You're Right, Conrad: Love Is a Kind of Power
The first time I ever enjoyed drinking a coffee, I was already in my forties. My dad had consumed staggering amounts of Folgers when I was growing up, but I found the stuff bitter and awful and never made it past the first sip. I tried it again in college and continued to hate it. But one summer, partway through Obama’s second term, after I’d moved back to Washington state from Washington D.C., I flew out to Antigua, Guatemala for a board meeting for the Center for International Policy. In the hotel courtyard on the morning after I arrived, I drank a latte made from Guatemalan beans prepared by a Guatemalan barista and my perspective changed entirely.
A few days later, hopped up on caffeine from consuming too many cups of my newfound beloved beverage, I stood outside the hotel talking with my friend Conrad about this idea I had for a framework describing the six kinds of power. Conrad knew more about D.C. than almost anyone I knew. He thought about it for a few seconds, and then looked at me.
“I think you’re missing something important,” he said. “Love. Love is a kind of power.”
I didn’t know how to think about that at the time. I’d conceptualized power as levers and gears, mechanical things to change the world. But over the intervening years I have realized that Conrad was right (of course): love and human relationships and trust and loyalty are absolutely forms of power, and maybe they’re the most potent forms of all.
On the last evening of Lindsey Graham’s life, he had just come home from Ukraine and was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press the next morning. He called Donald Trump to talk about the SAVE America Act, the voting bill Trump badly wanted and the Senate had refused to give him.
At about 8:30 that night, emergency crews were sent to Graham’s Capitol Hill home.
Lindsey Graham had grown up with his sister Darline in Central, South Carolina, where their parents ran a restaurant and pool hall. The family lived in one room behind the business. Their mother died of cancer when Lindsey was twenty-one; their father died of a heart attack fifteen months later. By then Lindsey was twenty-two, starting law school, and Darline was thirteen. He became her legal guardian, and then adopted her so that she could receive his military benefits if something happened to him.
When Lindsey Graham died, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Darline to fill his Senate seat. Three days after her brother’s death, JD Vance swore her in.
Darline can cast the same vote her brother would have cast. She can introduce the same bill. But she does not step into the same position of power her brother held, because much of his power was in relationships, like the relationship that had Lindsey Graham on the phone with the president on a Saturday night.
I’ve struggled for years with how to think about Conrad’s observation in the context of the framework for power, but thinking about the mortality of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump makes it a little clearer, because it’s clear to anyone who thinks about it that whoever succeeds them won’t have the full measure of their power, so much of which is based on relationships. It’s the much more personal version of network power: not sending an email to a million people, but instead making a phone call to a single person.
Love sounds squishy next to constitutions, money, courts, and mass communication. But power is the ability to shape what happens. Love obviously does that. Love changes what people are willing to do, what they will sacrifice, who they will take care of, and whose call they will answer. So do trust and loyalty and friendship and fear and the accumulated understanding that comes from knowing another person for a long time.
In August 1920, after more than seventy years of organizing, the Nineteenth Amendment to give women in the US the right to vote was one state short of becoming part of the Constitution. As it was being considered by the Tennessee House of Representatives, a twenty-four-year-old Republican named Harry Burn arrived wearing the red rose of the anti-suffragists. He voted twice to prevent the amendment from coming to a vote.
But in his pocket was a letter from his mother, Febb Burn: seven pages about the rain, the farm, an upcoming wedding, and people they knew. Tucked among those ordinary tidbits of their family life was an instruction:
“Hurrah and vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt.”
Near the end, she added,
“Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt.”
“Mrs. Catt” was Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the main organizer of the state campaigns to pass the Nineteenth Amendment. When the amendment finally came up for a vote, Harry Burn, thinking of his mother, said aye. His vote broke the deadlock, making Tennessee the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment and giving women in the U.S. the right to vote.
Generations of women had organized, marched, lobbied, been arrested, endured beatings, changed Congress, and carried the amendment through thirty-five states. That work brought the country to a moment when one young man had to decide whether to obey the people threatening his political career or listen to his mother. Women have the vote, in part, because one mother wrote to one son—and he loved and trusted her enough to listen.
A map of power which treats human beings as interchangeable will always be missing something important. In a diagram of a network, every connection looks like a line. In an actual human life, some of those lines can carry almost no weight, and some carry the full weight of a lifetime of love.