Monday, November 11, 2024

Speaking of Which

Draft file opened 2024-11-06 2:00 PM. Finally posted 2024-11-11 10:00 PM. Added a couple small bits on 2024-11-12.

Sections:

Trump won. I don't know why. I cannot fathom why anyone, much less an outright majority of voting Americans, could stand him, or could in any way identify with him, let alone entrust him with great power. It is not inconceivable to me that this result was rigged, with every voting machine in the country shaving several points in his favor -- and that all the election denial hoopla of 2020 was just misdirection, while they worked on perfecting the software.

Or, I suppose, it's possible that a thin majority of the American people have become so soul-deadened, demented, and/or deranged that they wish nothing more than to inflict this guy on the rest of us. In which case, the obvious answer is "to dissolve the people and elect another." The phrase comes from a Bertolt Brecht poem, a bit of Communist Party humor, not really applicable here, but it does convey the disconnect when you realize that the people you got are not the ones you imagined or hoped for. We need better politicians, but we also need to become better people, not least to stop them from the temptation to gaslight us.

Personally, I was delighted when Kamala Harris ran away with the Democratic nomination. I didn't think of her in terms of categories or attributes, and was always annoyed when people brought up "first woman," etc., like some kind of milestone. She just seemed like a generic American -- at least in the America I know, which includes many years of living in Kansas, as well as some in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. I knew that she wasn't a leftist, that she was a shrewd and calculating politician, and that she circulated easily among friends in high places. But she seemed personable and relatable, flexible, nimble, like someone who could recognize problems and try to do things to fix them. She seemed much better to me than her predecessors (going back at least to 1992).

Besides, I'm old enough that I'm no longer enamored of utopia, nor patient for the long struggle, so I wasn't inclined to criticize. Surely, I figured, she must know what she's doing? And if not, if she blew it, we could unload on her then. But why give Trump any comfort from division. He was such a clear and present evil -- a word I normally abjure, but why beat around the bush here? -- that nothing could budge my vote from Harris. And now, like Hillary Clinton, and unlike -- no matter how little regard you have for him, Joe Biden -- she has committed the unpardonable sin of losing to Trump.

Still, as I'm writing this intro, I don't feel like tearing into her campaign or other shortcomings. As I collect links, I'm sure I will nitpick here and there. But it's still hard for me to see why she lost, or what else she could have done about it. That wasn't the case with Hillary Clinton: her faults, both personal and political, were obvious from the start, and the sanctimonious scapegoating for her loss only heightened her flaws. I could reconcile myself with the theory that Americans had candidates they disliked, but could only vote one of them off the island, and they chose her, because they knew her better. Surely, this year those same voters would dispatch Trump? Even as his polls held up, I expected a last gasp break toward sanity.

That it didn't happen suggests a much deeper problem, which brings us back to the voters. Or should, if I could figure it out. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that America has been in some kind of moral decline since approximately when I was born -- in 1950, the week before Chinese volunteers entered the Korean War and reversed the American advance, forcing a stalemate, which American sore losers still refuse to accept. Sure, Americans committed many sins before I was born, but we could aim for better, and teach our children to make a better world. The Hays Office made sure that the good guys wore white hats, and triumphed in the end. I certainly grew up believing in all that, seriously enough that when events proved otherwise, I protected my ideals by turning against the actual America. But what I never lost was the notion that in the end, it will all turn out well.

We may not be at the end yet, but Trump sure seems like a serious turn for the worse. He's four years older than I am, but came from a completely different class and culture, and at each step along the way he had different reactions and made different choices, always breaking bad, which sometimes meant embracing deteriorating social morality, and often accelerating it. Oddly enough, he's the one who poses as a pious patriot. Stranger still, lots of people believe him, perhaps because he allows them to indulge their own vile impulses.

As far as I can tell, there are two types of Trump voter. On the one hand, there are people who actually like him, who get off on his arrogance and nastiness, and who like to see other people hurt. (I've previously noted two types of Christians: those who hope to help their fellows, and those who are more focused on consigning those they disapprove of to hell. Trump is practically a messiah for the latter group.) The second type are party-liners, who will always vote Republican, no matter how much they may disapprove of the candidate. The two groups overlap, but each group extends the other, nudging a minority up toward 50%.

Elite Republicans may not love Trump, but they'll do anything to win -- their whole graft depends on it -- so they go along, figuring they can control the damage (as well as profit from it). This is much like the conservatives in Weimar Germany figuring they can control Hitler -- meanwhile, Trump resembles Hitler at least in his political pitch (his ability to rouse the passions of people for whom economic conservatism has little appeal). Such fascism analogies resonate for some people, especially on the left, who know the history, but are meaningless to those who don't -- most Trump voters, although he seems to have some staff who revel in it, as they keep sending dog whistles, not least to provoke charges that never seem to work.

There is a certain genius to Trump/Republican politics, in how they've manage to flip attacks into accolades: charges that would discredit any normal candidate only seem to make Trump stronger, and that rubs off on the rest of the Republicans. The key element here has been the extraordinary success of partisan broadcasting, keyed to fear, flattery, and rage: the net effect has been to sow distrust and deny credibility to anything Democrats say or do, while championing Republicans as defenders of true America. The result is a tribe that has come to reject facts, reason, and/or any hint of moral purpose: all are rejected as tools of the devil.

Trump adds very little of substance to this toxic infosystem, but he does offer some kind of charisma or style, and disinhibition (which passes for candor if you buy it, or cluelessness if you don't), and serves as a lightning rod for attacks that only confirm the bond between him and his fans. This can be very confusing for all who are immune to or wary of his charms: his appeal makes no sense to us, and meaningful response is nearly impossible. On the other hand, they counter with the same logic and even more fervor, making even less sense to us. The double standards are mind-boggling. For example, one might try making a case that Trump has been unfairly targeted by prosecutors, but how do you square that with his threats to do much more of the same, and the "lock her up" chants?

But it's not just that Trump Republicans are easily deluded and controlled by their media. That feat is built on top of much deeper social trends that go back at least to the 1940s, with the founding of the military-industrial complex and the extension of American hegemony to serve global capitalism, with its attendant red scares, both foreign and domestic. Americans had an idealized picture of themselves coming out of WWII, which made the world Trump and I grew up in. But the task of protecting capital turned into nasty business, and we started to divide into one camp that relished the fight, and another appalled by it. We started seeing films where bad guys were recruited to do dirty work for supposedly good guys, who turned bad themselves. Before long, American presidents were ordering assassinations, kidnapping, and torture. Trump started out with his Nazi-symp father, his apprenticeship under Roy Cohn, and his mobster connections. He fit right in. He only had to wait until America became rotten enough to embrace him. Bush's Global War on Terror made that possible.

Well, the other part of the equation is the rise of the super rich, made possible by the ideological attack on the notion of public interest, and by the assertion of "greed is good," and the general belief that "might makes right" (i.e., anything you can get away with is fine). The richer the supers got, the more they leveraged their wealth through lobbies, PR firms, donations, and media to turn government to do their bidding, further increasing their wealth. They usually rented their spokesmen, but Trump, having personified great wealth on TV, gave them a new angle: he could have it both ways, claiming their authority while pretending to be free of their influence.

I'm not sure how much of the election any of this explains, although it may help explain why Democratic attack ads don't seem to be drawing any blood. As with Republican attack ads, they may do nothing more than confirm one's own virtues (or vices if that's your thing). But it does make one wonder if raising money isn't overrated.

We could, of course, look into the many ways Democrats have contributed to their downfall. The losers are always quick with thoughts, so a fair number of them will show up in links below. I may have more to say on this below, but for here I'll pass, except to point out a couple of fundamental dynamics:

  1. There is a deep divide and conflict within Democratic ranks, between corporate/neoliberal and populist/democratic tendencies; they both share a fear of the right but are deeply distrustful of each other. That produces acrimony, as you'll see below.

  2. Democrats are subject to higher expectations than Republicans. Democrats are expected not just to win elections, but to address issues successfully, and are held accountable for any failures. Republicans only have to win, and there are few strictures on how low they can go to win. When they do win, they can readily screw up, but are rarely held accountable.

  3. Democrats are also held to higher ethical and moral standards. Republicans may even embrace their own's misbehavior, while excoriating Democrats for the same faults. (Thus, for instance, Hillary Clinton is horribly corrupt, but Donald Trump is just a rogueish businessman.)

  4. Democrats believe in public service, in representing all people, and as such they credit Republicans with legitimacy where Republicans deny any to Democrats, and seek to cripple them wherever possible. Republicans see politics as a zero-sum game.

The net effect is that Democrats campaign at a severe handicap. Republicans can lie, cheat, and steal, but Democrats can't -- and in many cases don't even know how. Democrats want to be liked, even by Republicans (and especially by the rich), so they are careful not to offend. (Even so, a casual reference to "garbage" gets blown up sky high, while Republican references to "vermin" get laughed away.) Republicans can exaggerate for effect, while Democrats pull their punches, and that muddies their messages. Democrats cede critical ground in arguments, seemingly legitimizing Republican stands, which only become more extreme. The media love loud and brusque, so they lap it up, amplify it, spread it everywhere, dispensing with reason and nuance, and especially reality (the most boring subject of all).

Then there are structural factors. America is divided into states, districts, precincts, all of which can be gerrymandered, as Republicans were quick to turn to their advantage. The Senate is grossly undemocratic, and the filibuster there has made it impossible for Democrats to pass meaningful reforms, even on the rare occasions when they seem to have majority power. The Republicans have packed the courts, which they're increasingly using to restrict executive power by Democrats, and to increase it by Republicans. Many judges are protected from any oversight by lifetime appointments. Many reforms, as well as redress by impeachment, require supermajorities, which Republicans use to lock themselves in power, even if they lose popular support. (Orban's system in Hungary has made extensive use of this, and is widely cited by Republicans as a model for America -- although in may have originated here, much like Nazi, South African, and Israeli race laws drew on American precedents.)

But the biggest structural problem of all is money. Republicans worship it -- even poor ones are defined by their deference or indifference to great wealth -- and the rich thank them for their service. The single most certain prediction for a second Trump term is yet another round of tax cuts for the rich. Next up is another round of regulatory loopholes, give-aways, and subsidies to needy (or just greedy) businesses. Lobbyists took Washington in the 1980s, and have only grown ever since. Republicans run "revolving door" administrations where lobbyists are as likely to work for the government as against it. The net effect is that government is as likely to work against the public interest as for it.

Republicans love this, because it reinforces their message that government is inefficient, wasteful, and useless, and should be shrunk (and ultimately "drowned in the bathtub"), except they never actually do that, at least as long as they can use it to feed their political machine.[*] While this is mostly done with money, Republicans are also looking forward to using their power in other ways: in turning the civil service into a patronage system for political operatives; in aligning information services with their political messaging; and in using coercive powers to suppress heresy and dissent, to punish their enemies, and to empower (or at least pardon) their allies.

When Democrats talk so piously and nebulously about the "death of democracy," this is what they are actually referring to. Only it's not a future threat, something that might be avoided if only enough people would vote for a Harris, a Biden, a Clinton, an Obama. It's been happening for a long time -- I used to see 1980 (Reagan) as the turning point, but now that I see it less in policy terms than as a mental disorder, I see much more originality and continuity in Nixon (which has the advantage of making Johnson's Vietnam the breaking point -- it certainly was what turned my own life upside down -- instead of the nascently-Reaganesque Carter). Maybe with Trump redux, Democrats will finally realize that they have to fight back, and stop trying to pass themselves off as some kind of prophylactic, a thin barrier to limit the contagion.

Which brings us back to money. As I said, Republicans worship it. But so do Democrats: maybe not all of them, but virtually all of the kind that run for higher office, because the system is rigged so that only those with access to money can run serious campaigns. (Bernie Sanders is the exception here, and he did come up with a novel system of small donor support, but when he came to be viewed as a threat, big donors dumped tons of money -- Michael Bloomberg more than $500M; compare that to the $28M he spent this year for Harris against Trump -- to quash his campaign.) Harris is no exception here. She raised more money than any Democrat -- or Republican for that matter -- ever. And she lost. So maybe money isn't the answer?

I'm not going to try to tell you what Democrats should do instead, but maybe they should start by waking up and looking at the real world we're living in, a world that they are at least in some substantial part responsible for creating. And that means they need to re-examine their worship of money. There's much more that can be said about this, but I've droned on long enough. I should leave it here.

[*] That machine, by the way, is a thing of wonder, which I don't think has ever been fully dissected, although there is a lot of literature on various aspects of it. If Machiavelli were here, he would write a letter offering advice on how an aspiring young Republican could rise to a position of great power and influence. (As Gramsci noted, real princes didn't need such guidance. The point of the book was to expose their machinations to those with no such experiences.) This would not only lay out the topography of institutions, but the networking, the lexicon of coded language, the spin, and ultimately the psychology of why anyone would want to be a Republican in the first place -- something I still find incredibly alien even though I often take great pains to try to understand others in their own terms.

As of Saturday afternoon, I have 144 links, 15438 words. I was planning on not posting until Monday, so I have time to make another round or two, but I have enough feedback on the election to offer a few bits of speculation about the future. I put little stock in them, given how poorly my predictions have held up. But I can hedge a bit by offering a couple of alternatives.

On several occasions, notably 1992 for the Republicans, and 2016 for the Democrats, incumbent parties seem to have felt permanently entitled to the presidency, and took their defeats bitterly, lashing out blindly. The level of vitriol Republicans directed at Bill Clinton after 1992 was almost unprecedented in the never-very-polite lore of American politics, and set a pattern that they repeated after 2008 and 2020 (arguably the most over-the-top, but by then their character was expected, and the sore loser took personal charge of the rage).

While Democrats didn't behave that atrociously after 2016, when pretty much everyone expected Hillary Clinton to easily defeat Donald Trump, her followers reacted with dismay and a massive round of accusations and scapegoating -- especially directed at Russia, although there were many other factors at work, including how distasteful and provocative Trump was, and that Clinton supporters still had a chip on their shoulders over the strong Bernie Sanders challenge to what organization Democrats expected to be a cakewalk.

Democrats' opinion of Trump has only sunk lower with four years in power and four years plotting his comeback. But so far, reaction has been mild, other than the inevitable shock and sadness. Trump's margin has been sufficient that it's hard to doubt his win. And while Harris seemed promising at the Convention, that may have largely been relief that Biden was out, the assumption that his administration had a good story that was simply poorly communicated, and the pretty conviction belief that Trump was such damaged goods that most Americans would be glad to be rid of him. But it was never really love for Harris, who's proved to be an easy (and rarely defended) target for post-mortems. This also suggests that we misread Trump -- that our loathing of him isn't shared by enough Americans to beat him -- so maybe this isn't a good time to go ballistic on him (as we did in 2016).

Trump's margin opens one new possibility that we haven't considered, which is that if he governed competently, he could actually consolidate his power and become regarded as a significant American president. Admittedly, we have no reason to expect this. His first term was a disaster of unfathomable dimensions. He's spent most of the four years since scrambling to stay out of jail. And his campaign theme has been redemption and revenge. If he attempts to put into practice even a significant share of what he campaigned on, evaluations of his legacy should sink as far below the scale of American presidents as Caligula and Ivan the Terrible.

But will he? I wouldn't bet against it, but it's just possible that having won, as ugly as that whole campaign has been, he'll change course. I don't mean to suggest that he won't be as bad as his voters want him to be on signature issues like immigration. But now that he's president, why should he adopt austerity budgets and demolish services, just to prove that government doesn't work. If he does that, he'll be blamed, and if he doesn't, he'll reap the credit. Plus the whole Fox machine is behind him, so who's going to complain? Certainly not the Democrats, who are always ready to help a Republican president do a good deed. (Remember when they foolishly thought "No Child Left Behind" would better fund education?) He's promised a better ACA. Why not rebrand it like he did with NAFTA, adding a couple tweaks that most Democrats can get behind, and magically turning it into the Republican program it always was? He'd be a hero, whereas had he done any of Paul Ryan's plans, he'd be a goat.

The big difference between Trump now and then isn't just that he has some experience to learn from, but that this time he gets to pick his own staff. In 2016, he left that mostly to Pence and Priebus, who saddled him with a bunch of assholes even he couldn't stand, including the so-called "adults in the room." This could, as most of us feared, be for the worse, but Trump was always hemmed in by regular Republicans, ranging from the Koch-controlled Ryan to the Blob-heads in the national security racket. One big reason he won the 2016 primaries was that he disagreed with hardcore economic orthodoxy. But as a neophyte Republican, he got stuck with a bunch of crooked, deranged incompetents, and their rot killed his whole administration. Granted, he wasn't smart enough to figure it out in real time, and he may still not be, but the new crew were competent enough to run a winning campaign this time. We shouldn't exclude the possibility that they're competent enough to manage him, or to let him manage, some level of competency. For which he'll handle the PR, as that's his thing, and it will probably be more hideous than the actual administration, which above all else has to keep business booming and profits soaring.

One area where he has a mandate and some real power to act is foreign policy, where Biden has been utterly disastrous. It's well past time to settle the Ukraine War, which needs a bit more art and tact than he's shown so far, but is doable without looking like too much of a surrender to Putin (but if the Democrats scream treason, that'll probably make it more popular). The obvious deal there is status quo on the ground, and dial back sanctions as stability and security is ensured. The US actually needs a cooperative relationship with Russia, and that means undoing the sanctions. He needs to do that without looking like a Russian stooge, but Putin seems to be more sensitive to how Trump looks than Trump himself.

Israel is a different matter. He'll give Israel whatever they want, with no complaints or pretense of humanitarian concern. At some point, he'll broker a deal with Egypt, the Saudis, Syria (via Putin), and maybe even Iran, to send the rest of the Palestinians Israel hasn't killed already into permanent exile. Maybe he'll get Israel to concede Lebanon, and that will be the end of it. It's a horrible solution, but in some ways it'll be a blessing. The Democrats were just going to drag it out. [*]

I could go around the world, but in foreign policy, there is virtually nothing he can do (other than start a war, e.g. with China) that wouldn't be an improvement over Biden. In general, he'll depress trade and immigration, and disengage in the internal affairs of other countries. He could easily negotiate peace deals with North Korea, Iran, even Cuba and Venezuela. He doesn't care about human rights in those places. (Biden didn't either, but the pretense was killing.) BRICS will continue to grow, Europe will go its own way, and the American people will be just fine. (Maybe fewer cheap goods and less cheap labor, but nowhere near the scare levels that liberal economists like to predict.) If Democrats complain about this, they'll only dig themselves deeper graves. The era of American global hegemony is ending. Protracting it will only make a bad thing worse.

By the way, Vance is a creep, but he's much smarter, and much savvier both on foreign and domestic policy than Pence ever was. Plus, as the heir-apparent, he has incentives not to turn the administration into the dumpster fire that Pence left with. I could go on and on, but you should get the idea by now. Having shown he can win, legitimately (as these things go), Trump has little reason to destroy democracy. He could even build on the majority he already has. He faces two dangers: one is his own bad instincts; the other is the idiot nihilism of much of the Republican Party. But he owns that party now, and the rank-and-file are basically followers, controlled by the propaganda machine, and the apparatchiki are just hired hands: they do what they're told.

Again, I have very little confidence that Trump will do any of this -- even on Israel, where he will continue to do whatever Netanyahu wants, but Netanyahu is used to and even seems to like it being a forever war, so he may not press that hard.

So it's really just up to him. As for the Democrats, all they can do is react. It's hopeless for me to try to advise, as none of them are ready to listen. They first have to figure out who they are, who they want to represent, and what they want. But this game of conning both the donors and the voters is wearing awfully thin.

[*] I could add some caveats and nuance here, but the key point is that this is what the dominant political coalition of Israel actually wants, and that Trump, both by temperament and in light of his donor support network, is unlikely to offer any resistance to anything Israel demands -- even more so than Biden-Harris, who as Democrats felt the need to express humanitarian concerns and their commitment to democracy. Trump has no such concerns, and may even see the mass expulsion of Palestinians as an exemplary model for his own mass expulsion of "illegal immigrants." But any number of things could limit this "ethnic cleansing." I'll leave this to your imagination, assuming you have enough to see that public opinion all around the world will increasingly shift as Israel approaches genocide's "final solution" -- even in the US, which should be of some concern to Trump, although his first instinct will be to fight and suppress it. He will see it as an opportunity to break pro-Israel donors away from the Democratic Party, solidifying his support, but freeing Democrats from having to toady for Israel, as Harris did and paid for. But ultimately opinion could turn against Trump/Israel here. The tide could even turn in Israel as the costs of war and isolation mount. And a massive influx of Palestinian exiles will be welcome nowhere: the US and EU go without saying, but public opinion makes this a tough sell in the Arab autocracies, which could blow up under the strain -- and which have their own major financial pipeline to Trump (e.g., Kushner's billion dollar slush fund).

I think the most likely scenario is that Gaza is totally crushed and depopulated, but that Israel is pressured to dial back its apartheid and ethnic cleansing measures in the occupied areas (including parts of pre-1967 Israel, where Palestinians are 20% of the population, and have barely-nominal citizenship) to pre-October 2023 levels. But a wide range of scenarios are possible. While Trump's election strengthens Netanyahu, they are fighting a perilous uphill battle (against a world which has been inexorably decolonising ever since 1945), where they may well wind up just retreating into their fortress-castles. [**]

[**] MAGA is clearly such a retreat, on many fronts (e.g., they want to return to a world where stern fathers can spank naughty daughters). Most of their beliefs should be resisted, but their retreat from neoliberal/neoconservative foreign policy is overdue. The world has changed since WWII, when America extended its hegemony over the "free world" and set up its quasi-holy war against the enemies of capital. Most of the capital that American armed and propaganda forces so fiercely defend isn't even American any more, and what is isn't of much value to most actual Americans. (A precise accounting of that capital may depend on how you account for Elon Musk, who I'd argue is case proof that not all immigration is good). Moreover, America's defense of that capital has lost much of its effectiveness, as American soldiers have given up the fight (why risk ruining their lives for oil moguls?), as corruption has made the war machine prohibitively expensive, and as the world itself has become increasingly unconquerable. (Phrase comes from Jonathan Schell's 2003 book, The Unconquerable World.)

Neoliberals will accuse Trump et al. of "isolationism," because that's the slur they deployed against a previous generation of (mostly) Republicans, who were wary of their schemes for one world market, dominated by American capital, and regimented by American arms. Although the US rarely had much of a standing army before 1939, Americans were widely engaged in the world, mostly through trade, not insignificantly through missionary work, but only rarely through imperialist adventures (1898 counts, as does the subsequent "gunboat diplomacy"). This willingness to engage the world on fairly equitable terms, including the resistance to European imperialism announced in the Monroe Doctrine, the pursuit of Open Door Policy to break up imperial monopolies, and the "arsenal of democracy" which defeated the final campaigns of Germany and Japan: all this earned Americans considerable good will around the world, which America's post-WWII abuse of power has only turned into a "legacy of ashes" (to borrow the title of Tim Weiner's history of the CIA). While the "isolationist" taunt will impress subscribers of Foreign Policy, it's a spent term, a piece of liberal cant that will produce more backlash than agreement.

While the "defense Democrats" have been ascendant against Trump and for Biden, I can only hope they will be seen as bankrupt now, and that Democrats will revert to something more like Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy (a kinder, gentler redressing of Gunboat Diplomacy, not that it changed things much), and a renewed interest in the UN, which the neocons sought so hard to trash. Also, I do not expect Trump to be consistent here: even if his tendency is to withdraw, institutional support for militarism and world dominance remains strong, at least as much in the Republican Party as in the Democratic, and it's easy to play on his ego as "the leader of the free world," especially when all he has to do is to follow friendly bribes.

I woke up Monday morning with the thought that I could finally add a third intro here, where I talk about what Democrats should do now that they've been driven from national power. I always planned on a final chapter to my political book where I would offer what I saw as practical political advice to save the world. (Well, in some versions of that book, I tacked on an extra section, which would describe the dystopia that would ensue if Democrats fail and allow Republicans to do all they've wanted. That much, at least, I'll spare you spoilers for.) So I have given this subject a fair amount of thought, and if I had the time (and were still so inclined) I could write about this at considerable length. However, with Monday slipping away from me, and no desire whatsoever to face this file on Tuesday, I'll try to keep this very brief: some reflections and scattered tidbits, but no structure, and no cheerleading. I'm not trying to sell my advice. I'm just throwing it out there.

Monday evening, I find I haven't written this section, and no longer have time. I think I did make many of the points I've been thinking about under various articles, so I'll leave it to you to ferret them out. Anything involving money, credibility, and trust is likely to be relevant. The biggest problem Democrats have is that lots of people don't trust them -- on lots of things, including avoiding war. They have to figure out how to fix that. And funny thing, beating the Republicans at fundraising and at advertising and celebrity endorsements and "ground game" isn't doing the trick.

Why so many of those people trust Republicans instead is way beyond me, but there is considerable evidence that they do. There is also ample evidence that trust in Republicans is foolish and sometimes plain stupid, but until Democrats get their house in order, distrust in them takes precedence. One saving grace may be that most Americans really hate corruption, and they don't much care for incompetence either. Republicans are up to their necks in both. Now if you can just show them, you should be able to score points. But it's hard to do when you're corrupt and incompetent as well.

One thought I'm pretty sure I didn't get to yet concerns "woke." I think of it as something like satori, a state of mind that if you're lucky, you find yourself in through no discernible effort of your own. It's good to be woke, but only you can know that. What it is not is a license for an inquisition, which is how most of the anti-woke have been trained to view it. And it's not that they disapprove of inquisitions in general. It's just that they prefer their own.

Top story threads:

Election notes: Some general pieces here, then more specific ones on Trump (why he won, and how horrible that is) and Harris (why she lost, and who cares) following, then sections on the Senate (flipped R), House (undecided, but probably still R), and other issues below.

  • Washington Post: 2024 turnout is near the 2020 record. See how each state compares. I've seen references to a drop in voter turnout in 2024, especially relative to 2020, but this data shows a pretty close match, with 9 states posting new highs (44 year window). Trump won those states 5-4, with all of his wins in battleground states. Of 5 states with turnout under 55%, 4 were among Trump's biggest margin states (WV, AR, MS, OK), while the lowest one anywhere was Hawaii.

  • Zack Beauchamp:

    • [11-06] Donald Trump has won -- and American democracy is now in grave danger: "Trump's second term poses an existential threat to the republic. But there's still good reason for hope."

    • [11-06] The global trend that pushed Donald Trump to victory: "Incumbents everywhere are doing poorly. America just proved it's not exceptional." I still have, and haven't read, his book, so I know that this is his turf, and he likely has something interesting to say about the rest of the world -- something I, like most people, don't know a hell of a lot about -- but I don't see how this could possibly work: it just seems like another correlation pretending to be a cause. No need to deal with this now, but I will note one line: "Three different exit polls found that at least 70 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country's current direction, and they took it out on the current ruling party." Links in that line to the following:

  • William Bruno: [10-23] Why foreign policy is the biggest issue this November: "From Gaza to Ukraine, this election will have world-spanning consequences. Now more than ever, we need to push for an anti-war, anti-imperial foreign policy." This came out before the election, so its tactical advice, like "hold Harris accountable," is moot, but the core issues are certainly important.

  • Thomas Frank: [11-09] The elites had it coming. Of course, he's mostly talking about Democrats, although fellow traveler Dick Cheney gets as many nods as Barack Obama.

    Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump's appeal -- and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn't figure him out.

  • Michelle Goldberg: [11-06] This is who we are now.

    Trump's first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.

    So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning rather than defiance. . . . But eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What's left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us. . . .

    Ultimately, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they're craving. . . . We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism the way George W. Bush -- whose re-election also broke my heart -- discredited neoconservatism.

    The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump's opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years -- saving what we can and trying to imagine a tolerable future.

    One nit here is that no matter how discredited she thought neoconservatism was when Bush-Cheney departed, it still rules the roost, as Biden showed us with his disastrous cultivation of wars, and Harris underscored by welcoming Dick Cheney to her campaign. Even as some especially notorious individuals were put to pasture, the institutions supporting them remain unchecked and unexamined. I'm also less certain of Trump's incompetence. Much will depend on whether he hires competent people who can keep his trust without blundering. Sure, he did a very bad job of that during his first term.

  • Tyler Austin Harper: [11-06] What we just went through wasn't an election. It was a hostage situation. This seems about right:

    Heading into Tuesday's vote, a large majority of voters said that the country was on the wrong track and that they were disappointed with the candidates on offer. A plurality of voters said that regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things worse. Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not make them proud of America.

    The blame for this grievous state of affairs lies with the Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which played a game of chicken with the electorate, relying on apocalyptic threats about the end of democracy to convince people that they had no choice but to vote as instructed. Both candidates offered up policies that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their bases. For one candidate, that contemptuous strategy succeeded. But it fails the American people.

    For all his populist posturing, Mr. Trump put forward tax breaks that favor the wealthy, championed tariffs that would almost certainly raise grocery prices, bad-mouthed overtime pay, praised firing striking workers and largely stayed mum while his allies discussed destroying the Affordable Care Act. He insisted abortion be left up to the states even though most Americans, including many Republicans, think it should be legal everywhere, and pledged to oppose any new gun restrictions even though an overwhelming majority of Americans say they should be stricter.

    And what were Trump acolytes to be given in return for greenlighting this unpopular agenda? Elon Musk promised a period of economic pain. Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump would bend the country over his knee and give it a "spanking." Why would any sign on? Because it was either that, they were told, or nuclear war under Ms. Harris. Some choice. . . .

    What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage situation. Our major parties represent the interests of streaming magnates, the arms industry, oil barons, Bitcoin ghouls and Big Tobacco, often without even pretending to heed the needs of voters. A political system like that is fundamentally broken.

    I skipped over the corresponding list of indictments against Biden and Harris, which struck me as (relatively speaking) small potatoes, but most show that the inordinate influence of money isn't limited to Republicans. The first paragraph cites two pieces on the threat to "end democracy":

  • Doug Henwood: [11-08] It was always about inflation: "Simply put, Donald Trump owes his reelection to inflation and to the fact that the Biden administration did little to address the problem in a way that helped working-class families."

    I often say that the Democrats' political problem is that they're a party of capital that has to pretend otherwise for electoral purposes. This time they hardly even pretended. Kamala Harris preferred campaigning with the inexplicably famous mogul Mark Cuban and the ghoulish Liz Cheney to Shawn Fain, who led the United Auto Workers to the greatest strike victory in decades. Those associations telegraphed both her policy instincts and her demographic targeting: Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs.

    Like Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the strategy failed, only worse. At least Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. Harris even lost among suburban white women, a principal target of this twice-failed strategy.

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [11-06] Americans wanted change and that meant Trump. There is something to this, but also several loads of bullshit:

      The simplest explanation, though, may be the most compelling: This was a classic "change" election in which the "out" party had an advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and also because the GOP chose a rival whose constant demonstration of his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest. In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated; and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same people and institutions they did.

      Nobody for a moment doubted that Trump would bring change. And indeed, his signature Make America Great Again slogan and message came to have a double meaning. Yes, for some it meant (as it did in 2016) a return to the allegedly all-American culture of the 20th century, with its traditional hierarchies; moral certainties and (for some) white male leadership. But for others MAGA meant very specifically referred to the perceived peace and prosperity of the pre-pandemic economy and society presided over, however turbulently, Trump. When Republicans gleefully asked swing voters if they were better off before Joe Biden became president, a veritable coalition of voters with recent and long-standing grievances over conditions in the country had as simple an answer as they did when Ronald Reagan used it to depose Jimmy Carter more than a half-century ago.

      The "better off" question is close to meaningless, as most people can't really tell, but as we've seen, are inclined to accept whatever their political orientation dictates. Unlike, say, the pandemic of 2020, or the financial meltdown of 2008, or the deflationary recession of 1980, or the great one of 1929-32 (is that what MAGA means?), there is little objective reason driving voters to change. Granted, there may be unease driven by slower, almost tectonic forces (like climate change), but few people think them through, and those who do tend to prefer orderly change over the kind of disruption Trump promises.

    • [11-09] Democrats lost because of their bad policies, not their bad attitude. I beg to differ, but both could have been better.

    • [11-12] Kamala Harris came much closer to winning than you think. The argument here is that the shift to Trump was less in the highly contested swing states than anywhere else (Harris topped Biden only in Colorado).

  • David Sirota: [11-07] Election 2024: How billionaires torpedoed democracy: "Both parties' 2024 campaigns claimed to be about 'saving democracy.' Yet both parties ended up bought and paid for by billionaires."

  • Jeffrey St Clair:

    • [11-06] Chronicle of a defeat foretold: "What does history repeat itself after it does farce?" He's very harsh on Harris here. One thing I find curious is an uncredited chart, which if I'm reading it right says that 24% of respondents think Democracy in the US is secure, vs. 74% threatened. Harris leads secure 59% to 39%, but trails in the larger threatened group, 46% to 53%. But isn't securing democracy supposed to be her issue? As an issue, it's nebulous enough that Trump was able to deflect it by claiming that Democrats were the real threat to democracy (after all, they're the ones rigging the polling and the voting!). Democrats could bring up fascism, but the response is simply, you're the real fascists, and who else really knows any better?

      This is an aside, but fits here as well as anywhere. I haven't found an article making this point so far, but could Kelly's fascism comments have been a plant? (Like one of Roger Stone's dirty tricks?) If Trump's operatives know that being charged with fascism will only solidify their support -- not because their supporters identify with fascism, but because they see it as stereotypically leftist infantile name-calling (unlike "libtard," which they know is just a joke). But mainstream Democrats generally shy away from such a loaded term, so how do you get someone like Harris to use it? You give her permission, by allowing her to quote someone like Kelly. This whole notion of "permission" is sick and pernicious. There's a quote somewhere about how the Cheney endorsements of Harris give Republicans permission to vote against Trump: it becomes something real Republicans can do without surrendering their identify. Harris may have had some doubt about "fascism," but she couldn't resist the Cheney honey trap, as she saw it as a way to steal some significant slice of Republican votes, putting her over the top. I have no reason to believe that Kelly and the Cheneys were plants, other than that they precisely had that effect. That they did, of course, was Harris's gaffe (and yeah, I'm following Kinsley rules here, otherwise I would have said "blunder").

    • [11-08] The crack-up. Title from F Scott Fitzgerald. Selected bits:

      • This "white wave" electorate didn't reject progressive ideas; they rejected the candidate who failed to advocate them for fear of alienating Big Tech execs and Wall Street financiers. Voters in both Alaska and Missouri approve increasing the minimum wage to $15. Voters approved paid sick leave in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska. Voters in Oregon approved a measure protecting marijuana workers' right to unionize. Alaska voters banned anti-union captive audience meetings. Arizona voters rejected a measure that lowered the minimum wage for tipped workers. Massachusetts approved the right of rideshare workers to organize for collective bargaining. New Orleans voters approved a Workers Bill of Rights. Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York approved measures granting a state constitutional right to abortion.

      • Harris lost the popular vote by five million votes. Jill Stein only garnered 642,000 votes, just 25,000 more than RFK, Jr., who'd long since withdrawn. In no state did Stein get enough votes to cost Harris the state. Good luck blaming the Greens (which says much about the politically emaciated condition of the Greens). Even in Wisconsin (where Harris lost by only 31,000 votes), Stein, who captured only 12,666 votes, didn't fare well enough to be blamed (or credited) for costing Harris the state. In Pennsylvania, Harris lost by 165,000 votes. Stein collected only 33,591 votes. In Michigan, where Stein had her best showing in a battleground state, winning 44,648 votes (0.8%), Harris lost to Trump by 82,000 votes.

      • Murtaza Hussain: "Suppressing the Bernie movement in 2016 effectively destroyed the Democratic Party. That was a turning point year GOP also had an insurgency with Trump but they ultimately worked with him to some new kind of synthesis. The Democrats never got past their decrepit ancien regime."

      • Some of you may remember that it was the Obama brain trust, irritated at Trump's role in promoting the birther conspiracy, who worked feverishly in 2011 to make Trump the face of the post-Tea Party GOP. Obama's former campaign manager and policy guru, David Plouffe later explained the thinking: "Let's lean into Trump here. That'll be good for us." That worked out about as well for the Democratic base as the bank bailouts.

    • By the way, St Clair also wrote The wolf at the door, which is a fund drive piece, but also a history of a publication that's still bristling with anger 30 years after inception. There's not just a lot to be angry about today, but much more coming down the pike. Be sure of that.

  • Freddy Brewster: [11-05] Leonard Leo's dark money web is sowing election day chaos.

  • Israel/Palestine considerations:

  • International reaction:

Trump:

  • Peter Baker: [11-06] 'Trump's America': Comeback victory signals a different kind of country: "In the end, Donald J. Trump is not the historical aberration some thought he was, but instead a transformational force reshaping the modern United States in his own image." This piece came out immediately after the election was called, showing once again that no one beats the New York Times when it comes to sucking up to those in power.

  • Walden Bello: [11-07] How did I "predict" that Trump, despite his repulsive persona and politics, would prevail? "Democratic Party leadership has been discredited and there's room for new progressive leaders to take the helm."

  • Jamelle Bouie: [11-09] What do Trump voters know about the future he has planned for them? Not much, partly because they don't believe what he says, and they believe even less what Democrats say he says. At some point in this post I should quote something Jeffrey St Clair wrote recently: [10-25]

    More than half of Trump's supporters don't believe he'll actually do many of the things he claims he'll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris's supporters hope she'll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won't. And that pretty much sums up this election.

    What we should add to St Clair's observation is that the Trump understanding was much more credible than the Harris take. Trump lies all the time, sometimes just to provoke a reaction. Harris, well, doesn't have Trump's track record, but she's a politician, and how far do you trust politicians, especially to do the right thing?

  • John Cassidy: [11-11] Donald Trump's victory and the politics of inflation: "Joe Biden's strong record on jobs and Kamala Harris's vow to reduce the cost of living couldn't prevent the Democrats from succumbing to a global anti-incumbency wave." One thing that bothers me in virtually every article this week that even mentions inflation is that no one seems to have a clear understanding of what it is, of how it works, of what is bad (and in some cases good) about it, of what can and should be done about it. I can't do it justice here, but I do want to stress one point: it creates both winners and losers. Good government policy would try to limit the winners (perhaps by taxing off their windfall) and to compensate the losers (the "cola" in Social Security is one example of this). The press seem to buy the notion that it is an always bad, which mostly means that they are carrying water for the side that wants less inflation (e.g., for bankers, which is largely why the Fed is so hawkish against inflation). I wouldn't say that there was no real inflation coming out of the pandemic: I suspect that some inflation was inevitable, but the winners and losers (and therefore who felt the pain, and who needed help) were largely determined by pricing power, which has been tilted against workers and consumers for some time, but became more acute when inflation was added to the mix. Policies limiting monopolies and price gouging would have helped, but Biden and Harris got little credit for them, even from supposedly liberal economists. Trump offered nothing but an outlet for rage. Why anyone thought that might be any kind of solution is way beyond me, but according to polls, many people did. They were deceived. Whether they ever learn from such mistakes remains to be seen.

  • Jelani Cobb: [11-07] 2016 and 2024: "We will be a fundamentally different country by the end of the next Administration." Indeed, we already are.

  • Ed Coper: [11-08] White noise: why hatred of Donald Trump fuels his success as much as his supporters' love: "A network of organised disinformation sows doubt, kills policy reform and keep us ad adds as we debate Trump-mania." Some misdirection in his first paragraph:

    Historians will long scratch their heads that a Republican candidate who -- despite an inability to string a coherent sentence together, being grossly underqualified and rife with extramarital affairs -- would go on to not only win election but become one of the most popular presidents in US history.

    Turns out the subject here was Warren Harding, elected president in a 1920 landslide. How it advances an understanding of Trump isn't clear, but even stranger stories ensue.

  • David Corn:

    • [11-04] Trump and his voters: they like the lying: "He's a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect. The question won't fade: How does he get away with it?" "Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy."

    • [11-06] America meets its judgment day: "Trump's victory signals a national embrace of the politics of hate and a possible fascist future."

  • Ben Davis: [11-09] None of the conventional explanations for Trump's victory stand up to scrutiny: "This election has blown a hole in the worldviews of both leftists and centrists. The pandemic may be a more important factor." This piece covers a lot of ground, quite sensibly. The section on Covid is really about something else:

    I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.

    Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump's term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.

    I've often thought that the Democrats took way too little credit for the first big pandemic relief bill, which Pelosi and Schumer largely wrote and pushed through, while Trump had to acquiesce because he was mostly worried about the falling stock market. The sunsetting made it palatable to Republicans, and made sense given that it was relief for an emergency. Democrats figured they could run on extending key parts of it, but did they? Not really. Worse than that, Trump claimed credit for the immediate effects, then blamed inflation on the act's largesse. Democrats were, once again, screwed coming and going, mostly for not following McConnell's formula of just letting the country go to hell, just so voters would blame the incumbent president.

  • David Dayen: [11-08] The triumphant return of corruption: "A look at the biggest stock gainers since Trump's election shows that paying tribute to the next president will have its benefits." He identifies several especially large gains, from outfits like MoneyLion (up 61%, "investors believe, correctly, that consumer protection, which made a comeback in the past four years, will be destroyed again"), CoreCivic (up 72%, a "private prison" company), GEO Group (up 61%, another "private prison" contractor), and Coinbase (up 41%, "the crypto exchange"). "We can get ready for four years of pay-to-play deals, corporate back-scratching, and a public unprotected from scam artists."

  • John Harris: [11-10] From Trump's victory, a simple, inescapable message: many people despise the left: "The tumult of social media and rightwing propaganda has successfully cast progressives as one judgmental, 'woke' mass." I don't doubt his point, but the examples mostly make me think that most of the people who "hate the left" have little if any idea what or whom the left is. That suggests some kind of communication problem, which makes most sense in the US, where we don't have our own party, and are often stuck under the dead carcass of a Democratic Party, whose leaders hate us as much as the right thinks it does. But there must be more to the story than that: some deep, dark psychological factors that are never really acknowledged and near impossible to dislodge There must be a literature researching this. We certainly have research on why people become fascists, which overlaps significantly with hating the left. On the other hand, my own study of history has shown that everything decent and valuable that has ever happened in America has its origin in the left. Why can't anyone else see that?

  • David Hearst: [11-07] Trump has a choice: Obliterate Palestine or end the war: Most likely he won't even think of it as a choice, but simply following the directions of his donors. The question is whether he can see the many downsides of doing so. He has several odd talents, but clear thinking and foresight aren't among them.

    Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.

    And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump's first term as president, the US was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right -- the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.

    Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.

    Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the US embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.

    Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump's sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.

    This was -- and still is -- a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.

    This led directly to the Hamas revolt, and the Israeli reprisal, not just collect punishment but a systematic plan to render Gaza uninhabitable, so credit him there, too. As I noted in my intro, I expect he will simply cheer Netanyahu on to "finish the job." I don't think he has any idea what that entails, how it will look, and how it will reflect back on America, and on him personally. Nor do I think he cares. He's one of those guys who strictly lives in the present, trusting his instincts will never fail him.

    There is much more to this piece, including a concluding section on "Hope for the future," where he notes: "It may be that as Biden departs, we have seen the party's last Zionist leader. That in itself is of immense significance for Israel."

  • Murtaza Hussain: [11-06] Trump is eyeing Iran hawk Brian Hook as first foreign policy pick.

  • Lauren Markoe: [11-07] Who is Howard Lutnick? Trump transition team leader is a billionaire supporter of Jewish causes and Israel.

  • Michael Mechanic: [11-07] Why did Trump really win? It's simple, actually. "When the economy thrives while half of America struggles, something has got to give."

  • Lorrie Moore: [11-07] A fourth-rate entertainer, a third-rate businessman, and a two-time president: "The 2024 election, like the one in 2016, had the same nutty and vapid Donald Trump, the same retrograde gender politics, and the same result."

    He is a third-rate businessman and fourth-rate entertainer, a husband to fashion models, a wannabe standup comedian who cannot land a punch line but floats language out into the air, hoping it will cohere, then flare, though it usually wanders into vapor and fog. As with much current standup, it can get raunchy and crass, but the MAGA people accept this lack of dignity. I was struck with puzzled admiration at his forty minutes of quiet swaying to "Ave Maria." It was like performance art. He also did a skit at McDonald's and one in a garbage truck. He will do most anything to avoid talking about actual governing, which he does not know that much about. He perhaps understands that most voters don't want to discuss that and want to just leave it to their elected officials. We are a country that is about money and entertainment. Trump was running as the embodiment of these. One PBS commentator used a Hollywood metaphor to explain him: Trump is a franchise blockbuster, familiar and splashy; Harris is an independent art-house film with subtitles.

  • Elie Mystal: [11-07] There's no denying it anymore: Trump is not a fluke -- he's America: "The United States chose Donald Trump in all his ugliness and cruelty, and the country will get what it deserves." This is certainly one viewpoint. Still, I have to ask, how many people didn't understand the choice this clearly? And for those who did not, why not?

    We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid. . . .

    Everyone who hates Trump is asking how America can be "saved" from him, again. Nobody is asking the more relevant question: Is America worth saving? Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures. A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited, its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be hunted doesn't really deserve to be "saved." It deserves to fail.

    Trump is not our "retribution." He is our reckoning.

  • Rick Perlstein:

    • [11-05] Garbagegate, with a twist: "The media's penchant to balance the two parties and control the narrative didn't quite work when it came to a Trump insult comic's comments about Puerto Rico."

    • [11-13] How to hear a fascist: "Trump was supposed to be in decline, losing it. He lost it all the way to the White House."

  • Kelefa Sanneh: [11-07] How Donald Trump, the leader of white grievance, gained among Hispanic voters.

  • Timothy Snyder: [11-08] What does it mean that Donald Trump is a fascist? "Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs." This is an article that we must admit, he's competent to write, but hardly anyone else is competent to read. I bookmarked it because it's an issue I take some perverse interest in. I haven't read it yet, because I doubt that I'll learn much -- e.g., I already knew the Marinetti story, and that's pretty obscure -- and the rest will probably just be annoying.

  • Rebecca Solnit:

  • Elizabeth Spiers: [11-06] Trump offered men something that Democrats never could.

  • b>Asawin Suebsaeng/Tim Dickinson: [10-03] 'American death squads': inside Trump's push to make police more violent: "Trump's recent call for a 'violent day' of policing is part of his plan to push cops to be as brutal as possible and shield them from accountability." Pre-election piece I should have noticed earlier (or should have been better reported).

  • Michael Tomasky: [11-08] Why does no one understand the real reason Trump won? "It wasn't the economy. It wasn't inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer."

    The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media -- Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk's X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan's, and much more -- sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

    Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper's Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. . . .

    I think a lot of people who don't watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don't understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it's the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

    I haven't even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes -- inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is "the envy of the world." But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world's easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won't take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the "roaring Trump economy" will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

    Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my "Ulan Bator question." If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? "You would know that she is a very stupid person," Gertz said. "You'd know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she's a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you."

    Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he's been "the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years," that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is "doing it all for you."

    To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side's view of things. It's simply "the news." This is what people -- white people, chiefly -- watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you've seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That's reach, and that's power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it's owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

    Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff.

    Also, this ends with another key point/example:

    The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

    The reason? The right-wing media. And it's only growing and growing. And I haven't even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it's too late, which it almost is.

  • Katrina vanden Heuvel: [11-07] Americans are desperate for change. Electing Trump was a misguided message: "The causes of Donald Trump's victory will be endlessly debated, but misdirected discontent is clearly a major factor."

  • Julio Ricardo Varela: [11-08] Trump broke a record with Latino voters. History can tell us why. "Trump exploited an 'us versus them' mentality that has long existed among Latinos living in the US and those outside this country."

Also, some more speculative pieces on what a second Trump term might do (some issue-specific, some more general). Most of these assume Trump will try to do what he campaigned on, but I suggested an alternative scenario in the second section of the intro (but even it doesn't argue against most of the forebodings here):

  • Matt Bruenig: [11-07] What does Trump's win mean for the NLRB? "Donald Trump will probably sack National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has been friendly to unions, on day one of his presidency."

  • Jonathan Chait: [11-08] Trump can prosecute anybody he wants, transition leader says: "Department of Justice is now Department of Trump Justice."

  • Rachel M Cohen: [11-06] Trump won. So what does that mean for abortion? "It will be easier to restrict reproductive rights in the president-elect's second term."

  • Tim Dickinson: 'You can't despair. Because that's what they want.' "Experts tell Rolling Stone what resisting authoritarianism in America will look like in Trump's second term." And if you have a subscription, you can find out what they have to say.

  • Abdallah Fayyad: [11-06] This one chart foreshadows Trump's immigration crackdown: "Investors in private prisons think they've hit the jackpot with a second Trump presidency."

  • Jonathan Freedland: [11-08] Think you know how bad Trump unleashed will be? Look at the evidence: it will be even worse. I can think of many risks, but I'd hardly put "the end of Nato" second (or anywhere) on my list. It's not going to happen, because NATO is really just an arms sales cartel, and Trump loves a good racket. His threats to withdraw from NATO were just meant to shake down more tribute. He won't back out, not least because that would only incentivize Europe to build up their own arms cartel.

  • M Gessen: [11-15] This is the dark, unspoken promise of Trump's return: An expert on Russia, learned the hard way, looks back there for insight.

    For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. "Liberal democracy," he says, "offers moral constraints without problem-solving" -- a lot of rules, not a lot of change -- while "populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints." Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn't interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect's appeal in terms of something more primal: "Trump promises that you don't have to think about other people."

    Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one's own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this "morally unconstrained collective egoism."

    While there are people in Trump's circle who look to Orban as a guide to how to lock into power, Trump has many other sources of inspiration, even without cracking open his copy of Mein Kampf. For instance, the crypto-creep in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who was reelected with 84% of the vote, his popularity largely credited to his war on gangs. That's the sort of publicity Trump would gladly kill for.

  • Andrea González-Ramirez: [11-08] What to know about Susie Wiles, Trump's next Chief of Staff.

  • Karen J Greenberg: [11-07] It's not just about the president: "It's about the presidency."

    Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer . . . in their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that "Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability."

    And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. "The often-feckless Trump," they wrote, "also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump -- but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect." . . .

    A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral presidential powers to a new level. . . . New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump "and his associates" plan to "increase the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House."

  • Ken Klippenstein: [11-12] Read the leaked Rubio dossier: "Trump camp details 'lightweight' Marco Rubio's liabilities." I restrained myself from noting reports that Rubio is in line to become Secretary of State, but couldn't resist reporting this.

  • Paul Krugman: [11-11] Why Trump's deportations will drive up your grocery bill: Seriously, a week after the election, and this is the best he can do? Alternate title: "Did you know that the pennies you saved on groceries were paid for by exploiting undocumented immigrant labor?" At least he paid off the "tarrifs will drive inflation" story he's already done a dozen times.

  • Avery Lotz: [11-10] Trump rules out Haley, Pompeo admin posts: No surprise with Haley, who still has a lot of sucking up to do. Pompeo, however, was always so good at it. The mark against him, beyond his very brief presidential campaign, could be policy. He is remembered as one of Trump's stealthiest hawks, and was especially influential in sabotaging Trump's North Korea diplomacy. Suppose Trump remembers that?

  • Rachel Maddow: [11-10] Dead last: "Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet." More than you, or I at least, need to read right now about Huey Long, Spiro Agnew, and anti-corruption hero Viktor Navalny (who is inconveniently dead). This sounds like an AI distillation of her recent books, which sound like they were written by someone else.

  • Branko Marcetic:

    • [11-02] Trump is planning a third red scare: "Donald Trump and his allies aren't making a secret of it: if they win, they're going to launch a campaign of repression to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement and the organized left."

    • [11-08] Trump is planning a presidency of, by, and for the rich: "Now that the 'pro-worker' GOP led by Donald Trump holds the reins of government, what does it plan to do? A program of handouts for big business and austerity for the rest of us."

  • Dylan Matthews: [11-06] Trump proposed big Medicaid and food stamp cuts. Can he pass them? "What Trump's return means for America's poor people."

  • Jane Mayer: [11-08] Donald Trump's Supreme Court majority could easily rule through 2045: "Democrats failed to make the Court itself a major campaign issue, but what comes after the Dobbs decision could very well be worse, and more far-reaching."

  • Julianne McShane: [11-06] After win, Trump fans admit "Project 2025 is the agenda".

  • George Monbiot: [11-07] Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth -- and it will take a progressive revolution to stop him.

  • David Remnick: [11-09] It can happen here: "Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that Trump's reëlection is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are."

  • Tony Romm: [11-11] Trump eyes pro-crypto candidates for key federal financial agencies: "The incoming administration has explored new personnel and policy that can deliver on Trump's campaign promise to turn the United States into the 'crypto capital of the planet.'" Something else that Trump is going to do that is going to be really horrible, although in this case not without an element of farce.

  • Jennifer Rubin: [11-11] Trump can keep campaign promises or be popular. Not both. This is pretty much what I said in my second intro. The problem here is that Republicans don't see the need to be popular, or even want to. They want to rule. They want to be feared. And they think that they can extort and/or terrorize enough people to vote for them that, with their other dirty tricks, they can stay in power, and do all the sick and demented things they've been dreaming of. Remember the 2000 election? Lots of pundits thought that Bush, with his "compassionate conservatism" spiel, and coming off a relatively moderate record as governor of Texas, would show some modesty -- he had, after all, lost the popular vote, and only won when the Supreme Court prevented a recount in Florida -- and tack to the center. But as soon as Bush was inaugurated, Cheney took over and declared that Republicans had come to power with a purpose, and they were going to do everything they wanted, just the way they wanted it. Getting re-elected wasn't his department. He was there to break things, and that's exactly what he did. (Then, somehow, Rove managed to wangle Bush a second term anyway, despite the fact that nearly everything he had done in his first was massively unpopular.)

  • Matt Sledge: [11-07] Crypto sweep puts Congress on notice: vote with us or we'll come after you with millions: "In all likelihood, crypto deregulation is coming."

  • Peter Wade: [11-10] Trump tells GOP to bypass Senate confirmation process, block Biden judicial appointments: "Despite an incoming Republican majority, Trump wants new party leadership to agree to recess appointments." That way he can appoint people even Republicans could object to. (Obviously, RFK Jr. jumps to mind.) Here's another report:

  • Joel Warner: [11-07] What can we expect from a second Trump presidency? "From unleashing more dark money in politics to expanding fossil fuel production and assaulting reproductive rights, here's some of what we can expect from a second Donald Trump administration.

PS: Trying to wind up on Monday, I'm starting to see a number of early appointments (e.g., Trump picks Rep. Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations), which are beyond the scope of this post and section, as well as damn near impossible for me to keep up with. I will say that they do show that he's actually thought about transition and administration this time (unlike in 2016), he has a plan, and is executing it quickly. This certainly argues against the notion that he might not govern as viciously as he campaigned. I should also note that the Wade story above shows that he intends to dominate Congress (or bypass them wherever possible), rather than have to negotiate with anyone (even mainstream Republicans). He is basically confirming the fears of all those who predicted that Trump would turn the presidency into a dictatorship.

Harris:

  • Kat Abughazaleh: [11-08] Democrats need to clean house before they screw up again: "It wasn't just the people running Kamala Harris's campaign who failed. The leadership of the entire party is at fault."

  • Dean Baker: [11-13] Did bad economic reporting doom Harris?

    This is the time for everyone to do their election autopsy, where everyone pushes their preferred story of what went wrong for the Harris campaign. Mine will focus on what I consider the simplest and most obvious, the media painted a picture of a bad economy which was virtually impossible for the Harris campaign to overcome. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the alternative reality folks at Fox, I mean the New York Times, Washington Post, and other bastions of the establishment media.

    Just to provide context, there is little doubt that people's views of the economy were hugely important in determining the vote. Exit polls consistently put the economy as the number 1 or number 2 issue in people's minds as they went to vote. And those rating the economy as a top issue voted for Trump by a huge margin.

    I find it completely unfathomable why anyone worried about the economy would look to Republicans (especially Trump) for relief. History, as far back as Herbert Hoover, is unanimous on this point, at least for most (working/middle class) people -- higher-income people may have done relatively better with Republicans, but with the possible exception of the top 1% (at most), they too have fared better with Democrats. Or you could look at policy preferences, which again favor Democrats by a huge margin. As Baker points out, a big part of people's evaluation of the economy is simply partisan, but that doesn't explain why a majority (actually well above the actual vote) thought better of Republicans.

    Baker continues:

    At the most basic level, the media have continually chosen to highlight the negative about the economy. University of Wisconsin political science professor Mark Copelovitch did an analysis last year showing that mentions of "inflation" and "recession" dwarfed mentions of unemployment, even as the latter was hitting record lows and we never had a recession.

    The inflation we did see was part of a worldwide burst of inflation related to the pandemic, where the US rate was little different than the inflation seen in countries like France and Germany. We were told people don't blame the pandemic, they blame Biden. That is undoubtedly true, but that is because the media didn't remind people that the inflation was due to the pandemic in the same way they always reminded people that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was "disastrous." . . .

    Most people are not getting their news from the New York Times or Washington Post, but the information presented in these outlets does spread to other news outlets and to social media. When people hear the bad economy story in the elite media they help its spread elsewhere.

    It's true that most regular consumers of these outlets supported Harris, but that misses the point. . . . They helped to advance a bad economy story that was at odds with reality. Given the importance of perceptions of the economy in people's voting, it would have been all but impossible for Harris to overcome this negative economy story, and she didn't.

  • Josh Barro: [11-09] This is all Biden's fault. He starts with Biden picking Harris as his VP in 2020.

  • Chris Bohner: [11-02] Kamala Harris is not doing well with union voters.

  • Jonathan Chait: [11-06] Why America rejected the Biden-Harris administration: "It's not that people love Trump. Democrats simply failed." As usual, Chait swims in his own tide:

    The seeds of Harris's failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump's 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting blinders on the Democrats' decision-making elite.

    So, after Hillary Clinton failed, they should have moved further to the right? How was that even possible? No mention of what the Democrats did in 2018, after moving so far into left-wing peril. (They won both houses of Congress.) But Chait then claims Biden in 2020, who "won because he abstained from that rush to the left, keeping him closer to where the party's voters had remained" -- maybe he should recheck his old columns complaining about Biden getting hoodwinked trying to appease Sanders voters?

  • Aida Chavez: [11-07[ Harris ran to Trump's right on immigration -- and gained absolutely nothing for it: "Harris could have focused on how US foreign policy pushes immigrants to leave their homes. Instead, she ran on border security."

  • Maureen Dowd: [11-09] Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics: Inevitable that someone would bring this up. Who are these "normal people"? And when does one ever get a chance to really talk with them? Yet somehow, they always show up to second guess you.

  • Liza Featherstone:

  • Malcolm Ferguson: [11-08] Democrats say Kamala Harris ignored their dire warnings on Liz Cheney.

  • Daniel Finn: [11-07] Corporate donors guided Kamala Harris to defeat: E.g., Mark Cuban.

  • Oliver Hall: [11-09] I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost.

    You should know what I didn't hear during the hours speaking to US voters. I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than 1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false: the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.

    After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women, despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters just didn't care.

    For reasons that I'm sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks, people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls, I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.

  • Benjamin Hart: [11-09] Why Kamala Harris's campaign was doomed from the start: Interview with Amy Walter, publisher/editor of Cook Political Report.

  • Bob Hennellyk: [11-11] Progressives aren't the problem in the Democratic coalition: "Ignoring low-wage and low-wealth voters cost Kamala Harris big."

  • Sarah Jones:

    • [11-06] Kamala Harris squandered her opportunity to win.

      Donald Trump had bet on a sense of aggrieved masculinity as the return path to power, and while there's much we don't know about who turned out to vote and why, his strategy did not alienate white women in the numbers Harris needed to win. Misogyny and racism should receive due attention in postmortems to come, but they can't explain Tuesday on their own. The story is more complicated, and dire. Though she spoke of freedom, of forward motion, of change, voters did not trust her to deliver. Some will blame the left for this, but Harris tried centrism as did Biden and Clinton before her, and that didn't work, either. Leftists do not control the Democratic Party and never have; only consider the party's intransigence on Gaza. If the Democratic brand is poison now, blame its grifter consultants, who never fail out of politics no matter how many pivotal races they lose. Blame Harris, too, whose message was simply too anemic to overcome decades of Democratic failure.

    • [11-12] Bigotry is not the answer to Donald Trump: There's a Seth Moulton quote in here that is horrible not because he's slandering trans people (maybe he wanted to, but I doubt he's referring any actual people) but because it shows how clueless some Democrats can be when it comes to facing Republican talking points. Democrats have to get much smarter at that. Some decent humane principles wouldn't hurt, either.

      Even so, the Democratic Party's problems did not start with Harris or with her economic policy, or with a few pro-trans remarks that she made before she ran for president. The party's inconsistency -- its refusal to reliably champion working Americans -- left trans people vulnerable to attacks from the right. Had voters believed that Democrats would lower the costs of housing or health care or other basic necessities, perhaps Harris would have won, or at least run a closer race. Instead she courted elites, as generations of Democrats have done before her, and handed the country to an aspiring tyrant.

      Now some Democrats and their liberal supporters would rather help Trump divide the working class against itself than admit the party failed. Liberals project their own intellectual and moral failings onto the left, which they accuse of rigidity and a certain wishful thinking. When Maureen Dowd wrote that "woke is broke" in her post-election diatribe, she imagined a country that is nothing more than a mirror of herself. When the hosts of Morning Joe read her column on air in its tedious entirety, they revealed themselves, not some hidden truth in the national soul. Their conclusions are far too convenient to be realistic. How lucky for Dowd that voters share her exact biases, that their enemies are her enemies and their fears her fears.

      Democrats need to deal with the electorate they have, but they can and should do so without denigrating trans and nonbinary people. Liberals and electeds who say the party should move further to the right do so because they aren't interested in serving the working class. They'd rather absolve themselves while avoiding the hard work of introspection. That way lies a political dead end. If the Democratic Party is to be fit for purpose, it will have to offer voters real answers, not technocracy or elitism or scapegoats. Trans people didn't cost Democrats the election. Liberals did that all by themselves.

  • Tim Jonze: [11-06] 'George Clooney - who cares?' Did celebrity endorsements actually harm Kamala Harris?

  • Eric Levitz: [11-08] The debate over what Democrats do now hinges on one question: "There are two ways of interpreting Harris's loss." Actually, there are lots of ways to interpret the loss. The question isn't which one is right. (Even if you could do that, what good would it do you? A book? A posh job in academia, or at some think tank?) The only real question is: what, given the new reality, do you do about it? And no single Democrat is going to answer that. As Will Rogers explained back in the 1930s: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." Today's Democrats aren't more organized or ideologically coherent than they were in Rogers' day. Ever since the Civil War, the Republicans have been the core party -- calling themselves the G.O.P. was brilliant, shape-shifting PR -- and the Democrats were whatever fell off the margins: tariff-adverse traders and bankers, big city immigrant machines, neo-Confederates, rural populists, any stray Catholics or Jews. Under FDR, they picked up labor support, and briefly became the majority, but Republicans never lost their conceit that they are the one true American party, and as they became more conservative, they evened up the balance by welcoming white racists (while Democrats attracted blacks and other estranged minorities, while losing their older ethnic groups to the Republican melting pot).

    After losing Congress in 1994 and 2010, Democratic presidents could consolidate their control over what was left of the Party, and respond to the losses in a coherent manner -- which guided both Clinton and Obama to second terms, but offered damn little help for other Democrats (either politicians or the party base). But this loss, like the McCain loss in 2008, leaves the Party with no leadership. Harris has liquidated her political capital, as have her predecessors (Biden, Obama, the Clintons), who were all very much (in retrospect, much too much) of her campaign.

    Which basically sets up a free-for-all to see who can rise up and lead a revived Democratic Party. Sure, some pundits and consultants are going to advise accommodation to the right winds, but who among the rank-and-file really wants to compromise on abortion bans, book burning, or genocide arming? At some point, you have to decide that enough is enough, that the right and the rich already have much more than they deserve, and that we have to fight back. And as that happens, new leaders will rise from the ranks. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is once again setting an example of a politician who intends to defend us -- from Trump, of course, but also from the defeatists in our own ranks.

    After the utter disaster of the Bush-Cheney regime in 2008, the Republican grandees were left aimless and speechless. Then the Tea Party broke out, and moved the Party radically to the right. The Tea Party didn't take over the Party, but the Party revived, largely on their energy, and bounced back remarkably fast. This will be harder for Democrats, because everything is harder for Democrats, but it won't be for lack of issues and critical analysis. And if the money powers get in the way, we need to learn to live without them, and show them to be the villains they actually are.

  • Jill Lepore: [11-10] Democrats tried to counter Donald Trump's viciousness toward women with condescension: "The Harris campaign felt the need to remind women voters that they can vote for whomever they want. Women understood this. The campaign failed to."

  • Damon Linker: [11-07] Kamala Harris failed to read the room.

  • Milan Loewer: [11-05] If Harris loses today, this is why: "To win working-class voters -- and possibly today's election -- Democrats need to attack economic elites. But the Kamala Harris campaign hasn't consistently offered an anti-elite counter to Donald Trump's right-wing populism." On the other hand, Republicans are very adept at channeling rage against elite Democrats. Why can't Democrats turn the tables on the some of the most entitled, selfish, greedy people in America?

  • Martin Longman: [11-07] I'm not sure the race was ever winnable. A big chunk of this is based on a pre-election piece:

    • Nate Cohn: [11-02] Why are Democrats having such a hard time beating Trump? "The national political environment just isn't as conducive to a Harris victory as many might imagine." I don't really buy the argument for a global tide toward conservatism, and there's much else I'd nitpick in his left-and-right momentum survey, but he's certainly right that Harris leaned against progressive policies that just four years ago Biden leaned into, and that undermined both the Democrats' credibility and the message that Trump and the Republicans are nihilist lunatics with no plans that could actually solve anything.

  • Branko Marcetic: [11-06] Democratic Party elites brought us this disaster. I'm tempted to quote lots of this rant, but can't quite hone in on any single section. I also rather doubt that the Trump vote is being driven by economic hardship -- not least because Trump's offering nothing to help, whereas Harris actually is. The problem there seems to be that mass of people who believe Trump on everything and Harris (or any other Democrats) on nothing.

    As a general rule, politicians campaign for donors early on, and make amends to donors after the election, but during the closing stretch, they focus on trying to appeal to voters. That's the point when, for Democrats at least, their messaging leans left, toward things that might actually help people. Voters have good reason to be skeptical, and I can think of cases where it didn't work well, but at least the politician is showing them some respect. I can't say as I was paying a lot of attention, but I didn't notice Harris doing that this campaign. Rather, they were raising money like crazy, and she doesn't seem to have taken the necessary step of changing that money into votes. I think that goes back to credibility, which has been in short supply since Clinton started triangulating. Even if it seemed to be working, as with Clinton and Obama, you look back years later, and see what the donors got out of the process, but can't remember what you got.

    Clinton like to quote Harry Truman as saying, "if you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote Democratic." Problem there is that when folk start living like Republicans, they start voting Republican, so you lose them -- especially the snots who will kick the ladder out so no one else can follow them (which, by the way, seems to be part of the problem why Democrats are losing Latino voters). Meanwhile, the people who didn't make it up start blaming you, and some of them vote Republican (or just don't vote) just to spite you, so it's lose-lose.

  • Nicholas Nehamas/Andrew Duehren: [11-09] Harris had a Wall Street-approved economic pitch. It fell flat. "The vice president vacillated on how to talk about the economy, and ended up adopting marginal pro-business tweaks that both corporate and progressive allies agreed made for a muddled message." I wonder if her late start didn't have something to do with this. She wound up spending way too much time talking to donors, and not enough to voters. She adopted much of what the former told her, and little from the latter. Most campaigns shift from one focus to the other (then the donors get a second shot after the votes are counted), but she was relentlessly, obsessively fundraising up to the very end. That worked to raise a lot of funds, but they never managed to turn those funds into votes -- possibly because the interests aren't the same. Or maybe she had enough time and help to figure things out, but just liked the donors more. And wanted more to impress them, perhaps because that's where her personal future lies (now more than ever).

  • Lydia Polgreen/Tressie McMillan Cottom: [11-07] Democrats had a theory of the election. They were wrong. Transcript of a conversation between two of their non-right opinion columnists:

    Polgreen: On Tuesday we found out that the nation really, really wanted a change. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency, but Republicans took the Senate and made gains in blue states like my home state of New York and big gains in New York City, too. . . .

    McMillan Cottom: I don't live in New York full time, I live in the South. I spent a lot of time with working-class people, people living in the mountains and rural parts of the country. And I also saw a sort of acceptance and integration of Donald Trump's vision of an America where no one has to give up anything to win. And it appeals a lot to Hispanic voters, to working-class voters, especially working-class men. It appealed a lot to people in rural parts of the state of all races. That concerned me and concerned me the entire campaign.

    Polgreen: I think I was a bit more optimistic, in part because, to me, this election really turned on this question of who has a stake in the system as it currently exists and who feels that they could benefit from just blowing it all up. . . .

    I think I felt hopeful that here we had a generic Democrat who had these plain vanilla policies that were not that exciting. They tried to address around the edges some of the issues that people needed from government.

    I thought maybe that could work. Maybe there's just enough chaos, just enough of a sense that this is too dangerous. That gamble was just wrong, and ultimately you were right.

    McMillan Cottom: Again, I take no pleasure in that because if I am right, I am right because I thought -- and now have evidence -- that the anger that Americans feel cannot be directed toward the truth.

    More interesting things in here, including:

    Polgreen: The other thing is that we are living in this zero-sum moment where people think giving something to someone else means taking something away from me.

    There was that moment where JD Vance was talking about how if immigrants made countries rich, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the richest city in the world, and the United States would be the richest country in the world. Well, news flash, the United States is the richest country in the world. . . .

    McMillan Cottom: One of the things that JD Vance is actually very good at that Donald Trump is not good at, is he figured out how to take something that is a problem about relative differences and make it feel like an absolute loss.

    The point here isn't that Vance is really clever, but that he finds a way to get back to his basic campaign proposition. He's not unique -- I've seen Bernie Sanders do this many times, but the secret here is not dogged repetition, but having a point to get back to. Continuing:

    McMillan Cottom: But that relative loss, despite the fact that objectively, they are still doing OK, is enough when turned into anxiety and fear and aggression, which Donald Trump is very good at doing, feels like an emotional catharsis. And then JD Vance comes behind and says, "Not only are you losing, but yes, your loss is coming because someone else is gaining."

    What we do not have on the other side, to your point, is either a center or center-left and, I'd even argue, a Democratic center-right story that captures that emotion in the same kind of way.

    Also:

    Polgreen: Yeah. And I think that the idea that the Democratic Party has to work within a set of defined rules of the existing order is just a brain disease.

    I had initially skipped over all the New York Times pundits, until I was pointed here by:

    • Steve M.: [11-07] Voters think every party is the leopards eating people's faces party:

      What this suggests to me is that millions of voters didn't think they were voting on a choice between chaos and stability. They think both parties destabilize the country. So they chose Trump's promise of a form of destabilization they found appealing over the status quo, which they see as an unappealing destabilization.

      In the famous meme, a supporter of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party says, "I never thought leopards would eat MY face." Donald Trump won because millions of voters think Democratic policies lead leopards to eat their faces, and Trump's policies will make leopards eat the faces of people they don't like.

      In particular, young men of all ethnicities think liberal culture has created a pro-queer gynocracy that's eating the faces of straight males. They want leopards to eat the faces of people they think are benefiting in this culture. . . .

      A majority of Hispanic men appear to have voted for Trump despite the fact that some will be caught up in his crackdown on undocumented immigrants. These Trump voters believe that only the undocumented will have their faces eaten, and they're fine with that. (Harris campaigned on a border crackdown, so she didn't talk much about how heavy-handed Trump's immigration policies are likely to be.)

      Trump chose popular victims of the leopards -- women, trans people, immigrants, criminals. Democrats could have chosen the rich, but bashing the rich reportedly scares some moderates. It sets off alarm bells in the "liberal" commentariat and reduces the big-money contributions that are necessary for Democrats to run one of our country's staggeringly expensive presidential campaigns.

      A day earlier, M. also wrote:

    • [11-06] Trump is a toxically masculine Andy Kaufman, and other unorganized thoughts: "A few thoughts on one of the worst days in American history." Section heads (some with a bit of quote):

      • Eeyore: I was right to be pessimistic, and it's clear that I should have remained pessimistic even after Kamala Harris entered the race.
      • Democrats and Republicans agree that Democrats are bad [longer quote to follow]
      • Maybe ground game is meaningless
      • But didn't voters think Trump is crazy?
      • Which brings me to Biden: But the race might have been different for her or Biden if Biden had been able to persuade voters that he cared and was working hard to make their lives better [but he couldn't, and she wouldn't].
      • And also, America is massively sexist: I don't think I'll live to see a female president. There are too many trad Christians and too many whiny boy-men -- and they just elected the biggest whiny boy-man of them all.

      The point about Democrats cited a comment from Frank Wilhoit that is worth quoting here:

      People vote their emotional compulsions, which, by definition, are purely destructive; that is why all voting is negative-partisan. Trump will get one vote: his own. The votes that are recorded as his will be votes against, not Kamala Harris, but the Democratic Party and its constituencies. Comparably, Harris will get no votes at all; the votes that are recorded as hers will be votes against, not Trump, but the Republican Party and its constituencies.

      History is on the side of the Republicans here, because they understand what is going on; that is why they focus exclusively upon degrading the Democratic brand. We do not understand. . . . We should have spent every moment of the past forty-five years screaming total rejection of the "conservative" pseudophilosophy, and nothing else. . . .

      It is too late now; one cannot suddenly "discover" a problem that has been in being for decades and try to whip up any urgency around it.

    • Patrick Healy/David French: [11-06] It's time to admit America has changed: Two more conservative New York Times pundits discuss the election.

  • Norman Solomon: [11-07] Democrats ignored every warning and the results are catastrophic: "Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension."

  • Andrew Prokop:

    • [11-06] One striking pattern hidden in the election results: "Were voters rejecting Democrats -- or just the Biden-Harris administration?" Or, I have to ask, just Harris? I haven't entertained the possibility, at least in print, that they simply don't trust a person with any/all of her attributes, which most obviously include: woman, color, from California, both parents immigrants. None of that bothers me, nor does it bother most people, and nearly all of the people who think of such things were going to vote Trump anyway, but if you can't win the kind of landslide you deserve on issues alone, maybe think about that. As for the pattern:

      But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there's a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump.

    • [11-06] Why Kamala Harris lost: "Trump won because Harris inherited a tough situation from Joe Biden -- and ultimately could not overcome it." I'll nominate this piece for a bracket elimination tournament to find the most intellectually lazy explanation for the loss. He offers three reasons: a global trend ("in the years since the pandemic, incumbent parties have been struggling in wealthy democracies across the world"); "Biden's unpopularity" (which Harris "had to figure out what to do about that"); and "Harris's own record," by which he means Harris's 2019 presidential campaign, when she "embraced progressive policy positions that Democrats now view as politically toxic." As I've said, I don't know what the answer is, but it's got to be something more than that. As for the "tough situation" Biden left Harris in, his only detail was that Israel-Gaza had "divided Democrats' coalition." (I'd submit that it didn't divide the coalition that actually identified as Democrats, but it turned off a lot of other voters that Harris needed.)

    • [11-11] The debate over why Harris lost is in full swing. Here's a guide. "Was she a weak candidate? Was it Joe Biden's fault? Did Trump have unexpected strength? Or was it a global trend?" This appeared too late for me to explore, but I have one suggestion: instead of looking for things that might have moved the needle a point or two, start from the assumption that Trump (and most Republicans) were be any objective criteria so bad they should have lost by at least 10, possibly 20 points, and see if you can identify any problems at that scale? I'd start with money and media structure, and then consider the difficulties of establishing trust against those odds. Harris wasn't a weak candidate so much as one not strong enough to overcome those bigger obstacles. Same for Biden, who had some additional weaknesses that Harris only partly made up for. We can go on down the list, but we keep coming back to what happened to the world to make Trump seem credible, while Harris was ultimately judged by many to be some kind of phony.

  • Nathan J Robinson: [11-06] Once again, the Democratic leadership has failed us all: "In 2016, we warned that Hillary Clinton's campaign was not resonating with Americans. In 2024, we warned about Kamala Harris, and we were ignored again. Now, the worst has happened. So, what do we do? A leftist analysis can help us chart a path forward."

    Since we're here, let's file some "I told you so" links cited in the article:

  • Bret Stephens: [11-06] A party of prigs and pontificators suffers a humiliating defeat: I can't stand Stephens, who even spoils his conversations with Gail Collins -- their latest, The Trump era never really ended, has a title that could develop into interesting analysis, but doesn't. This piece, too, is mostly crap, but he gives you a good taste of how the Republican mindset caricatures Democrats. (Do you suppose his Harris endorsement was another plant? He doesn't seem to have the faculties to have based it on reason -- well, as he explains later in the piece, his first reason for voting for Harris was Ukraine, followed by trade policy. The only time Republicans ever go bipartisan is when they suspect an opportunity to make Democrats look bad to their voters.) Here's a sample:

    The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. [bogus examples follow, starting with trans athletics]

    The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today's left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don't like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

    Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. [more bogus examples] And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

    Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how's that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

    This is massively unfair, but it's the bread and butter of right-wing media, so Democrats have to get better at handling it. That doesn't mean inching closer to Republicans, not least because that never works, but better framing is possible, and trust-building is essential. I don't see that working with a hack like Stephens, but most people are more open-minded than him (or minded, for that matter).

  • Bhaskar Sunkara: [11-08] The Democrats lost because they ran a weak and out of touch campaign: "The party, increasingly divorced from workers, leaned too much on an activist base instead of a voting base."

  • Michael Tomasky: [11-06] Latino men were the big defectors -- but they weren't the only ones: "Here's how Harris failed to replicate Biden's 2020 victory over Trump."

  • Bernie Sanders: Sanders endorsed and campaigned for Harris. After the election he posted this:

    It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right.

    Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

    I don't have the links handy, but right after Sanders made his statement about Democrats abandoning the working class, I saw a bunch of flak on Twitter charging Sanders with hypocrisy because during the campaign he praised Biden's record for labor (most pro-labor president since . . . ?). Pretty low bar, but during a campaign you take what you can get. Afterwards, you go back to what you want, which is a candidate who is more effective for working people. Sanders wants that. His detractors don't seem to.

    Other articles that focused on Sanders:

    • Jessica Corbett: [11-07] Sanders slams 'big money interests' that control Democratic Party after loss to Trump.

    • Krystal Kyle: [11-06] Bernie would have won: "The Democratic smothering of the Bernie coalition reaped its reward today."

    • Branko Marcetic: [11-07] Bernie Sanders is right to be incensed at the Democrats.

    • Natalie Shure: [11-12] Bernie would have won. Seriously. "Trump keeps winning because the Democratic party refuses to be the party of the working class." Sanders has one thing that few Democrats have, which is credibility. The counterpoint is that if the Democratic Party had nominated Sanders, rich Democrats like Michael Bloomberg would have bagged the election, throwing it to Trump -- much like previous generations of Democratic elites did to Bryan (1896) and McGovern (1972).

    • Jared Ryan Sears: [reply to a tweet that featured Sanders' post-election statement, the one with charging the Democrats with abandoning the working class]:

      • Unions are the strongest they've been in decades.
      • Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.
      • The child tax credit was expanded.
      • A minimum corporate tax was enacted.
      • A tax on stock buybacks was added.
      • High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.
      • Millions of jobs were created.
      • Unemployment has remained low.
      • Manufacturing returned to the US.
      • Prescription prices were lowered.
      • More Americans have healthcare than ever before.
      • -Billions were given to student debt relief.
      • -The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered Cobra payments, and even directly gave Americans money.

      Let's stop pretending that nothing was done by this administration when it inherited a pandemic, a migrant crisis, and high inflation and managed not only to address all of those issues through Republican obstruction but accomplished much more as well.

      There's always more to do, and mistakes happen, but to act like Democrats abandoned the working class is ridiculous.

      Lots of comments follow, some agreeing with Sanders, but most attacking him, the vitriol especially strong from points farther left -- attacks on his endorsements of Clinton/Biden/Harris (I always filed those under "go along to get along," a game he's played rather skillfully) and charging him with genocide (he did reflexively support Israel after the Oct. 7 revolt, but as it became clear that Netanyahu's game plan was genocide, he has shown exceptional clarity and bravery in opposing US arms to further that genocide). I've generally insisted that people of the left are good-hearted, well-meaning, and thoughtful, but by evidence here, at least a dozen are simple-minded assholes, not unlike thousands (or millions?) on the right.

      PS: On second thought, I think these comments were to Sanders' original thread, not to the Zachary Carter tweet that led me to it. It is quite possible that he is heckled like this all the time, and that the "extreme left" attacks are deceptive trolls. Sorry for opening that can of worms.

Resisting and coping: I've generally put the "what comes next" pieces under Trump (second section), but the corresponding "what do we do now" pieces are likely to have nothing to do with Harris (not that the idea doesn't crop up in the various pieces critical of the Harris campaign). I wasn't really expecting to do this section, but found one piece, and thought there may be more (e.g., I moved the Ganz piece in from elsewhere).

  • John Ganz: [11-06] I hope I'm wrong: "About Trump and other things." Many worthy thoughts in this post:

    There's a political lesson there, too, though, that applies to the present moment: having a clear vision of things, even if it is unpleasant or dark, beats no vision or an unclear one. Trump's campaigns had a clear mythos: a story about what America is and was and where it is going. No Democratic candidate that's run against him has been able to articulate an opposing vision. This is not particular to this or that candidate, although all of them had individual weaknesses. We can litigate that forever. But it's really a problem of American liberalism: liberalism is unsure of itself and ameliorative, it's not a bold vision of the future as it once was in its heyday under LBJ or FDR. Trumpism may be reactionary, but liberalism too, has become too backward-looking -- look at my references in the previous sentence. It longs for an old age of consensus instead of gamely going to war to win a new one. American liberalism has also become a land of smug statisticians and wonks who want to test every proposition and shrink from striking out in a new direction, from testing rhetorical appeals in the public arena rather than the statistical survey. Trump and his campaigns were willing to venture boldly and that's part of what appealed to people. He said, "Follow me and make history," a dubious claim made by others before him, but it excites people.

    He also admits that his command of the history of fascism may not have helped:

    Antifascism is a century-old tradition now and the critics of who see in it a longing to recreate an old order are on to something. It's a politics of memory and meaning that are fading from this world. But it at least has a certain imaginative dimension, it's an ethos: its mythical core contains a struggle between good and evil. Unfortunately, it doesn't resonate at this moment. For voters for whom "democracy" was an issue Harris was the obvious choice, but that wasn't enough people. It's perhaps too idealistic, too abstract and airy, and not focused enough on practical issues, although for me it's a social democratic impulse, uniting the struggle for democracy and people's day-to-day needs. In any case, it's not a story that the American people get anymore.

    He also points out that "resistance" has its legacy rooted in the struggle against fascism, which may not be the best model right now. In particular, Trump's popular margin has given him a clear path to power, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, who used their demagoguery to gain a power base, but in the end resorted to force to seize power.

  • Natasha Lennard: [11-06] The answer to Trump's victory is radical action: "As ever, don't expect the Democratic Party to save us. Now is the time for grassroots action."

  • Nathan J Robinson: [11-14] Here's the silver lining: "Horrible Republican policies are inevitably unpopular and will generate backlash. As Trump's presidency becomes a chaotic failure, a new left movement can rise." While it is a near certainty that Republican policies will fail to solve the problems they target (even by their own measures), and that they will generate backlash that will propel a Democratic resurgence (assuming we still get to vote -- a risk Republicans are all too aware of). But his "the dog that caught the car" metaphor is dead wrong. Republicans know exactly what they want to do with the car once they've caught it. And while Bush in 2000, Reagan in 1980, and Nixon in 1968 offer some precedents, Trump is moving much more aggressively than any previous president-elect.

    Robinson further tweeted: "this is not to diminish the terrible harm that will be done. It's going to be utterly awful, but it may spark unexpected popular uprising that lead to a transformative political movement." I responded:

    The "dog that catches the car" metaphor doesn't work here. Trump may seem clueless -- I've quipped that he doesn't know how to devise "dog whistles"; he's just a dog who responds to them -- but his crew know exactly what they want to do, and are doing it at record speed.

    Another commenter, perhaps facetiously: "Thank you for your role in giving the American people this convenient accelerant. When you think about it, in the end it was Hitler who brought lasting democracy to Germany after the war."

  • Timothy Shenk: [11-08] It's time to resist the resistance: "Resistance" in the sense of reflexive opposition that focuses on Trump personally:

    The origins of Resistance politics go back over a decade, even before Mr. Trump entered politics. In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama's team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. "Let's really lean into Trump here," Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. "That'll be good for us."

    And it was, for a while -- so good that when Mr. Plouffe joined Kamala Harris's campaign over the summer, it still seemed like the basis for a winning coalition. . . .

    But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It's reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.

  • Robert Wright: [11-08] How to fight Trump mindfully. This is good, but that he's actually quoting himself from seven years ago is a bit inauspicious:

    The premise of the Mindful Resistance Project is that understanding and addressing the root causes of Trumpism is important -- so important that we shouldn't let Trump's antics and outrages get in the way of this mission. To put a finer point on it: 1) We need to respond to each day's news about Trump wisely -- with moral clarity and forceful conviction but with awareness of the way overreactions to his provocations can play into his hands. 2) Meanwhile, we need to get a deeper understanding of the forces that led so many people to vote for Trump. These forces include globalization, demographic change, the loss of jobs through automation, and a political polarization that is grounded partly in the tribalizing tendencies of social media. This polarization is also grounded in what you might call the psychology of tribalism, in cognitive biases that afflict us all -- so fostering an understanding of how our minds work will be among the goals of this project.

Senate:

  • Nia Prater: [10-07] Where does control of the US Senate stand? As of Thursday, Republicans defeated Democratic incumbents in Ohio and Montana, and picked up the seat in West Virginia (not reported here), with races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada still undecided (with Pennsylvania looking like another Republican gain).

House of Representatives: I thought I'd have more in this section, including specific races, but I never even got around to looking at the numbers.

Other election matters:

Other Republicans:

  • Griffin Eckstein: [11-09] Jones calls for "Nuremberg Two" against Democrats following Trump win: "The conspiracy theorist and radio host said the Trump DOJ had a mandate from God to prosecute Dems." The subhed is no surprise, but the invocation of "Nuremberg" shows a mind-boggling level of ignorance (specifically, about Nazi Germany) and contempt for truth, and indeed for everyone. Of course, that's hardly news with this guy.

  • Adam Clark Estes: [11-07] We're all living inside Elon Musk's misinformation machine now: "As Musk gains even more power, X gains more influence." More on Musk and Big Tech:

    • John Herrman: [11-08] Big Tech's loyalty era: "Elon Musk's big bet paid off. Tech leaders are adjusting -- and warming -- to a new reality."

    • Timothy Noah: [11-08] Dump Twitter: "If you stick with Elon Musk, you're complicit."

      Whatever you call it, the social media site was Musk's primary tool to elect Trump. In Bloomberg's Tech Daily newsletter for November 7, Kurt Wagner writes that Musk "turned his feed into a Trump-inspired billboard for his more than 200 million followers," that it "became a major source of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories," that Musk "re-shared posts from the former president's supporters, not all of them accurate," and that Musk turned X into "a much more powerful version of Truth Social."

      Still, hard for me to see how shutting down my account, with 3000 posts, 650 followers, and 49 following, is going to make a dent in Musk's bottom line, much less his brain.

  • John Feffer: [10-30] The cruelty of crowds: "The far right has weaponized the Internet."

  • Casey Wetherbee: [11-03] The GOP playbook for sabotaging environmental regulations.

Other Democrats:

  • Kate Aronoff:

  • Ryan Cooper: [11-07] Time for Democrats to abandon the mainstream media: "The 'liberal media' was in the tank for Trump. Democrats should take their subscription dollars elsewhere."

  • Nicole Narea: [11-07] Why Democrats couldn't sell a strong economy, in 3 charts: "Top-line indicators pointed to cooling inflation and a strong economy. What did Democrats miss?" Section heads:

    • There was a real inflation backlash (even though chart shows that "overall wage growth has outpaced inflation")
    • The job market is tougher (chart shows: "more people are facing long-term unemployment")
    • Americans have less money and are taking on more debt (chart: "Americans are saving less after the pandemic"; doesn't look like much less, after a big spike during the pandemic, but credit card debt and delinquency rates are up)

    By the way, here's more on the credit card thing:

    • Steve M: [11-08] The election explained, in two charts. I probably missed the significance of this because I don't have any credit card debt, and had no idea the interest rates were this high (21.9%, up from a little over 14% just a year ago?). Part of the problem has to do with Biden reappointing Trump's Fed Chair pick, but the larger part is that we got rid of the anti-usury laws that used to provide a cap on this kind of loansharking. Harris could have came out with an anti-usury platform, and when questioned about it, told folk to look it up in the Bible. That, plus writing off most student debt -- which only exists due to political malfeasance, and which while Biden attempted some remedies, Harris hardly ever talked about -- would have had much broader and more tangible appeal than the silly notion of exempting tip income (a Trump idea that Harris adopted and helped legitimize -- every time you create a haven for untaxable income, you undermine our ability to tax the rich. How hard would it have been to point out that if we taxed rich folk at levels they had to pay before they paid off politicians for their tax cuts, people who depend on tips to make up for subminimal wages, as well as everyone else who is underpaid in America, could be taxed less, and get better benefits in the bargain?

      By the way, M. points out (and I can relate, not least by being a bit older):

      Ordinary people were already struggling more than their parents, then inflation struck in 2021. It hurt incumbent parties all over the world.

      Yes, it has receded in America. Yes, we now have the strongest economy in the world.

      But the two charts at the top of this post show how the economy looks to people who were already struggling to pay their bills every month when inflation hit. In all likelihood, they pulled out credit cards to buy necessities, and now they can't pay those credit cards off.

      My wife and I can afford to pay our credit card bills in full every month, but I don't look down on people who can't. If your family is bigger than ours, if you're younger (we're in our sixties), if you've ever had a stretch of unemployment or big medical bills, you have it harder than we did. If you went to college or grad school in the past twenty years, you'd be shocked at how small our student loan burden was in the 1970s.

      By economists' criteria, this is a booming economy. It's pretty sweet for people who can afford it. But I completely understand that it doesn't look so sweet if you're living paycheck to paycheck.

      I tried to run a one-person business for a while in my twenties and early thirties and got myself in debt. It sucks. It sucks to pay a partial bill and see no decrease in the debt because the interest keeps compounding and compounding. I managed to get out of that debt and never looked back, but when you're in the thick of it, it's miserable.

      If you've never been in that situation, count your blessings. If you think everyone who gets into debt is a bad person, well, I guess I was a bad person.

  • Wiley Nickel: [11-11] What should Democrats do now? Form a shadow cabinet. "The venerable British institution of the opposition would serve America well today." I've loved this idea ever since I first found out about it. It's more natural in a parliamentary democracy than it would be in America, but it could be done here, and it would give Democrats some leadership visibility in each specific area of government. Nickel is proposing drawing the cabinet from Congress members, which would make it a lot like the committee minority members. I think it would be better for the DNC to organize and raise money for a shadow government, mostly of technical experts (which could include some notables, like Pete Buttigieg in Transportation, or Robert Reich in Labor, or former members of Congress), selected by the Democratic caucus in Congress, possibly adding Democratic governors, maybe even party chairs in the underrepresented-but-still-important red states.

  • Osita Nwanevu: [11-08] The long Obama era is over: "The democrats must learn to speak to voters who don't believe in the politics of old and aren't interested in returning to it." I never thought of there being any "Obama era," probably because he made so little effort at delineating it from the "Clinton era," which he jumped the line on to little if any practical effect. The more customary term for them both, on through Biden and Harris, is "neoliberalism," except that one already lost its cachet before Biden.

    The long Obama era is over. The familiar homilies -- about how there are no red states or blue states and Americans share a set of common values and working institutions novelly and externally threatened by agents of chaos like Trump -- never described political reality. They now no longer work reliably even as political messaging. The hunt should be on for alternatives.

    The word "homilies" is striking here. Obama specialized in them, as if he had to constantly remind us that he was utterly conventional, someone who could be counted on to always say the correct thing. I remember my surprise at one point when Trump made fun of Obama for always ending his speeches with "God bless America." It's the most anodyne statement ever for an American politician, and yet it gives these yokels, who claim to put God and America above all else, an excuse to laugh at him.

  • Paul Waldman: [11-10] Voters punished Biden for problems he didn't cause and effectively addressed: But for some reason couldn't talk coherently about, some of which can be attributed to age, some to his usual awkwardness, but also also to the problem that Democrats have to speak both to donors and to voters, two groups that want to hear different things, a task that even the most eloquent of Democrats have trouble pulling off. Alternate title, which I clicked on before arriving here, is "Trump is about to take credit for Biden's accomplishments."

  • Stephen Wertheim: [11-11] The Cheney-loving Democratic party needs a reckoning about war: "Election outcomes have multiple causes, of course. Yet foreign polilcy was one of the reasons Americans gave Trump the largest Republican victory in decades."

  • Matthew Yglesias: [11-12] A Common Sense Democrat manifesto: This seemed monumental enough to sneak in the day after. I was pointed here by Jonathan Chait, who tweeted: "I think (or at least hope) this will be an important reference document going forward." (Nathan Robinson heckled back: "shouldn't you probably shut up for a while," with a link to Chait's October 8 article: The race is close because Harris is running a brilliant campaign: "Stop complaining; the centrism is working.") Chait probably likes it because Yglesias's neoliberalism is showing, and because it's written in ways that signal anti-left bias. But the "principles" aren't so bad:

    Different people have different views and different priorities, and principles need to be loose enough to accommodate some differences. But I also don't want these to be total platitudes; I want some people to read them and think, "Fuck this, I don't agree." Over the next few weeks, I'll share posts elaborating on each one individually, but in the meantime, these are the principles I'd like to see the Democratic party embrace:

    1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

    2. The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

    3. Climate change -- and pollution more broadly -- is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

    4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone's identity groups over their individuality.

    5. Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people's basic freedom to live as they choose.

    6. Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

    7. Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

    8. Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

    9. All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

    Before getting to his list, Yglesias explains (and here I'll add my comments in brackets):

    Being a Democrat should mean caring more than Republicans about the lives of poor people, about equal rights and non-discrimination, about restraining big business in matters related to pollution and fraudulent practices, and about protecting social insurance for the elderly and disabled. [I'd add everyone else to "poor people," but you could just say 99% if villains are politically useful. Proper, not means-tested, social insurance becomes more valuable as you go up the income scale.]

    These are important progressive ideas, and because they are important progressive ideas, I think that anyone who identifies as a leftist or a progressive should vote for Democrats. [So why try so hard to drive us away? The charge that leftists are all-or-nothing is easily disproven.]

    But that doesn't mean that Democrats' agenda should be driven by those on the far left [or the right, or corporate neoliberalism, or identity groups, or any faction; it should be driven by problems and practical solutions]. A big-tent Democratic coalition needs leftists. But left-wing candidates are rarely winning tough elections, and too often, they're not improving governance of the solidly blue places where they're elected. [Leftists face many obstacles from entrenched forces, including donor-seeking Democrats, but even so, is this really a valid generalization?] . . .

    Most elected Democrats are not, themselves, actually that far left, and when faced with acute electoral peril, they swiftly ditch ideas like defund the police or openness to unlimited asylum claims [which are effectively caricaturs of leftist ideas, propagated to militate against the left]. But what they haven't generally done is publicly disavow the kind of simplistic disparate impact analysis that leads to conclusions like policing is bad. Similarly, the Democrats are not a degrowth party. [Degrowth is an idea that deserves consideration, but isn't a left political position.] When good GDP numbers come in, Joe Biden and his team celebrate them -- they believe in taking credit for strong growth. But even without being a degrowth party, Democrats are heavily influenced by the views of major environmentalist organizations that do have a degrowth ideology at their core.

    Critics on the right charge that Democrats are in the grips of radical ideology, but the truth is more boring: Many elected officials are just not particularly rigorous thinkers (think of how much backbench Republicans have shifted on various policies since Trump took over). Most only really understand a few issues and do a lot of going along to get along. . . .

    Winning elections is important, because if you don't win, you can't govern. [But if you win on the basis of bad ideas that don't work, your governing will have accomplished nothing, and you'll lose again -- at least until the other party reminds people of their own incompetence.]

    The Republican Party is basically just a racket: they lie, cheat, and steal, whatever it takes to ascend to power, so they can lie, cheat, and steal some more. Democrats have to run against Republicans, but they are also expected to tell the truth, to work earnestly for the public good, and to deliver tangible results. Democrats need the left, not just as reliable votes against Republicans, but because the left has useful ideas to solve or at least ameliorate problems that bedevil us. This repeated cycle of "centrist" or "neoliberal" -- Chait prefers the former term, while Yglesias is one of the few who actually embraces the latter -- blaming the left for many failures of the high-roller Democrats they favor needs to stop. Democrats need to figure out how to sell viable solutions to the people, and to deliver them once they are elected. Since most of those solutions come from the left, they need to stop demonizing the left, and start treating us as respectable and honorable.

    PS: Chait just wrote A farewell to New York, so with his new gig at The Atlantic, I guess I won't have him to kick around any more. One more reason not to subscribe.

Israel: This has been my top section ever since Oct. 7, 2023, only pushed down due to the election.

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

Ukraine and Russia:

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:

  • Lukas Scholle: [11-09] Germany's coalition collapsed, but recession is here to stay: "German chancellor Olaf Scholz has dismissed his finance minister, Christian Lindner, pitching the country toward elections. Economic woes will be at the center of the campaign -- yet proposals for a break with austerity are are conspicuously absent."

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

  • Washington Post: [11-11] Nations gather for UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.

    As nations gather at this year's talks, which are scheduled to run until Nov. 22, delegates will also have to contend with their countries' failure so far to deliver on the central pledge of last year's negotiations. The United States, for one, is producing more oil than any country, ever -- a trajectory expected to accelerate when Trump returns to the White House.

Other stories:

  • Kyle Chayka: [10-30] The banality of online recommendation culture: "A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations." I didn't have time to write about this piece last week, and don't have time now, but being a guy who both writes and consumers self-styled "consumer guides," this is obviously up my alley. Also as a software engineer, I might note that I was thinking about algorithmic approaches to sharing preference information before many of the better known systems for aggregating such data became available -- none of which, needless to say, I find particularly useful.

    • Ruby Justice Thelot: [09-11] In praise of gatekeeping: "Why we need gatekeepers to resist cultural hyper-optimization." I found this in an open tab next to the Chayka article, so thought I should keep it. I'm not sure that the specifics matter to me. Also, the phrase is a bit loaded. The people I know (or at least the ones I follow) are more likely to be door-openers than gatekeepers.

Obituaries

Books

Chatter

  • Joshua Frank: [10-24] I wrote a book on how John Kerry blew the 2004 election by catering to the right, ignoring the antiwar vote, and outhawking Bush. Twenty years later, Kamala Harris is following the same losing playbook.

  • Aaron Maté: [10-27] If I were the Harris campaign I'd be playing this clip of Trump refusing to support a minimum wage hike on loop. Instead they're palling around with the Cheneys and yelling "fascist" at every turn.

  • David Sirota: [10-29] This is so far beyond parody that you could convince me it's a bit. [Response to Hillary Clinton: New Yorkers: Donald Trump may have Madison Square Garden, but we have Carnegie Hall.]

  • David Klion: [10-31] I'm confused why the Harris campaign thinks it's a good idea to send Bill Clinton to Michigan days before the election to lecture Arab and Muslim voters on the ancient Jewish claim to "Judea and Samaria."

  • Matt Duss: [10-31] It's ridiculous for Trump to claim to be the anti-war candidate and it's also ridiculous that that lane has been left wide open for him.

  • Eric Levitz: [11-96] Interesting how much rightwing propaganda outperforms leftwing propaganda across formats. It's not just that Fox beats MSNBC and the right dominates radio: As Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Rogan illustrate, podcasters tend to discover they can maximize their audience by moving right.

  • The Onion: Breaking News: The Onion on the verge of collapse after not being able to make up stuff that is more idiotic than the current reality in our political lives in these United States!

  • Rick Perlstein: [11-12] Don't quit Twitter. Ignoring fascist spaces is bad. Silence impliles assent, shuts down witness of the lies they're devising & the plans they're hatching. Don't initiate threads; the algo will just bury them. Tell the truth in threads, like leafletting an occupied French village.

  • Jeet Heer: [11-12] [Comment in response to Wally Nowinski, who offered a chart I can't read, and said: "Old white folks moved toward Kamala. Every other group moved towards Trump."] This is exactly the result you would get if you ran a pro-system, pro-status quo, hug-the-Cheneys campaign: improvement from those most invested in the system, alienating everyone else.

    [Actually, I find this interesting, perhaps because I belong to the "old white folks" demographic. Could it be that we weren't tuned into social media, so missed a lot of the lies, while we relied on more conventional news sources? Or maybe his point is to lambast us, while blaming the groups with the largest shifts to Trump (topped by black men) on the Harris campaign?]

  • db: [11-13] [illustration is House map, showing Republicans with 218 seats, clinching the majority, vs. 208 for Democrats] We did it! Worst possible world. thank you Kamala, thank you Joe, thank you Barack, and thank you to the DNC for strangling left populism in the crib and all but assuring this outcome! Couldn't have done it without you!

  • Rick Perlstein: [11-14] I have decided that I hate the adjective "unserious" as shorthand for "evil person who is stupid and dangerous and wrong about everything." The people it is purported to describe are plenty serious.

  • Dean Baker: [11-15] It's pretty funny to hear Trump boasting about his huge mandate. No Democrats has ever been elected president with a smaller mandate. I guess we can't expect a reality TV show star to be very good with numbers.
    [Later amended: "sorry, forgot about John Kennedy."]

Allen Lowe [11-07] Facebook post that somehow I managed to see on [11-15], but worth keeping for later:

One of the most annoying results of the election are those who are now standing up and saying the Democrats are gone and corrupt and that's it. Well, I'm not going to join the party of Jill Stein. And the Democrats still have a demographic advantage and still won a large percentage of the votes, and I don't care what you think, they are the only hope. Even Bernie Sanders agrees.

So I don't want to hear about how the billionaires would've won either way. I want to hear about how Biden basically eliminated 50% of child poverty only to be rebuffed by the Republicans when the law wasn't renewed. I want to hear about this huge infrastructure bill which is employing so many people and helping to make unemployment incredibly low. I want to hear about social welfare which flourishes under the Democrats because the agencies make appointments staffed by good people who take care of poor and disabled people. The Republicans staff them with people bent on destroying them and harming people like my disabled son.

I thought we learned our lessons during the prior Trump administration, when those who had told us that Hillary and Trump were the same slunk into the corner with their tails between their legs. Now they're coming out to try to tell us this is what they predicted all along.

Ridiculous, but it does show that many of them secretly hope the United States will sink into oblivion so a revolution will rise from the ashes. More people have to suffer so they can justify their own hallucinatory politics.The only thing that will rise from the ashes is more death and destruction.

Some good comments, like this one by Brian Simontacchi:

I think this is relevant to our conversation yesterday, so I'll just chime in and rebut a couple of your points:

  1. Biden did some very good things, shockingly. My expectations weren't high initially. He exceeded them easily
  2. As long as they try to prevent this outcome, I'll be supportive of Democrats and hold their feet to the fire at the same time. I can walk and chew gum
  3. Billionaires always win. Why spend all that money for no return?
  4. I think it's clear no lessons have been learned at all

I feel like you're working backwards from the conclusion that the outcome determines the causality. I don't think that. I think people, highly susceptible to misinformation and visceral tribalism, are easily manipulated, and Trump and his echo chamber are quite good at pressing those buttons. I think people change their minds with what they think is happening in the news and to them, and they don't care as much about a global or local responsibility to stability, if they ever did. When the billionaires make the global economic trends, they determine which professions and trades are most distressed and how those people will likely respond in an election. Its all coordinated; things will get worse before they get worse.

I'm just here to diagnose trends and be honest. I have no soft spot for billionaires or politicians. I want peace for my neighbors but I have to understand what's happening. Frankly, I have no loyalty to either party, only to harm reduction which I can't even impact from a blue state. If we can't have consistent progress, I'll settle for harm reduction, even though that is not my ultimate goal, or my responsibility to successive generations.

I hope we can talk about this amicably. If we can't, I'll cease and desist.

As best I recall, I've been pretty consistent in believing that Biden, and later Harris, would defeat Trump, but I saw one scenario as particularly ominous: if the wars in Ukraine and Israel drag on through election day (as they have now done), I predicted that many voters would desperately search for an alternative, which could tip the election to Trump. I relaxed my prediction a bit when Harris replaced Biden, figuring she would be seen as less culpable, but she was in Biden's administration, was involved in much of its disastrous foreign policy, and made little if any effort to distance herself from its failures. Worse still, she started campaigning with hawks like Liz Cheney.

I figured I should go back and find the quotes. I've found several bits I wrote on a possible Trump win, so I'll include them here. The main one was from July 24 (actually quoting a July 18 letter), but we'll keep them in order, starting with this one (I'm adding bold in a couple spots):

June 22, 2024:

I find it impossible to believe that most Americans, when they are finally faced with the cold moment of decision, will endorse the increasingly transparent psychopathology of Donald Trump. Sure, the American people have been seduced by right-wing fantasy before, but Reagan and the Bushes tried to disguise their aims by spinning sunny yarns of a kinder, gentler conservatism.

Even Nixon, who still outranks Trump as a vindictive, cynical bastard, claimed to be preserving some plausible, old-fashioned normality. All Trump promises is "taking back" the nation and "making America great again": empty rhetoric lent gravity (if not plausibility) by his unbridled malice toward most Americans. Sure, he got away with it in 2016, partly because many people gave him the benefit of doubt but also because the Clinton spell wore off, leaving "crooked Hillary" exposed as a shill for the money-grubbing metro elites. But given Trump's media exposure, both as president and after, the 2024 election should mostly be a referendum on Trump. I still can't see most Americans voting for him.

That doesn't mean Trump cannot win, but in order to do so, two things have to happen: he has to make the election be all about Biden, and Biden has to come up seriously short. One can ponder a lot of possible issues that Biden might be faulted for, and come up with lots of reasons why they might but probably won't matter. (For example, the US may experience a record bad hurricane season, but will voters blame Biden for that and see Trump as better?) But we needn't speculate, because Biden already has his albatross issue: genocide in Gaza. I'm not going to relitigate his failures here, but in terms of my "optimistic view," I will simply state that if Biden loses -- and such an outcome should be viewed not as a Trump win but as a Biden loss -- it will be well deserved, as no president so involved in senseless war, let alone genocide, deserves another term.

So it looks like the net effect of my optimism is to turn what may look like a lose-lose presidential proposition into a win-win. We are currently faced with two perilous prospects: on the one hand, Biden's penchant for sinking into foreign wars, which he tries to compensate for by being occasionally helpful or often just less miserable on various domestic policies; on the other, Republicans so universally horrible we scarcely need to list out the comparisons. Given that choice, one might fervently hope for Biden to win, not because we owe him any blanket support, but because post-election opposition to Biden can be more focused on a few key issues, whereas with Trump we're back to square one on almost everything.

But if Biden loses, his loss will further discredit the centrist style that has dominated the Democratic Party at least since Carter. There are many problems with that style, most deriving from the need to serve donors in order to attract them, which lends them an air of corruption, destroying their credibility. Sure, Republicans are corrupt too, even more so, but their corruption is consistent with their values -- dog-eat-dog individualism, accepting gross inequality, using government to discipline rather than ameliorate the losers -- so it comes off as honest, maybe even courageous. But Democrats are supposed to believe in public service, government for the people, and that's hard to square with their individual pursuit of power in the service of wealth.

So, sure, a Trump win would be a disaster, but it would free the Democrats from having to defend their compromised, half-assed status quo, and it would give them a chance to pose a genuine alternative, and a really credible one at that. I'd like to think that Democrats could get their act together, and build that credible alternative on top of Biden's half-hearted accomplishments. It would be nice to not have to start with the sort of wreckage Trump left in 2021, or Bush left in 2009, or that other Bush left in 1993 (and one can only shudder at the thought of what Trump might leave us in 2029). But people rarely make major changes based on reasoned analysis. It usually takes a great shock to force that kind of change -- like what the Great Depression did to a nation previously in love with Herbert Hoover, or like utter defeat did to Germany and Japan in WWII.

If there was any chance that a Trump win in 2024 would result in a stable and prosperous America, even if only for the 51% or so it would take for Republicans to continue winning elections, we might have something to be truly fearful of. But nothing they want to do works. The only thing they know how to do is to worsen problems, which are largely driven by forces beyond their control -- business, culture, climate, war, migration -- and all their lying, cheating, and outright repression only rub salt into the wounds. When people see how bad Republican rule really is, their support will wither rapidly.

The question is what Democrats have to do to pick up the support of disaffected Trumpers. One theory is to embrace the bigotry they showed in embracing Trump. A better one would be promise the grit, integrity, independence, and vision that Trump promised by couldn't deliver on, partly because he's a crook and con man who never cared, but largely because he surrounded himself by Republicans who had their own corrupt and/or deranged agendas.

July 18, 2024:

For what little it's worth, here's my nutshell take on Biden:

  1. If he can't get control of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza by early October, he's going to lose, no matter what else happens. For people who don't understand them, they're bad vibes, so why not blame the guy who was in position to do something about them. That may be unfair, but that's what uninformed voters do. And if you do understand them (which I think I do), Biden doesn't look so good either. He sees Ukraine as a test of resolve, and Israel as a test of loyalty, and those views are not just wrong, they kick in his most primitive instincts.

  2. Otherwise, the election will go to whichever side is most effective at making the election into a referendum on the other side. That should be easy when the other side is Trump, but it gets real hard when most media cycles focus on your age and/or decrepitude. That story is locked in, and isn't going away. When your "good news" is "Biden reads from teleprompter and doesn't fumble," you've lost.

  3. Even if Trump's negatives are so overwhelming that even Biden, incapacitated as he is, beats him (and surely it wouldn't be by enough to shut Trump up), do we really want four more years of this?

September 1, 2024:

Nia Prater: [08-27] RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are joining the Trump transition team: I noted this story last week, dismissing it with "sounds like something, but probably isn't." Here I should note that while it probably isn't, it could actually be something. Kennedy and Gabbard have a lot of traits that discredit them as presidential candidates, but the one thing they do have is pretty consistent antiwar track records, which they are not just committed to, but are eager to use against Biden and Harris, who are not exactly invulnerable to such charges. Moreover, they can say that they left the Democratic Party because they opposed how hawkish the Party had become -- so hawkish that even Trump would be a safer and more sensible foreign policy option. It remains to be seen how credible they'll be, because, well, on most other issues they're nuts, but on this one, they could be more credible than Trump himself to people with real concerns. I've said all along that if Biden doesn't get his wars under control, he will lose in November. The switch to Harris gives Democrats a partial reprieve, but the one thing she is most seriously vulnerable on is the suspicion that Democrats are going to continue saddling us with senseless and hopeless foreign wars. Kennedy and Gabbard could be effective at driving that point home -- sure, not to rank-and-file Democrats, who are generally much more dovish than their leaders, and who are even more wary of Republicans on that count, but to the "undecideds," who know little, even of what little they know.

September 9, 2024:

Robert Wright: [09-26] Is Trump a peacenik? No, but if you're worried that Biden (now Harris) is a bit too fond of war, he says a vote for him will save you from WWIII. And given that American politicians of both parties have long and ignominious histories of lying about wanting peace while blundering into war, and given how little reliable information there is about either, there may be enough gullible but concerned people to tilt the election. Wright reviews some of the contradictions here, and there are much more that could be considered.

I've been worried about just this prospect all along, and I remain worried. I don't have time to explain all the nuances, but very briefly, Biden has done a very bad job of managing US foreign affairs, failing to make any progress dealing with a number of very manageable hostilities (North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, many others) while letting two crises (Ukraine, Gaza) drag into prolonged wars that he seemingly has no interest in ever resolving (at least he doesn't seem to be putting in any effort). The only good thing you can say about his handling of Afghanistan is that he dodged the worst possible option, which was to stick around and keep losing. And while he's made money for the arms and oil industries, both have made the world a much more dangerous place. And then there's China -- do we really need to go there?

One might reasonably think that anyone could have done a better job than Biden has done, but we actually know one person who had every same opportunity, and made them all worse: Donald Trump, the president before Biden. Is there any reason to think that Trump might do better with a second chance? The plus side is that he may be more wary this time of relying on the "deep state" advisers who steered him so badly. (Biden, too, was plagued by their advice, but he seemed to be more in tune with it -- the only changes Biden made in US foreign policy were to reverse Trump's occasional unorthodox lapses, especially what he viewed as softness on Russia.)

On the other hand, Trump brings a unique set of disturbing personal characteristics to the job: he cares more about perception than reality; he wants to be seen as very tough, but he's really just a whiney bitch; he's majorly ignorant, and incoherent on top of that; he's impetuous (but he can usually be talked down, because he rarely has any reasons for what he wants to do); he's vain and narcissistic; he has no empathy with people he meets, so has no idea how to relate with them (e.g., to negotiate any kind of agreement); he has no sympathy for other people, so he has no cares for anything wrong that could happen; he has a weird fascination with using nuclear weapons, so that's one of the things he often has to be talked down from; I know I already said that he's ignorant and implied that he's clueless, but he's also pretty stupid about how most things in the modern world actually work. He does, however, have a keen interest in graft, and a passing admiration for other right-wing demagogues, if only because he admires their art and sees them as his peers. About the only thing I can see as a positive is that he doesn't seem to feel any personal need for war to prove his masculinity -- for that he's satisfied abusing women.

I'm sure there are more, but these at least make the point. After Harris took over, I hoped that she might be held less responsible, and other factors would give her a chance. I also resisted all the hectoring from the left, figuring that's just what we normally do, even if it's not helpful at the moment. Besides, I knew that I couldn't really do anything about it: that the forces in motion were way too powerful for whatever I think to make any difference at all. So I just went with it.

But now I'm left with all these doubts: about my own judgment and understanding, about other people, about the whole notion of sides. I'm getting old, and tired, and frustrated. And while it's premature to say that we have no future, I can't see any viable path for me to continue working like this.

Therefore, this is my last Speaking of Which post. Probably ever, at least not for quite some well. I have a Jazz Poll to run, and that's going to be enough of a time sink to last me to January. I'll keep posting Music Week, probably as long as I'm able, possibly with a new burst of energy but more likely with diminishing returns. The political book I've contemplated for twenty-some years now is definitely dead. Much of it would have been practical advice on how Left Democrats might more effectively frame issues. Clearly, I'm in no position to do that.

I may consider writing up more "blue sky" policy ideas. I've always been very fond of Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, which gives me the perfect subtitle. But each chunk of that would take considerable work to research and whip into shape, and I have little confidence of doing that. The more serious writing project would be to return (or restart) the memoir. I don't know that will be of any interest, but it's a subject I know, have thought about, and often find myself slipping into, and it could be a springboard for anything else I wanted to slip in.

The other obvious project would be to go back and review the several million words I've written (most collected here, from the founding of the notebook and/or blog up to some point in 2022) and see what can be packaged into something useful. A couple people have looked at this, and thrown their hands up in the air. When I look, I see lots of things that still strike me as worthwhile, but I, too, have little idea what to do with them. My ideal solution would be to find an editor willing to work on spec, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that.

If anyone is interested in nattering on about this life decision, you can contact me through the little-used question form.

Original count: 265 links, 26798 words (31647 total)

Current count: 306 links, 31947 words (37699 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.