The Trouble with Complete Sentences
There is a strange experience that comes with living abroad: occasionally the country you live in looks very different from the country being discussed elsewhere.
That was the starting point for this piece.
Over the past year, I’ve watched Spain’s Pedro Sánchez become something of a progressive pin-up internationally: articulate, pro-European, humane on immigration and, in the present political climate, blessed with the almost exotic ability to speak in complete sentences.
And much of the praise is deserved.
But watching from Spain, I kept thinking: yes, but…
Because people don’t actually live inside GDP figures, speeches at the UN or declarations about democracy. They live in apartments they may no longer be able to afford. They buy groceries, wait for doctors, pay electricity bills and wonder why the pothole outside their house is still there.
That tension led me from Sánchez to Mark Carney in Canada, Andy Burnham in Britain and Zohran Mamdani in New York, and to a broader question about progressive politics: what happens when being the reasonable alternative to something much worse becomes confused with actually making people’s lives better?
The resulting essay, “The Trouble with Complete Sentences,” has just been published by Rabble.
It begins in Spain, travels across the Atlantic, and eventually comes down to something decidedly unglamorous: potholes.
Because sometimes that’s where politics actually lives.
