progressives gearing up for the 2020 elections."
In his own words, here is David Daley's Book Notes music playlist for his book Unrigged:
Bruce Springsteen, “The Rising”
My first book, an expose of the unprecedented Republican partisan gerrymander that warped Congress and state legislatures nationwide, received a second life after November 8, 2016. Americans awoke to a closely divided country in which all of the political power in Washington and almost 35 states was held by one side -- the side that usually received fewer votes. Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count helped explain why that kept happening -- and why it was no accident. I was invited to give a lot of talks about gerrymandering, and often found myself before rooms of newly energized activists, explaining just how deep a mess we were in, and just how long the road out would take. I sucked the air out of the room.
So when I went to give a talk in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation, I reached out to a new activist group, Voters Not Politicians, led by twentysomething Katie Fahey, which was gathering signatures for a statewide initiative that would establish an independent commission to draw district lines. Their optimism, their fight, helped dissolve my black cloud. I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” in my head, his gruff grumble building toward that joyous singalong release. I realized there was another book right here. That there were more Katie Faheys. I wanted to meet them. This new book, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy began with that quest for hope.
Patti Smith, “People Have The Power”
Unrigged is a book about people power, and Patti Smith provided the anthem. When we lived in New York we’d often see her at Bowery Ballroom during her New Year’s Eve stand, and “People Have The Power” would be this anthemic roar that got us all ready to take on another year. Beginning in 2017, her words became something different: The empowering reminder I needed that we did have the power “to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.” Patti sings that “Where there were deserts/I saw fountains,” and it perfectly captured the indomitable spirit of the reformers I met. Unrigged takes 250 pages to say what she observed in seven words. Where there were deserts, these citizens saw fountains. And then they made them real.
Eminem, “Lose Yourself”
Desmond Meade still has the commanding demeanor of the celebrity bodyguard he once was, before he spiraled into drug abuse, prison, and one steamy Miami afternoon, found himself waiting for the next oncoming train, ready to end all his suffering. But the train didn’t come. He walked across the tracks, wandered a few blocks, and came upon a treatment center. He checked himself in. Soon he was not only clean but married, and a law school graduate. Meade could turn around his life, but one thing he could never get back in Florida was his right to vote. In the eyes of the state, he was forever a felon. Meade joined the Florida Rights Restoration Council, and in time became its leader, fronting a mighty moral coalition of second-chance believing church goers, tattooed-Trump loving deplorables, and criminal justice reformers, left and right, bankrolled by the ACLU and the Koch Brothers. On a steamy Orlando morning, three months before Floridians would vote on a constitutional amendment returning the right to vote to 1.4 million people, and ending a vestige of the Jim Crow South, I watched Meade take the stage at a summer convening to “Lose Yourself,” thrusting his right fist in the air and singing along, trying to will this unlikely political force over the finish line. “Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment,” he sang. “Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?”
R.E.M., “These Days”
Maybe my favorite chapter in the book profiles the visionaries behind Run For Something, Flippable, Sister District and Forward Majority, groups that have focused progressive energy into state legislative and other local races where long-term political power is won. They’re led, almost entirely, by young women. And they’ve fired up a new generation and trained them to run, and win. Important victories in Florida and Texas, are due to their work, as are newly blue legislatures in Virginia, Washington state and New York. I’m a fortysomething guy, so I’d always leave my time with these groups with this optimistic anthem from R.E.M.’s purposeful Pageant album echoing in my head: “We are young despite the years/We are concern/We are hope despite the times.”
Janelle Monae, “Americans”
One of the most powerful days reporting this book took place in Alabama, where I joined the Alabama Voting Rights Project on their mission to track down and register 75,000 people who had lost their voting rights due to a similar Jim Crow-era law. The state had finally fixed it, after 135 years, but wouldn’t lift a finger to actually tell these people they could vote again. So this nonprofit took the herculean task on themselves. We spent the morning at the bus station in Birmingham, approaching people one by one as they started their commutes to work, tentatively asking if they’d been trapped by this old law because of a criminal conviction. A woman in her late 30s first waved me away, insisting she couldn’t vote, but had her attention caught by the clipboard. We quickly determined she could: She’d been convicted of a minor drug possession charge at 17. Under the old Alabama law, that had cost her the right to vote, forever. She had never voted before. We registered her on the spot, both of us in tears. On the long drive back to Montgomery that evening, after a full day of bus stations, barber shops, and door to door canvassing, the Project’s dynamic young leader, blasted the new Janelle Monae album. The last track, “Americans,” stopped me cold – this amazing journey of righteousness, focus, determination, an insistence this land was all of our lands. “Don’t try to take my country. I will defend my land,” she sings, before the big conclusion: Until Latinos and Latinas don't have to run from walls/This is not my America/But I tell you today that the devil is a liar/Because it's gon' be my America before it's all over.” Hell yeah, it is.
Simon and Garfunkel, “America”
There was another memorable trip to Idaho, where a group of millennials founded Reclaim Idaho, set out to expand Medicaid for almost 80,000 state residents, and painted an aging RV bright green and set out to persuade the state. They let me ride along, and after a long day in Idaho Falls, there were no hotel rooms to be found. We pulled into a pitch-black RV camp in what felt like absolute nowhere, but turned out to be a town called American Falls. There were more stars than I’d ever seen, and in the morning, we awoke, surprised, to find ourselves both atop a beautiful reservoir, but with these glorious mountains in the desert. After coffee at the camp’s cafe, we piled back in the RV and started the drive along dusty I-86 to Pocatello. What came on the radio but Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” those gentle harmonies, that cascading drum roll, never grander or more romantic than watching the lonely western sky through the giant RV windows, on a mission, all of us gone once more to look for America. The book began with a quest for hope. I found it.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked. His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, the Washington Post, and New York magazine. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, the former editor of Salon, and lives in Massachusetts.
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