Opinion | How the ‘Green Wave’ Movement Did the Unthinkable in Latin America - The New York Times

While access to safe abortion is threatened from the United States to China, the “Marea Verde,” or Green Wave, women’s movement has helped deliver groundbreaking reforms and progress on reproductive health and rights in Latin America.

Abortions were legalized up to 14 weeks of pregnancy in Uruguay in 2012, in Argentina in 2020 and in several states in Mexico since 2007 — and in Baja California as recently as Oct. 29. In September, Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in the state of Coahuila and limited the circumstances in which medical professionals can refuse to provide care on the grounds of religious or personal belief.

Previously, legal exceptions permitting abortion were narrowly interpreted, and anyone seeking to end a pregnancy could face stigmatization, mistreatment by health professionals and criminal prosecution.

It has not been an easy road, and many governments in the region — like many around the globe — still oppose the struggle for reproductive rights. In Honduras, the Congress changed the country’s Constitution to make it all but impossible to legalize abortion. The Dominican Republic rejected a proposal to decriminalize abortion when a pregnancy is life-threatening to the mother, unviable or the result of rape or incest. And in September, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador ruled out any change to abortion laws as part of the country’s constitutional reform. Women there have been sentenced to up to 40 years in prison on charges of violating the law, many after miscarriages or stillbirths.

The Green Wave achieved victories over such obstacles and could find success elsewhere, with aggressive campaigns and mass popular protests organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights, especially protecting women against violence.

The movement arose from the #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) movement, which started in Argentina in 2015 to demand an end to the sickeningly high rate of murdered women. It got its name in 2018, after more than a million activists, many wearing green scarves, occupied the streets of Argentina to support the legalization of abortion.

These scarves became a resistance symbol, inspired by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who wore white scarves to call attention to the government’s abduction and murder of their loved ones during that country’s last dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983. The use of green scarves in women’s rights mobilizations soon spread in Latin America and elsewhere. In January 2021, many activists in Poland rallying against new abortion restrictions wore green scarves.

The Green Wave’s strategies were decades in the making. The first successful legal action occurred in 2006, after Women’s Link Worldwide filed a petition with the Colombian Constitutional Court arguing that the criminal law that classified abortion as a crime under any circumstances should be found unconstitutional. In response, the court decriminalized abortion in cases of rape, nonviable pregnancy and when the life or health of the pregnant woman is in danger.

The court said that state efforts to protect fetal life also had to recognize women’s rights not to be treated as “a reproductive instrument for the human race.”

Equally important as legal action has been the movement’s efforts to break the stigma against abortion and help people understand the realities women and girls face when they’re forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. In 2016, Planned Parenthood Global and others began the Niñas, No Madres (Girls, Not Mothers) campaign to inform and engage the public about the consequences of sexual violence and forced motherhood for young girls. In Bolivia, the recent case of an 11-year-old raped by her 61-year-old step-grandfather and forced to carry the pregnancy to term has reopened this debate.

For years, stories of mostly poor women and girls facing criminal charges and putting their health and lives at risk because of the lack of access to safe abortion services went unheard. Research by Human Rights Watch and other groups has shown that criminalizing abortion does not eliminate it, but rather drives people to resort to unsafe procedures that endanger their lives. It also exacerbates inequality and discrimination. Many, particularly those who live in poverty or in rural areas, resort to unsafe self-induced abortions or seek assistance from untrained providers. The abortion rate is higher in countries that restrict abortion access than in those that do not.

Along with grass-roots mobilizations to apply pressure from the bottom up, the movement has enlisted notable women to promote its cause. In 2018, more than 250 Argentine actors and writers signed a letter calling on Congress to decriminalize abortion. The issue took hold as a campaign topic when Alberto Fernández, who was then a presidential candidate, promised to submit a bill to Congress decriminalizing abortion. Under concerted pressure from the Green Wave movement, a bill to legalize abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy was passed in December 2020.

The solidarity of the Green Wave has helped break down stigma and raise awareness around women’s and girls’ rights, and has influenced policymakers to place reproductive autonomy and gender justice at the core of this political and legal debate. In moves that might have been unthinkable a decade ago, Chile’s Congress is debating the decriminalization of abortion up to 14 weeks, and Colombia’s Constitutional Court is hearing a case that could effectively decriminalize abortion by removing it from the country’s penal code.

Big challenges remain in Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, as well as in other Latin American countries where abortion is not yet legal. But the sisterhood of the Green Wave is and will be the movement’s strength. It has taught us that organization and collaboration are what fuels successful demands for women’s rights.

Ximena Casas is the women’s rights researcher for the Americas region at Human Rights Watch. She previously worked to advance the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights of Latin American women at Planned Parenthood Global and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

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Have you or a partner had, or considered having, an abortion?

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Opinion | Stopping Climate Change Doesn't Need to be Altruistic - The New York Times

One of the approximately 700 things that make climate change a knotty problem is that fighting it requires people living today to do things for the benefit of future generations. And, you know, what have future generations ever done for us?

Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, argues that when designing climate change policies, appeals to altruism will fail and that what’s needed is a solution that benefits people alive today as much as it benefits our grandchildren and our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

He argues that he has such a win-win solution. He says the nations of the world should immediately enact high carbon taxes, but offset them by cutting other kinds of taxes such as those on income, sales and property. The offsetting tax cuts, he argues, should be so large that they increase budget deficits, saddling future generations with debts that will have to be repaid.

So that covers how people living today would benefit — lower taxes. What about future generations? Isn’t this a bad deal for them?

No. True, they will have those debts to repay. But the steps taken today to fight climate change will have such big payoffs, Kotlikoff reasons, that future generations, too, will be better off on balance than they would have been.

But that’s not even the most counterintuitive part of Kotlikoff’s plan. In the future, he argues, some poor nations like India will need to send money to some wealthier nations like Canada. His logic is that India and other nations near the Equator will gain the most from the prevention of climate change, while Canada, Russia and a few other northerly nations will on the whole be neutral to worse off — since they will have to pay a lot to help prevent climate change, while themselves gaining little to nothing. So to make sure that every nation benefits from the plan, winners from it like India should compensate the losers like Canada and Russia.

Kotlikoff calculates that under his plan all generations in all nations would be made approximately 4 percent better off than they are now.

Kotlikoff isn’t doing this work alone. He’s collaborating with a far-flung group of experts in computational economics: Felix Kubler, a professor of financial economics at the University of Zurich; Andrey Polbin, the head of macroeconomic modeling at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy in Moscow; and Simon Scheidegger, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Lausanne. Since 2019 they have written three papers on various aspects of the plan, the most recent of which was released last month. They also published an essay last Wednesday on the economics website VoxEU. They’re working on a fourth academic paper that allows for uncertainty about the trajectories of the economy and the climate. Kotlikoff says uncertainty doesn’t alter the general thrust.

Although the plan is designed to equally benefit all nations and all generations on average, there would be people in each nation and generation who would lose — and might put up a fight against the plan. Coal miners, for example. But Kotlikoff says individuals, too, could be compensated so that everyone came out ahead. For instance, the government could pay coal miners’ salaries for a period after the mines closed or make lump-sum payments to people whose commutes got more expensive when the price of gasoline went up. He admits getting the payments exactly right would be tricky.

As for India paying Canada: probably not going to happen. That aspect of the plan follows from Kotlikoff’s premise that economists should not make moral judgments about who’s deserving and undeserving, and instead should simply look for solutions that make everyone better off. (Kotlikoff says politicians could eliminate the transfers from India if they wanted, “but we can’t rely on altruism or morality” as the basis of the plan.)

Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

• What should our leaders be doing?
  Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency.
• What are the worst climate risks in your country?
  Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces.
• Where are Americans suffering most?
  Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.
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Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University, argues that the claim of Kotlikoff and his co-authors that they’re doing pure, prescription-free economics doesn’t hold up: “They very much engage in the kind of policy prescriptivism they accuse others of.”

Still, the core idea of Kotlikoff’s proposal — looking for win-win solutions — is something that negotiators at the climate conference in Glasgow should think about when they come up for air this week. Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed with Kotlikoff an important tool for studying intergenerational equity in the 1980s, told me that Kotlikoff and his team are on to something. “The underlying point they’re making is absolutely right,” he says. There has to be a way, he agrees, to divide up the gains from stopping climate change in a way that makes everyone better off.

“But,” he added, “that doesn’t mean it’s one that’s easily accomplished.”

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Number of the week

$15 billion

That’s the likely monthly amount by which the Federal Reserve will taper purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed has been adding to its bond holdings at a pace of $120 billion a month to hold down long-term interest rates and support economic growth. According to the minutes of the meeting on Sept. 21 and 22 of the Federal Open Market Committee, participants “generally commented” that decreasing the pace of purchases by $15 billion each month “provided a straightforward and appropriate template that policymakers might follow.” The committee is expected to announce on Nov. 3 its decision about when and how quickly to taper its purchases.

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Quote of the day

“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle, a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

— G.K. Chesterton, “The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic” (1929)

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W&M launches Democracy Initiative to promote civic engagement, civil discourse - William & Mary News

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  For the people:  The W&M Democracy Initiative's vision, outlined by a working group of roughly a dozen representatives from a wide array of disciplines and departments throughout the university, is aimed at promoting a shared sense of purpose in preserving American democracy.  Photo by Stephen Salpukas

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by Adrienne Berard |  November 1, 2021

The vision for William & Mary’s new Democracy Initiative is succinct: “W&M aspires to be a place where respectful dialogue takes place on challenging topics.”

The initiative’s vision, outlined by a working group of roughly a dozen representatives from a wide array of disciplines and departments throughout the university, is aimed at promoting a shared sense of purpose in preserving American democracy.

Co-director Steve Hanson, W&M’s vice provost for academic and international affairs, says that the charge may seem simple, but it’s one of the greatest challenges of our time.

“We're aiming to get people to reflect deeply on how you combine things in a democracy that are often antithetical,” Hanson said. “It’s imperative for the future of our republic that we learn to advocate for the beliefs we are passionate about, while having tolerance for perspectives we disagree with. That’s really hard to do. At its core, this initiative is about finding a path out of polarization through conversations that aren’t about division or anger, but bridging gaps.” 

Hanson is an expert on post-communist Europe and the rise and fall of democracies. He explained that there will be both curricular and co-curricular aspects to the initiative, which will extend throughout the university and beyond.

“Our goal from the start was not just to include the whole university, but the entire local community in this work,” he said. “As the Alma Mater of the nation, we have a responsibility to lead this kind of engagement and ensure that our whole community is involved.”

Carrie Cooper, Democracy Initiative co-director and dean of W&M Libraries, has a long track record of partnering with the local community to promote lifelong learning and has expanded access to Swem Library for local community members. She helped launch the One Book, One Community program with the Williamsburg Regional Library (WRL), an initiative that brings together the local community with the William & Mary community for a shared reading experience. 

This year’s selected read, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg, is a tribute to libraries and the important role they play in building connections, Cooper explained. Copies of the book were handed out to the university community at an event during W&M’s Homecoming & Reunion Weekend last month and are available at W&M Libraries and WRL. Klinenberg will give a book talk to W&M and the local community on February 24.

“There is a strong link between libraries and democracy,” Cooper said. “Local libraries have always encouraged participation in the electoral process and free access to information. W&M Libraries is where residents and students converge. We imagine the Democracy Initiative will provide a platform and series of events for the purpose of facilitating intergenerational conversations between the university and the broader community.”

Cooper added that the initiative aspires to give students and community members occasions to practice having better arguments, using the framework provided by the Aspen Institute’s Better Arguments Project.

William & Mary’s Democracy Initiative launched at the start of the fall semester with a panel for all incoming new students titled “Better Arguments Bring Us Together,” featuring W&M Vice President for Student Affairs Ginger Ambler, W&M Law School Dean Ben Spencer and Associate Professor of Government Jaime Settle. A goal of the session was to provide tools for fostering debate and constructive conversation as part of the university’s Office of Student Transition Engagement Programs (STEP), which supports the transition of students into and through their W&M community experience.

Events such as “Better Arguments Bring Us Together” will be a key part of the work of the initiative, Hanson explained. For example, Harvard Professor Daniel Ziblatt will visit William & Mary on Nov. 11 to deliver the George Tayloe Ross Address on International Peace, entitled "The Life and Death of Democracies: Lessons for America."

The project will continue to evolve, Cooper added. The working group has recently completed an inventory of courses that could be included in a wider, democracy-based curriculum. The full inventory will allow W&M scholars and researchers to partner on democracy-related projects across a range of disciplines. The group has also identified opportunities for students outside the classroom to explore democratic ideals and practice civil discourse.  

While an election is right around the corner, Hanson and Cooper stressed that they are planning for the long term – and thinking broadly about many aspects of civic life, not just the issues on the ballot today. 

For example, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will take place in 2026. The team at the Democracy Initiative is already formulating programming and curricula that will provide a fuller context for the anniversary.

William & Mary has also launched its Vision 2026, which outlines the strategic planning framework for the university over the next five years. One stated goal is to “elevate civic engagement and service for the 21st century.” The university plans to do so by: doubling down on W&M’s abiding commitment to evidence-based argument and discovery as a public good, modeling civil discourse, convening disparate views to advance democratic values and promoting community-engaged teaching, research and learning.

“To me, this initiative is about institutionalizing the value of bringing people together,” Hanson said. “We hope to serve as a model for civil discourse and to continue to be a leader in advancing the principles of democracy, much as we have done at our best moments throughout our institution’s complex history. Democracy is under threat throughout the world right now and the most immediate countermeasure we have is frank discussion of the issues.”

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Time to make America safe for diversity — again | Opinion - nj.com

Recently, I was listening to the radio and happened upon the “Freakonomics” program. The topic that day was our seeming addiction to contempt; the sense that we have a “contempt crisis” in our politics and even our daily lives. This sounded right to me as I listened and thought about how nasty and brutal our national discourse has become over the last several years.

I’d guess there are many factors that have brought us to this point. One factor no doubt involves what’s left of the news media. Another is how social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter feed us content that aligns with whatever their algorithms discern we’re comfortable hearing and seeing. Tthese outlets serve as echo chambers, reinforcing and justifying whatever position is being advocated. It makes sense if the goal is to grow an audience, but it comes at a steep price.

Today, there is little that remains of the moderate middle, meaning conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans. Everything is being funneled either to the very left or the very right. In and of itself, this is not necessarily a new thing. What is new is our unwillingness to be challenged with new information and facts, or to consider anything that might suggest that we were wrong, incorrect, hypocritical, biased to ill-informed.

When presented (not confronted) with new information or facts that challenge what I think, rather than entertain the idea that my existing view might be wrong, I dismiss the information itself as “fake news,” “spin” or “propaganda” — and I hold the source of that information in contempt. Once we conclude that someone or some group is deliberately trying to deceive or mislead us, they naturally become the enemy.

This is where contempt hardens. At that point, we’ve largely eliminated the possibility that someone expressing an opposing opinion is simply doing so because they’ve lived a different set of life experiences than the ones that shaped us. In recent years, we’ve decided that we no longer need to listen, or to compromise or concede anything.

Yet, most people I encounter on a daily basis are tired of all the yelling, hatred, division and contempt. The hard part is deciding how best to move forward, and the answer is not obvious or easy. I suspect that it would help to take a more charitable and nuanced view of those who hold different opinions from ours.

               

Not that long ago, I was reading a blurb about a commencement speech that President John F. Kennedy gave at American University in June 1963. At the time, it did not get much attention domestically, but it did have an impact around the globe. In the years since, the remarks have taken on greater weight in the context of the Cold War going on when they were delivered. Kennedy advocated a lessening of hostilities with the Soviet Union and suspension of nuclear testing.

What caught my attention was what JFK said about the Soviets at a time when they were thought of as evil: “No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue… .Let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And, if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

This was a radical idea in 1963. In some circles, it was seen as blasphemy. But beyond simply tolerating the Russians, JFK suggested something much more when he said, “As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements — in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.”

In our current moment, we’re talking about our neighbors and fellow citizens. Let’s make our nation safe for diversity of thought and action, and perhaps hail the accomplishments of our fellow citizens. It’s a start.

Albert B. Kelly is the mayor of Bridgeton. Contact him by phone at 856-455-3230 Ext. 200.

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Herzog says he's 'frustrated' with current political discourse - The Times of Israel

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President Isaac Herzog says at a journalism conference in Eilat that he is “frustrated” with the current political discourse, amid scathing attacks surrounding this week’s crucial discussions on the state budget.

“I have met all the party leaders and I am holding very frank conversations with them,” Herzog says, noting specifically that he has held such talks with opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who has voiced some of the most strongly worded diatribes against the current government.

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Opinion | I Just Turned 60, but I Still Feel 22 - The New York Times

NASHVILLE — I was already in college before I finally understood that my entire life had overlapped with second-wave feminism, a force that transformed American culture without so much as registering on a certain young woman in Alabama. All my life I had been stepping through open doors, it turned out, blithely unaware of the vision and sacrifice and passionate persistence of the women who had opened those doors for me.

Once I understood that, I also understood that I wouldn’t want to have landed on this planet a single moment earlier than I did.

A woman born in Lower Alabama in 1961 has little use for nostalgia. Go back to the “good old days” when women were limited to professions like education or nursing and little else? Back to a time when the opportunities available to Black and brown people, and to Black and brown women especially, were even more profoundly limited? No, thank you very much.

The only trouble with being born in 1961 is that in 2021 you will turn 60, something I did last week. It’s very strange to persist in feeling 22, even as every mirror — and every storefront window and polished elevator door — reveals the truth. Sixty is the point at which people must admit they are no longer middle-aged.

Lately it’s been dawning on me that I would not want to have been born even one minute later than 1961, either. Last week I mentioned this new thought to a friend, and her response was immediate, as though she’d already had it herself: “Because we won’t have to live through the cataclysm?”

Exactly.

Well, no, not exactly. On the days when headlines are full, yet again, with firestorms and catastrophic flooding and biodiversity collapse and endless pandemic and a depressingly effective disinformation campaign to deny the climate emergency — on those days, yes. Absolutely yes. On those days I am glad to be 60 because it means I almost certainly won’t live to witness the cataclysm that is coming if humanity cannot change its ways in time.

But that’s not the way I think on most days. On most days I am simply grateful for the 60 years I’ve had.

The joking birthday cards that start coming at 40 were funny 20 years ago because they were so far from reality. Now they’re funny because they’re so true. One of the cards I got last week featured a vintage photograph of plump women in swimsuits who looked remarkably like me in my swimsuit. “At your age, swimming can be dangerous,” the card read. “Lifeguards don’t try as hard.”

I laughed so hard my belly jiggled, a feature of being 60 that troubles me only a little. This is just who I am now, a person who looks exactly like her late mother, despite far more exercise and a far healthier diet. Besides, I loved my mother, and I love seeing her again in every store window I pass.

I feel lucky to have gotten to 60 despite a genetic propensity for cancer; despite the lingering effects of Covid, which will apparently dog me for the rest of my life; despite having survived other infections — strep, pneumonia — that might have killed me if not for the pure luck of being born after the invention of antibiotics. Many infectious diseases that used to kill people by the millions I never even had to worry about because I was lucky enough to have been born after the widespread availability of vaccines.

Sorrow in the face of aging would be a poor response to such good fortune.

Thanks to that immense, unwarranted luck, I have lived long enough to be surrounded by the truest possible friends. Sixty years have given me time to learn that true friendship comes not from proximity — attending the same schools or belonging to the same church or having children the same age or voting for the same political candidates. Friendship is forged across time, through good fortune and tragedy alike, and true friends are those who keep on loving one another even when it isn’t convenient, and even when they don’t always agree.

I have lived long enough to have learned, too, that what is beautiful and joyful is almost always fleeting and must never be squandered. That rejection rarely bears any relationship to worth. That whatever else might separate us, sharing a love for “Ted Lasso” is enough common ground to start the harder conversations. That life is too short to wear uncomfortable shoes.

These are the same lessons the pandemic ought to have taught us, a life-and-death recognition of what truly matters. I can still hardly believe it did not.

Maybe wisdom is just too much to ask of a culture in the grip of collective trauma. Maybe wisdom can be acquired only with time, even if time by itself is no guarantee. “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,” the Fool tells King Lear. So might he say to many of the old men now holding public office, and even more loudly to those no longer in office but still desperate to pull the levers of power.

A lifelong friend, one who will also turn 60 this year, sent me an email on my birthday. Her message contained a passage from “The Flower,” a poem by George Herbert: “Grief melts away / Like snow in May, / As if there were no such cold thing. / Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness?”

Who would have thought, indeed? But given enough time, we do go on, somehow. Like the stems and branches of springtime, our shriveled hearts can recover greenness, too. “And now in age I bud again,” Herbert wrote, and so it is with us.

With so many disasters upon us, calamity after calamity after calamity, a sentiment like that might sound like wishful thinking. And yet the accumulating decades almost always offer proof that fear and darkness do pass in time. Proof that hard work can open doors so wide it later seems as though they had never been closed.

It is a great blessing and also a great curse that the hard work of a single generation can wipe out the widespread memory of lack, of pain, but mainly it is a blessing. It means that even now, all is not yet lost. The decades can teach us that, too.

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Virginia Buries an Enduring Political Myth - POLITICO

President Joe Biden with former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe in October 2021, in Arlington, Virginia. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Opinion by JEFF GREENFIELD

11/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

The political universe Tuesday night will look a lot like the start of a NASCAR auto race, with the Virginia governor’s election serving as the starting gun for the next year — or two or three — of campaign diagnostics. You can already hear the budding analysis: “Democrats See Midterm Doom!” “Dems Dodged a Bullet!” “Will Biden Face a Renomination Challenge?”

We don’t need to wait until the results are in, however, to draw one clear conclusion from this contest. It will or should deal another decisive blow to one of the most enduring, least useful observations about American elections: “All politics is local.”

That piece of political wisdom was popularized by Tip O’Neill, the late speaker of the House. It was the title of the Massachusetts Democrat’s 1995 memoir, and it conveys the sense of folk wisdom rooted in the realities of neighborhoods, grocery stores and churches, far from the ivory towers of academia. Voters make judgments, the adage teaches, on matters rooted in their daily lives — the safety of their streets, the quality of their kids’ schools, the ability of their elected leaders to respond to their needs.

O’Neill himself explained his approach this way: “You can’t assume anything in politics. That’s why every Saturday I walk around my district. I talk to the longshoremen in Charlestown. I listen to the people in East Boston and their concern on the airport noise. I walk down to the Star Market in Porter Square, and people tell me about meat prices.”

As a guide to staying in touch with your constituents, this is wise counsel. Politics is filled with examples of powerful officeholders brought down by their failure to keep in touch with the people who elected them. But as a guide to what motivates voters, it has long since ceased being all that useful.

Take the most-watched race of the fall: Virginia, where Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin are in a close contest. (You could almost hear Democrats’ heart palpitations after one Fox News poll showed Youngkin up by 8 points among likely voters, followed soon after by a Washington Post poll with McAuliffe ahead by 1). But to some extent, the candidates are a sideshow: The outcome is far more likely to hinge on Joe Biden and Donald Trump — and whether the president or ex-president proves to be a bigger anchor on his party.

If this “nationalization” seems like something new, it shouldn’t. It’s been a growing fact of our political life for decades.

Presidential elections have almost always been driven by broader factors than local matters: war, inflation, recession, domestic upheaval, corruption. Over the last decade or two, the drift — more like a surge — toward political polarization has seen the steady disappearance of split ticket voting, where a personally admirable candidate of one party could win the votes from those who identify with another party. In 2020, only one Senate candidate, Maine Republican Susan Collins, won in a state carried by the other party’s presidential nominee. A decade ago, 23 senators came from states that had voted for the other party’s presidential candidate. Today, the number is six.

But does the pull of national issues really play out in an off-year gubernatorial race? Isn’t education, for example, one of Youngkin’s major themes?

It is, but that only strengthens the case. Virginia’s school boards are political hotbeds this year, but not because of funding arguments or normal education debates: It’s because of a national culture war over how we teach history and social studies, inserting itself angrily into a level of politics that used to be the most local imaginable. The pushback of suburban parents in a Democratic stronghold like Loudoun County, Virginia is itself part of a national revolt over a series of issues that encompass resistance to “top-down” commands: from masks to vaccines to what children should be taught about race.

However, the specter of last year’s presidential campaign is what hangs most heavily over the Old Dominion. Biden’s sagging approval ratings have fueled deep concern among Democrats that their voters, either out of weariness with last year’s battle or disaffection with Biden’s performance, may lack the enthusiasm to vote. The urgency with which Democrats were pushing for passage of Biden’s legislative agenda demonstrates the belief — wholly accurate or not — that the success on Capitol Hill could trigger a late burst of enthusiasm among Virginia Democrats.

And then there’s Trump. All through the campaign, McAuliffe has been making the 45th president his key issue. If you vote Republican, he argues, you will be giving new energy to Trump and Trumpism. Biden and Barack Obama did the same in their campaign swings with McAuliffe. The Democratic Party has done everything to beckon Trump into Virginia except chartering a plane for him. Just as consistently, Youngkin has been saying nothing to alienate Trump’s supporters, while saying nothing to imply he is a full-blown MAGA Republican.

“Trump?” Youngkin has more or less been saying. “The name is vaguely familiar, but…”

It’s a delicate dance for Youngkin, but if he succeeds, it could offer a path for Republicans seeking to win back the independents and suburbanites the party hemorrhaged during the Trump era.

None of this is to dismiss the potential impact of matters more local. If the contest is close enough, as most polls suggest, the outcome could be determined by how many Virginians simply don’t like the idea of a former governor wanting his old job back. But the real possibility that this election could be decided by how voters feel about last year’s presidential contenders should help rewrite Tip O’Neill’s famous axiom: “Some politics is local… most politics is not.”

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