“We don’t care who you voted for, just bring a dish to the potluck.”

I’ve uttered that phrase hundreds of times to my neighbors in South Philadelphia the last three weeks as I passed out postcards to invite them to a Unity Picnic and concert at Old Swedes’ Episcopal Church in Queen Village this weekend. 

I could see people’s shoulders relax, their brows unfurrow. Often, they looked at me with some mix of gratitude and confusion. 

Sometimes the reaction was disbelief. One guy at the Sunday Headhouse Farmers Market, dressed in his Eagles gear and pushing a stroller, happily took a card but then as he walked away sheepishly admitted to me, “I voted for Trump.” And I told him again — I don’t care who you voted for, just bring a dish to the potluck. 

He has no idea what I’ve already been through. Six years ago, I started a Philadelphia-based art and ideas magazine called Root Quarterly, in part because I almost lost my relationship with my conservative father, whom I love dearly, over politics. 

I wanted to create a place that got people off the hamster wheel of online insanity — our credo is print is dead, long live print. Our amazing collaborators want to employ art and beauty as a way to bridge divides, and for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania to contribute to national conversations — about housing, education, and culture. We’re probably the only arts and culture magazine in the country that was explicitly founded with viewpoint diversity and pluralism — not pro forma DEI — in mind. If we’re going to rebuild the fourth estate, we believe we need to do it with regenerative media that is rooted to its region, that is centered in elevation and celebration, and that aspires to intellectual and artistic excellence—and also to intellectual humility and curiosity. 

But when I reached out at the time to Albert Eisenberg, the co-founder of Broad + Liberty, I didn’t hear back. When my partner — in life and business — tried again months later, Eisenberg agreed to a lunch, and admitted to us that when I first got in touch, he’d assumed that because we were an art magazine, there was some sort of progressive “gotcha” coming, so he ignored the overture. He couldn’t fathom that we were operating in good faith — a little like that guy in the Eagles shirt. 

But you can’t improvise if people shut you down, or if you shut them down, and the next year — the next twenty-five years — is going to be a massive improvisation. More and more people are realizing, especially now after the decisive 2024 victory of Donald J. Trump, that the old political alignments don’t really mean much anymore. 

Things have been confusing, for me and others. My confreres are a broad mix of people, including progressives, conservatives, and libertarians; die-hard party people and defectors. No single issue connects or divides them. I try to listen to them all.

When you’re in a swirl of confusion, values ground you. Respect for individuality and liberty are important to me. In the last four years, I’ve served as the officiant at two same-sex unions of dear friends, and I also never once considered posting the “Black Square” during the summer of 2020. The first is about freedom; the second, coercion. Resisting internet-addled groupthink and compelled speech is a culture-war hill I will die on — and so is gay marriage. 

These friends are now worried that their marriages — an institution that I know to be a source of great strength and stability to them — will be annulled, and I want to be able to tell them cruelty and capriciousness of this sort won’t be on the table. Is it on the table?

The women I know are worried about abortion rights being taken away, but many of them are also glad that there is a better chance that women’s sports and spaces may stay sex-segregated, even if they also believe that trans women should be broadly protected and respected. In navigating the health system for a personal health crisis this year, I got an up-close-and-personal view of how hard it can be to get the right care generally, even before your needs are being used as a political football.

I know people who voted for Trump and people who sat it out because they didn’t like that there wasn’t an open process to nominate a Democratic candidate. Conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan voted for Harris. None of them like words-as-secret-handshake: They are befuddled or annoyed by coastal elites (even if they are one) insisting that we say “Latinx,” for instance, even when Latinos and Hispanics themselves roundly reject the term.

Military service and the trades are a solid tradition in my family, so I’m unsurprised that many of the working-class people of South Philadelphia who live below Washington Avenue — my Mexican, Italian, Vietnamese, Irish, Colombian, and Cambodian neighbors — voted for Trump, as did some of my family; others of them are blue dog Democrats. 

Certainly, my neighbors in tonier enclaves above Washington Avenue voted largely for Harris. Eventually, the Democratic party will have to get its head around class, since in ye olden times that used to be their bailiwick. Now they’re even shilling for broadscale surveillance and hanging out with Bush-the-Second-era architects.  

For the record, I dutifully — but under duress — voted for Harris, since my own views are some sort of crazy quilt of the above, stitched together from years of being in politically mixed company, working in political bridge-building spaces, and watching progressive overreach up close and personal in the arts and culture world, including in the funding community. 

I get that I confuse some people. My first job in Philly was at Bread & Roses Community Fund — a self-identified social justice organization — and I now serve on the board of directors for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which is often erroneously coded as right-wing. I’m an environmentalist who believes in nuclear power. I get criticized by both sides: As the editor of the sustainability magazine Grid, someone once left an abusive threat on my office line for assuming I supported Antifa, and when I founded my own art and ideas magazine, I was criticized for rejecting calls to adopt an explicitly anti-racist creed. 

If you’re looking for someone to embody what’s sometimes referred to as the “exhausted majority,” I’m your woman. This is exhausting. 

Even if I personally think that Donald Trump’s carnival barker, confidence-man persona makes him unfit to hold office and that he has some truly batty and dangerous ideas, I admit there’s a part of me that’s relieved that he has been a thorn in the side of the hegemony of the corrupt two-party system that doesn’t represent the will of the American people.

I just hope that now that Republicans are in power again, they’ll resist the urge to spend any time at all trying to take rights away from people, and focus instead on tangible investments that serve all Americans, such as fixing our roads and bridges. I’m for anyone who is less interested in wedges than in fulcrums, less inclined to shoegaze and more willing to take moonshots.

I hope when it comes to arts funding, whether it’s public or private philanthropy, we’ll focus on artistic excellence and singular vision, and on art that truly helps surface our common humanity, not insisting that artists solve social problems or parrot approved progressive narratives in our plays and paintings and pages. The first funding Root Quarterly received was from a free-market think tank — George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and their Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange — whose guidelines literally said, “If your project is too weird for traditional funders to understand, try us.” Their support for our weirdo project got us through a critical third year when no arts or media funder in Philadelphia would touch us. (Most of them still won’t.) We need more funders like Mercatus, who understand that independent, regional media strengthens democracy, and that art and beauty should connect us, not divide us, even when we sharply disagree about a play, or have different tastes in music.  

And I hope that in this whole strange political realignment that’s happening right now, people look to artists for how to proceed, because our creativity and propensity for improvisation is exactly what we need right now. 

Imagine that you are looking back on our country in 2,000 years. Its first 500 years will all be considered Early American History. That means that we are all founders, figuring it out together. We posed that question in our fall issue of Root Quarterly, and people responded. Richard Vague agreed to critique economist Tyler Cowen’s book on economic growth. Jocelyn Jones Arnold wrote about a free black ancestor and her experience of joining the Daughters of the American Revolution. Nico Perrino wrote about the future of the First Amendment. Our managing editor, Lauren Earline Leonard, talked to the Mummers about their cultural evolution, and I spoke with James Beard Award-winning chef and undocumented immigrant Cristina Martinez about the changing face of the Italian Market. We talked about art shows such as Shawn Theodore’s “A Race of Angels” at Paradigm Gallery + Studio, and featured large institutions such as the Barnes Foundation and Mickalene Thomas’s “All About Love” show. Former University of the Arts teacher Charles Browning’s odd, surrealist, Rorschach test of a painting “New Frontier” landed on the cover. 

A host of partners, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Old Swedes’ Episcopal Church, Braver Angels, and the National Liberty Museum stepped up. Our funders and volunteers took up the improviser’s creed of “Yes, and…” to create events to celebrate core values and accountability to our country’s future, which we’re calling “Founder’s Weekend.” 

We need better political parties, yes… and, maybe we also just need better parties? 

Governor Shapiro, you’re still invited to the Unity Picnic… as long as you bring a dish. Hopefully, that Trump-voting dude in the Eagles jersey will be there with an apple pie. 

If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Let’s hang out. We don’t have to talk about immigration on the first date.

EVENT INFO:

Founder’s Weekend Unity Picnic & Concert

November 16, 2024

3:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Old Swedes’ Episcopal Church

Concert by Deb Montgomery and Speech by Braver Angels National Ambassador John Wood, Jr. on the theme of “A House Divided Cannot Stand”

All are welcome. Please bring a dish to share and dress appropriately for the weather. 

Founder’s Weekend runs November 14 – 17th, 2024 and is convened by Root Quarterly magazine in partnership with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Braver Angels, Old Swedes’ Episcopal Church, the National Liberty Museum, and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.