We met Mitchell Thornton on a carbonstories cycling tour in 2024. He was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, selling souvenir t-shirts commemorating the 1965 freedom march. He donates a portion of his earnings to the local boy’s club. Mitchell was a small child when his uncle, Willy Thornton, marched across that bridge and was badly beaten. The civil rights struggle runs in his blood. Selma has taken its share of blows since then, from tornadoes to a stubborn economic decline. Selling t-shirts on the bridge is how Mitchell gets by.
Even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
Robert Burns
Winter settled in hard this year in New York City, a kind of atmospheric reckoning that felt less like weather and more like prophecy. Each storm seemed to carry a warning about what the air, the ice, and the rhythm of the planet are trying to tell us. It was not just New York. The whole country appeared tilted, from sharp, out-of-season cold in the Midwest and along the East Coast, broken up by strange warm spells, to relentless, record-setting heat still sitting over the American West. It feels as though the forecasts we have been warned about for years have finally arrived, stepping out of climate models and into the day.
After our January trip biking through Mississippi and Louisiana, exploring the data colonies of the AI gold rush as they swallow forests, farmland, and the long flat curves of the Delta, Jenny and I began the long drive back home. The return took us through muddy, then slushy, then frozen roads, climbing across mountains and long bridges under sheets of rain and ice, until we finally reached the city, just in time to be snowed into stillness. We stayed put, not by plan but by the logistics of friends in need and our own small health issues. The quiet turned reflective.
With travel suspended, I found myself scrolling back through years of email exchanges with an old friend from Arkansas. He is an elderly gentleman, and the only Trump supporter I know I can be honest with, at least some of the time. Our long digital argument has been everything a relationship can be: tender, furious, bewildering. As I reread our many emails, I began to see something larger taking shape. Maybe even the outline of a story.
To protect his identity, I will call him Earl. Now ninety-six, Earl lives alone in a two-room apartment in an assisted living facility in Arkansas. Last summer he gave his car to his granddaughter, not out of his own fear but as a kindness to his worried family. Now his travel happens in place. He does thirty minutes a day on an exercise bike in the gym, though he wrote to me plainly that it does not seem to be helping his walk much. He has cancer on his eyelid, something that has worried him for a while, though mostly as an inconvenience. His grandson is in the Navy. By his own account, he is a man of simple values: honesty, hard work, respect, self-reliance. These were lessons learned from parents who lived miles from the nearest doctor, over mud and gravel roads, without Medicare or Medicaid, never expecting the government to take care of them. His family has lived in the South for generations. By all measures, Earl is, in the term now circulating through right-wing media, a Heritage American. Interestingly, so am I, at least in the sense that my ancestors came from western Europe and can be traced back to the Mayflower. Yet I would not describe my identity through my heritage. What makes me American is what I believe.
I first met Earl about twenty years ago, when he entered my mother’s life. They were both older, both alone, and what they found together was, by any measure, a late-life miracle. My brothers and I were happy for her, and quietly puzzled. Their politics could not have been further apart. My mother was a woman of strong convictions, and so is Earl, and their convictions pointed in opposite directions. She passed away in 2019. I have wondered more than once whether their relationship would have survived what came after, recent years that have divided families and friendships once thought unbreakable. I don’t know. What I know is that love found a way to bridge what argument could not, at least for a time, and that Earl has remained in my life because of her. He is a living thread back to someone I miss, carrying politics I contest and offering warmth I still seek.
Earl has been reading my newsletters for years, long before Jenny and I pedaled through his part of the country and had dinner with him at a restaurant on the outskirts of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, the largest private gated community in the United States. He writes after nearly every post, commenting on the weather, my health, or Jenny’s bike accident last fall. In January, he called me “a very talented, gifted writer” and said my words let him see beauty he will never witness himself. Earl is, without qualification, a loyal reader and a good man. He is also, on nearly every question that matters most to me, my political opposite. Our stubborn coexistence of genuine affection and irreconcilable disagreement has been sitting in my email inbox all winter, quietly asking me to make some sense of it. This winter, I finally tried.
The arguments between us did not begin abstractly. They began, as most real arguments do, with a specific outrage: crime statistics, immigrants, Minneapolis. Earl wrote with what I can only describe as certainty. There had been enormous fraud in the Somali community in Minnesota, local politicians had looked the other way, and the large percentage of Somalis among the indicted was, in his view, a problem and not racism. He had not gotten this from Fox News, he was careful to say. He thinks as little of the New York Times as I do of Fox.
I wrote back with the numbers. The Department of Justice had indicted 98 defendants in Minnesota fraud-related cases, and 85 of those defendants were of Somali descent. The Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis numbers approximately 83,000 people. Eighty-five out of 83,000 is one tenth of one percent. I noted, too, that a white woman had been the lead in the fraud case, a fact Fox News was unlikely to broadcast. I asked him, “If 85 white people committed fraud in Little Rock, would that make the white community of Little Rock all fraudsters?”
I also pointed out that the broader narrative Earl had absorbed, the one Trump had been selling for years about waves of violent criminals pouring across the border, was not supported by the evidence. Study after study shows that immigrants, including undocumented ones, commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born Americans. A landmark Stanford University study tracking 150 years of census data found that immigrants have never been incarcerated at higher rates than the U.S.-born, and that today they are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native-born citizens overall. The National Institute of Justice found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent and drug crimes, and at one quarter the rate for property crimes. As the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled between 1980 and 2022, the total crime rate fell by more than 60 percent. The sensational crimes Trump spotlighted, Laken Riley and a handful of others, were real tragedies. But they were also statistical outliers, amplified precisely because they were rare, selected to confirm a fear that the data does not support. Earl should, if anything, be more worried about the native-born American down the street. The numbers say so.
His reply arrived the next day: “Michael, these are my last comments on this topic. It makes me angry and I don’t like that feeling. I am 96 years old and lived my life with the values taught me by my parents: be honest, truthful, work hard, treat everyone with respect and be a friend.”
I couldn’t help myself, and pressed back harder than I should have. I wrote that I wondered whether Earl and others who shared his narrative would prefer a country dominated by white, Christian, heterosexual men, where women stayed home to raise the children while men did the serious work. It was a provocation. He answered it with more patience than it deserved.
“WOW!! Michael you must have ESP thinking you know my beliefs,” he wrote. “I do not believe that everyone should be white heterosexual Christian men. That’s what makes this country so special. We have freedom to live our lives as we choose.” He went on: immigrants are what made this country great. They came here, worked hard, assimilated into our society, learned to speak our language, and didn’t ask for the government to provide all they needed. His objection was not to immigrants. It was to people who entered the country illegally and expected to be given everything others had worked for.
I reminded Earl that I have an adopted Colombian son and an adopted Korean daughter, biracial grandchildren, and a Jewish girlfriend. (I didn't mention that my most intimate friend is trans, another is bisexual, and I regard them both as chosen family.) Federal policy is not abstract to me. Laws now being written directly threaten my trans friend, and recent events in Minneapolis make clear that government policies may directly impact my own children, so it is hard to accept Earl's version of America when mine depends on surviving it. He wrote back with genuine feeling, but stood firm on illegal immigration, on assimilation, on merit over identity. We talked past each other and kept talking anyway. "I will always be your friend," I wrote. "I wish you and Jenny many more days of happy, safe, and informative bike trips," he replied. It was not a concession. It was something more complicated: a man of ninety-six drawing a circle around what he can hold, and choosing friendship over argument. At his age, that feels like no small thing.
But here is what I have been thinking about all winter. The exchange between Earl and me is not really about crime statistics or immigration policy, though it wears those clothes. For months I tried to make sense of it as a question of American character, as if there were some national “self” the country keeps failing to live up to. That framing felt right for a while, and then it didn’t. This is not a debate about character. It is a fight over identity, one that has persisted since the founding words were written and the contradictions in that room were deliberately left unresolved. I think that Earl and I, in our own modest ways, are stand-ins for that argument.
The phrase “Heritage American” crystallized this for me last month when Jeremy Carl appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Carl was Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State and the author of a 2024 book called The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. Under questioning, Carl described “white identity” as “certain types of Anglo-derived culture that come from our history.” Senator Cory Booker then pressed him on whether he believed white Americans were being deliberately replaced. The answer was unclear. Ultimately, the nomination collapsed under bipartisan opposition. Carl withdrew.
But the idea Carl represents did not withdraw with him. It has a name, a history, and a long list of supporters. Call it the heritage vision: the belief that America is not just a set of ideals open to anyone, but a civilization built by and for a specific people, English-speaking, Protestant, Northern European, and that everyone else is, at best, a guest who must fully assimilate or remain on the margins.
Set against that is what I would call the creedal vision: the belief that American identity is defined not by bloodline but by conviction. You belong if you commit to the principles: liberty, equality, the rule of law. It does not matter where you came from. Thomas Paine arrived from England two years before writing Common Sense and never once mentioned ancestry. Only universal rights and reason.
Both visions are genuinely American. Both go back to the founding. Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” while owning other men. “We the People” was drafted in a room that excluded, by design, women, enslaved people, and anyone without property. The founding was not a resolution. It was an argument handed down unfinished, and we are still having it.
Political scientist Rogers Smith calls this the Multiple Traditions problem. America has never been only the liberal democracy of the civics textbook. Beneath the promise of individual rights and the ideal of the common good, there has always been a third tradition: the unwritten assumption that some people belong more than others, based on race, gender, or religion. The first two traditions are what America puts on the poster. The third is what has too often decided who gets through the door.
The rhythm of this struggle has a terrible regularity. After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed birthright citizenship, and tried to rewrite the social contract. For a brief, radical decade, Black Americans held office from local school boards to the United States Senate. It didn’t last. Within a generation, Black Codes, literacy tests, poll taxes, and a Supreme Court willing to uphold separate but equal had slammed the door shut again. The creedal vision opened it. The heritage vision closed it.
Photo taken at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, during a carbonstories cycling trip in 2024.
The 1960s pushed it open again: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act signed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. By 2015, the foreign-born population had grown from under ten million to forty-five million. The dominant story America told about itself had shifted from a nation of a particular people to a nation of immigrants. The creed over the blood. It lasted roughly fifty years.
Since 2015, the heritage vision has been winning, not just in rhetoric but in law. Eighteen states have passed legislation dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023. President Trump’s 2025 executive order sought to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, the very text Reconstruction-era lawmakers used to guarantee citizenship to freed slaves’ children, to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship. These are not just policy disputes. They are quiet rewrites to the oldest American question: who counts in “We the People”?
When I pressed Earl on these things, he did not speak of heritage or hierarchy. He spoke of common sense: too many people came in too fast, the system cannot handle it, something had to be done. He worries about the deficit, about Medicare, about crime. He is not being cruel. He is, by his own account, being protective. But look closely at what he is protecting. The immigrants Earl admires came earlier, worked quietly, and blended in. The ones arriving now, in his imagination darker and more foreign, are a different matter. He may not think of that distinction as being about race. But it has a shape, and that shape has a history.
The historians Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith offer a useful, if sobering, explanation for why the creedal vision tends to lose ground when it is not actively defended. Looking back across American history, they find that real progress on inclusion has required three things happening at once: a major war that forces the country to depend on the very people it has been excluding, a foreign rival whose existence makes American inequality an embarrassment on the world stage, and a domestic movement strong enough to press the advantage. The Civil Rights revolution of the mid-1960s had all three. Jim Crow was not just morally wrong; it was a propaganda gift to Moscow and Beijing at the height of the Cold War. That external pressure mattered. When the Cold War ended, so did that pressure. And without it, the heritage vision tends to fill the space. It always has.
We met this young March for Life supporter in Washington, D.C., where he had come to attend the annual anti-abortion rally. The week before, roughly 500,000 women and their supporters had filled the same streets for the Women’s March, held the day after President Trump’s first inauguration. The March for Life drew a smaller crowd, with estimates ranging from 10,000 to 50,000, and featured a speech by Vice President Pence.
This past January, Earl wrote to me after my post from the Mississippi Delta. He had been thinking about the AI data centers rising along the river, devouring power and water in communities that can barely keep the lights on. “Our world is changing very rapidly,” he wrote. “Personally, at my age it’s frightening.” He mentioned a Neil Sedaka song, “I Miss the Hungry Years,” about a couple who worked their whole lives to accumulate things and then wondered if it was worth it. He sits in his two-room apartment and thinks about all that is gone, the houses, the cars, his wife, and wonders if the hungry years were the happiest.
I read that note several times. There is grief in it that has nothing to do with politics. It is the grief of a ninety-six-year-old man who has outlived his world, who gave away his car, who does thirty minutes on a stationary bike and calls it a victory. I wrote back that I understood, that our emphasis on things really does seem like a red herring, that values matter more. He replied: “I wonder if people were just as concerned when the industrial revolution began? That sure changed many lives. Progress is often hard to take.”
He is right about that. And the fact that he is right about some things while being, in my view, deeply wrong about others may be the most honest description I can offer of where our country actually is right now. Genuine wisdom and error can coexist comfortably in one person. Affection and argument run in parallel without canceling each other out. George Packer wrote something I have not been able to shake, that “patriotism is an attachment to what makes your country yours, distinct from the rest, even when you cannot stand it, even when it breaks your heart.” That feels like the exact territory Earl and I are standing on. We are staring at the same country, seeing almost opposite things, and refusing for now to let go.
Here is where the story stops being historical and becomes urgent in a different register. Earl and I have never argued directly about climate change. But we argued around it, back in the spring of 2020, when I sent him a link to a market-based carbon dividend plan developed by some of the most respected Republican elder statesmen in the country. He wasn't entirely dismissive, although he doubted that any international agreement could make China and India comply, and he worried that the bureaucracy would swallow the good intentions whole. But his deeper faith came through clearly: "I think the only way we/they will change is when technology creates a better mousetrap." And then, in a follow-up, he reached for the moon. "Who sent a man to the moon and back? Who has a large laboratory circling the earth? I believe that if engineers can keep such a large object powered up in space, the time will come when they have a device of some type to provide power for each home and building." He won't live to see it, he said, but his great-grandchildren will.
It is a genuinely American faith, and I do not entirely begrudge it. But it is also, I have come to understand, the thing that makes the climate crisis so hard to address in time. Earl is not a denier. He is a technological optimist who distrusts government action, and that combination is, in its way, more durable than outright denial, because it sounds so reasonable. Wait for the better mousetrap. Trust the engineers. But don't hand the bureaucrats another excuse to grow the state! It is the same instinct that makes him trust fossil fuels and resist climate alarm, not rejection of science exactly, but a deep, faith-inflected patience. Things change. People adapt. Progress is often hard to take, but America has always found a way through. That worldview has deep roots in the heritage vision, in a culture that survived without Medicare and Medicaid and sees federal intervention as presumption rather than protection.
The problem is that the communities which cannot afford to wait for the better mousetrap are rarely the ones Earl has in mind when he imagines American ingenuity saving the day. The struggle over American identity, who belongs, what the nation owes its people, what story it tells about itself, is inseparable from the struggle over the American response to climate change. They are, at the deepest level, the same argument.
The climate crisis is, at root, a question of belonging. Who gets the levee, and who gets left behind? Flood infrastructure after Sandy reinforced Lower Manhattan while public housing in Red Hook waited years for repairs. Clean-energy subsidies flow unevenly. Permitting fights consistently place the burden of fracking hubs, gas pipelines, electrical substations, oil infrastructure, wind turbines, and solar tracts on poorer, browner communities. When “We the People” contracts, when the republic’s story narrows to some of the people, the will to distribute protection fairly contracts with it. The communities most exposed to climate risk are, with painful consistency, the same ones historically excluded from the protected core of American identity: Black Americans in the coastal South, Indigenous communities at the front lines of extraction, Latino farmworkers in California’s heat-stressed Central Valley, immigrant families in flood-prone cities. That exposure is not accidental. It is the legacy of policy choices made under exactly the kind of heritage-first logic that is once again ascendant. You cannot build a just transition for people you do not fully recognize as belonging.
Earl is the Heritage Foundation’s ideal constituent: white, Protestant, rooted for generations in American soil, and yet the man himself is kinder, more open, and more willing to stay in conversation across difference than any think tank’s vision of him would suggest. He is both the thing I am arguing against and the thing that makes the argument feel insufficient. In one of our sharpest exchanges, I wrote to him: “You and I are on opposite sides of a fight over American identity that has been ongoing since 1776, since Jefferson wrote those words and the men in that room decided to defer the contradiction rather than resolve it.” He wrote back: “I wish you and Jenny many more days of happy, safe, and informative bike trips.” That answer carried within it something I have come to recognize as a kind of wisdom, or at least a kind of peace I have not yet earned.
Earl will not live to see how this decade resolves. He said so plainly, without self-pity: “I do not have the ability to forecast and will not live long enough to see how history will record this decade of the Great American Experiment.” I will probably see more of it than he will. My grandchildren will see most of it. They are the reason we keep cycling, writing and drawing, and refusing, even in this moment of contraction, to give up on the creedal republic: the one that says membership is open to all who commit to a common good.
The pendulum has swung before. It can again. But it has never swung on its own.
A view from the top of the Petit Jean Mountain at Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas. Taken during a carbonstories cycling trip in April, 2023.
Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to this blog to follow our next biking trip.
This newsletter was written by Michael Chase, with drawings by Jenny Hershey. Unless otherwise noted, all material is the copyrighted property of the authors, including all photographs and drawings. Jennifer Hershey’s drawings can be enjoyed on Instagram at deeofo.
Sources
NPR: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans — https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1237103158/immigrants-are-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-us-born-americans-studies-find NPR
National Institute of Justice: Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate — https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate U.S. House of Representatives
American Immigration Council: Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime — https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/debunking-myth-immigrants-and-crime/ American Immigration Council
Brennan Center for Justice: Debunking the Myth of the “Migrant Crime Wave” — https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-myth-migrant-crime-wave Brennan Center for Justice
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research: The Mythical Tie Between Immigration and Crime — https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime SIEPR
Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March, University of Chicago Press, 1999
Eric Foner, The Second Founding, W.W. Norton, 2019
Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?, Simon & Schuster, 2004
Jeremy Carl, The Unprotected Class, Regnery, 2024
George Packer, Last Best Hope, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
Senate Foreign Relations Committee nomination hearing, February 2026
Earl was correct. You are a gifted and talented writer Michael. Finally made time to read thoroughly and always feel enriched by your observations, honesty and insight. Feeling exhausted after a couple of very busy weeks but just wanted to say well done!
I LOVE IT!