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Friday, June 27, 2025

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 23 days ago, on June 4.

I've been busy working on the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025, which may seem a bit like "fiddling while Rome burns," but quite frankly, we'd all be much better off catching up with this year's still-remarkable parade of new jazz releases, including another bounty of dusted-off oldies, than we are helplessly watching Fox and CNN regale us with what little they can grasp of the world, and how little they -- let alone the actors and ideologues they report on -- understand of it. Jazz is, after all, music for people who take pleasure in thinking about what gives them pleasure, and often who are willing to expose themselves to the frontiers of human creativity. Politics is something nearly opposite: it hurts to even think about it, in large part because it's hard to recognize as human people who are so full of greed, petty hate, and lust for power, the class of people who promote themselves as others' expense, you know, the "newsmakers."

Note that the long comment on Ezra Klein and the long intro on Israel were written a couple weeks ago -- the latter after the bombing of Iran started, but I haven't tried to update it. Most of the tweets were collected as the popped up. (I could probably build whole posts out of them, but they'd be even more scattered than this forum is.) The music stuff has also been sitting around (but I should update the mid-year lists -- or more likely, I may keep adding to that section). Most of the rest of the comments are of recent vintage, even if the articles are a bit old. No doubt I'm missing some major stories. One I'm aware of is the New York mayoral primary, as a lot of my sources are thrilled by how well Mamdani has fared and/or afraid of what establishment Democrats may try to do to sabotage him. I'm going to go ahead and post whatever I have by bedtime, then return tomorrow to my jazz poll and whatever else I have need of working on.

Israel: I'm loathe to group articles, but there's too much here not to, especially given the rate at which it is piling up. I've been thinking about revolution lately. It's taken me a while because first I had to disabuse myself of the idea that revolutions are good things. That idea was deeply cemented in my brain because first I was taught that the American Revolution was a good thing, overthrowing monarchy and aristocracy to establish an independent self-governing democracy. Then the US Civil War was a second good revolution, as it ended slavery. Such events, as well as less violent upheavals like the New Deal and the movements of the 1960s made for progress towards equal rights and justice for all. Moreover, one could point to revolutions elsewhere that made for similar progress, although they often seemed somewhat messier than the American models. That progress seemed like an implacable tectonic force, driving both revolution and reform. And when you put more pressure on an object than it can resist, it either bends or breaks. So I came to see revolutions not as heroic acts of good intentions overcoming repression but as proof that the old order is hard and can only give way by shattering. France and Russia are the key examples: both absolute monarchies that could not reform, so had to be overturned. China, Vietnam, and Cuba were variations on that same theme. So was Iran, which was harder to see as any kind of shift toward the progressive left.

Meanwhile, leftists became more aware of the downsides of revolution, and wherever feasible more interested in reforms, reducing militancy to ritualized non-violent protest. On the other hand, while right-wingers also protest, they are more likely to escalate to violence, probably because right-wing regimes so readily resort to violence to maintain control. The result is that revolutions are more likely to come from the right these days than from the left. Which can be awkward for people who were brought up to see revolutions as progressive.

I'm bringing this up under Israel because Israel's far-right coalition government, going back to its formation before the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, makes much more sense when viewed as a revolutionary force. The single defining feature of all revolutionary forces is independent of their ideologies, which are all over the map, but has to do with with simple discovery that people previously denied power now find themselves free to test their limits -- which leads them to act to excess, as long as their is no significant resistance.

This may seem surprising given that Netanyahu has been in power off-and-on since the late 1990s. While his sympathies have always been with the far-right fringe of Zionism, and he's consistently pushed the envelope of what's possible in Israel and the world, he has always before exhibited a degree of caution. But since Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who were long identified not just as outsiders but as criminals, joined his coalition, they have effectively driven Israel's agenda: the genocide in Gaza, expropriation and terrorism in the West Bank, military adventurism in Lebanon and Syria, and not starting a war with Iran. Only a truly revolutionary government can go so far off the rails so fast and so carelessly.

Once you dispense with the assumption that revolutions have to be progressive, you'll find plenty of other examples, both left and right, some (like the French) oscillating between two poles, some generated from below (like the French or Russian), some from guerrilla wars (like Cuba and Afghanistan), some were simply gifted (like the Red Army's installation of Kim Il Sung, whose decision to invade the South was not directed by Moscow, nor effectively throttled), or more relevant here Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as chancellor (the main difference between Hindenburg and Netanyahu is that the former died soon and was forgotten, whereas Netanyahu continues as the figurehead for a regime spinning out of control.

One might note that Israel has always been a revolutionary state (more or less). Ben-Gurion was more artful than Netanyahu, but he always wanted much more than he could get, and took every advantage to extend the limits of his power. Had he believed his own rhetoric in 1947 when he was campaigning for the UN partition plan, he would have legitimated his victory in 1950, but instead he still refused to negotiate borders, biding his time while building up the demographic, economic, and military strength to launch future wars (as happened in 1956, 1967, 1982, up to this very day. When his successor, Moshe Sharett, threatened peace, he seized power again and put Israel back on its war path. He was shrewd enough to caution against occupation in 1967, but as soon as war seemed to triumph, he got swept up in the excitement. Nothing stimulates the fanatic fervor of a revolutionary like seeing what you took to be limits melt away. Just look at Hitler after Munich, or Netanyahu after his American allies encouraged his long-dreamt-of program of extermination.

We should be clear that until 2023, Israel's "final solution" was just a dream -- not that it was never acted on (e.g., Deir Yassin), but most dreams, no matter how vile, are harmlessly forgotten. We can date it way back, easily through Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, perhaps to the foundings of Zionism with Herzl. And we know well that settler colonialism, even when one imagines and/or professes benign intentions, is conducive to genocide -- perhaps not inexorably, but we have enough of a sample to draw that conclusion. What allowed Israeli dreams to be turned into action was the realization that the restraints which had inhibited Israeli leaders in the past had lost all force, and could be ignored with no consequences.

• Richard Silverstein [06-06] Shin Bet's Palestinian Proxies Are Gaza Gangsters: I've read a ton of books on Israel/Palestine, but two I never got to but always wished I had are Hillel Cohen's books on Israel's manipulation of Palestinian collaborators: Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (2008), and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967. I imagine the series could continue up to the present day, and will whenever the relevant archives are opened. Given this history, that Israel should be organizing and even arming Palestinian gangs is hardly a surprise, but underscores more forcefully than ever the moral bankruptcy of the occupation. Another lesson that one should draw from this is the realization that if Israel wanted Palestinians to have a stable and docile government, they could easily find people to lead it, and deliver enough respect and dignity to keep those leaders democratically elected. That they don't so isn't due to the intransigent militance of the Palestinian masses, but to their conviction that they can win by grinding the Palestinians into dust.

• Zack Beauchamp [06-13] The Israel-Iran war hinges on three big things: "It's impossible to know how this war will end. But here's how to make sense of it." Section heads: "What is Israel's objective?"; "Can Iran fight back?"; "How does Iran think about the bomb after this?" All of these points are fairly superficial: the first draws way too much on what Israel says, much of which is obviously misleading; the others ignore what Iran says, and especially the question of whether Iran wants to fight back, or even to fight in the first place. Like many critics, this piece attempts to approximate objectivity by hedging while remaining trapped in a profoundly distorted cloud of propaganda. (The word I first thought of was noosphere, but I settled for a plainer term, which puts more emphasis on its distinctly political construction. Beauchamp is not an apologist for Israel, but he is also not fully independent of a society that accepts the legitimacy of hasbara.) Beauchamp followed this piece with more:

  • Zack Beauchamp [06-22]: Three ways Trump's attack on Iran could spin out of control: "How does this war end?" Which, of course, misses the obvious point, which is that Israel doesn't want this (or any) war to end. They'd be happy to keep periodically "mowing the grass," as they did for well over a decade in Gaza, and if that ever blows back on them, they'd be happy to demolish the entire country (especially given that the prevailing winds for nuclear fallout are blowing away from Israel). The only practical limit on Israel's warmaking is financial: as long as the US is willing to foot the bills, and the American political system is effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of pro-Israeli donors, they're happy to fight on, oblivious to the consequences.

  • Zack Beauchamp [06-18] Trump doesn't have a foreign policy: "What he has instead is the promise of chaos." Instincts not reason, a blind faith that chaos will always break in your favor. He surrounds himself with people who tell him he's on a mission from God. And so far he's gotten away with pretty much everything, so doubt and worry are for losers.

  • Eric Levitz [06-23] 3 ways Americans could pay for Trump's war with Iran: "The conflict could take a toll in both blood and money." Section heads: "How Trump's war on Iran could impact the economy"; "Trump's attack has put American soldiers in harm's way"; "Trump may have made an Iranian nuclear weapon more likely." These are all pretty likely, and much more is remotely possible. Israeli/US aggression against Iran is a species of the Madman Theory, which can only work if the other side remains sane. (Indeed, that's true for all deterrence theories.) One problem here is that the more successful you are at decapitating responsible enemy leadership, the more likely you are to promote someone who's lost his marbles.

• Chris Hedges [06-10] Genocide by Starvation. Also led me to:

  • Chris Hedges [02-19] One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: Interview with Omar El Akkad, who wrote a book with that title.

• Tony Karon [06-18] Tony Judt was right about Israel, wrong about the West. Bob Marley did warn us: "As long as we rely on the existing constellations of nation states, decolonization will remain a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained."

  So, all stakeholders need to understand that they're not dealing with the America they knew 30 or 20 or even 10 years ago. The crumbling edifice has entirely collapsed, and is unlikely to return. There will be no Pax Americana, because Washington no longer sees any incentive to taking that level of responsibility for anything. As the President sounds off like a cartoon gangster from an ancient Hollywood movie threatening to murder Iran's leader and to devastate its capital. The only sure bet here is that even if it did manage to topple Iran's regime, the U.S. of today has no interest in sticking around to manage the chaos that would follow. As Trump made clear in a recent speech in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is done with "nation-building." (And as it has proven in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unmatched ability to destroy things is paralleled by epic failure to build anything of use to it on the ruins.

  The end of the article is also worth quoting here:

  Gramsci might have called it a morbid interregnum in which the old is dying but the new is unable to be born. But as the late, great Mike Davis wrote in what turned out to be his farewell missive, "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies . . . Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today's maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands."

  Which means humanity only has a future to the extent that it can take power from those destructive hands, and collectively chart a different course independent of the tumor-stricken ruling classes called out by Davis.

  By the way, my favorite line in the Davis piece comes early: "In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds."

• Ahmed Ahmed/Ibtisam Mahdi [06-20] 'The Hunger Games': Inside Israel's aid death traps for starving Gazans: "Near-daily massacres as food distribution sites have killed over 400 Palestinians in the past month alone."

• Orly Noy [06-20] Why everything Israelis think they know about Iran is wrong: "For historian Lion Sternfeld, Israel's regime change fantasies ignore realities inside Iran and risk repeating historic mistakes."

• Jamal Kanj [06-25] Ceasefire Not Peace: How Netanyahu and AIPAC Outsourced Israel's War to Trump? This article explains a lot about Israel's policy of sowing chaos throughout the Middle East, dating it to the 1982 Yinon Plan. That's one I was unfamiliar with, but it makes a lot of sense, and is consistent with a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior, like the practice of seemingly random bombings of Syria (and Lebanon and Iraq and now Iran) just meant to inflict terror. In 1979, after the Carter-brokered peace agreement with Egypt, Israel could have negotiated similar deals with Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and come up with some kind of decent implementation of their promise of "autonomy" for the remaining Palestinians, but instead they lashed out at Lebanon and doubled down on repression and settlement in the occupied territories. I don't know whether the Yinon Plan was a blueprint or just a reflection of the mindset which Begin had brought to power, but which was latent in previous decades of Labor Zionism.

• Vijay Prashad [06-25] Why the US Strikes on Iran Will Increase Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. This is pretty obvious, yet rarely seems to be factored into the war plans of the US and Israel, which invariably underestimate future risks. But there is little evidence that the US cares about nonproliferation anymore.

• Rahman Bouzari [06-26] Against Israel's New Middle East Vision. Israel "issued an evacuation order for Tehran"?

• Jeff Halper [06-24] Global Palestine: Israel, the Palestinians, the Middle East and the World After the American Attack on Iran.

• Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies [06-25] How the US & Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran. Grossi is Director General of the watchdog group that is supposed to monitor nuclear power and weapons programs around the world. This has a lot of detail on its operations and how the information they collect can be abused.

• Richard Silverstein [06-23] Regime Change in Iran Will Not End Well.

• Asa Winstanley [06-10] Illegal police raid on my home won't stop me covering Gaza: "The police broke the law when they ransacked my house. When will they stop harassing pro-Palestine journalists?" Winstanley is British, author of the book, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: H ow the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (2023).

• Branko Marcetic [06-18] Tulsi said Iran not building nukes. One senator after another ignored her: "seems like an odd thing to do unless you really want to go to war."

Tom Collina [06-08] Killing the Iran nuclear deal was one of Trump's biggest failures. It's not unusual for bad decisions to take years to mature into full-blown catastrophes. Not that he didn't produce enough immediate disasters, but the tragic costs of Trump's first term continue to emerge. Trump's surrender to Israel in scuttling the JCPOA, along with his let's-just-normalize-business-and-fuck-the-Palestinians Abraham Accords, as well as his signal that the US would always back Israel no questions asked, have lead directly to the current war and genocide. He bungled Ukraine and Afghanistan as bad, and probably North Korea too (although thus far Kim Jong Un has had the good sense not to embarrass him there). Back when Trump was first elected, I stressed that his presidency would result in four severe years of opportunity costs. The assumption there was that most of what he did wrong could later be reversed. That's proven difficult, and not just for lack of trying -- Biden not only didn't reverse Trump on Israel and Ukraine but made matters worse, and that's probably true, if less evident, for Afghanistan and North Korea as well. His second term is likely to be even more irreversible.

Jamal Abdi [06-29] How Biden Is to Blame for Israel and the US's 12-Day War Against Iran: "Biden's failure to reenter Obama's nuclear deal helped create the risk for a potentially catastrophic US war against Iran."

Jason Ditz [06-12] Israeli Minister Calls for Israeli Control Over Syria and Lebanon: So says Avichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister and grandson of a former Sephardi Chief Rabbi, whose solution for Gaza is "they need to starve."

Jonah Shepp [06-21] 'Regime Change' Won't Liberate Iran: Not that anyone in Israel or the US cares a whit about liberating Iran. Nudging it from one orbit of misery to another, preferably lower one, is all they really care about.

Mitchell Plitnick [06-27]: What comes next following the US-Israeli war on Iran? Follows up on his previous article:

• Mitchell Plitnick [06-13]: How Israel and the US manufactured a fake crisis with Iran that could lead to all-out war. I think he's right that nothing that happened has turned out very satisfactorily for any party. However, his reason for Israel starting the war needs a bit of elaboration: "The purpose of 'Iran nuclear issue' sham is and has always been to create a regime-change bloc in Washington and Brussells to force the Islanic Republic from power." "Regime change" in Iran isn't a realistic goal, but it holds out the false promise of an end to the war other than complete failure, which helps keep the Washington and Bussells blocs bound to, and subservient to, Israel.

Jeremy R Hammond [06-26] Lessons Unlearned from Israel's Bombing of Iraq's Osirak Reactor: "The claim that Israel's bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 halted or set back Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability is a popular myth."

Elfadil Ibrahim [06-24] Israeli-fueled fantasy to bring back Shah has absolutely no juice. That the author even considers the hypothetical gives this idea far more credit than it deserves.

Sanya Mansoor [06-27] Israeli soldiers killed at least 410 people at food aid sites in Gaza this month: "Israeli soldiers and officers have said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians waiting for food in Gaza."

Yanis Varoufakis [05-06] In the EU nothing succeeds like gross failure: The astonishing case of Ursula von der Leyen. She is president of the European Union, elected for a second term, and recipient of some big deal prize, although she's mostly been in the news lately for her cheerleading of Israel's Gaza genocide.

• Francesca De Benedetti [06-26] Ursula von der Leyen Is Waging War on Workers.

Eric Alterman [05-08] The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump: "Trump is offering American Jews a kind of devil's bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value." This article has a lot of useful information, especially the first section which shows pretty clearly how Trump is still an anti-semite, and how his particular brand of anti-semitism is especially ominous for American Jews.

Gabrielle Gurley [05-20] Republicans Break the Weather: "The private sector can't match the value proposition of the National Weather Service, but companies work to entice Americans to pay up anyway. What happens if they can't?"

Phil Freeman [05-22] Why Do You Hate Jazz? Who, me? This is Freeman's monthly column, with his monthly batch of 10 jazz album reviews (5 I've heard, only one A- so far: Horace Tapscott), but his intro is a review of a book by Andrew Berish, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse (2025, University of Chicago Press). Turns out that neither Berish nor Freeman hate jazz, and of course there are things one can learn from their chronicle of people who do. But I'm not exactly psyched to find out. It's a bit like trying to survey "unhappy families": there are so many, so different, and ultimately so pointless. I should, however, check out the other five albums Freeman likes.

Barry S Edwards [05-29] Why Did Americans Elect a Felon Instead of a Prosecutor: I would have started with the observation that a great many Americans actually admire criminals. As someone whose childhood was rooted in the years when the Hays Office Code was still in effect, I tend to date this to the emergence of TV shows like It Takes a Thief (1968-70) and movies like The Dirty Dozen (1967), which showed how bad people could be employed to "do good" as defined by American political powers, but said powers' culpability for criminal malfeasance goes back deeper, becoming even more obvious during the Vietnam War. But Edwards starts with mass incarceration. While that could be cited as evidence that Americans are sticklers for rules, it also exposes how arbitrary and capricious the police state is, which erodes confidence in what they call justice. In that system, it is easy to see prosecutors as cruel political opportunists, and "criminals" as their victims -- even when they're as guilty as Trump.

Also at Washington Monthly:

• Barry C Lynn [06-01] Resurrecting the Rebel Alliance: "To end the age of Trump, Democrats must relearn the language and levers of power."

• Philip Longman [06-01] The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It's Regulated Competition. "From airlines to energy, shipbuilding to railroads, America became a capitalist superpower in the 20th century based on careful market rules. It can do so again."

• Bill Scher [05-30] What Elon Musk Learned (and Donald Trump Didn't) About Governing: "It turns out public policy is harder than it looks."

Jared Abbott/Dustin Guastella [05-30] What Caused the Democrats' No-Show Problem in 2024? "New data sheds light on the policy preferences of nonvoting Democrats in the last election." They add "it may disappoint some progressives," but it looks to me like data we can work with. Unlike the cartoon progressives characterized here, I don't have any real complaints that Harris didn't run on sufficiently progressive policy stances. The big problem she (and many other Democrats) had was that voters didn't believe they would or could deliver on their promises. And a big part of that was because they cozied up to the rich and put such focus on raising money that voters often felt they were an afterthought, or maybe not even that.

Sarah Viren [06-06] A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia? "Maura Finkelstein is one of many scholars discovering that the traditional protections of academic freedom are no longer holding."

Ezra Klein [06-08] The Problems Democrats Don't Like to See: The co-author of Abundance defends his book and its political program, mostly from critics on the left, who see it as warmed-over, trickle-down growth fetishism that pro-business centrist ("new") Democrats have been have been peddling as the only viable alternative to whatever it is that Republicans have been peddling since Reagan or Goldwater. Unfortunately, both of these ideologies are often critiqued, or just labeled, as "neoliberalism": indeed, they have much in common, most notably the view that private sector capitalism is the only true driving force in the economy, even as it requires increasing favors from the public, including tolerance of high degrees of inequality, corruption, and deceit; the main difference is in ethics, where Democrats tend to be liberal (which is more often hands-off than helping), and Republicans tend to be laissez-faire (which is to say none, or more specifically that any pursuit of money is to be honored), not that they aren't quite eager to impose constraints on others (sometimes as "morality," often just as power). I wish we could straighten this terminological muddle out, as the net effect is to make the "neoliberal" term unusable, and the themes indescribable. This extends to "neoconservative," which has no practical distinction from "neoliberal": they are simply Janus masks, where the former is used to look mean, and the latter to look kind.

Klein's article originally had a different title: The Abundance Agenda Has Its Own Theory of Power. By the way, that link is from a reddit thread. I've never paid any attention to reddit, but the link has a number of interesting and insightful comments, including this one:

I think Ezra is largely right that the populist left needs to: a) work off of an actual coherent vision of the world and b) understand the risks of simplifying policy to simplify politics

To which someone else adds:

It's unironically even simpler than this and makes it wild that the progressives have been unable to figure out Abundance. The entire book and thesis can be boiled down to "the party of big government needs to make government actually work."

That's it. That's the whole thing. The rest of it is presenting theories for different areas that need more or less regulation, for enabling policy to take shape, etc. But that's literally the entire bag. . . .

It's not about a platform for winning elections, it's about materially making peoples' lives better so that they trust you when you say you want to do things.

One thing I've repeatedly tried to stress is that there are major asymmetries between the two big political parties. One is that while both parties have to compete to win votes -- for better or worse, most effectively by impugning the other party -- only the Democrats actually have to deliver on their promises by governing effectively. Republicans have cynically peddled the line that government is the problem, so all they are promising is to hobble it (for which they have many easy tools, including tax cuts, deregulation, corruption, and incompetence). Needless to say, when Republican administrations succeed in their sabotage, Americans are likely to vote them out, but by then they've dug enough holes that Democrats can never quite build their way out, let along deliver tangible benefits, leaving Republicans set up for the next round of political demagoguery.

So I think we should welcome whatever help Klein & Thompson have to offer toward making Democratic government more competent and fruitful. However, before one can implement policy, one has to win elections, so it's no surprise that Democrats of all stripes will focus immediately on the book's political utility. That's why Klein is perplexed: that the Democrats he was most critical of -- "blue-state governors like Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul and top Obama and Biden administration officials" who actually had power they could work with but have little to show for their efforts -- have embraced the "Abundance agenda," while "some of my friends on the populist left" have raised objections. He then goes on to develop his "theory of power," contrasting his own "more classically liberal" credo against "the populist theory of power," under which "bad policy can be -- and often is -- justified as good politics." This part of his argument is somewhat less than coherent -- even if I gave up my reluctance to accept his redefinition of "populism" -- and unlikely to be useful anyway.[*]

In his conclusion, Klein says:

So I don't see any contradiction between "Abundance" and the goals of the left. I don't think achieving the goals of the modern left is even possible without the overhaul of the state that "Abundance" envisions.

I haven't read his book[**], so I can't point to specifics one way or the other, but I also don't see the contradiction: there certainly are goods and services that we could use more of, and that's even more true elsewhere in the world. And it would be good to produce them more efficiently, at lower cost, and/or higher quality, which is to say that we should work on better systems and policies. But while I don't doubt that there is room for growth on the supply side, the larger problem for most people is distribution: making sure that everyone's needs are met, which isn't happening under our current system of price-rationed scarcity. A more explicit identification with the left, including more emphasis on distribution, and acknowledgment of other important issues like precarity, debt, and peace, would have improved his points about building things and trust.

It also would have made his agenda harder to co-opt by Democratic politicians who are basically bought and paid for by rich donors, who seem to be little troubled by rare it is that most of their voters ever benefit from the crumbs left over from their corruption. As Robinson points out, "They insist that their agenda is not incompatible with social democracy and wealth redistribution. But it's clearly a different set of priorities." It's a set of priorities that cause no alarm to the donor class, and may even whet their appetite, and that's why their agenda has the appeal it has, and is drawing the criticism it deserves.[***]

[*] In Kansas, where Thomas Frank and I were born, populism was a decidedly left-wing movement, mostly rooted in debt-saddled free farmers (like my great-grandfather, not that I know anything about his politics). Frank defends this view in The People, No! A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020). Also see his especially biting critique of the business/financial wing of the Democratic Party, Listen, Liberal! Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016). It's easy to condemn liberals as elitist when they recoil so fervently against common folk, even if in theory they believe everyone should share in their blessings. As for theories of power, there are some that make sense. The largely forgotten Rooseveltian countervailing powers is one, with faint echoes in recent antitrust and pro-union work. Anarchists have a more negative theory of power -- negative both in the sense that power is intrinsically bad, and that in almost always generating resentment and blowback it is dysfunctional. As a child, I was exposed to the saying, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and I've found that to be true.

[**] I wouldn't rule out reading the book in the future, especially if I find myself in need of boning up on certain technical issues like housing and infrastructure development. I read Klein's Why We're Polarized (2020), and found it to be worthwhile, especially for citing and digesting a lot of technical political science literature. I certainly wouldn't read him to expose him as an idiot and/or crook, as Nathan J Robinson suggests in his review below. I also wouldn't read Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (2020) for that reason, although I'd probably find even more evidence there.

[***] Aside from political agenda and policy mechanics -- various critiques on specific policies, especially their lack of concern for "intellectual property" rents, which is a major cost concern, a source of artificial scarcity -- there is a third strain of criticism, having to do with growth itself. There is good reason to acknowledge that sooner or later growth will have to slow and stabilize, or we will eventually fall victim to crashes. This was my initial reaction to "Abundance," and one I'd like to return to at some point, but while such crashes may hypothetically not be distant in the future, they could be much better managed if only people were more able to deal with immediately pressing political problems.

• Nathan J Robinson [06-13] Abandon "Abundance": "The latest Democratic fad sidelines equality and justice in favor of a focus on cutting red tape. This is not the path forward." After having complained about the masochism of having to read the book -- even after he's repeatedly made sport of dissecting much more obvious right-wing dimwits -- at least he admits this much: "Some of what's in Abundance is both true and important." The question this raises is whether, from a practical political standpoint, it does more good to cite Abundance in support of the "true and important" bits, or to discredit Klein & Thompson for the parts they get wrong, or that they use disingenuously. Robinson focuses on the latter, but that's what you'd expect from a critic (or just a rigorous thinker). For instance, he points out their use of motte-and-bailey arguments, which allow common sense to be turned into exaggerated claims, which when challenged can retreat into common sense. (I mean, who doesn't hate red tape?) Supporters can then pick and choose among such claims. For example, "Klein might personally believe in wealth redistribution and unions, but he's offered a great program for billionaires who don't want us to talk about the predations of the health insurance industry or big corporations crushing union drives. Let's talk about zoning reform instead!" He also points out how the authors ingratiate themselves with Democratic royalists by misrepresenting critics on the left: especially, "they spend more pages criticizing Ralph Nader and the degrowth movement (both politically marginal) than they do explaining how corporate power stands in the way of, for example, a universal healthcare system."

• Nathan J Robinson [2024-12-03] Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything: "The Biden administration's favorite centrist pundit produces smug psuedo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded." Yglesias and Klein are bound together as co-founders of Vox, from which they both bounded for more lucrative pastures. Yglesias in particular has repeatedly been a pioneer in new ways to exploit the internet. I read a lot by him for a long time, finally losing interest when he left Vox for Bloomberg and Substack and made his bid for the Thomas Friedman market with his One Billion Americans -- which fits in here as a prototype for Abundance. Because this piece came out back in December (when I was avoiding any and all news sources), Robinson doesn't dwell on that connections, while dwelling on numerous other faux pas. (It's impossible for me to mention either Yglesias or Klein in my household without being reminded of their support for the Iraq War.) I also just discovered that Robinson wrote a review of One Billion People back on [2020-11-13]: Why Nationalism Is a Brain Disease.

Ben Rhodes [06-08] Corruption Has Flooded America. The Dams Are Breaking. I don't doubt that crypto represents yet another higher stage of corruption than ever before, but the dams broke long ago, most obviously in the "greed is good" 1980s, not that they ever held much water in the first place. "President Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since starting his 2024 election campaign." But most of that is phony paper wealth, slathered onto his corpulence like flattery.

Henry Grabar [06-10] It's Robotaxi Summer. Buckle Up. "Waymo and Tesla offer competing -- and potentially bleak -- futures for self-driving cars in society."

Doug Henwood [06-13] We Have Always Lived in the Casino: "John Maynard Keynes warned that when real investment becomes the by-product of speculation, the result is often disaster. But it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins." I flagged this because it seems like an interesting article, but I can't read it because it's behind their paywall. Speaking of which, some more articles I clicked on but cannot read:

• Adam Serwer [05-27] The New Dark Age: "The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself." Starts talking about "the warlords who sacked Rome," suggesting that they were less culpable than Trump for the benighted period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Maybe, or maybe not. But having read Jane Jacobs' Dark Ages Ahead (2005), I'm inclined to view Trump and his minions less as instigators of a Dark Age than as an example.

• Adam Serwer [06-08] Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing: "Whatever they may be fighting about, they are both committed to showering tax cuts on Americans who already have more than they need."

Jeffrey St Clair

[06-13] Roaming Charges: From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Venice Beach: "It's becoming clearer and clearer every day that the South finally won the Civil War and the Insurrectionists won J6." Also: "The drones are coming home to roost." Also quotes Greg Grandin: "Only fools believed Trump is somehow antiwar. He's not a break with neocons but their evolution."

• [06-27] Roaming Charges: After Midnight: "Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace." St Clair doubts the effectiveness of the bombing. I don't have any particular stake in that argument. Anything that was damaged in the bombing, including the people who were killed or maimed, can be replaced easily enough. The physics and technology of nuclear weapons have been understood since the 1940s. At the end of WWII, the US rounded up all of Germany's atomic physicists and holed them up on a farm on rural England. They had spent years fiddling and fumbling in their efforts to build even a simple reactor, but what confused them was their uncertainty that it might work. Within two days of hearing about Hiroshima, they figured out a functional design. They couldn't build one. That took the Russians four more years, not because they had to figure out how it worked, but because the materials were hard to come by, and the processes complex. It took France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea even longer, but they all did it, and the timelines have more to do with motivation than with skill. A number of other nations, most obviously Germany and Japan, have demonstrated they have all the skills they need. It is, after all, easier to get a bomb to blow up than it is to keep a power plant from melting down. Iran, too, has amply demonstrated that they have the necessary skills, and for that matter the materiel. Netanyahu was probably right way back in the 1990s that Iran could produce atomic bombs from their program within 3-5 years, or 6-12 months, or whatever time frame he was projecting to panic his people and allies. That Iran never met his timelines is primarily because they didn't see the point of actually having nuclear weapons. Perhaps they were thinking that if Israel and America could see that they could, that would be enough of a deterrent to keep them from being attacked. Perhaps that thinking even worked until now. The big problem with the "madman theory" is that it assumes the other side will always be the sane one, without bothering to examine one's own sanity in contemplating such a contest. Iran's quite rational notion of deterrence failed because Netanyahu and Trump have not only called Iran's bluff, they've upped the ante, giving Iran the one necessity it was lacking: motivation. The gamble is that Iran will still realize that nuclear weapons are useless, a fool's game. They only seem to have value as a deterrent, but that no longer works against Netanyahu and Trump, who act like they're daring Iran in hopes of burying the entire country under mushroom clouds. After all, what's the point of nuclear superiority if you can't use it to extort your enemies and force them to submit to your will?

  Also linked here:

  • Lucian K Truscott IV [06-24] Fake man starts fake war makes fake peace.

  Further down, St Clair spots a tweet by Stephen Miller:

  The commentary about NYC Democrats nominating an anarchist-socialist for Mayor omits one point: how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That's how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.

  That's a fairly accurate description of New York City, but from the 1880s through 1910s, when borders really were open (albeit only for whites). The result was a long series of Irish-, Italian-, and Jewish-American mayors. And he's right that their descendents, mostly with Democratic mayors, led New York City to a dominant position in American finance and culture. They've also made it the richest and least affordable city in America, but even with all that wealth few New Yorkers see Republican nihilism as an attractive proposition.

Peter Shamshiri [06-16] The Politics of Eternal Distraction: "To some Democrats, everything Trump does is designed to distract you." It's taken Democrats an awful long time to realize that much of what Trump does is sheer distraction, so when they point that out, along comes someone to attack you for overstating your insight: after all, some of what Trump does is so plainly damaging that he needs this other crap to distract you from what he's really doing. I can't sort this out right now, but I'd caution against thinking that the "distractions" are the harmless parts: they often reveal what Trump is thinking, even where he doesn't have the capacity to deliver. That he even says he wants to do something profoundly stupid should make you suspicious of everything else, even if superficially plausible. But also you have to guard against getting carried away responding to every feint he throws your way. The word "distraction" can help in that regard, if immediately followed by redirecting back to something important.

Charlotte Klein [06-19] Are You a $300,000 Writer? "Inside The Atlantic's extremely expensive hiring spree." A certain amount of professional jealousy is inevitable with articles like this, and is indeed much of the interest. I mean, they could hire me for much less than any of these writers I've mostly never heard of, and I could write some genuinely interesting content -- mostly innovative engineering solutions to tricky political problems -- that won't read like everyone else's warmed-over punditry. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't want to write what they're so eager to pay for. I don't know who's footing the bills behind their current menu, but they're up to no good.

Scott Lemieux [06-19] Getting the war criminals back together: Quotes Elisabeth Bumiller seeking the sage advise of a washed up US General:

One person who sees little similarity between the run up to Iraq and now is David H. Petraeus, the general who commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and led the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion in Baghdad. "This is clearly the potential run up to military action, but it's not the invasion of a country," he said on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and order him to agree to the complete dismantlement of his nuclear program or face "the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people." If the supreme leader rejects the ultimatum, Mr. Petraeus said, "that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens."

Nobody's even talking about fixing Iran here. There's no warning that "if you break it, you own it." They just want to fuck it up, leave it bruised and bleeding in a ditch somewhere, washing their hands of the whole affair . . . unless they have to come back and do it again, which they probably will. Sheer nihilists, because that's the power they think they have.

Ryan Cooper [06-20] Climate Change Will Bankrupt the Country: "Climate-fueled disasters cost America almost a trillion dollars over the last year, far more than economists predicted." By "economists" he's referring to work by William Nordhaus, which he was critical of at the time and even more so now. The price tag will only continue to rise, and with it private insurance becomes increasingly untenable. While this will be bad for everyone, the ones with the most to lose are property owners and lenders, who will experience ever greater precarity, and no doubt will finally be driven to attempt to socialize their risks. This will be a huge political factor in coming years. The phrase "too big to fail" will haunt us. And while one may debate the merits of bailing out individual companies, the whole country poses a somewhat different problem: who's big enough to bail us all out?

Josh Dawsey/Rebecca Ballhaus [06-20] Stephen Miller's Fingerprints Are on Everything in Trump's Second Term: "The deputy chief of staff has played an outsize role in immigration -- and amassed more power than almost anyone else at the White House." Also on Miller:

• Pablo Manríquez [06-24] Stephen Miller's Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir Raises Conflict Concerns.

Naomi Bethune [06-24] ICE Impersonators Proliferate Amid the Agency's Undercover Tactics: "Pretending to be an ICE agent to commit crimes is disturbingly easy."

David Klion [06-24] State of Exception: National Security Governance, Then and Now.

No More Mister Nice Blog: This might as well become a regular feature. I've skipped over a few pieces, mostly about the NYC mayor race, which are also of interest:

• [06-10]: Gosh, if only there were a way to test the premise that the LA protests are an "80-20 issue" favoring Republicans: "Hand-wringing Trump critics think America won't vote for a candidate who's linked to controversial protests, and they cling to this belief even though America just elected the guy who did January 6." He also offers some sound advice:

  Why can't Trump critics be advocates for their own side? Why must they echo right-wing critiques of the protest movement? Given the way most Americans consume news these days, I'm guessing that it might not register on many voters that the protestors are waving Mexican flags (and that they should see this as a moral outrage) until they start hearing about the flags from both sides. (Compare this to the war on "woke" language: I'm sure most voters have now heard the word "Latinx" far more often from centrist Democratic language police than they have from actual "woke" Democrats.)

  I'll say it again: If your critique of Democrats/liberals/progressives echoes right-wing critiques, shut up. You're just an extra megaphone for the right, which doesn't need any help getting its messages out. . . . So please stop the tone policing, and stick up for your side.

  My bold.

• [06-11]: Trump came into office wishing a mf'er would: "Two commentators I respect . . . believe that Donald Trump is militarizing Los Angeles out of weakness. I don't think that's true."

• [06-13]: Everyone knows that only Republicans are normal!: "They're engaging in totalitarian repression, obviously, but they claim they're freeing people." Exmaples of Republican "normalcy" follow.

  Republicans struggle with the idea that anyone could possibly want to live in a place where people are of very different ethnic backgrounds, speak different languages, and have different religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), just as they struggle with the idea that anyone could be unalterably gay or bi or pan or trans just because they aren't. They struggle with the idea that anyone would want to live in a city where you can do most of your errands in a fifteen-minute radius, because they're used to long drives whenever you have to run errands. Increasingly, they're selling the message that everyone wants a marriage consisting of a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home "tradwife" who gives birth to large numbers of children, after marrying young (and preferably as a virgin), and they can't believe anyone really wants a life that's different from that.

  It is true that Republicans have chosen to represent an imagined majority: a large bloc of people who can be characterized as "true Americans" and flattered as "patriots." They can be treated as a socially and economically cohesive bloc, with some sleight of hand added to line them up behind the true economic powers. This has always been true: it was built into the design of the Republican Party in the 1850s, when white, protestant free soil farmers and small-time business and labor actually formed something close to a majority of voters. That's baked into the initials GOP, which writers (including me) find irresistible because we tire of overly repeating words, especially "Republican." (It's effectively a proprietary pronoun. One of the many asymmetries of our warped politics is that Democrats don't have an equivalent pronoun or alias.) Republicans are skating on thin ice here: their "majority" is thinning out, haphazardly reinforced as various ethnic groups become honorary whites, and various sects are accepted as close enough to protestants (the new term is "Judeo-Christian," with "Abrahamic" in the wings, held back by the political opportunism of anti-Islam bigotry.) But the larger risk Republicans run is that they don't represent their voters at all well. They lie to them, they steal from them, they double-cross them whenever they see an opportunity to make a quick buck. On the other hand, Democrats are developing their own nascent myth of a majority built on diversity, equity, tolerance, mutual respect and aid, and solidarity.

[06-14]: Trump's muddled, on-and-off militarism won't split the GOP at all.

[06-18]: Jeb Bush was right about Trump and "chaos". Cites a piece by Jamelle Bouie ([06-18: Maybe Trump and Miller Don't Understand Americans as Well as They Think They Do), regarding Trump's polling slump.

[06-21]: Your right-wing neighbors still don't believe the Minnesota shoter was a conservative ideologue: I haven't yet cited any articles on the June 14 assassination of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, but the basic facts are available on Wikipedia (2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators), not for lack of interest or alarm but mostly a matter of timing. That right-wingers have worked overtime to twist the stories into unrecognizable shapes is unsurprising: if anything, it's standard operating procedure, and the examples are as telling as their penchant for gun-toting vigilantism. One of the most fundamental differences between right and left is that only the former believes that violence works, and will resort to it readily (and will lie about it afterwards, because that's even more part of their nature). Two earlier pieces on the shootings:

• [06-15]: Your right-wing neighbors think the Minnesota shooting were liberal-on-liberal violence.

• [06-17]: Republicans hate Democrats, and media liberals consider that an acceptable prejudice.

[06-22]: To your right-wing neighbors, this will be Trump's war only if it works. Cites a Joshua Keating article ([06-21]: This time, it's Trump's war) I had initially skipped over.

[06-23]: Will Democrats be too high-minded to respond to young people's war fears? I don't know what he means by "high-minded." What Democrats need to do is convey the view that any time Americans pull the trigger that represents a failure of American foreign policy, regardless of whether you hit the target or not. Of course, from 2021-25, Biden was the one demonstrating incompetence by not preventing war situations from developing and/or spreading. But why show Trump the slightest leniency when the voters cut them no slack?

[06-26]: In New York, I'm enjoying this billionaire freakout.

[06-28] The Supreme Court's Republicans know our side will never use the power they've potentially given us: The Supreme Court "ruled that lower-court judges can't protect even fundamental constitutional rights using nationwide injunctions."

The Supreme Court's Republicans aren't worried that the shoe might be on the other foot someday because they know the shoe will never be on the other foot. This is why they're willing to give Donald Trump nearly unlimited power: they know that any Republican would use the power in ways they like and no Democrat would ever use it in ways they dislike. They're giving powerful weapons to Trump and future party-mates because they know the enemy -- Democrats -- will never use those weapons.

Tweets:

• Alan MacLeod [06-05]: The most American leading ever: Kids could end up in foster care over lunch debt, Pennsylvania school district warns parents

• Adam Serwer [06-08]: Don't let Trump and Musk's feud obscure their fundamental agreement: Both men and the party they own are committed to taking as much as possible from Americans who need help in order to give to those who have more than they could ever want. [link to his Atlantic article: Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing]

  For years, commentators have talked about how Trump reshaped the Republican Party in the populist mold. Indeed, Trumpism has seen Republicans abandon many of their publicly held commitments. The GOP says it champions fiscal discipline while growing the debt at every opportunity. It talks about individual merit while endorsing discrimination against groups based on gender, race, national origin, and sexual orientation. It blathers about free speech while using state power to engage in the most sweeping national-censorship campaign since the Red Scare. Republicans warn us about the "weaponization" of the legal system while seeking to prosecute critics for political crimes and deporting apparently innocent people to Gulags without a shred of due process. The GOP venerates Christianity while engaging in the kind of performative cruelty early Christians associated with paganism. It preaches family values while destroying families it refuses to recognize as such.

  Yet the one bridge that connects Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump is slashing public services while showering tax cuts on the rich. This is the Republican Party's most sacred, fundamental value, the one it almost never betrays. Whatever else Trump and Musk may fight about, they are faithful to that.

• Nathan J Robinson [06-09] goddamnit so many @curaffairs readers have requested a review of "Abundance" that now I'm having to write it. why do our readers want me to suffer[?]

  I commented: Why, compared to idiots you love writing about (like Peterson & Rufo), is Klein a sufferance? Maybe it takes more work to accept and build on what he offers than to trash it as not enough or some kind of sellout, but the idea that Dems need to build/deliver isn't wrong.

  When I clicked on post, I got a pop-up saying: "Want more people to see your comment? Subscribe." The days when social media companies were happy just to profit off our free content are obviously over. Now in their pay-to-play racket they view everyone as an advertiser, which will tend to reduce every comment to the credibility level of advertisements (i.e., none: advertising has been proudly post-truth for over a century, and indeed was born that way).

• Richard D Wolff [06-09] US liberals also enabled Trump. They let the right enlist them against the left after 1945. As the GOP right-turned authoritarian, a unified liberal-left opposition would have been real and powerful, unlike today's liberal-vs-left split opposition.

• Isi Breen [06-09]

  Has anyone written an article about how Abundance is a swan song for Obama's presidency? That it's less about doing anything new and more about getting back to the last time it seemed like the party had its shit together?

  Problem here is how can anyone still think that the Democrats had their shit together under Obama? He promised "change" and shrunk it down to virtually nothing. He lost Congress after two years, and never won it back, giving him an excuse to do even less than he was inclined to do. Even the articulateness he was famed for before he ran deserted him. (Or was it some kind of race to the bottom with the dumbing down of the American people?) I have dozens of examples, but one specific to "abundance agenda" is that Obama refused to pursue any stimulus projects that weren't "shovel-ready." (Reed Hundt, in A Crisis Wasted, has examples of things proposed but rejected because Obama and his locked-in advisors like Summers and Emmanuel wouldn't consider anything that smacked of long-term planning.)

• Kate Wehwalt [06-13]:

  It's crazy how in 40 years the internet made everyone stupid and ruined the entire world

  Nah. It just made you more aware of how stupid people already were.

• Kim, Bestie of Bunzy [06-19]

  Watching this man try to get rid of imaginary raccoons he thought were invading reminds me of what white people are currently trying to do [to] America to get rid [of] immigrants they think are invading

  This comes with a 0:43 video, where the captions read: "My dad had raccoons in his tree house. Nobody has been up there in years. He tried to get rid of them with a combination of . . . smoke bombs and firecrackers. Anxiously watching for fleeing raccoons . . . [the tree house catches fire and is destroyed]. No raccoons were seen or found." Much more of interest in Kim's feed. I didn't expect (i.e., couldn't have imagined) this one:

  Israeli Interior Minister Ben-Gvir accuses Mossad chief Barnea of starting a war: - Why did you provoke Iran! Barnea: - I didn't know Iran had such rocket capabilities!

  The head of Mossad "did not know"

  I've been imagining that Ben-Gvir was the architect of the war, and conjuring up rationales for him doing so. Netanyahu has been complaining about Iran's rockets ever since Israel pivoted against Iran after the 1990 Gulf War neutralized Iraq as Israel's chief bête noire (more like a boogeyman meant to frighten the US and make it subservient to Israel -- a card they've played many times, and which you still see working as US politicians clamor for war against Iran). What this suggests is not that they were unaware of Netanyahu's propaganda, but that neither Ben-Gvir nor Barnea believed Israel's own propaganda, which they both used for their own purposes. Long-range rocket attacks were a significant part of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, with Iraq using Soviet Scuds and Iran building their own (after exhausting their US-built rockets). Extending their range to reach Israel would have been easy, and didn't cross an obvious red line, like nuclear bombs would have. Still, to be a nuclear threat, as Netanyahu has long insisted Iran is, you both need warheads and some way to deliver them: Iranian rockets have always been an obvious part of the equation. (Same for North Korea, which has even larger rockets.) Israel has routinely blamed Iran for every rocket from Gaza, Lebanon, and/or Yemen, so claiming now that you didn't know Iran had "such rocket capabilities" is an admission that you thought the rockets from Gaza, etc., weren't serious threats. They were just propaganda foils.

• Pessimistic Intellect, Optimistic Will: Includes graphic of a press release by Hakeen Jeffries ("Democratic Leader"). Second and third paragraphs are solid points, although I wouldn't say that the kind of diplomacy the US needs to engage in at the moment is "aggressive": how about "serious"? or "constructive"? or just something that suggests you're not insane? However, before he could allow himself any of that, first Jeffries had to recite his pledge of allegiance:

  Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States and can never be permitted to become a nuclear-capable power. Israel has a right to defend itself against escalating Iranian aggression and our commitment to Israel's security remains ironclad.

  Not only is none of this true, and as articulated is little short of psychotic. Still, the real problem with always putting this pledge first isn't that it suggests you cannot think clearly. It's warning other people that you cannot or will not do anything about Israel's behavior because you're not even in charge of you own thoughts let alone actions.

• Matthew Yglesias [06-22]:

  Every president of my lifetime except Joe Biden actually started wars, but somehow he ended up getting lambasted from the right and the left for providing military supplies to allies as if that made him the greatest warhawk in American history.

  No one I'm aware of has tried to sort out a ranking of "greatest warhawks in American history," but even if one did, not being the "greatest" wouldn't be much of a compliment. Biden needed not just to not start new wars, but to end them. He not only didn't do the necessary diplomacy to end the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, what diplomacy he did do, combined with his unflinching supply of arms and money to support the war efforts, made it possible for the wars to extend and spread. (Ukraine is slightly different, in that sending arms there can be justified by the need to counter Russian aggression, but also in that there are clear opportunities for diplomatic resolution. Support for Israel, given their long history of aggression and domination, is impossible to justify.) And while you might credit Biden with ending the Afghanistan war, once again he failed to show any diplomatic skill or interest. His popularity sunk not because he ended the war, but due to the ineptness of his withdrawal. The only thing you can say for him is that he was painted into an untenable corner by predecessors, but it's hard to see where he even tried to right their wrongs.

• Ian Boudreau [06-26] Responding to a tweet noting that "mamdani's win has made the ny times, the washington post, fox news, trump, third way, and the democratic establishment very mad" citing a Washington Post Editorial Board article: "Zohran Mamdani's victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party: New York cannot take its greatness for granted. Mismanagement can ruin it."

  Wow, mismanagement of New York City - what a genuinely terrifying prospect! Siri who is the current mayor of New York City?

  I don't have the bandwidth to deal with what looks to Wichita like a remote mayoral primary, but is obviously big news for the media centers and for the electorally-oriented left. It's quite possible that left candidates are much better at articulating problems and proposing solutions than they are at administering and implementing, but couldn't that just as easily be due to the obstacles entrenched powers can throw into the way, including their cozy relationship with the establishment press? One thing for sure is that whatever management skills conservatives think they have aren't helped by the evils of their ideology.

  Jamelle Bouie adds: "i think i would take the hysteria over mamdani's ability to govern more seriously if half these people hasn't endorsed eric adams."

  Ryan Cooper quotes Paul Krugman: "centrist Democrats often urge leftier types to rally behind their nominees in general elections. I agree. Anyone claiming that there's no difference between the parties is a fool. But this deal has to be reciprocal."

• Don Winslow [06-28]:

  16 million Americans are about to lose their health insurance because 77 million Americans voted for this shit.

  

Mid-Year Music Lists: I usually collect these under Music Week, but it's probably easier here.

• Rolling Stone [06-05] [AOTY] The Best Albums of 2025 So Far: "What a year it's been for great music -- as opposed to, say, everything else."

• AV Club [06-26] [AOTY] AV Club's Best Albums of 2025 (So Far).

• Billboard [06-24] [AOTY] Billboard's 50 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• Consequence [06-02] [AOTY] The 30 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• Exclaim [06-02] [AOTY] Exclaim!'s 25 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• The Fader [06-06] Best Albums of 2025 (So Far).

• The Guardian [06-10] The best albums of 2025 so far.

• NME [06-26] [AOTY] The best albums of 2025 . . . so far!

• Paste [06-06] AOTY] The 40 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• PopMatters [06-26] [AOTY] The 70 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• RIOTRIOT [06-12] Sick of What I Want: The 30 Best Albums of 2025 So Far (#30-11) and (#10-1). Also of note: The End of the World Should Not Come Between Us: The 50 Best Songs of 2025 So Far.

• Slant [06-23] The Best Albums of 2025 . . . So Far.

• Spin [06-02] [AOTY] Best Albums of 2025 (So Far).

• Stereogum [06-02] [AOTY] The 50 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• Treble [06-10] [AOTY] The 40 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

Current count: 146 links, 12549 words (14967 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 21 days ago, on May 14.

I started this shortly after the last one, but added very little to it during the last week of May, before trying to wrap it up on June 3 (bleeding into June 4). Rereading the older material led to some editing and expansion, while the latter material is as slapdash and disorganized as ever, and I'm undoubtedly leaving more scraps on the table than I can possibly deal with in the moment.

PS: Posting this Wednesday afternoon, without the "index to major articles" or postscript, which I may try to add later. More loose tabs still open, and I'm finding more all the time, but I desperately need to break off and do some other work, and keep this from becoming an infinite time sink.

Ben Smith [04-27] The group chats that changed America. Evidently there's a whole world of private group chats dominated by billionaires -- Mark Andreessen's name keeps popping up -- where the affairs of the world are being hashed out (e.g., Group chats rule the world), far removed from public political discourse. Should we be surprised that these people are mostly fatuous assholes, with their experience of the world completely removed from almost everyone's daily life?

Jill Lepore [04-28] A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump: "Each morning before the day's decree, I turn to a slim book, hoping for sense, or solace." I'm not sure that the framing of short, classic books helps much, although any connection to the known world could have helped one get through the days. But the history of those 100 days seemed pretty well thought out, until I got to this:

Trump won the Presidency in a free and fair election with a mandate to curb inflation, restrict immigration, cut taxes, support small businesses, and reverse progressive overreach, especially in employment and education. From his first day in office, he set about dismantling much of both the federal government and the Constitution's system of checks and balances. By declarations of national emergency, by executive order, and by executive action -- and frequently in plain violation of the Constitution -- Trump gutted entire departments of the federal government. He defied the federal judiciary. He rescinded funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He lifted regulations across industries. He fired, forced the resignations of, or eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees. He hobbled scientific research. He all but criminalized immigration. He denounced the arts. He abandoned the federal government's commitment to public education. He revoked civil rights and shuttered civil-rights programs, deriding the goals of racial equality, gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He made enemies of American allies, and prostituted the United States to the passions of tyrants. He punished his adversaries and delighted in their suffering. He tried to bring universities to heel. He bent law firms to his will. He instituted tariffs and toppled markets; he lifted tariffs and toppled markets. He debased the very idea of America. He created chaos, emergency after emergency.

Trump felled so much timber not because of the mightiness of his axe but because of the rot within the trees and the weakness of the wood. Many of the institutions Trump attacked, from the immigration system to higher education, were those whose leaders and votaries knew them to be broken and yet whose problems they had failed to fix, or even, publicly, to acknowledge. Now is not the time to admit to these problems, leaders -- from Democratic Party officials to C.E.O.s, intellectuals, university presidents, and newspaper editors -- had advised, for years, because this is an emergency. They refused to denounce the illiberalism of speech codes, the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement and Title IX cases, mandatory D.E.I. affirmations as a condition of employment, and the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left. Even after Trump won reëlection on a promise to destroy those institutions, they refused to admit to their problems, presumably because his victory made the emergency even emergencier.

This starts off ok, although "free and fair" aren't the first words I'd choose to describe the 2024 election. And while Trump had campaigned on that issue list, his promises were rarely more specific than "Trump will fix it." Sure, a lot of people placed blind faith in his leadership, but nearly as many recoiled from the prospect in horror. If by mandate you mean popular support for his actual policies, that's quite a stretch. The second half of the first paragraph does provide a nice thumbnail sketch of what he actually did, but it was virtually all by executive fiat, and cost him a good 5 points in approval rating.

The second half goes awry with the list of "leaders," which could be designated the Establishment Democrats. While it is certainly true that they refused to admit some obvious problems -- the main ones I would group as Inequality and War -- they seemed pretty satisfied with the status quo, and campaigned on keeping things as they currently were, or were going. The word "emergency" causes much confusion here. They used the word to gain a bit of legal leverage to go around an obstructionist Congress that they couldn't win and hold, partly due to gerrymandering but mostly due to poor political messaging. On the other hand, Trump used the word to describe a purely imaginary existential terror, which only he can fix because only he can right the propaganda machine that sold the idea to the gullible masses, but which he has little intention of fixing once he discovered the extra powers presidents can claim during "emergencies."

Still, where does the second half of the second paragraph come from? So we're going to blame the failure of the Establishment Democrats to defend their ivory towers and executive suites from Trumpian chaos on "the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left"? The left has never been in any position to dictate establishment policy. If they bought into #MeToo or D.E.I., it's because they had their own reasons. Perhaps they saw them as sops to the left, or to the people the left tries to advocate for? Or maybe they were just diversions from the more important matters of Inequality and War, which produced much of the rot Trump is inadvertently disrupting.

For what it's worth, I don't especially disagree with the anti-woke critique, just with the blame heaped on the left for pushing the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, etc., lines too far. If for some reason the powers-that-be overreact and "cancel" some racist/sexist/whatever jerk, why do we have to be the ones condemning illiberalism and demanding due process? Why do we have to pull our punches and defend free speech for Nazis? (And note that the ACLU actually does that, as that is their mission, and most of us support them for that.) I'm open to engaging in the left's perpetual practice of self-criticism, but sure, I can get a bit squirmish when admonished for the same faults by smarmy liberals, and even more so by outright fascists, possibly because they find it impossible to criticize the left without projecting their own sense of superiority.

But while much of what Trump has done in his first (and by no means his last) 100 days should be simply and resolutely undone, I wouldn't advise reflexively undoing everything. I don't doubt that there are bureaucrats who shouldn't be taken back, and dead wood programs that we're better off without, as well as much more that would benefit from a fresh rethink. I wouldn't rush to restore DEI programs, but I would restore the DOJ Civil Rights Division's enforcement budget, and encourage them to be more vigilant. I doubt you can undo his pardons, but you could add some more to spread out the effect: we should be more generous in forgiving those who trespass against us. And while I can't point to any even inadvertent blessings from Trump's foreign policy shake up, that's one area where a Biden restoration shouldn't even be contemplated.

At some point, it might be interesting to take Lepore's essay and strip it down to the plain history, skipping all of the Swift and Coleridge and Whitman fluff. Even knowing it's happened, such plain words are likely to still be sobering, shocking even. Lepore's idea may be that we can always look back to civilization. But perhaps civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Scott Lemieux [05-04] Thelma and Louise economics: Starts with a long quote from Maia Mindel [05-01] Check Your Exorbitant Privilege!, which includes the Thelma & Louise ending scene video, in case you need that reference explained. Lemieux adds: "The biggest problem with Trump's trade war is that it's based on nostalgia for something that can't be reconstructed." And he ends with Trump: "We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple."

Brad Luen [05-04] Top 50 albums of the Fifties: The jazz list here is so good I'm hard-pressed to supplement it. The pop and rock, country and blues hit the obvious high points with best-ofs limited to 1950s releases (some since superseded; Lefty Frizzell is an obvious omission). The Latin and "Old World" lists give me something to work on.

Mitch Therieau [05-06] Can Spotify Be Stopped? Which raises, but doesn't answer, the question of why should it be stopped? I'm pretty skeptical of tech giants, but I subscribe to Spotify, and it gives me pretty good value. There are things about it that I don't like, and there is much more I just haven't taken the trouble to understand. I could imagine something much better, but most of the complaints I hear have to do with shortchanging artists and labels, and I don't really see that as my problem, or even as much of an economic problem. This is a review of Liz Pelly's book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

Nate Weisberg [05-06] Inside the Trump Assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "An agency lawyer and union representative opens up about the Trump/Musk rampage on the CFPB, what happens next, and why he's still optimistic." I think it's hard for people to recognize the extent to which the Trump administration has not only turned a blind eye to fraud and other white collar crime but has actively promoted it.

Samuel O'Brient [05-10] Bill Gates' major decision draws shocking response: He's says he's not only going to give away his fortune, but dissolve his foundation within 20 years. I've had very little kind of even nice to say about him or his company -- at least since 1984, when they had a good chance to hire me but passed because, like Trump, they "only hire the best people," and explicitly decided I wasn't one. But I'll save those sour grapes for the memoir. The Windows monopoly came later, as it was barely a demo program at the time: both the technical decisions that made it crappy software, and the business dictates that turned it into a profitable monopoly. So I've always viewed his philanthropy as whitewashing blood money. But dissolving his fortune shows a sensibility to human limits I never gave him credit for, one that appears to be as rare in high tech these days as it was a century ago among the Rockefellers and Mellons of yore. More radical still is the idea of dissolving a foundation, a major loophole in estate tax law that encouraged moguls to leave permanent monuments to themselves. I've long felt that foundations should be required to dispense all of their net income plus a fixed percentage of their endowment each year, so that they have limited lifetimes.

Joshua Schwartz [05-12] The hidden costs of Trump's 'madman' approach to tariffs: "The downsides of his trade policies are symptoms of a larger strategic flaw." Much to think about here, but my initial thoughts settle on how much I hate game theory. The madman theory assumes that your opponent is more rational than you are -- or at least is rational enough to avoid catastrophe -- so why can't you just reason with them and work out something sensible? And why make it some kind of contest of estimated power, when you know that even winning that game is at best temporary as the loss creates resentment that will eventually come back to bite you?

Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson [05-13] How the economic and political geography of the United States fuels right-wing populism -- and what the Democratic Party can do about it. The authors have written a number of worthy books on American politics, including (at least these are the ones I've read and can recommend): Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005); The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement (2007); Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010); American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016); Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequalilty (2020). This will probably turn into another one, but it's going to take some more work. I think the "density divide" is a mostly illusory artifact of other factors. (Democrats have gotten very bad at talking to anyone other than well-educated pan-urban liberals.) Even more inexplicable is "plutocratic populism." What passes for "right-wing populism" these days is basically the substitution of false issues for real ones. That Republicans can get away with this is partly due to their clever efforts, but also to the Democrats' chronic ineptitude at talking about real issues and exposing and deflecting the nonsense they face. Also from this group:

• Alexander Hertel-Fernandez/Shayna Strom [04-30] Designing economic policy that strengthens US democracy and incorporates people's lived experiences.

• Yotam Margalit [05-13] Countering right-wing populism: Identifying its cultural roots and charting a path forward.

Sharon Zhang [05-13] DNC Moves to Oust David Hogg After He Says Party Isn't Standing Up to Trump. He's 28, and has made the DNC nervous by organizing a PAC calling for primarying against ineffective elders, so they approved a complaint from a 61-year-old woman who lost, citing the election as a violation of the party's "gender parity" rules. (Why do Democrats have rules that are so easily lampooned?) They also voided the election of Malcolm Kenyatta to a vice-chair slot, who seems to be less controversial but collateral damage.

• Chris Lehmann [05-19] The DNC's Latest Feud Is an Exercise in Futility.

• John Ross [04-30] David Hogg Is Not a Threat to the Democratic Establishment: "He's offering the appearance of change without the substance." Still, isn't appearances what matters most to the DNC? Can they even conceive of substance?

Nathan J Robinson [05-14] The Myth of the Marxist University: "Academia is not full of radicals. There just aren't many Republicans, perhaps because Republicans despise the academy's values of open-mindedness and critical inquiry." I don't feel like really sinking into this, but I could probably write a ton. One thing is that in the early 1970s, I actually did have significant exposure to explicitly Marxist academics: there were a half-dozen in just the sociology department at Washington University, and a few more I knew of in other departments. That was an anomaly, and the Danforths were already moving to dismantle the sociology department when I left. They fired my main professor there, Paul Piccone, and as far as I know never got another academic posting. I knew a few more Marxists elsewhere, mostly through Piccone, and many of them had a rough time, despite being very worthy scholars. Marxists had two strikes against them: one was that they were on the wrong side politically, as universities have traditionally been finishing schools for the upper class (a role they've largely reverted to, not least by making them unaffordable to the masses); and secondly, they demanded critical thinking, which made them not just subversive, but smarter than more conventional thinkers. I can't quite claim that there's no such thing as a dogmatic Marxist -- many academics in the Soviet Union were just that, and ridiculous as a result -- but most of us saw Marxism not as an ideology but as a step on the way towards better understanding the world (and sure, of changing it for a better future.

Since my day, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there seems to have been a concerted effort to poison the wells and salt the earth of academia to deny any sort of legitimacy to Marxian thought -- a campaign effective enough that even Robinson, who isn't afraid of declaring himself a socialist, shies away from admitting any sort of Marxist sympathies. In some ways this doesn't matter. While the Marxian toolkit is exceptionally powerful, there are many ways to get to the truth of a matter. But we should recognize that the right's agenda isn't just to stamp out a heresy. It is to shut down critical thought, and turn the universities back into a system for training cadres who accept and cherish the inequalities and injustices of the present system. Understanding Marxism will hobble their agenda, but even if one remains ignorant of Marx and his followers, inequality and injustice will drive a good many people to resist, to question, to research, and ultimately to reinvent the tools they need to defend themselves.

Some more Current Affairs:

• Interviews:

  • [05-07] The Political Perils of 'Common Sense': Interview with historian Sophia Rosenfeld.

  • [05-29] A Lack of US Diplomacy Is Destroying the World's Security: Interview with former ambassador Chas Freeman "on US failures to pursue mutually beneficial diplomatic resolutions in China, Ukraine, and the Middle East."

• Nathan J Robinson:

  • [05-28] Andrew Cuomo Is Worse Than Even You Know: "Why on Earth is he a contender for mayor?"

• Rob Larson [05-08]: The Wall Street Journal Admits It — Capitalism is a Miserable Tyranny: "The 'free market' workplace subjects people to an ugly, naked hierarchy." Then it's not really a free market, is it? (Your word for the day: monopsony. Granted, it's rarely applied to how a company controls its own workers, but it's what allows them to do so. And like monopoly, it's power obtained by removing freedom from the market.)

• Alex Skopic:

  • [04-10] China Knows How to Deal with its Billionaires.

  • [04-17] Trump Is What Happens When You Give a Landlord Power: "He wants to 'own' Gaza and Greenland, and he treats immigrants like tenants he can evict at will. The rent-seeking class created Trump, and now he's governing as America's landlord in chief."

  • [05-16] How the AP Stylebook Warps Reality to Serve Power.

  • [06-02] How the Right Abuses Tolkien: "For Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and other figures on today's far right, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien have become a cultural touchstone. Pity they don't understand the first thing about them." I don't know either, and don't care, but maybe you do.

Marci Shore/Timothy Snyder/Jason Stanley [05-14] We Study Fascism, and We're Leaving the U.S.: Three Yale historians pack up and leave Trumpland, in what looks less like a principled stand than a book promotion -- I'm not familiar with Shore (a specialist in Polish and Ukrainian intellectual history), but I've read books by Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom) and Stanley (How Fascism Works), and consider them useful (although, like most "threat to democracy" alarms, they fail to consider how little actual democracy they have left to defend -- a better book to read on this is Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone).

I've pondered the fascism question quite a bit, and have no doubt that there are common ideas and attitudes among Trump and other Republicans, which become genuinely perilous when given power -- as has happened with Trump's election, and with his subsequent power grabs. When we look for historical insights, it is hard not to recall the early days of fascism: while the differences are considerable, few other analogies convey the gravity of what's happening, or the consequences should it continue.

David Klion [05-15] I Thought David Horowitz Was a Joke -- but He Foreshadowed the Trump Coalition: I wrote about Horowitz's obituary last time, but I figured this article is worth citing anew. One thing that could use a deeper look is the hustle that moved him into a position of prominence (editor at Ramparts) on the new left, and which found much more lucrative support when he moved to the far right (e.g., his son as Marc Andreessen's VC fund partner). Of course, it's not just hustle. More than that it's the ability to make yourself instrumental for people with the power to make you rich.

Jeffrey St Clair:

• [05-16] Roaming Charges: Sturm und Drang Warnings. Opens with a flurry of videos of ICE agents brutally attacking "suspects." Then there's "Trump grants white South Africans refugee status," with a picture that prompted Julie K Brown to quip, "I've never seen refugees with so much luggage." Much more, including this:

  There's not a single Congressional district where the support for slashing Medicare is more than 15%. Of course, this doesn't matter to MAGA. Unlike the Democrats, they sought power in order to use it, especially for malign unpopular policies, and they don't fret about the future political consequences. Imagine a party who won power and then fulfilled their promises for englightened popular policies, instead of worrying how it might piss off Wall Street?

  Of course, there is no such party. The Democrat establishment is Wall Street's first line of defense against any policy agenda that might restraint capital and/or redistribute wealth, regardless of how popular such programs might be.

• [05-23] Roaming Charges: White Lies About White Genocide: Starts with Richard Burton (more likely the 19th century imperialist explorer than the Welsh actor): "The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

• [05-30] When the Dead Speak and the Living Refuse to Listen. Emphasis added:

  The problem with writing about Gaza is that words can't explain what's happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror.

  Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to subdue Gaza, depopulate it of Palestinians, and seize the Strip for itself. Israel will not change. It hasn't deviated from this genocidal course since October 8, 2023. For 19 months, every Palestinian has been a target because Israel wants Gaza cleansed of Palestinians. Therefore, everyone can be bombed. Everyone can be starved. Everyone can be denied medical care and the mere essentials of life.

  I would have added to the second bold bit, "and no one else can change it." Or maybe I mean "will," but the distinction between "can't" and "won't" isn't likely to be tested.

• Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson [05-13] How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump: "At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden's weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?" This is a chunk from their book.

James Kirchick [05-20] All the President's Enablers: "Three books on Joe Biden's presidency jointly paint a devastating portrait of an ailing, geriatric leader surrounded by mendacious aides and grasping family members." Review of Tapper's book, along with the campaign tomes by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Fight) and by Chris Whipple (Uncharted) -- how weird that both books include "Wildest" in their subtitles?

Jennifer Szalai [05-13] A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle: A review of Tapper's Original Sin, which "depicts an aging president whose family and aides enabled his quixotic campaign for a second term."

Ravi Hari [05-14] Joe Biden's memory lapses sparked concern among aides, new book reveals.

Michelle Goldberg [05-16] How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden's Infirmity?

Benjamin Hart [05-22] Jake Tapper Dissects Bidenworld's 'Big Lie': An interview with Tapper. One tidbit here is about how Mike Donilon, who seems to be the most culpable person in Biden's entourage, made about $4 million on failed campaign.

Andrew Rawnsley [05-22] Who's to blame for the Biden tragedy?

John Koblin [05-23] Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper: "A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it also has generated intense scrutiny of him and his work."

Scott Lemieux [05-24] Joe Biden winning the 2020 nomination was probably suboptimal, but it was not an elite conspiracy: Evidently Tapper is pushing the line that it was. Looking at the list of candidates and their money suggests that something screwy was going on, especially with the donors (two of whom spent lavishly and ruinously on themselves).

Lloyd Green: [05-25] Original Sin: How Team Biden wished away his decline until it was too late.

Carlos Lozada [05-20] Biden Is a Scapegoat. The Democrats Are the Problem. Of course it is. It's always "THE DEMOCRATS." Even though straw polls often show generic Democrats beating generic Republicans, when actual Democrats lose, it's always the fault of "THE DEMOCRATS." There's such a mismatch between what they say and what they actually do, that it's hard not to suspect them of deceit, corruption, ulterior motives, and sheer sophistry. For some reason Republicans manage to avoid or belittle such suspicions, even while engaging in much more egregious misbehavior -- for some reason that seems to build up their brand as badass action figures, while for all of their behind-the-scenes machinations, supposedly brilliant Democratic operatives keep squandering tons of cash and losing elections that should be easy.

Norman Solomon [05-13] The Careerism That Enabled Biden's Reelection Run Still Poisons the Democratic Party: Original Sin "reveals top White House aides lying to journalists and trying to gaslight the public over Biden's decline." What should also be clear is that journalists sleepwalked through all four Biden years: they were blinded by naive bipartisanship, allowing Republicans to drive the few stories they bothered with, which meant that they constantly sniped at Democrats over bullshit (which did include Biden's age)) while ignoring real problems, like war and inequality, that Biden was helpless at, or in some cases simply uninterested in.

Stanley B Greenberg [05-29] The Real Original Sins: "What do Democrats need to do to win back voters' trust?"

Branko Marcetic [05-23] Will Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not. Author wrote the only serious (not just left, which counts for a lot) pre-2020 election book on Biden (Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden) and has covered him extensively as president, so I expected him at least to review Original Sin, and was surprised how hard this piece was to find. As he points out, "In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true." And: "The careerism, elite myopia, and poor judgment that led the party establishment to run an ailing man the entire country could see was plainly unfit to be president don't seem to have gone anywhere."

New Republic:

• Michael Tomasky [05-19] What the Democrats Need to Learn From the Biden Cover-Up Fiasco: "As much as covering up the president's infirmity was a scandal for all involved, the Democrats' mortal sin was the one that was right out in the open." Which one? Presumably the Harris succession, which was consecrated with hardly a whiff of debate, locked in (like so much in the Democratic Party) by the donor elite, who didn't dare risk running a candidate with ideas of proven popularity.

• Alex Shephard [05-21] Was It Really a "Cover-Up" if We All Knew the Truth About Biden? I think he's wrong here. Nobody knew the truth, possibly including Biden. How could they? Biden was sheltered, with his inconsistencies and lapses explained away by people in a position to know better, but influenced by political exigencies they never acknowledged. In this void, Republicans spread all sorts of charges and innuendos, which lacked credibility because they're extremely biased liars -- as was obvious from every charge based on policy differences. The problem was that Biden's people got caught in their competency lie, which not only discredited them but gave Republicans credit for their whole kit and caboodle. Nor was competency the only lie Democrats got trapped by: ending the war in Gaza was the big one, but there were dozens more, especially their crowing about how great the economy was when some factors were hitting many people hard (like high interest rates).

• Osita Nwanevu [05-23] The Democrats Are Having a False Reckoning Over Joe Biden: "Party elites aer considerably more responsible for their woeful state of affairs than the former president." Probably true, but he is their leader, and his reputation in tatters exposes their own desperation and malfeasance.

Nicholas Kristoff [05-17] The $7 Billion We Wasted Bombing a Country We Couldn't Find on a Map: The price tag comes from Yemen Data Project and Defense Priorities. Given the multi-trillion dollar price tags on Iraq and Afghanistan, this number seems like a pittance. While the cruelty, waste, and ineffectiveness are obvious, I don't get why any journalists would write like this:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation's protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

How would Kristoff know how unpopular the Houthis are? They must have some kind of popular base, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to displace the Saudi- and American-backed police state that they overthrew. As for their alliance with Iran, what other option did we give them? And would Iran be such a problem if we weren't so obsessed with cutting Iran off and pushing them away?

Dave DeCamp [05-19] Trump's 'Golden Dome' Missile Shield Expected to Cost $500 Billion: That's a wild guess that nobody believes. The only chance it has of working is if no one tests it. The cost of a working system is unimaginable, because any conceivable system can just as easily be circumvented, and anticipating how many ways, and handling all of them, adds orders of magnitude to the cost. Israel's Iron Dome works because Israel is small, and has weak enemies, with primitive technology. Even so, to say it "works" is pretty generous, given Oct. 7, 2023. (If it worked so well then, why is Israel still at war 18 months later? I know, "rhetorical question"! They're at war to kill Palestinians and render Gaza uninhabitable, and the attack was just an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway. In this context, Iron Dome may have helped sucker Hamas into an attack that was more a gesture of unhappiness than a serious attempt to hurt Israel.)

Taking Iron Dome and gold-plating it isn't going to make it work better (but it will make it more expensive, which is largely the point to advisers like Elon Musk). Reagan's Star Wars plan in the 1980s never turned into anything more than graft, and there's no reason to expect more here. The waste is orders of magnitude beyond insane, but worse than that is the attitude it presents to the rest of the world: we dare you to attack us, for which we will show you no mercy, because we really don't care how many of you we kill to "defend ourselves." Every time I see something like this, I recall the scenario laid out in one of Chalmer Johnson's books, where he talks about how easy it would be for someone like China to put "a dumptruck full of gravel" on top of a rocket and blast it into low earth orbit, destroying all of America's communications satellites -- which would wipe out much of our internet service, weather forecasting, GPS, and pretty much all of the command and control systems the US depends on for power projection around the globe. That wouldn't make it possible for China to conquer America, let alone to replace the US as "global hegemon," but it would undermine America's capability to fight wars in China's vicinity. That was all with technology China had 20 years ago. Note that North Korea, which the US has given much less reason to be cautious, has that same technology today. But someone like Trump is going to think that a Golden Dome protects him from such threats, so he's safe from having to make any peace gestures. After all, look at how much peace the Iron Dome gave to Israel.

Kyle Chan [05-19]: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The US Will Be Irrelevant. Dean Baker recommended this "very good piece," adding "it's not good for the home team. Trump's loony fantasies are not a way forward." Chan is a Princeton-based expert on "technology and industrial policy in China," so he's looking for nail he can hammer. China has a real industrial policy, and while it's tolerated quite a bit of inequality, it's ultimately rooted in a civic desire to raise the entire country out of poverty and into everyday wealth. The US has no such policy, nor for that matter much civic desire. Chomsky summed up the American system succinctly: one where profits are privatized, while liabilities are socialized. That reduces all of us to marks, where entrepreneurs (and mobsters) are free to rob everyone (even each other) blind. When Trump became president, he didn't change from private taking to public service. He just realized that being president gives him leverage to take even more, and unlike his predecessors, he has no scruples to get in his way. (Also that his courts have promised him immunity, although one wonders how much he can flaunt this being-above-the-law thing?)

The issue I have with this piece is the concept of "dominant," and for that matter the horse race illustration, which seems like a lot of projection. What China can and will do is reduce a lot of the dominance the US has long exercised over the global economy and its politics -- including the part known as "exorbitant privilege." What China cannot do is to replace us and become the same kind of "global hegemon" the US has been. Americans can't conceive of a world without a ruler, so they assume that if they lose power, it must be to someone else -- someone less benign than we are.

The US gained its power during WWII, when its economy, planned and directed by the most socialist government in American history, blossomed, producing widespread prosperity for most Americans, while the rest of the world was reduced to ruins. That disparity couldn't last, but as long as the US didn't abuse its power -- and at first its "open door" policies were much preferable to the old colonial extracters -- many nations were inclined to follow along. The main problems came when countries tried to assert their independence, especially if they ran afoul of America's championing of capital, with or without any form of democracy. The nations we habitually describe as enemies are mostly struggling for independence.

PS: Consider this chart from a Richard D Wolff [06-02] tweet, which shows "GLobal average net favorability of the US and China, which a decade ago was running pretty steady with the US around +20 and China around -7, but the US rating sunk fast with Trump to -1.5, while China has improved to +8.8.

Jodie Adams Kirshner [05-20] The Sun Sets on West Virginia's Green-Energy Future: "President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act was finally bringing jobs and industry back to the state. But not for long." The picture here shows Trump grinning with a couple other suits, backed by grim men in hard hats -- presumably coal miners -- and flags. Even if Trump manages to bring coal back, and the economics of that are unlikely, they will do so with automation instead of workers, few of whom will benefit. West Virginia's flip to the Republicans is sad and pathetic.

Theodore Schliefer [05-20]: Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering GOP Clout Online: This is probably true, up to a point:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump's victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

This mentions some projects vying for donors: Chorus, AND Media, Channel Zero, Project Echo, Double Tap Democracy. And notes that one was founded by "Rachel Irwin, who led a $30 million influencer program last cycle for Future Forward, the biggest Democratic super PAC." I'd love to see a full accounting of the $1B-plus that the Harris campaign burned through to such underwhelming effect. My guess is that tons of money have already been spent along these lines, to very little effect, largely because the donor-friendly messaging was didn't gain any traction with voters. Perhaps the donors themselves are the problem, and we'd be better off with shoestring-funded grass roots projects which at least have some integrity?

This piece came to my attention via Nathan J Robinson, who suggested putting some of that money into his magazine, Current Affairs, "if you genuinely want to build media that effectively challenges the right and is not just telling Democrats what they want to hear." (Which, by the way, is definitively not today's lead article: Lily Sánchez [05-19] We Still Need to Defund and Abolish the Police. What we really need is some better way to make the police work for us, to solve our problems, and one thing for sure is that requires some funding -- not necessarily for the things we currently fund, but something. "Defund the police" is a joke hiding behind a slogan, but damn few people are likely to go for the slogan, and the joke isn't even very funny -- least of all to people who are routinely victimized by crime, which if you count fraud is pretty much everyone. What they're basically saying is that the police are so dysfunctional you could get rid of them and wouldn't be worse off.)

But Robinson is right: the left press gives you much more bang for the buck than the grant-chasing opportunists who try to pawn themselves off as consultants. Politics today is much more about who you fear and hate than who you like let alone what you want. Republicans understand this, so they fund all manner of right-wing craziness, even when they get embarrassing, because they turn lots of people against Democrats, and they know two things: they can use that energy, and they don't need to fear that it will go too far, because they're convinced they can control it. (Granted, they are not always right, Hitler being a case in point.)

But Democrats don't get this: first, they fear the left, perhaps even more than they fear the right (e.g., Bloomberg spent $500M to stop Sanders, but only $25M to support Harris over Trump); and second, they don't see the value in using the left against the right (possibly because they think their muddled programs, like ACA, by virtue of being more "centrist," have broader appeal than something like Medicare for All, or maybe just because they don't dare offending their donors). To some extent they are right: media bias is such that Hillary Clinton was seen as more dishonest and more corrupt than Donald Trump, but it's hard to fight that with candidates as dishonest and corrupt as the Clintons.

The only Democrat who realized he could use the left was Franklin Roosevelt. He saw unions as a way to organize Democratic voters, but he also thought that capitalism could survive a more equitable distribution of profits, and that the nation as a whole would be better that way. Meanwhile, union leaders like John L Lewis saw that communists were among his best organizers, so he used them as well, while cutting deals that fell far short of revolution. All that went out with the Red Scare, since which liberals have been much more concerned with distancing themselves from the left than from the right -- even though the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" has always been happy to fall in line behind their modest corporate-blessed reform efforts (while the trans-Democratic left has, since FDR's day, been vanishingly marginal).

The one thing Trump might be good for is to finally bury the hatchet between pragmatic Democrats and the more idealistic left. We need both. We need the left to push us to do good things. We need the pragmatists to figure out ways do them that don't provoke counterproductive backlash.[*] And both, but especially the left, need to expose the right for what they are, in terms so clear that no one can deny their truth.

[*] Note that they don't have a very good track record on this. Even after they got all of the affected lobbyists to sign off on Obamacare, severely limiting the system, Republicans generated a huge backlash just to exploit the political opportunity.

Andrew Day [05-20] Cut Israel Off — for Its Own Sake: There are lots of good reasons for taking this position. Even American Conservatives can do it. Even people who seriously love Israel and care for little else are coming around. That just leaves the mass murderers in Israel, their paranoid, brainwashed and/or just plain racist cohort, and their sentimental fools -- probably not paranoid, but brainwashed and/or racist, for sure -- in the west. More Israel, and here I'm more concerned with the growing sense of futility than with the daily unveiling of more atrocities (for some atrocities, look further down):

• Ori Goldberg [05-12] Israel Is Spiraling: "The government's genocidal fervor is ripping through the carefully constructed layers of self-delusion that power this country."

• Kenn Orphan [05-21] Palestine is the litmus test for every value the West holds dear. "And we are failing miserably."

• Yakov M Rabkin: [06-03] Will Israelis Repent for Gaza Genocide? Re-Humanization Takes Courage.

  Jewish tradition teaches that it is never too late to change course, to repent, and to make amends. Of course, to make such a sharp turn requires courage. A well-known Jewish insight is quite clear about it: "Who is the greatest of all heroes? He who turns an enemy into a friend." Most people in Israel vehemently reject as "exilic" this traditional Jewish wisdom that upholds peace as the supreme value. They see in it only "comfort of the weak." But, in fact, this is what real strength is all about.

• Taya Bero [06-01] Why is a pro-Israel group asking the US to investigate Ms Rachel? I never heard of her before I started seeing tweets highlighting her Gaza statements, but evidently she's a big deal in some quarters. While the Trump administration hopes to chill free speech across the entire opposite political spectrum (see Magarian below), Israel is the one subject that has already moved to active suppression. It's tempting to say that's because it's the hardest to make light of.

  Not that this particular government has any scruples about banning speech, assembly, or anything else they find disobedient.

• Melody Ermachild Chavis: [06-02] Gaza's Destruction Injures Israel Forever: Maybe it seems perverse to focus on the self-harm Israel is responsible for, when there are much more obvious victims -- vast numbers of Palestinians, of course, but also a few widely scattered Jews who get caught up in blowback or (at least as likely) "friendly fire."

  Some Israeli soldiers have themselves tried for years to warn of exactly what I am pointing out. Former soldiers founded the NGO Breaking the Silence, which has published testimony of Israeli soldiers revealing the brutal ways the occupation is sustained. Today, they are saying that if anyone thinks they are being a friend to Israel by defending its actions in Gaza or by staying silent, they are not. Friends don't let friends commit war crimes.

  Eventually, every war ends. And when this one ends, Israel's young men and women will return from combat bringing with them the wounds we can see and those that cannot easily be seen. They, and Israel, will be changed forever.

• Ibrahim Quraishi [06-02]: "These Could Be Our Children:" Israeli Women Opposing the War, an Interview.

• Gary Fields [06-03] Never Again?

  It is now imperative to acknowledge what people of conscience the world over know to be true: The State of Israel is operating a Death Camp for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. By forcibly confining the Palestinians of Gaza within impassable bounds, while at the same time slaughtering and starving them within this confined space, the State of Israel has made a mockery of the slogan, "Never Again."

Sandeep Vaheesan [05-21] The Real Path to Abundance: "To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have top get the story right about what's standing in the way." Review of Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance, in which he finds much to nitpick, before moving on to more general problems. Among the most cutting:

It's not insignificant that Klein and Thompson's attacks echo the Trumpist agenda they disclaim. The affluent undoubtedly have more time and resources to spend advocating for their interests than the poor. But instead of calling for steeper progressive taxation and anti-monopoly policies that would rein in the power of the affluent, Klein and Thompson focus single-mindedly on red tape. Instead of calling for expanded state capacity to expedite environmental reviews (as they do for some government projects, like California's High-Speed Rail Authority), they suggest we should ditch environmental review entirely. And instead of making the case for strengthening and broadening democratic participation in land use policy, they imply we should simply jettison it altogether. . . .

This vision is undemocratic in both form and function. Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers -- in short, more oligarchy. That is exactly what Trump and Elon Musk are hoping to achieve by taking the chainsaw to federal agencies, and that is why, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini puts it, they are "hitting the professional-managerial class -- and hitting them hard." These points of overlap with Trump's agenda also matter politically.

Also related here:

• Dean Baker [05-27] Why Are the Abundance Boys Scared to Talk About Patent Monopolies? He later expanded this to [06-01]: My Abundance Agenda. Nothing here questions the value of producing more, but stresses that it does make a lot of difference just how you go about doing it.

• Ed Kilgore [05-29] The Abundance Agenda Revives an Old Democratic Rivalry: "Helping the public sector get tangible things done may be the only way to protect progressive interest and identity groups from MAGA." Huh? This looks like (and he's quoting Jonathan Chait) anti-left Democrat think they've found a cudgel in the "abundance agenda" to beat down the left, who they continue to identify not in class but in identity terms. This assumes two things: that the "abundance agenda" will be massively popular once one has the power to implement it; and that its appeal will be so obvious that Democrats advancing it will be able to win the elections they need to implement it. There is little evidence for either. I agree that Democrats have to promote policies that will attract massive political support, and that once they have the power, they need to deliver substantial tangible benefits. I don't doubt that increasing production is part of the solution, but unless it can produce useful goods and services, and be directed where needed, it's just another scam for supply-side trickle-down.

Greg Grandin [05-22] The Conquest Never Ends: Tie-in to the author's new book, Greg Grandin: America, América: A New History of the New World, which I've just started, but also ties in to Israel's echo of the Conquest in Gaza. Subheds here: "Conquest, Then and Now"; "From Cortés to Hitler"; and "The End of the End of the Age of Conquest," which sees Trump's ambitions to expand American power from Greenland to Panama alongside Israel's clearing of Gaza and Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a deliberate reversal from the decolonization movement that followed the demise of the German and Japanese empires in WWII. Of course, there are differences, not least being that Israel is operating shamelessly in plain sight, but as Grandin points out, the Spanish broke new ground in documenting their destruction and enslavement through the then-novel medium of the printing press.

Also at TomDispatch:

• William D Hartung/Ashley Gate [05-27] The Coming of a Values-Free Foreign Policy: "Donald Trump has ripped off the human rights veneer that once graced US foreign policy." Or that tried to hide the disgrace of US foreign policy? While on the one hand I'm pleased to cut the hypocrisy, there was something comforting in the thought that Americans felt the need to pretend they were doing good in the world. With Trump, it's all transactional, and much of that is directed into his personal accounts.

• Alfred McCoy [05-25] How American Soft Power Turned to Dust in the Age of Trump: "Why the world's richest nation is killing the world's poorest children."

• Juan Cole [05-29] Trump of Arabia: "Is Trump's Axis of the Plutocrats Marginalizing Israel?" I don't see how anyone can doubt that pro-Israel donors are getting their money's worth out of Trump. His support for clearing Gaza out is undoubtable, and he'll probably wind up negotiating a mass evacuation. Similarly, he has no concerns or scruples about whatever Netanyahu wants to do in the occupied West Bank. On the other hand, he seems less inclined than Biden to let Israel dictate his foreign policy beyond Israel's immediate borders. Happy as he is to cash Israeli checks, he realizes that the real money is in oil, and that oil-rich Arabs are eager to grease his skids. There are even rumors that he'll resurrect the Iran nuclear deal he scuttled in his first term. Others have noticed this, although they keep trying to imagine less crass motives:

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [05-19] Why Trump ghosted Israel: He likes 'winning': "Leaving Netanyahu off his itinerary of must-see leaders was tactical, not so much a strategic, move."

• Todd Miller [06-01] Donald Trump's Border World in the Age of Climate Change: "The United States, the world's largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal."

• Liz Theoharis/Aaron Scott/Moses Hernandez McGavin [06-03]: The Christian Nationalist Mission to Banish Trans People.

Mike Lofgren [05-24] Pete Rose, Donald Trump and the corruption of literally everything: "Our president's meddling in baseball history: Another reminder that he ruins everything he touches." Aside from Rose, the other names are ancient, with only Joe Jackson likely to receive any HOF consideration at all (some other names I recognize: Eddie Cicotte, a near-HOF quality pitcher also part of the Black Sox scandal, as were Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, and Lefty Williams; also: Benny Kauff, Lee Magee, Cozy Dolan; others I didn't recall: Joe Gedeon, Gene Paulette, Jimmy O'Connell, William Cox; I was surprised that Hal Chase was not on the list, but no one in MLB history has been so notoriously corrupt for so long -- probably not HOF caliber, but pretty comparable to a couple others who have been inducted; see Wikipedia for details on these and others). I always hated the way sports writers lionized Rose, so I tended to denigrate him. (I suppose Charlie Parker was another one I underrated because everyone else seemed to overrate him.) If I had to rank Rose, I'd put him somewhere just below Paul Waner, but well above Lloyd Waner. That Trump would favor Rose seems typical of both (sure, I'm less certain that Rose would reciprocate, but I wouldn't rule it out).

• George F Will [05-15] Pete Rose and Donald Trump, what a double-play combo: Will is categorically wrong on everything in politics, except that he hates Donald Trump, probably for the same reasons Churchill hated Hitler. Will's one saving grace is that he knows a lot about baseball, and writes about it intelligently and well. So when I wanted to compare notes on Rose and Trump, I landed here, where the key line is his description of Rose as "a monster of self-absorption." QED, I'd say.

Kenneth P Vogel [05-27] Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner: "Paul Walczak's pardon application cited his mother's support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary." Add his name to the list of examples "of the [Trump's] willingness to use his clemency powers to reward allies who advance his political causes, and to punish his enemies."

Yasha Levine [05-28] A Letter to My Fellow Jewish Americans: Starts with the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington DC, by a shooter identified as Elias Rodriguez, predictably spun as "a pure act of antisemitism," because what other reason can there be for wanting to strike back at Israel?

So I want to say this to many of my fellow Jews in America: I know you are desperate to justify and deflect your support for Israel's actions. . . . This denial may work on you, but it has little power in the larger world. You've been sheltered for far too long, thinking that you and your children would never bear the cost of your political decisions. But here is the thing: What happened in Washington DC . . . there is a lot more of the same kind of violence coming our way. And it's all your fault. . . . Give up your biblical-nationalist fantasies before it's too late. We all live in one world. We're all connected. Continuing on this path will only bring ruin and death.

Jack Hunter [05-29] The great fade out: Neocon influencers rage as they diminish: "Mark Levin leads a dwindling parade of once important voices now desperate to stop an Iran deal. MAGA world is increasingly tuning out." They may be receding, but like a flood they've left their filth everywhere, deep in every crevice of the national security hive mind. Cleaning them out is going to take much more diligence than scatterbrained posers like Trump and Vance can muster.

Steve M [05-30] The New Sanewashing: Assuming Trump Has Ideas, Not Just Resentments and Personality Defects. This cites three examples, all from the New York Times within the week:

• Edward Wong [05-26]: Trump's Vision: One World, Three Powers?
• Edward Wong [05-29] Trump Makes a New Push to 'Decouple' U.S. From China.
• Glenn Thrush [05-29] Trump's Flurry of Pardons Signals a Wholesale Effort to Redefine Crime.

I sympathize with reporters who habitually seek to find some "method in the madness," but even if some in Trump's orbit would like to dignify his outbursts with some kind of underlying concept, Trump himself shows little interest in rationalization. As M puts it: "Trump's only idea here is: 'You're criminals. We're not.'" As for the Wong articles, "Donald Trump, geostrategist? Nahhh." His notion of a new tri-polar world order may be more realistic than the Clinton-Obama-Biden "indispensable nation" hypothesis, but even so he's way behind the curve, where even the lesser BRICS nations are charting their own courses, and Europe is only humoring American vanities as long as the demands (like buying F-35s) aren't too onerous.

More from No More Mister Nice Blog:

• [05-27] Democrats Need to Run on Their Policies' Coattails: Introduces Jess Piper, a Democratic Party activist who blogs as The View From Rural Missouri. (She doesn't say where, but in Applebaum and Joplin she gets there by driving south for four hours, so that puts her north of Kansas City, near the Iowa border. Joplin's 2.5-3 hours south of KC, and 3.5-4 hours east of Wichita. Piper is overly impressed with Anne Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and for that matter with Heather Cox Richardson, who she reads "every morning," but unlike them shows little evidence of clamoring for foreign wars -- not least because she sees enough evidence of autocracy in Missouri to prioritize fighting it here.) Missouri is a former swing state that has turned into a Republican lock, but in recent years they've approved a number of referenda favoring issues like a $15 minimum wage and abortion rights -- issues that their elected Republicans then seek to nullify. The pitch: Democrats need to become recognized as champions and protectors of programs that are already popular. Which suggests they need to run on them, not just away from other Republican talking points.

• [05-28] Elissa Slotkin Almost Gets It. I could nitpick my way through this, but let's just say that Democrats need to find a leader who can channel Bernie Sanders' critique, in all of its intensity and passion along with his own unassailable credibility and integrity, yet not panic the donor class into self-destruction and caricature. Slotkin has some of what's needed, but isn't there yet.

  By the way, Sanders blew his chance in 2020, by running to the left to stave off Warren instead of ingratiating himself with the party centrists. I don't particularly blame him for sticking with his instincts: Trump did the same thing, but he didn't offend the donor class the way Sanders did (he was, after all, one of them, whereas Sanders is not). But the real reason Sanders beat Warren was not because he was farther left but because he had much broader appeal. I blame the "smart money" people for not seeing that what they needed to win wasn't ideological purity but someone who could get votes by credibly painting Trump as crooked and monstrous. On the other hand, they should have known that Sanders was at most a mild reformist, and even his most strenuous efforts would be tamed by the lobbyists and bureaucrats in their pockets, protecting their business interests. One almost suspects that the reason Bloomberg et al. panicked so was because they realized that the left critique of their ridiculous wealth was too right to permit any scrutiny.

• [05-29] That Origin Story for Trump's War on Higher Education Leaves Out a Few Facts: "Pro-Gaza campus protests are a pretext now. The war [he means Trump's war, or assault, on academia] would have happened anyway, because the right can't tolerate the existence of any institution it can't control."

• [05-31] Do Trump's Poll Numbers Improve Every Time We Beat Him? Here he develops a couple ideas from a Ross Douthat column, on Trump's ability to survive his own self-made crises:

  I worry that many Americans are having a reptile-brain response to Trump's push-and-pull on tariffs. Obviously, MAGA Nation is happy no matter what he does:

  

  But I worry that there's a psych-experiment quality to this:

  1. Trump arouses anxiety with new tariffs. Markets tumble.
  2. Trump removes/suspends all or some of the tariffs he imposed. Markets rally.
  3. Even though we're no better off than we were before step 1, voters feel as if progress is being made. Trump's poll numbers go up.

  Trump's poll numbers aren't terrible anymore because he's constantly doing things, and constantly telling us he's doing things. Biden did things that would have paid off in the long run, but most voters didn't know what he'd done because he was a terrible public communicator, and because Democratic presidents generally assume the public will simply know what they've done.

  Trump's decent poll numbers suggest that roughly half the country just wanted a president who seemed forceful, no matter what he was doing -- and if they don't like the specifics, they believe there are still guardrails to save them.

• [06-01] Trump Probably Doesn't Believe Biden Was Killed (but He Wants to Kill Biden's Presidency): Another example of how Trump doesn't just disregard truth but sees its violation as a stimulant, and how his fans find his lies all so very funny.

• [06-02] Stephen Miller Was Already Trying to Memeify the Colorado Attack Just Hours After It Happened: Well, sure, I agree that "Israel's brutality in Gaza is no justification for this." I am, however, a bit confused by this group (Run for Their Lives) and the final line: "US supporters of the Israeli hostages say they're scared but have vowed to keep demonstrating." In Israel, hostage supporters demonstrate against the government, which clearly has no interest in freeing the hostages (and indeed, would rather they had been killed than captured). But in the US, who are they demonstrating for or against? The simpler, clearer message here is to call for a cease fire and an end to the genocide, which would almost certainly lead to the hostages' release, as that message could be supported by both friends and critics of Israel. But if, as suggested here, the group's demonstrations are strictly against Hamas, their purpose here is nothing more than to rally support for Israel's genocide: the hostages are pawns of Israel as much as of Hamas. The meme, by the way, is something about "suicidal migration" ("a powerful term," "a term we should use more"). It's stupid, but sometimes that's the best they can come up with.

• [06-03] Democrats Aren't Doomed, Though They Should Be Less Doomed. This starts with Nate Cohn [06-03] Should Republicans Have Won in a Landslide?: "The question of whether Donald Trump cost conservatives a more decisive victory is a useful one to consider." This strikes me as fairly idle speculation, based on very little understanding of why Trump won and/or Harris lost. One thought that I do have is that while Trump may have had more negatives than many other Republicans, he alone was able to campaign on pure emotional energy (redemption, revenge, etc.). Any other Republican would have pulled the focus back toward policy, and Republican policies are notoriously unpopular -- which is a big part of why even Trump ducked Project 2025. And that's just the Republican side. Any chance that Democrats might run stronger candidates with better messaging? It's not like there's no room for improvement there.

Howard Dean [05-31] How Democrats can pull off a win under a GOP trifecta: Dismantle the "legal" drug cartel: Dean's leadership of the DNC produced major wins in 2006 and 2008, so Obama replaced him with a cronies who went on to squander Democratic majorities in Congress and in the States, leaving Obama as the only major Democrat to survive. I haven't noticed him name in ages, so I jumped on this. Not what I expected, but he has a good case against the rackets that manage pharmacy benefits. Just how Democrats can fight them without a power base isn't clear, but it should be a campaign issue.

Gregory P Magarian [05-31] Three ways the government can silence speech without banning it. "Among the present administration's chosen tools: making institutions stop or change their advocacy to get government benefits; inducing self-censorship through intimidation; and molding the government's own speech to promote official ideology."

Melvin Goodman [06-02]: Marco Rubio: The Secretary of Statelessness: One of the few hopes I have for Trump is the utter destruction and humiliation of Rubio, which seems to be well underway. He was the most unsavory of Trump's 2016 opponents, and by far the most ambitious of the 2024 cabinet picks, which is to say the one guy who still thinks he can outsmart and use Trump.

Tareq S Hajjaj [06-02] Aid massacre: Israeli forces kill 75 Palestinians at U.S.-run aid distribution center: "The Americans and Israelis set a huge trap for us to lure us here and kill us." Hajjaj had previous reports on the aid center from May 27 ("It looked like a large prison": Chaos ensures at U.S.-Israeli-backed aid distribution site in Gaza) and May 29 (Palestinians describe being treated like animals as chaos breaks out again at U.S.-run aid site in Gaza). Also:

• Abdaljawad Omar [05-30] The 'chaos' of aid distribution in Gaza is not a system failure. The system is designed to fail.

Blaise Malley [06-03] "Shameful, vindictive erasure": Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk's name from Navy ship: "announcing the renaming during Pride Month was intentional." One thing about the Trump administration is that no chance to offend is too petty for them.

Cheyenne McNeill [06-03] "Disgusting abomination": Elon Musk attacks "big, beautiful" spending bill: Needless to add, while vomiting the usual clichés about "this massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill," he also took exception to the removal of several cuts that would have specifically benefitted his companies. For more on this, see:

• Marc Caputo: [06-03] Four reasons Musk attacked Trump's "big beautiful bill".

Tweets:

• Jeffrey St Clair [05-17]: I've read this headline story [from Haaretz: Prominent French rabbi receives death threats over criticism of Israeli policy in Gaza] three times and it's giving me a migraine . . . The Rabbi's getting death threats for opposing a policy of starving children to death. Who's the real anti-Semite? The Rabbi or the Zionists threatening her life?

• Moira Donegan [05-18]: In what might be the logical endpoint of American Zionism, the Heritage Foundation has declared that pro-Palestinian activism is not just antisemitic, but is in fact a shadowy global conspiracy . . . led by Jews. [Link to NYT piece: The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement. Identified among the leaders of a global "Hamas Support Network" are "Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Sorow and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois."]

• Tony Karon [05-20] Imagine if Gary Lineker[*] had said this? Or any New York Times editor, or Democratic Party politician? Even Israel's Zionist parliamentary 'left' is making clear that Israel is not a "normal" state; it's a psychotic genocidal regime that must be stopped.

  In an interview with Israeli public radio yesterday, the leader of Israel's Democrats party, Yair Golan, said: "A sane country doesn't engage in fighting against civilians, doesn't kill babies as a hobby and doesn't set for itself the goals of expelling a population."

  [*] I had to look up Lineker, an English sports broadcaster (former soccer player) who has been blackballed by BBC for expressing "political views," although as far as I can tell not very radical ones.

• Aaron Rupar [05-20] Tim Scott on crypto legislation: "This bill must go forward because it's good news for the American people, especially the ones living in poverty." [Rupar adds: "let them eat shitcoins"]

• Mark Jacob [05-20]: Trump and RFK Jr. say today's kids are "the sickest generation in American history." Is that just a feeling? Here are some facts: About 46% of children born in the U.S. in 1800 did not live to see their 5th birthday. In 1900, the figure was 24%. Now it's under 1%. [Link to New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg/Dani Blum: Kennedy and Trump Paint Bleak Picture of Chronic Disease in U.S. Children: "A highly anticipated White House report blames a crisis of chronic illness on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, lifestyle factors and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants."]

• Alejandra Caraballo [05-22] This [the Republican budget bill] passed 215-214. We're going to lose our healthcare because 3 senior Dems have died this year. We lost Roe because Ginsburg didn't retire. We lost the election because Joe ran for reelection. Our country is being destroyed because geriatric Dems can't retire and let go of power. [What power? More like personal ego perks.]

• James Surowiecki [05-26] [Linking to a Bernie Sanders ad and tweet, saying "75% of Democrats want the party to move in a more progressive, pro-working class direction. Is the Party leadership listening? Or will they continue with their ideology of maintaining the status quo?"]

  Joe Biden was the most pro-working-class president in 60 years, and working-class voters did not care.

  Nathan J Robinson replied: "one reason they didn't care is because half the time he could barely speak in complete sentences." Of course, the more obvious riposte was that the bar was pretty low, and Biden didn't deliver on most of the gestures he made, that he didn't make that many, and that few of them were bold enough to get attention. No doubt his inability to speak coherently about what he wanted was part of the problem. But also after a long career in the business-as-usual center of the Democratic Party, he didn't want much. But even if you buy Surowiecki's assertion, what about Harris? Biden may have been on the minds of those who hated him, but the name on the ballot was Harris, and how much working class support, or even rapport, did she offer? Clearly there was a block of voters who felt enough of a bond with Biden to vote for him over Trump, but didn't feel the same about Harris or Clinton, and they seem to have been the swing voters. It's unfair, and dumb, that Biden could win those voters when a pair of educated and wonky women with essentially the same platform could not, but the answer isn't to whine. It's to present a critique and a vision that voters (and not just donors) can get behind.

Current count: 169 links, 12807 words (15319 total)

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 15 days ago, on April 30.

I made a rather arbitrary decision after midnight Tuesday evening to post what I had at the moment. I'm pretty sure I have up to a dozen tabs still open, but I'm not expecting to have much free time Wednesday or Thursday, and didn't want to leave the thing hanging. If/when I do find time, I may add more here (if I think something fits), or save it for next time. One thing that kept me from closing was that I tried to answer a couple questions, and couldn't quite figure out the second (suppressed for now). Good chance I will focus on that next.

More 100 Days Pieces:

• The Guardian: [04-29] Tracking Trump - everything that's happened in the president's first 100 days: A day-by-day timeline, in LIFO.

• Sidney Blumenthal: [04-30] After 100 days, Trump has destroyed Trumpism.

• Harold Hongju Koh [05-02]: One Hundred Days of Lawlessness.

Norman Solomon: [04-30] The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn't learned its lesson: "The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists. In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict." I'd go so far as to say that the value of a free press in a democracy is that it uncover the facts and framework so that we can properly evaluate and judge our politicians. American mass media has been pretty deficient on that score in general, but especially when it comes to matters of war. Solomon offers numerous examples of how easily the architects of the Vietnam War gamed the media. Sure, in the end, what we saw overwhelmed what we were told, to such an extent that many of us still distrust most public institutions: Trump's charges of "false news" work because that's been our experience forever.

American presidents have never come anywhere near offering an honest account of the Vietnam war. None could imagine engaging in the kind of candor that the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg bluntly provided when he said: "It wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side."

Two months after taking office in early 1977, President Jimmy Carter was dismissive when a reporter asked if he felt "any moral obligation to help rebuild" Vietnam. "Well, the destruction was mutual," he replied. "We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability."

A dozen years later, Ronald Reagan told a gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that the war had been a "noble cause" — "however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom."

While announcing formal diplomatic relations with Vietnam in July 1995, President Bill Clinton felt compelled to fabricate history. "Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives," he said. "They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people."

At the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington in May 2012, President Barack Obama spoke of "honoring our Vietnam veterans by never forgetting the lessons of that war" — which included "that when America sends our sons and daughters into harm's way, we will always give them a clear mission; we will always give them a sound strategy." But Obama was far along in replicating the tragic folly of the Vietnam war.

Yanis Varoufakis: [04-30] Trump and the Triumph of the Technolords: "Trump is a godsend for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other technofeudal lords. Any short-run loss from his tariff delusions is a small price to pay for an agenda that would deregulate their AI-driven services, bolster crypto, and exempting their cloud rents from taxation."

Ed Kilgore: [05-01] Marco Rubio Might Have His Jobs, But He's No Henry Kissinger: Huh?

Chas Danner: [05-03] Trump Loses Another Election Abroad: "Australia's Labor Party looked doomed a few months ago. Now, thanks in part to Trump, it's expanding its majority." The thing I don't quite understand is why the center-left parties in Australia and Canada were considered sure losers before Trump showed them that yes, indeed, things could get much worse. Sure, this fits in with the line that Harris lost as part of a global reaction against incumbents (that also wiped out the Tories in the UK).

• Yanis Varoufakis: [05-06] Why the centre will not hold: Voters want the system upended: Starts with the Canada and Australia elections, although one could also look at the UK, and France, where the runoff system effectively keeps Le Pen out of power. For the moment, Trump is scary enough to drive voters to alternatives, but what more are the centrists offering other than not being Trump? Not solutions, scarcely even acknowledgment of concerns, but more of the "business as usual" that is generating such widely felt problems. And because they're not solving problems, or visibly attempting, and because they're reluctant even to assign blame and identify enemies (especially the ones they cultivate as donors), they lose all credibility -- even their dire warnings about boogeymen slip by the wayside, until someone like Trump gains power and reminds us how much worse it can get. One big point here is that the wins in Canada and Australia were achieved not at the expense of the far right, but by panicking the left into joining the center, even though the center has nothing positive to offer.

• Wolfgang Munchau: [05-05] The death of the centre-right: It failed to address an alienated electorate: This is more of a Europe thing, as our two-party system only allows for left-right branding, even when both are for all intents and purposes centered -- meaning under the thumb of the same donor class and its dominant ideology -- leaving their branding options mostly negative: the Democrats are a mixed bag of liberal, left and center who can only find unity as anti-right; the Republicans are more homogeneous, but still are better defined as anti-left than as conservative, libertarian, authoritarian, or anything else. I would add that those stances are more emotional than logical or practical, which allows the center to cater to or humor them without sacrificing power or policy. (Although I'd also point out that the left has a coherent critique and program, and that the right doesn't, which gives the right an advantage for campaigning but makes governance a disaster.) Multiparty systems in Europe allow for more personal profiles: far-right and far-left vs. center-right and center-left are not just points on a political scale but, given the dominance of emotion over logic in voting, are becoming distinct personality types. In this scheme, as the system fails and panic increases, the far-factions increase at the expense of the center. But as this happens, and especially as the far-right become more ominous to those with centrist leanings, the center-right becomes the empty quadrant: they pale in emotional satisfaction to the far-right, they aren't needed to defend against the far-left, and they cannot be trusted by even the center-left to keep the far-right down (as the center-left has habitually done to the real left).

Alexander Nazaryan: [05-04] Who's to Blame for the Catastrophe of COVID School Closures? "A new book tries to make sense of a slow-motion (and preventable) mistake that affected millions of children." The book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, by David Zweig, who is interviewed here, and allowed to spout his opinions with no review. It isn't obvious to me that the closures were bad decisions, or that they had long term consequences, let alone catastrophic ones, but I also find it hard to credit strawman attacks on caricatures of a left that has never come close to exercising the sort of power they are blamed for. This ends with the interviewer asking "are you optimistic that officials will handle the next pandemic better when it comes to school closures?" To which Zweig answers: "I think a significant portion of the public just simply won't tolerate it the way they did last time." So next time will be worse, not just because we learned nothing but because the do-nothing agitators have only been further empowered.

Note that I'm not arguing that the closure policy was ideal or even right, and certainly not that we shouldn't review what happened and learn to do better. I'm not surprised that "remote learning" is less effective for many students, but surely it could be improved much over the current practice of just blasting students with data. Perhaps it requires more individual teacher attention, not less? Also, I admit that my views are rooted in my own ancient experience with a school system that taught me little and tortured me much. One thing I learned later is that at least some, perhaps many, students will learn on their own what they can't learn in school.[*] One thing I really hate is Zweig's attitude that every minute/day/month that a child is deprived of full bore, high-pressure education is a moment totally and irretrievably lost that will mar the person forever. I could point to the practice of tiger parenting here, but I see that more as an internalization of rat race capitalism, and its perverse reduction of human values.

[*] I am probably an outlier in terms of my ability to pick up expertise in purely academic subjects, which was possibly aided by my being freed from the school system at a tender age (15). But I've known others who loathed school and deliberately underachieved, but on their own went on to master not just the rote practice but the science and logic of the trades that interested and engaged them. I've learned as much from them as I've learned from anyone with a proper academic pedigree. Even so, I admit that there are things that I've been unable to learn on my own, where the discipline of coursework could have made the difference. In particular, I've long noted with regret my inability to advance in mathematics after my standard -- and frankly not very good[**] -- curriculum was broken. (I've compensated somewhat by reading books about mathematics, like Philip J Davis/Reuben Hersh: The Mathematical Experience and John Allen Paulos: Innumeracy, two general surveys I highly recommend, as well as more esoteric fare like Douglas R Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach, James Gleick: Chaos: Making a New Science, and Benoît Mandelbrot: The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

The exception (there always is one, isn't there?) was in 6th grade, when I had a very elderly -- and much despised by everyone else I knew -- math teacher who embraced the temporary vogue for New Math, and introduced me to sets and number theory -- concepts not only interesting in themselves but which provided nearly all of the math I eventually needed for a career in software engineering. It is worth quoting from the Wikipedia page here:

Parents and teachers who opposed the New Math in the U.S. complained that the new curriculum was too far outside of students' ordinary experience and was not worth taking time away from more traditional topics, such as arithmetic. The material also put new demands on teachers, many of whom were required to teach material they did not fully understand. Parents were concerned that they did not understand what their children were learning and could not help them with their studies.

But also note what they were opposed to (and eventually managed to shut down):

All of the New Math projects emphasized some form of discovery learning. Students worked in groups to invent theories about problems posed in the textbooks. Materials for teachers described the classroom as "noisy." Part of the job of the teacher was to move from table to table assessing the theory that each group of students had developed and "torpedo" wrong theories by providing counterexamples. For that style of teaching to be tolerable for students, they had to experience the teacher as a colleague rather than as an adversary or as someone concerned mainly with grading. New Math workshops for teachers, therefore, spent as much effort on the pedagogy as on the mathematics.

In other words, New Math might encourage students to learn on their own and to think for themselves. When I moved on to 7th grade, it was back to the rote learning of Old Math, where I learned little of note but the A grades were easy, and I lost interest -- especially after my 9th grade science teacher was so horrible I not only ditched that as a career inclination but never took another science course (and as such had diminished use for more math).

Kenneth Rogoff: [05-06] Trump's Misguided Plan to Weaken the Dollar: "The so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, proposed by Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran, aims to reduce the United States' current-account deficit by weakening the dollar. But this plan is based on a deeply flawed understanding of the relationship between the dollar's global status and US deindustrialization." I've been asking this same question: if the goal is to square away America's current accounts deficit, wouldn't it be more straightforward to just weaken the dollar -- making US exports cheaper to others, which should result in us selling more, while making imports more expensive, some of which could easily be replaced with cheaper domestic supplies -- than to raise tariffs, which make trade less efficient while inviting retaliation? I've long assumed that the "strong dollar" was dictated by the political clout of finance, because the main effect of the trade deficits has been to feed money back into the finance system, making the bankers (if not necessarily other capitalists, like manufacturers) all the richer. Those in finance have little reason to reduce the trade deficit, because it's already working just fine for them. Rogoff offers a couple reasons why an attack on the dollar wouldn't help with the deficit, and concludes "the idea that tariffs can be a cure-all is dubious at best," but doesn't really answer my question. He is, by the way, a former chief economist from IMF, and co-wrote a famous book called This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which I don't recall all that well reviewed. He has a new book more specifically on this subject: Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead.

• Ezra Klein: [05-02] Trump vs. the Dollar: Interview with Kenneth Rogoff. An interview, which gets into more depth about "exorbitant privilege": where the idea came from (it was originally, as you might guess, a sneer, but has since been adopted as some kind of divine right), what benefits it bestows, and how insecure they may be. (What is lacking, I think, is details on exactly who benefits, and how much or little that may matter to the rest of us.) The bottom line is here:

  It has stabilized for the moment because Trump has retreated partly. But what I thought might have taken 10 or 15 years to happen took place within a week. And we're never going back.

  So our exorbitant privilege, our lower borrowings -- never going back to what it was. We may have lost a quarter percent, a half a percent, just permanently higher.

  We can have a recession to bring them down -- and we can get into that -- but I don't think that bell will ever get unrung.

  One especially interesting line is: "Americans know they've been good, but they don't know they've been lucky." That's pretty common among evidently successful people. Rogoff follows this observation with sports metaphors, so I'll drop in a couple more: "born on third base, but thinks he hit a triple." You might counter with Branch Rickey's "luck is the residue of design," but few other people ever cultivated luck as assiduously as Rickey. Donald Trump was born with so much luck he's spent a lifetime squandering it and still gets by on nothing but.

Adam Gurri: [05-07] Why We Need a Reconstruction of the Liberal Public Sphere: "How media systems work, how ours came to be, and where we go from here." Son of media guru Martin Gurri -- I have a copy of his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which seemed like it might offer some insight into the Trump-addled media circus, in spite of (or perhaps because) its author having wound up voting for Trump in 2024 (on extremely specious "free speech" grounds); I may have clicked here expecting Martin -- has "worked all over the adtech ecosystem," but also founded Liberal Currents ("an online magazine devoted to mere liberalism"). This is a long piece I've barely skimmed and can't especially recommend but the subject is important enough to bookmark it and return at some future point: Democrats desperately need to learn better ways of talking to and about other people, because recent approaches don't seem to be working at all. I don't know what the answer is, in part because it's hard to see how anything can effectively counter the forces that are fragmenting and denigrating consciousness with their relentless barrage of misinformation and misinterpretation. But I am pretty sure that nostalgia for "the Big Three" era isn't the answer, or even a part of it. That was, after all, the system that gave us the Red Scare, the Cold War, and especially Vietnam, and was still largely intact trumpeting Reagan's "morning in America," Bush's "new world order," and another Bush's "global war on terrorism."

• Adam Gurri: [04-29] Unfit to Be the Ruler of a Free People: The Anti-American Presidency of Donald Trump: "The Trump administration is an affront to everything good that America has become and everything America has ever sought to be." This piece aligns the author with the liberal democrats who have always sought to see the sunny side of America idealism, and therefore regard Trump as an abomination, rather than as just an especially ripe and pungent instance of rot that's deeply embedded in American history. Choosing sides in this debate is a distracting parlor game, when it's much easier for both to agree that Trump and his legion are hideous and need to be stopped. Still, I will note that those who have tried to rescue patriotism and piety from the Republicans have had not only had very little success, they've become objects of ridicule for the very people they try to convert. (I was especially struck by how Trump made light of Obama's habitual "God bless America" speech ending, obviously a lie because they all agree he's a Muslim terrorist driven by his hatred and lust to destroy America. )

Gaby Dal Valle [05-07]: Grifters thrive under Trump's scam-friendly administration: "Gutted watchdog agencies and unprecedented 'influence peddling' means unrestrained fraud." This is the essential story of the Trump administration, the one you can be sure of adding new installments to each and every week. This is also Trump's main vulnerability, as his graft is only barely more popular among rank-and-file Republicans -- who are so easily motivated by the slightest stench of scandal on the Democratic side -- as with Democrats and independents.

Sarah Jones [05-07]: The Christians Who Believe Empathy Is a Sin: "When suffering is irrelevant, anything can be justified." I don't exactly understand why, other than because their politics depends on desensitizing to cruelty. Ends with: "The social contract is held together by empathy, which is why authoritarians fear and despise it so much. All they can offer is a net."

Orly Noy [05-07]: What a 'peace summit' reveals about the state of the Israeli left: "Well-meaning dialogue workshops, panels on distant political solutions, but no mention of genocide: these are privileged distractions we can no longer afford." I spent over a year, from Oct. 7, 2023 through Nov. 6, 2024, documenting and denouncing Israel's genocide -- a word that will suffice for what's happening, which admittedly is much more than that, but also no less -- but I've largely bypassed the subject since then. This does not represent a change in my views, or a lessening of concern, but simply a choice to focus my limited time and energy on matters that are less glaring and/or are open to possible solution. While I may have been overly optimistic that Harris, had she won and transitioned from campaign to governing (from sucking up to donors to actually having to grapple with real problems), would have compelled Israel to limit its goals, I was certainly correct that Trump would rubber-stamp whatever Israel's leadership wanted. Given that force is not a viable option -- no opposing force has the means, much less the desire, to go up against Israel (and the US) -- the Houthis and/or Hezbollah are at most minor irritants -- and that war wouldn't be a good idea anyway, and that US support can be counted on, the only way this ends is when Israel itself decides to stop it. Hence, our hopes are limited to efforts like this "peace summit," political efforts that gnaw away at blanket US/Europe support for Israel, and the resilience of the Palestinian people, who are paying the price for our confusion and indifference. As usual, if you want latest news, see this website, MondoWeiss, Middle East Eye, etc.

• Basel Adra: [05-06] Palestinians awoke to bulldozers. Their village was destroyed by noon: Note that this was in the West Bank (not Gaza), the village Khilet al-Dabe.

• Qassam Muaddi [05-09]: Exterminating Gaza was always Israel's plan, but now it's official.

• Ofer Cassif: [05-09] Israel laid out its harrowing plan to take Palestinian territories in 2017. Now it is happening.

• Faris Giacaman/Tareq S Hajjaj [05-06] Israel is creating a power vacuum in Gaza by backing armed looters -- and killing anyone who tries to stop them.

• Mitchell Plitnick [05-02] Biden staffers admit what we all knew: White House lied about ceasefire efforts.

• Dave Reed [05-10] Weekly Briefing: Israel plots ethnic cleansing under Trump's cover.

• Thomas L Friedman [10-09] This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally: No, he hasn't flipped. He still has "zero sympathy for Hamas" ("a sick organization"), and sure, it's taken him an awful long time to get to a point that should have been obvious even before the Oct. 7 uprising, but his extreme reluctance qualifies him as a bellwether. A tweet mentioning this piece starts, "when you've lost Thomas Friedman." If appeals for murdered children would have gotten to you, you'd already be clamoring for a cease fire, if not much more. Friedman only cares about something else: realpolitik. He recognizes that genocide is a bad look for Israel, and that it is bleeding support for the land and people he so cherishes, and under these circumstances, he sees that blanket US support only encourages politicos like Netanyahu to do worse things, to bleed more support.

  One way to look at this is: if you care for Palestinians, you've long recognized Israel as a force intent on your destruction, so your response is to two-fold: to elicit sympathy for your people, and to applaud their heroism and resilience in the face of occupation. You also have negligible political influence, especially where it matters most, in Israel and the US -- and especially to the extent that your aims can be viewed as a zero-sum game at Israel's expense. If your concerns are more general, if you oppose injustice and its enforcement in all forms, then you should be able to recognize Israel as a major offender, and seek remedies, starting with a ceasefire, that restore justice. You, too, have negligible political influence, at least in the US, as is evident by America's deep commitment to global power projection, and by America's generous support for regimes that have a history of abusing human rights. But at least your group is one that the real powers in pre-Trump America feel the need to pay lip service to. (Trump doesn't feel any such need, which makes him an object lesson on what happens when you don't at least pretend to have any scruples.)

  But there is a third group of people who have good reason to oppose Israel's genocide, and that's those who genuinely love their idealized notion of Israel, and wish nothing more nor less than to rescue their ideal from the racist/murderous reality that can no longer be ignored or excused. Their remedy of last resort is "tough love": Friedman's title cannot have been easy for someone who's spent 30+ years propagandizing Israel as America's greatest ally, but he at least recognizes the leverage point, and at long last sees no better option. This puts him midpoint on a scale that started with early "tough love" adopters like Peter Beinart and (somewhat later and more equivocally) Bernie Sanders, and will likely continue even beyond Friedman. When you still find Israel-lovers, work on them: ask how can they profess love of Israel and concern for the safety and well-being of Jews and still excuse what Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir have done? They have no answer, and need to see that. When they fall back on their hasbara, dispel it -- it's really quite easy, as at root its irreducible claim is that God's Chose People have a right to dominion over all others. (If you are one of them, you should recognize that the proposition is ridiculous. If you are not, you have no other recourse, as your side has been chosen for you.) And if they still refuse, they are lost -- as is any nation based on such obstinate self-regard. But we should be clear that anyone who still supports this Israeli government is no friend of the Israeli people and nation, or of Jews anywhere. It is they who are promoting anti-semitism.

• Hanin Majadli: [04-09] This Intolerable Gap Between Jewish Memory and Palestinian Reality:

  I blame Israel's school system and the State of Israel for having introduced the Holocaust into my veins. . . . This intolerable gap between the memories of the Jewish people and the reality of the Palestinian people, between the insistent pledge of "Never Again" and what is happening now, in the present, is something that burns one's heart, something almost inconceivable. This is the gap between an Israeli society that opens its heart, at least ostensibly, to a painful historical memory while ignoring, sometimes brutally so, the pain that it itself is responsible for.

David Armstrong: [05-08] The Price of Remission: "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I've covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked even me."

Jeffrey St Clair [05-09]: Roaming Charges: 100 Days of Turpitude: Starts with more on the new pope than I ever thought to ask. Although, for the record, see: Pope Leo XIV Calls for Peace in Gaza, End to Israeli Blockade on Aid. Of course, St Clair has much more than that.

Michael Tomasky [05-09]: You Won't Believe How Much Richer the Trumps Have Gotten This Year: Estimate is $3 billion in three months. A big chunk of that comes from crypto: whereas lesser crooks could be accused of "selling out," Trump gets to buy in, on terms that all but guarantee profits. And given his ability to direct public money to private ventures, his "investors" could be able to recoup plenty in his allotted four years. This flows into another [04-25] story specifically on crypto: "Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done." That may seem like a big claim, but whoever's the runner up is nowhere close.

Nia Prater [05-09] A Few of the Many Lowlights of Jeanine Pirro, Trump's Newest U.S. Attorney. Trump nominated the Fox host after finding his original pick, Ed Martin, a counsel for January 6 rioters, "would be unable to survive Senate confirmation." It's hard to see how anyone who would object to Martin would be reconciled to Pirro (who "compared January 6 rioters to Revolutionary War soldiers").

Chas Danner [05-09] A Too-Deep Dive Into Trump's Doll Comments. For more on this:

• Margaret Hartmann [05-09] Trump Declares War on 'Country' of Mattel: He wants to drive Barbie off the market.

Liza Featherstone [05-09] Kamala Harris 2028? Hard Pass. "Brat Summer is over and never coming back." She had a solid poll lead coming out of the convention. She had tons of money. Her opponent was a fraud and a nincompoop, and was promising to wreak mayhem on his supposed enemies. And to my mind, at least, she was likable as well as competent. (Maybe I was just a sucker for the cooking videos?) Sure, there were things about her campaign that bothered me, but the choice was so stark and her favor was so huge that I decided just to trust her. She had a theory about winning, and while I didn't particularly agree with it, it wasn't necessarily unworkable. So when she failed, it was just as easy to blame the voters as to blame her. (Pace Hillary Clinton, who did much more to deserve her loss.) But whatever the reason, she's just not substantial enough to keep running. (The only major party candidate to lose repeatedly was William Jennings Bryan, who you may or may not like but at least he stood for things. The only one to come back after a loss was Richard Nixon, and he was much worse than a serial loser. Third party candidates like Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Ralph Nader at least had stands, but anyone can be a "lesser evil," which was ultimately the bottom line for Harris, as for Biden.)

Steve M [05-10] The Rise of Fascism and the Tabloidization of Government: All of his posts are worth reading, but I want to quote from this one:

The dumbing down of America, on this and many other subjects, is a consequence of the politicized tabloidization of the news by Fox and other outlets. Let's look at what news ought to be and what it is now, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and other weaponizers of tabloidization.

We know what the news should ideally be: stories that tell us what we need to know about significant events in our communities and in the world at large. Tabloidization changes this formula: Instead of telling us what we need to know to understand our world, tabloid news tells us whatever makes our pulse race, and presents it all in the most emotion-inducing way possible. An editor of The Sun in Britain said that the paper should "shock and amaze on every page."

The evil genius of Murdochism is that it's politicized tabloidization. Fox doesn't present the news. It presents news (and pseudo-news) stories crafted as narratives of good and evil, with evil always represented either by liberals or by groups associated with liberals (people of color, sexual minorities, college professors, and so on). The top stories are whichever stories are most successful at getting viewers' blood to boil. . . .

Fox was intended to mislead ordinary Americans about what's really important, but it wasn't intended to mislead the people who run our government. Now, however, our government is run by people who also have Fox brain. They don't think they need to focus on issues Fox ignores, and they don't think they need to understand anything at a deeper level than what you get from Fox content.

Also see:

• Steve M: [05-07] Punishment Is All They Want. Starts with a tweet from Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) saying: "The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci." I don't believe that Democrats should attempt to match the glee with which Republicans wish to consign their enemies to unspeakable hells, but Democrats do need to get much stronger at assigning blame for what ails Americans, and promising to fix those problems, especially by removing those responsible from power. Once removed from power, there is something to be said for forgiveness and forgetting, because falling into the sadistic vengeance trap is not just bad for the victims, but for those in power as well.

Ammar Ali Jan [05-10]: India and Pakistan Are on the Brink of Catastrophe: "Many Hindu nationalists termed the recent Pahalgam terror attack 'our October 7' and now call for Pakistan to be 'reduced to rubble.' Even under a tenuous cease-fire, nationalist saber-rattling is colliding with the collapse of international law." This is always the risk when you install a government whose primary identity is hatred of others. Of course, there are differences, which should be sobering: Pakistan has 240 million people, whereas Gaza only had 2 million. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, where Hamas had little more than sticks and stones. On the other hand, Israel has shown what unopposed power can do, and few nations have followed their exploits more enthusiastically than India has.

Joan C Williams [05-10]: The Left Has to Speak to Average American Values -- or Perish: Interview with the author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2019), has a new book out, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Pull quote: "What working-class people know is that their parents' or grandparents' families looked quite different from theirs, and everything seemed to work then. Now nothing seems to work." I'm old enough to recognize what she's talking about from my own family and neighborhood, but I'm not feeling nostalgic about it; more like resentment, and relief that those times are behind us. I don't disagree that what we have now isn't working as well as it should be, but I prefer solutions based on what we've gained, not on what we've lost. Still, with the future unfathomable, people spend most of their time looking back, and that suggests some ways to talk about present wrongs. We do need help talking, because the standard Democratic Party spiel isn't cutting it. Speaking of which, which article led me to this:

• Hillary Clinton [03-28] How Much Dumber Will This Get? Well, how much dumber are you going to make it? She starts: "It's not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it's the stupidity." Sounds like a distinction without much difference, but I'm always wary when someone like her calls others out for hypocrisy. We'll give her a pass on "stupidity," because she's much more useful as an example of how worthless, and sometimes dangerous, smarts alone can be. But Trump, sure, he's so stupid that even his denials ("stable genius," "person, woman, man, camera, TV") are ipso facto proof. His stupidity is so vast one really needs to be more specific. To wit, Hillary continues:

  We're all shocked -- shocked! -- that President Trump and his team don't actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What's much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That's dangerous. And it's just dumb.

  The rest of the op-ed is a long lecture excoriating Trump for sins against conventional (deep state? blob?) foreign policy -- "reckless with America's hard power," "shredding our soft power," "more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America's adversaries," "cozying up to dictators," "blowing up our alliances," "we also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable" -- punctuated by bursts like "dumb" and "not smart." Even when she complains about "undermining the rule of law at home," "flagrant corruption," and "tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt," she's preoccupied with its foreign policy impact ("trashing our moral influence"). It has long occurred to me that her biggest mistake in 2016 was how much desire she had specifically for the role of Commander in Chief. Has any presidential candidate ever won, or even run, on a pro-war platform? Not even Trump has been that stupid.

  PS: My wife offered an answer to my rhetorical question: Kamala Harris. I get the point without quite sharing the feeling. Biden's wars, unlike Bush's, were things he stumbled into, out of bad luck, misplaced loyalties, and a deficit of understanding and will to do anything about them. Harris, following past vice-presidents, made no real effort to distinguish herself, and way too often parroted the deadly clichés of Washington defense-speak, which is pretty much what Clinton did, but with extra relish.

Dave DeCamp [05-12] US Replaces B-2 Bombers at Diego Garcia Base With B-52s: This caught my eye because my father helped build the first B-52s over 70 years ago, when I was a child. He continued to work on refitting and refurbishing the planes until he retired. As noted, the "main difference" between the bombers is that the B-2 has "stealth," but perhaps more important is that the B-52 can carry more bombs, and not the so-called "smart" ones: it is a tool for indiscriminate mass bombardment against an "enemy" that lacks modern anti-aircraft defense. "Between March 15 and May 6, the US launched over 1,000 strikes on Yemen."

Peter Linebaugh/Marcus Rediker [05-13]: A World Turned Upside Down: "Christopher Hill's history from below." Hill was one of the three great Marxist historians of British history, usually listed first ahead of Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, either alphabetically or by period. This reviews a new biography, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, by Michael Braddick. I've been reading a lot of Hobsbawm recently, because his period is closer to mine, but early on I was much more into Hill, perhaps because his period in British history directly flows into American history.

Scattered tweets:

• James Surowiecki: [04-30] Starts by quoting Attorney General Pamela Bondi:

  Today is Fentanyl Awareness Day. In President Trump's first 100 days we've seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives.

  So each and every fentanyl-laced pill would, if normally distributed, have killed six different people? How does that even work? Even if each and every dose was potentially fatal, how does it move from a dead body to another living body? Wouldn't the second, third, and later generation doses weaken or decay or diffuse? And when you're killing so many people wouldn't there be some reaction that limits the spread? As Surowiecki notes, she's counting "one third of all Americans," even before revising her figures to "258 million lives. That's 75% of all Americans."

• Sara B: [04-30] Happy 80th anniversary of Hitler killing himself in his bunker to all who celebrate, which, as I now understand, is not everybody.

• Meidas Michele: [05-04] Just an image, which reads:

  Trump officially entered the psychotic emperor phase. He's not coming back. The Pope image was it. That was the line. He crossed it and kept walking. This isn't trolling anymore. This is clinical delusion. The tariffs on movies. Reopening Alcatraz. These aren't policies. This is a man deep in a psychotic loop thinking revenge is leadership and trolling is governance. Every time he does something more insane, MAGA cheers louder. And every cheer convinces him he's still the chosen one. So he takes it further. No one's driving the bus anymore. They're just throwing gasoline and screaming kumbaya and Hallelujah.

• Rick [05-06]: Just an image, which reads:

  If we deported MAGA men age 17 to 50 & replaced them with immigrants the violent crime rate would drop 70-80%, Crimes against women & children would be almost zero.

  I'm not sure what data supports this hypothesis, but it's been widely reported that immigrants are much less prone to violent crime than natives, and the male age demographic certainly is, so if you could do this, you probably would see some movement in that direction. Of course, you can't do this, and whatever benefit you might see in crime reduction would be trivial compared to the disruption and backlash such a policy would produce, but the meme has a certain didactic value, as long as you understand that it's really just a joke.

• Mariah [05-07]: Another image:

  Anyone else notice how all of a sudden no one's eating our cats and dogs anymore? No one's performing sex change operations in schools or aborting babies after birth anymore. The price of eggs doesn't matter and a recession isn't a bad thing, it's just a necessary growing pain.

• Alan MacLeod [05-13]

  Real democracy is pleasing opinion columnists at a newspaper owned by the world's richest man. For more on how Bezos destroyed the Washington Post, read my report into the outlet.

  This was an article from 2021, so he likely has more he can add. What he does offer is a reference to a 2024 piece by Ishaan Tharoor on El Salvador: The inescapable appeal of the world's 'coolest dictator', Nayib Bukele.

  MacLeod started his thread with praise for Claudia Sheinbaum as the "world's most popular leader" (80% approval rating). Later down my feed, I find a faux link to another Washington Post op-ed, by León Krauze [05-09] Mexico's democracy is fast eroding under Scheinbaum's rule. Somehow these same hackneyed charges get paraded out any time any nation puts someone more/less left into power -- a template that goes back to attacks on Franklin Roosevelt -- yet right-wingers are never held to the same standard.

Obituaries:

• Trip Gabriel: [04-30] David Horowitz, Leftist Turned Trump Defender, Is Dead at 86: I remember him as an editor at Ramparts and the author of one of the first books highly critical of historical American foreign policy, The Free World Colossus (1965), which I probably still have upstairs. After he flipped to the right, he published tons of books, but as far as I could tell never made a lick of sense -- typical titles include: Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004); The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party (2017); Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America (2017)); Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020); and I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America (2021). Also:

  • David Klion [05-15] I Thought David Horowitz Was a Joke -- but He Foreshadowed the Trump Coalition

This is old, but I'm reading Carlos Lozada's The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, and the book is made up of previously published book reviews, so most of the chapers are readily available online. This one I especially recommend:

Carlos Lozada [2021-09-03] 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed. On the day, I was well aware of the history of American interventions in the Middle East, including Sharon's counter-intifada that was already underway in Israel and PNAC's plots to project US power throughout the region (their alignment with Israel's far right amplified by post-Cold War delusions of America as the world's sole "hyperpower"). So I saw the attacks as further proof of US mistakes, but also as an opportunity to change course and get right with the world, because doubling down -- as Bush and his loyal opposition did with scarcely a moment's reflection -- would only bring further pain and suffering, and ultimately ruin for all. (As, well, it did.) Mine was a very isolated position at the time, so I'm gratified to see a reviewer like Lozada come around to it eventually.

The books reviewed here are [* ones I've read, 7 of 21; order is from the article illustrations]:

• [*] Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
• [*] Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)
• Peter Bergen: The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden (2021): the latest of several books Bergen wrote on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, starting with Holy War, Inc. (2001)
• Richard A Clarke: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (2004)
• Jim Dwyer/Kevin Flynn: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (2005)
• Garrett M Graff: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019)
• Bob Woodward: Bush at War (2002)
• [*] Jane Mayer: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (2008)
• David Cole, ed: The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (2009)
• The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (2014)
• Robert Draper: To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (2020)
• [*] Anthony Shadid: Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005)
• [*] Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006)
• [*] Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008)
• Craig Whitlock: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (2021)
• The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007)
• David Finkel: Thank You for Your Service (2013)
• The Iraq Study Group Report (2006)
• Spencer Ackerman: Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (2021)
• [*] Karen Greenberg: Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy From the War on Terror to Donald Trump (2021)
• The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)

I skipped all of the official reports and document collections, and I tended to focus more on early books (when I felt more need for research) than on later ones (which seemed unlikely to add much to what I already knew). The recent books by Ackerman and Draper look likely to be valuable. I'm curious about the Graff book to see how it dovetails with my memory. Of course, I've read more in this area. Omitting the large number of books on Israel, as well as most of the more generic books on US politics, Islam, and oil, here's a rough list (whittled down from here, sorted by year published):

• Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000): First book in English on the Taliban, predates 9/11 and the US invasion.
• Tariq Ali: The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002): NLR Marxist, understood everything instantly.
• Max Boot: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002): Not on 9/11 or aftermath, but very influential for those who wanted to justify military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. For the rest of us, a comprehensive catalog of American military misadventurism (e.g., look up "butcher and bolt").
• Dilip Hiro: Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (2002)
• Gilles Kepel: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2002): Published in France earlier, US edition includes a brief coda on 9/11. This is by far the best book on Jidadist thought all across the Muslim world, certainly to date, and probably still.
• Lewis Lapham: Theater of War (2002, New Press)
• Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002): One of the "clash of civilizations" hawks' favorite intellectuals.
• William Rivers Pitt/Scott Ritter: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (2002)
• Shibley Telhami: The Stakes: America and the Middle East: The Consequences of Power and the Choice of Peace (2002)
• Tariq Ali: Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (2003)
• Joan Didion: Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003)
• Sheldon Rampton/John Stauber: Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (2003)
• Jonathan Schell: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003): More general book, but prophetic title.
• James Carroll: Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War (2004): Also wrote an important historical book on the US military: House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2006)
• Seymour Hersh: Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)
• Gilles Kepel: The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004)
• Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004)
• James Mann: Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004)
• Michael Scheuer [Anonymous]: Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004): CIA analyst.
• Rory Stewart: The Places in Between (2004): Travel narrative across Afghanistan before US invasion.
• Nicholas von Hoffman: Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies (2004)
• Andrew Bacevich: The New American Militarism: |How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005): The first of his many books on how Americans kicked "Vietnam syndrome" and learned to love war again.
• Larry Beinhart: Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (2005): One of the best books ever on lying in American politics.
• Aaron Glantz: How America Lost Iraq (2005)
• Michael Klare: Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (2005)
• George Packer: The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (2005): Big Iraq war supporter changes his mind.
• Scott Ritter: Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (2005)
• Paul William Roberts: A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq (2005)
• Evan Wright: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (2005): Embedded reporter on the road to Baghdad, basis for an HBO series.
• Tariq Ali: Rough Music: Blair Bombs Baghdad London Terror (2006)
• Ira Chernus: Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (2006)
• Noam Chomsky/Gilbert Achcar: Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2006)
• Patrick Cockburn: The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006)
• Michael R Gordon/General Bernard E Trainor: Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006): The embedded view from command headquarters.
• Frank Rich: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina (2006)
• Louise Richardson: What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (2006): Not just Jihadists.
• Scott Ritter: Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change (2006)
• Thomas E. Ricks: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006)
• Nir Rosen: In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006): First report from an unimbedded reporter in Iraq.
• Ali A Allawi: The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (2007)
• Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007)
• Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2007): Massive reporting from all over. Previously wrote the definitive book on Lebanon, Pity the Nation (1990).
• Dahr Jamail: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007)
• Lewis Lapham: Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2007)
• Trita Parsi: Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007): I've skipped over several other books on Iran, but this one has a lot of insight into how Israel uses Iran to manipulate the US (and why the US lets it).
• William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007)
• Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008)
• Chris Hedges/Laila Al-Arian: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (2008)
• Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008)
• Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008)
• Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008)
• Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009)
• Gregory Feifer: The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (2009)
• Karen Greenberg: The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days (2009)
• Seth G Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (2009)
• Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009)
• Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2009)
• Thomas E Ricks: The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (2009)
• Tariq Ali: The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (2010)
• Andrew Bacevich: Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010)
• John W Dower: Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010): Historian of Japan, wrote two major books, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986), and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (2000).
• Tom Engelhardt: The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (2010)
• Chalmers Johnson: Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (2010): Former CIA analyst, final volume in a brilliant series of books that started with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000), one of the first books sensitive to the amount of self-harm America's empire cost. I've read them all, including The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004) and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).
• Geoffrey Wawro: Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (2010)
• Nir Rosen: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World (2011)
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (2012)
• Kurt Eichenwald: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars (2012)
• Michael Hastings: The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2012)
• Rashid Khalidi: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013): Palestinian historian, so most of his books focus there (I have read several), but US ability to interact with the Arab world is sharply limited to Israel's demands, so you can't really separate the two interests.
• Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013)
• James Risen: Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014)
• Andrew Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016)
• Rosa Brooks: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon (2016)
• John W Dower: The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II (2017)
• Steve Coll: Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2018)
• Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War (2018)
• Matt Farwell/Michael Ames: American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the US Tragedy in Afghanistan (2019)
• Tariq Ali: The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold (2022)

This is, by the way, an incomplete list of books I've read by several authors: Gilbert Achcar, Tariq Ali, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Steve Coll, Chris Hedges, Dilip Hiro, Chalmers Johnson, Fred Kaplan, Jon Krakauer, Robert D Kaplan, Rashid Khalidi, Lewis Lapham, Jane Mayer. The above list seems to tail off after 2012, which is roughly when the Obama surge in Afghanistan burned out. (The Michael Hastings book was pivotal, in that it was shortly followed by the sacking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the shelving of his counterinsurgency strategy, which had no support from troops who had little desire either to fight and even less to aid Afghans.) I wound up paying no attention to the handful of books on ISIS, or on the drone wars that were surging elsewhere. Besides, there was much more to read about elsewhere, especially in US politics.

At some point, I should revisit this list and try to draw up a shorter, more useful annotation. That obviously looks like a lot of work right now, but Lozada's piece is a good framework to start. I don't think his methodology of focusing on commission reports, document caches, and reporters with direct access to their sources (like Woodward) is better than my approach of mostly working through critics I'm familiar with and inclined to agree with (like Ali, Bacevich, Chomsky, Engelhardt, Hedges, Johnson, and Lapham), but if my preferred critics are right, the more conventional sources should ultimately fit into their understanding -- as they do.

By the way, a couple more personal 9/11 book remembrances:

• Bruce Bernard/Terrence McNamee: Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope (1999): Big pictorial history with over 1000 images chronologically from 1900 into 1999. I spent much of the day of 9/11 thumbing through this book, which helped me keep the day's events in context.
• Barbara Crossette: The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998): A few days after 9/11, I went to the bookstore in search of historical background. I found nothing that seemed directly appropriate, but wound up buying this book on British imperialism in India, which reminded me of Jan Myrdal's brilliant Angkor, which showed how European imperialists mentally translated their disabilities into badges of superiority.
• Robert D Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2001): I also, in fairly short order, wound up reading most of Kaplan's travel/history books, including his most famous Balkan Ghosts (1993) and his valentine for the Afghan mujahideen, Soldiers of God (1990, reprinted 2001). His work helped me formulate a framework for understanding the region, although I tended to draw opposite conclusions from his, and I gave up on him as he became increasingly entangled in the US war machine.

Another old article link:

Alison L LaCroix: [2024-06-10] What the Founders Didn't Know -- But Their Children Did -- About the Constitution. This is a useful précis of her book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, which covers legal arguments about federalism in the 1815-61 period. As noted, these debates have been resurfacing of late, especially around issues like abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana which states have often treated variously but which touch on constitutional rights that should be universally protected.

Current count: 74 links, 9592 words (11481 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 13 days ago, on April 17.

Index to major articles:

• Intro Musk Quote
• Bill Barclay on China
• Eli Clifton on Miriam Adelson
• Jeff Faux: Progressive Rethink
• Chris Bertram: War on Immigrants
• Avi Shlaim: On Israel
• Sarah Jones: On Pronatalism
• Ana Marie Cox: Radical Right Culture
• Jeffrey St Clair: Roaming Charges
• Joshua Frank: Censorship
• Rob Urie: Social Democracy
• Matt Sledge: Tariffs
• Antonio Hitchens: Trump Worship
• Anna Phillips: Insurance in Texas
• Natalie Allison: Pope Francis
• Ryan Cooper: Pete Hegseth
• Will Stone: Health Care Cuts and Other Trump Mishaps
• Greg Grandin: Latin America
• Dave DeCamp: Bombing Somalia
• Anatol Lieven: Ukraine
• Ha-Joon Chang: On Free Trade
• Annie Zaleskie: On David Thomas, and Other Obits
• Sarah Jones: On Vouchers
• David Dayen: On Tariffs
• Christian Farias: Arresting a Judge
• Ross Barkan: Trump and FEMA
• Matt Sledge: Marco Rubio and Israel
• AP: White House Press Association
• Nathan Taylor Pemberton: Right-Wing Fantasies
• Branko Marcetic: On Biden
• Herb Scribner/Praveena Somasundaram: Holocaust Museum
• Zack Beauchamp: On Canada
• Nick Turse: On Vietnam
• Scattered Tweets
• One More Tweet (on Israel)
• After 100 Days

I picked up this quote from a fundraising appeal from The Intercept, and it seemed like a good opening quote:

Elon Musk spent nearly $300 million to install Donald Trump in the White House and then gleefully tore through virtually every part of the federal government that does anything to help everyday people.

And now that Tesla's net income has fallen by 71 percent, he thinks he can just waltz right back to the private sector, no questions asked?

This brings to mind the phrase Fuck You Money. I mean, if anyone has it, if such a thing exists, that would have to be the richest man on earth. Elon Musk certainly acts like he thinks he has it. He thinks he answers to no one, and that everyone else must bow before him. And sure, he does get away with it much of the time, but that's mostly deference given by people who his accept his worldview and values. This is especially amusing where it comes to Trump.

Back in 2015, Trump was the guy who thought he had "fuck you money." He was by far the richest guy running for president, which allowed him to boast that he was the only truly free candidate, the only one who could do what he wanted simply because he thought it would be the right thing to do, while every other candidate was beholden to other richer guys, who ultimately pulled their strings. Of course, the big problem with that theory was that he had no clue as to what the right thing to do was, and anyone who put trust in him on that score was soon proven to be a fool. But it also turned out that Trump wasn't rich (let alone principled) enough to stand up to richer folk -- especially as he sees the presidency mostly as something to be monetized. (Perhaps at first it was more about stroking his ego, but even a world class narcissist can grow weary of that.) In the end, Trump not only doesn't have "fuck you money," he's just another toady.

On the other hand, Musk is just one person in a world of billions, most way beyond his reach or influence -- which doesn't mean he's beyond the reach or effect of all of them. By making himself so conspicuous, he's also made himself a symbol of much of what's wrong with the world today, and as such, he's made himself a target.

Bill Barclay: [03/04] China's Dangerous Inflection Point: "Is China's growth model exhausted?" I was trying to look up the author here, as some friends have arranged for him to come to Wichita and speak on Trump and the financial system. Aside from him being involved in DSA, and writing a lot for Dollars & Sense, I had no idea what he thought or why. I still can't tell you much. He starts by positing two views of China, then lays out a lot of facts without tipping his hand for any sort of predictions. The best I can say is that makes him less wrong than virtually every other American to venture an opinion on China in the last 20-30 years.

The simple explanation for why American economists and pundits are so often wrong about China is that they assume that everything depends on sustained growth, and the only way to achieve that is the way we did it, through free markets and individualist greed -- which, sure, lead to increasing inequality, ecological and social waste, and periodic financial crises. But after the depredations of the colonial period, and the chaos of Mao's false starts, China has actually proven that enlightened state direction of the economy can outperform the west, both in terms of absolute growth and in qualitative improvements to the lives of its people. Liberalizing markets has been part of their tool kit, and inequality has been a side-effect they have tolerated, perhaps even indulged, but not to the point of surrendering power and purpose (as has happened in the US, Europe, and especially Russia). What central direction can do is perhaps best illustrated in the rapid shift from massive development of coal to solar power -- a shift we understood the need for fifty years ago but have only made fitful headway on due to the corrupt influence of money on politics.

So when Barclay argues that China needs to shift to an increase in consumer goods spending in order to sustain growth rates, he's assuming that American-like consumer spending would not just be a good thing but the only possible good thing. Still, I have to wonder whether even sympathetic observers aren't blinded by their biases. I don't see much real reporting on China, and I'm not privy to any internal discussions on long-term strategy, but several things suggest to me that they're not just following the standard model of nation building (like, say, Japan did from the 1860s through the disaster of WWII) but have reframed it to different ends (as one might expect of communists, had the Russians not spoiled that thought -- perhaps the different residual legacies of Tsarism and Confucianism have something to do with this?).

While I've seen reports of increasing inequality and a frayed safety net, some things make me doubt that the rich have anything similar to the degree of power they hold in the US, Europe, Russia, and their poorer dependencies. While China has allowed entrepreneurs to develop where they could, the state has followed a plan focusing mostly on infrastructural development, systematically spreading from the vital cities to the countryside. Barclay singles out their focus on housing, but doesn't explain whether they've followed the American model (which is to grow through larger and more expensive houses) or by focusing on more efficient urban living. Housing is only a growth market as long as you can keep people moving to bigger and better houses. But just moving people from country to city is a one-time proposition, which seems to be what China's planners have done.

Similarly, China's shift from intensive coal development to solar shows not only a willingness to think of long-term efficiencies, but that they're willing to move away from sunk costs -- which in our vaunted democracy are attached to powerful political interests, making it impossible for us to do anything as simple as passing a carbon tax.

Another example of how China has been able to avoid getting trapped by crass economic interests is the pandemic response. Looking back, it was inevitable that the small business class in America would mount a huge backlash against the inconveniences of pandemic response, but China was willing to take the economic hit to impose a much more restrictive regime, thus saving millions of lives (all the while being chided by American economists for stunting growth, although in the end they fared better than most, even by such narrow measures).

PS: I looked up Barclay because some friends had invited him to come to Wichita and speak on "the international financial system, the dollar, trade, crises and Trump's (on again/off again) tariffs." He did, and gave a pretty general explanation that mostly aligned with things I already knew, with occasional political asides that I largely agreed with. In particular, his explanation of why some tariffs might work while Trump's will only cause chaos and turbulence was pretty much what I've been saying for months -- although lately, as I noted last time on Levitz, I'm coming around to the view that tariffs are bad political tools, especially given that it's often possible to come up with better ones. I considered asking a question on this and/or a couple other points, but as usual wound up tongue-tied and silent. China never came up.

Eli Clifton: [03-18] The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns: "Miriam Adelson is more than a funder of the Maccabee Task Force, she's also its president." Given that Adelson is the biggest funder of both Trump and Netanyahu, it's getting hard to tell which is the dog and which is the tail. That one person could have so much malign influence over two "democracies" is one of the greatest absurdities of our times. By the way:

• Akela Lacy: [04-23] Trump Administration Texted College Professors' Personal Phones to Ask if They're Jewish.

By the way, I wrote this entry after writing the closely related entry on the Lambert tweet below, but before I wrote the intro bit on Musk above -- much of which could apply just as well to Adelson, who like Musk is much richer than Trump, but who is less inclined to make herself into the story -- although as one of the top sponsors of both Trump and Netanyahu, she has as much as anyone to answer for.

Jeff Faux: [03-24] Time for a Progressive Rethink: "Anger at the Democratic Party's inept leadership and subservience to Big Money has been rising since the election. But the left also must examine our own role in enabling Trump." No doubt, but it's hard to read pieces like this without eyes glazing over, especially with lines like "Ultimately the 'identity vs. class' debates are sterile. Both are needed to create a political majority." I'd put more focus on:

1. Setting out clear values that most Americans agree with, especially where Republicans are ineffective and/or unwilling to help.
2. Acknowledging what works, and why it works, and keeping that as a baseline for changing what doesn't work, or doesn't work well enough.
3. Identifying incremental policy changes that move us measurably in the right direction.
4. Reassuring people that they have no reason to fear us overstepping the mark, and that all policies are open to be reevaluated if they don't seem to be working, or if they're producing other problems. We want tangible, practical results; not ideology.
5. Making it clear who opposes popular reforms, and why, and acting strongly to counter their influence. In politics you need to be clear about who your enemies are, and why they are wrong.

These are very general statements, but it should be easy to see how they apply to any given policy area. Take health care, for instance. You can probably fill that form out yourself, in actual terms, without recourse to slogans like ACA or MFA.

Chris Bertram: [03-29] Trump's war on immigrants is the cancellation of free society.

Avi Shlaim: [04-04] Israel's road to genocide: This is a chapter from Shlaim's new book, Genocide in Gaza: Israel's Long War on Palestine. I should note that I was alerted to this by Adam Tooze: [04-13] Chartbook 375 Swords of Iron - Avi Shlaim & Jamie Stern-Weiner on Israel's war on Gaza, which reproduces the chapter but not the endnotes. If you have any doubts that this is genocide, and intended as such, you really owe it to yourself to read this piece. It is crystal clear on this very point, and anyone who continues to excuse or rationalize the Israeli government's behavior on this point should be ashamed.

• Tareq S Hajjaj: [04-24] Rafah no longer exists. This is part of Israel's plan to permanently occupy Gaza.

• Nadera Mushtha: [04-15] Palestinians fear Gaza's largest cemetery has been destroyed. Not even our dead can have peace.

• Qassam Muaddi: [04-14] Israel's escalating West Bank assault is part of a larger plan to split the territory in two. This gets less press than the devastation of Gaza, but has proceeded so systematically it's hard not to see it as part of the same strategic campaign, where the ultimate goal is to wipe out the entire Palestinian population of Israel.

  Settler violence in the West Bank has displaced no less than 20 Bedouin communities in the West Bank since October 2023, while the Israeli army and settler attacks have killed more than 800 Palestinians in the same time period. According to UNRWA, Israel's "Iron Wall" offensive has so far displaced well over 40,000 Palestinians and completely depopulated the Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps, with Israel's Defense Minister saying that its residents would not be allowed to return for at least a year.

Sarah Jones: [04-17] Pronatalism Isn't a Solution, It's a Problem: "We don't need more Elon Musk babies. We need reproductive justice."

Ana Marie Cox: [04-17] How the Radical Right Captured the Culture: "Blame Hollywood's 'unwokening' and the extraordinary rise of right-wing podcasters on slop: intellectually bereft, emotionally sterile content that's shaped by data and optimized for clicks." Long article with a lot of references I don't really get, so this is hard to recognize, or even to relate to much of what passes for culture these days.

• Kathy Waldman: [04-26] Trump Is the Emperor of A.I. Slop: "It makes sense that a man who yearns for a reality untroubled by other humans would be drawn to an art that is untouched by anything human." I'm not really sure what's going on here, but a second article on right-wing "slop" surely deserves to be noted. I'm not sure that after Trump it will ever be possible for anyone to believe anything ever again. I'm pretty sure this is a trend that predates Trump. It certainly predates A.I., which, like capitalism, is more of an accelerant than something genuinely novel.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-18] Roaming Charges: Trump's Penal Colony. Another weekly installment in Trump's catalog of horrors. I get the temptation not just to look away but to warily regard Trump's gross attacks on allegedly illegal people as some kind of trap, meant to provoke the sort of hysterical reaction he can easily dismiss -- after all, to his base, who but the wildly caricatured "radical left" could possibly defend the miscreants he is "saving America" from? And aren't there many more facets of his agenda, especially economic matters, that Democrats could oppose while expecting more popular support? But as St Clair makes clear, what's at stake here isn't immigration policy. It's whether the legal system can limit presidential power, and whether that power can run roughshod over the fundamental civil and political rights of any and all people in or subject to the USA. Unfortunately, Trump's criminal abuses of power are hard to explain to most people, partly because when focused on arbitrary individuals we fail to see how that may affect us, and partly because generalities, like the threat to democracy, tend to sail over our heads. (It's not like previously existing democracy really gave us much power to begin with.) We need to find effective ways of talking about Trump's fundamentally criminal-minded abuse of power. But we also need to find some alternatives beyond the widely discredited status quo ante.

• Dana Mattioli: [04-15] The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His 'Legion' of Babies -- and Their Mothers: "The world's richest man juggles more than a dozen children and 'harem drama' along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy."

• Jeffrey St Clair: [04-25] Living on the Cliff's Edge: The Pueblo People, Pope Francis and the Fate of the Earth: An excerpt from his new book (with Joshua Frank): The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.

Joshua Frank: [04-18] They're Coming for Us: Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide. Starts with an example from the hard sell of the Iraq War, but as I recall there was considerable debate and debunking at the time, even if major outlets like the New York Times were totally in league with the Bush regime. A more telling example was the near total stifling of any response short of all-out war in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (One example was how Susan Sontag was pilloried for so much as questioning Bush's labeling of the hijackers as "cowards.") While most people recognize today that the Iraq War, like the McCarthy witch hunts and the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans, was a mistake, the far more consequential decision to answer small-scale terrorism with global war is still rarely examined. Moreover, 9/11 has left the government with some legal tools that Trump is already abusing, as in the charge that anyone critical of Israel is criminally liable for aiding and abetting terrorists (Hamas, a group that has often proved more useful to Israel than to the Palestinians). But it's not just Trump, and not just the government: Israel has been using its influence to stifle free speech about a list of issues running from BDS to genocide in a quest for thought control that Trump is only too happy to jump onto.

Rob Urie: [04-18] Social Democracy isn't Going to Save the West. I figured from the title this would be mostly about Europe, but the examples mostly come from the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, which is to say the one that pines for bipartisan unity with like-minded Republicans, while making sure that nothing gets passed that doesn't benefit corporate sponsors. The chart on the increasing erosion of Medicare to privatized "Advantage" plans is especially sobering.

Matt Sledge: [04-19] The Galaxy Brains of the Trump White House Want to Use Tariffs to Buy Bitcoin. The graft behind crypto is too obvious to even give a second thought to, so why do we keep getting deluged with articles like this, on proposals that people with any sense whatsoever should have nipped in the bud?

• Matt Sledge: Congress's Biggest Financial Priority Is "Stablecoin." What the Hell Is That? "Instead of tackling crashing markets, Congress is pushing a crypto sector that the Trump family is financially involved in."

• Michael Tomasky: [04-26] Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done: Yes, this involves crypto.

Antonio Hitchens: [04-21] How Trump Worship Took Hold in Washington: "The President is at the center of a brazenly transactional ecosystem that rewards flattery and locksktep loyalty."

Anna Phillips: [04-21] Why Texas is seeing eye-popping insurance hikes: "Worsening storms fueled by climate change, coupled with inflation, are driving some of the highest home insurance costs in the country." I pretty easy prediction at this point is that the home insurance industry is going to go broke, losing enormous numbers of customers who can no longer afford insurance, and ultimately failing even those who can. The only politically acceptable solution is for the government to shore up the industry with reinsurance, which given the industry's profit needs will be very expensive and wasteful. But the right-wingers will scream bloody murder over socialism, and governments will be hard pressed to come up with the funds.

Natalie Allison: [04-21] The story behind JD Vance's unexpected visit with Pope Francis: "Vance and Francis had publicly disagreed in recent months on immigration policies and other aspects of church teaching." Still no details here on how Vance managed to kill the pope and win the debate. Perhaps Rick Wilson's book [Everything Trump Touches Dies] has some clues? [PS: Next day tweet: Dalai Lama Quietly Cancels Scheduled Meeting With JD Vance"] I've paid very little attention to the Pope's death, but some of the first reactions focused on his concern for Palestinians and his opposition to war in general and genocide especially.

• James North: [04-21] Mainstream obituaries are erasing Pope Francis's deep concern for Palestine.

• Aaron Boxerman: [04-22] Even in Sickness, Pope Francis Reached Out to Gaza's Christians.

• Joseph Massad: [04-28] Pope Francis defied western silence on Gaza, but Vatican complicity endures.

• Andrea Bartoli: [04-25] Pope Francis was often mocked for railing against current wars: "From Gaza to Ukraine, the Pontiff was consistent in his pursuit of peace, which drew fire from certain sectors."

• Marco Carnelos: [04-29] Pope Francis stood with the marginalised against a world built on domination: "Francis forged a legacy grounded in the true spirit of the Gospels, defending justice and human dignity against systems that emptied them of meaning."

Ryan Cooper: [04-21] Pete Hegseth May Be Too Incompetent Even for Trump: "Turns out Fox News loudmouths are bad at running the military." I'd expect them to be bad at running anything. As for the military, there are reasons to hope that Hegseth's vanity and incompetence won't have a lot of effect: the organization is very big and complex, so his ability to deal with things on a detailed level is slim; it has its own ingrained way of doing things -- a distinctive culture and worldview -- that makes it very resistant to change; it engages very little with the public, in large part because it doesn't do anything actually useful; and its mission or purpose is largely exempt from the Trumpist ideological crusade, so his people don't see a need to deliberately break things. While all government bureaucracies develop internal mores and logic that offer some resilience against incompetent management and perhaps even misguided policy dictates, few are well fortified as the military against the direct attacks Trump and Musk have launched elsewhere. More on Hegseth and the military:

• Jessica Washington/Nick Turse: [04-14] Pentagon Considers Cutting Its Sexual Assault Rules.

• Nick Turse: [04-15] Pete Hegseth Is Gutting Pentagon Programs to Reduce Civilian Casualties. They should clarify that they're not talking about American civilians who work or engage with the US military. We're talking about the propensity of the US military to kill bystanders as collateral damage in their haphazardly orchestrated offensives.

• Mark Thompson: [04-24] Pentagon stops being coy about space war: "The fledgling Space Force issues its marching orders while DOD backs tiny nuclear reactors to power its US bases."

• Nick Turse: [04-25] Pentagon Insiders on Hegseth Leak Hypocrisy: "Full On Shit Show".

Will Stone: [04-21] With CDC injury prevention team gutted, 'we will not know what is killing us'. With a bit of effort I could probably find dozens of similar stories. The following are short links easily found near this piece:

• Julie Appleby: [04-22] Help for ACA health plans could be harder to get since RFK Jr. axed teams of 'fixers'.

• Jonathan Lambert: [02-18] National Science Foundation fires roughly 10% of its workforce.

• Sydney Lupkin: [04-03] After promising transparency, RFK guts public records teams at HHS.

• Sydney Lupkin: [04-18] How FDA cuts could make the food and drug supply less safe.

• Yuki Noguchi: [04-09] Coal miners' health care hit hard in job cuts to CDC.

• Yuki Noguchi: [04-15] DOGE cut a CDC team as it was about to start a project to help NC flood victims.

• Bram Sable-Smith/ArielleZionts/Jackie Fortier: [04-10] As measles spreads, federal budget cuts force closure of vaccine clinics.

• Joseph Shapiro: [04-01] HHS layoffs hit Meals on Wheels and other services for seniors and disabled.

• Selena Simmons-Duffin: [04-08] HHS guts sexual violence prevention division, leaving local efforts adrift.

• Rob Stein: [04-23] Funding cut for landmark study of women's health, followed by [04-24 In a reversal, the Trump administration restores funding for women's health study.

• Will Stone/Sydney Lupkin: [02-19] FDA staff handling drug safety for pets and livestock lost jobs in Trump firings.

Some other typical Trump mishaps briefly noted:

• Amnesty International: [04-15] The human cost of the repressive cooperation between the US and El Salvador.

• Julia Angwin: [04-30] 'This Is What We Were Always Scared of': DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State.

• David Dayen: [04-24] Justice Department Shutting Branch That Prosecutes Consumer Fraud Cases: The Consumer Protection Branch, "a part of the Civil Division that prosecutes cases involving tobacco marketing, fraud against seniors and service members, and entities involved in the opioid crisis."

• David Dayen: [04-29] Hatched Job on CFPB Even Worse in the Details: "Declarations in a case reveal a haphazard hobbling of the consumer protection agency."

• Umair Irfan/Patrick Reis: [04-29] Trump boots climate scientists from climate science report: "The attack on climate science continues."

• Dhruv Khullar: [04-28] A Life-Changing Scientific Study Ended by the Trump Administration: Robert F Kennedy Jr. "terminated one of the world's longest-running diabetes trials."

• Schuyler Mitchell: [03-21] Trump EPA's Next Move: Making It Harder to Sue for Getting Cancer From Roundup.

• Julie Su: [04-25] Worker Rights Threatened at the Department of Labor: "Elon Musk and Donald Trump want to make federal employees miserable on the job. Their latest trick: threaten criminal penalties for exercising free speech."

• Daniel Boguslaw: [04-24] While Gutting USAID, Marco Rubio Quietly Saved Cuban Regime Change Programs.

• Chris Walker: [04-29] Trump White House Dismisses All Contributors to National Climate Assessment.

Greg Grandin: [04-22] The Long History of Lawlessness in US Policy Toward Latin America: "By shipping immigrants to Nayib Bukele's megaprison in El Salvador, Trump is using a far-right ally for his own ends." After a brief intro on the outsourcing of terror prisons -- not prisons for terrorists, but institutions to terrorize prisoners -- this moves on the history, noting that "in Latin America, the line between fighting and facilitating fascism has been fungible."

Dave DeCamp: [04-24] US Military Bombed Boats Off the Coast of Somalia Using New Trump Authorities: Evidently, Trump has extended warmaking authority to military commanders outside officially designated combat zones (Iraq and Syria), so AFRICOM commanders no longer have to seek permission to bomb "suspects."

Anatol Lieven: [04-24] Ukraine and Europe can't afford to refuse Trump's peace plan: "It's actually common sense, including putting Crimea on the table." In olden days, I would automatically link to anything by Lieven, but I haven't been following Ukraine lately -- although it's certainly my impression that neither the facts nor my views have changed in quite some time. The war is bad for all concerned, and needs to be ended as soon as possible. The solution not only needs to preclude future war, but to leave the US, Europe, Ukraine, and Russia on terms friendly enough that they can cooperate with each other in the future. That means that no side should walk away thinking it has won or lost much of anything. The obvious face-saving solution would be for a cease fire that recognizes the current lines of control. I guess we can call that the "Trump plan" if that helps, but that much as been obvious for a couple years now. Not in the immediate plan but very desirable would be a series of plebiscites that could legitimize the current lines and turn them into actual borders. My pet scheme is to do this twice: once in about six months, and again in about five years. These should take place in all contested parts of Ukraine. (Kherson, for instance, is divided, but mostly controlled by Ukraine. The current division could be preserved, or one side could choose to switch to the other. Russia could also request votes in other Ukraine territories, like Odesa.) The second round would allow for second thoughts, especially if the occupying power did a lousy job of rebuilding war-torn areas. One can argue over details, but my guess is that the votes would go as expected (which would be consistent with pre-2014 voting in Ukraine). Both Russia and Ukraine should welcome immigrants from areas where their people lost. No need to impose any non-discrimination regime on either side (other than to allow exit), as the Minsk accords tried to protect Russians in Ukraine (a sore-point in Ukraine, which largely scuttled the deal, leading to the 2022 war). Russia and Ukraine need to emerge from the deal with normalized civil relations. Ukraine can join the EU if they (and the EU) want. I don't care whether they join NATO or not, but NATO should become less adversarial toward Russia, perhaps through negotiating arms reduction and economic cooperation deals. (My general attitude is "Fuck NATO": it shouldn't exist, but since it does, and since Russia took the bait and sees it as a threat, and has in turn, especially in attacking Ukraine, contributed to the mutual suspicion, the whole thing should be wound down carefully.) Sooner or later, US sanctions should also be wound down, and the US should ultimately get out of the business of sanctioning other countries.

Trump, of course, promised to end the war "in a day," which was never likely, not because someone sensible couldn't pull it off in quick order (not a day, given the paperwork, but a few weeks would have been realistic), but because Trump's an ill-mannered, arrogant nincompoop who neither understands anything nor cares about doing the right thing.

• Anatol Lieven: [03-07] Fareed Zakaria, stuck somewhere in 1950 or 1995, is wrong again: "Transatlantic elites let political bias and their sclerotic world view prevent them from seeing the Ukraine War for what it really is." Starts by noting that "certain Trump statements have been utterly wrong, unnecessary, and counter-productive" (e.g., "threats to take Greenland and aggressive mockery of Canada and Mexico," "constant threats of tariff increases"). Zakaria appears here as one of those pundits who have vowed to fight for Ukraine as doggedly against Trump as they have against Putin.

Ha-Joon Chang: [04-24] There Should Be No Return to Free Trade: A Jacobin interview with the Korean economist, who was one of the first to understand that so-called Free Trade was something much different from the win-win proposition it was presented as (e.g., see Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade the the Secret History of Capitalism, from 2007, among his other books).

Annie Zaleski: [04-24] David Thomas, Pere Ubu's defiantly original leader, dies at 71. One of my all-time favorite groups, starting from their first album, The Modern Dance (1978), which was some kind of personal ideal: a combination of concepts, aesthetics, and sounds perfectly in tune with my thinking and aspirations at the time. Also in obituaries this week:

• Jon Pareles: [04-25] David Thomas, Who Led the 'Avant-Garage' Band Pere Ubu, Dies at 71.

• Carl Wilson: [04-25] David Lynn Thomas, 1953-2025: This is long and very good.

• Sam Roberts: [04-23] Karen Durbin, 80, Dies; 'Fearless' Feminist Who Edited the Village Voice.

• Robert D McFadden: [04-21] Herbert J Gans, 97, Dies; Upended Myths of Urban and Suburban Life. He was already a major sociologist in the early 1970s when I was a student, and occasionally ventured into explicitly political thought, coming out of More Equality in his 1973 book, and much later, in 2009, indulging in the utopian fantasy of Imagining America in 2033. I wonder how those books hold up. But even if not, the need is greater than ever.

• Clay Risen: [04-29] Andy Bey, Jazz Singer Renowned for His Vocal Range, Dies at 85.

Sarah Jones: [04-24] 'Education's Version of Predatory Lending': "Vouchers don't help students. Their real purpose is more sinister, says a former supporter." Interview with Josh Cowen, author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.

David Dayen: [04-24] The Permanent Tariff Damage: "Trump tries to walk back his tariffs after supply chain collapse and threats of empty store shelves. But reversing course entirely may not be possible."

• David Dayen: [04-03] They're Not Tariffs, They're Sanctions: "Stop trying to place coherence on a policy that's really just a mob boss breaking legs and asking for protection money."

  The problem with this "logic" is that America is not indispensable and other countries have just as much ability to retaliate, forcing the whole world into recession and making it very clear who started it.

Christian Farias: [04-26] Judge Dugan's Arrest Has Nothing to Do With Public Safety: She was arrested for allegedly "obstructed the functions of ICE by concealing a person the agency wanted to arrest while that person, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was in Dugan's courtroom facing her in an unrelated matter." There is also an Updates file on this. Some more tidbits from the Trump Injustice Department:

• Madeline Leung Coleman: [04-25] Trump Wants to Execute People Again -- Starting with Luigi Mangione. "He [Trump] executed more people in a single term than any president since the 1890s."

• Elie Honig: [04-25] Trump's Attack on Harvard Is a False Flag; "Combatting antisemitism at the university is really just about thought control."

Ross Barkan: [04-26] Trump's Most Unhinged Policy May Be Starving MAGA Arkansas of Disaster Relief: "Snuffing out FEMA is causing some collateral damage." Some jokes are funny in one context but not at all funny in another. Ronald Reagan's line about "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" was pretty funny when you didn't actually need the help, but it's actually a line that's been laughed at by no one ever in the wake of a natural disaster. Charity may help a bit, but it's mostly accompanied by opportunists and hustlers, and most of the money sticks to the fingers of whoever's handling it. And while the almighty market might eventually organize a somewhat optimal response, that's only in time frames where we all die. Disaster relief is one thing where we all automatically look to government for help. After a decade-plus as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton knew that well enough that he made FEMA Director a Cabinet-level position. GW Bush then staffed it with shady cronies and their screw ups sunk his presidency even worse than Iraq. With its energy policies, Trump is guaranteeing that there will be ever more and worse natural disasters, and that a many Americans will blame him directly. Still, trashing FEMA shows a level of cluelessness that is mind-boggling. Remember how the winning campaign slogan of 2024 was "Trump will fix it!"? But since taking office, all he's done has been to break things further, perversely going out of the way to break the very organizations that had been set up to fix problems when they arise.

Matt Sledge: [04-26] Marco Rubio Silences Every Last Little Criticism of Israel at State Department: "he singled out a human rights office that he said had become a platform for 'left-wing activists' to pursue 'arms embargoes' on Israel: The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor."

AP: [04-27] White House journalists celebrate the First Amendment at the annual press dinner: I've always regarded this as a preposterously hideous event meant to glorify the absolutely lowest scum of the journalism profession: the people who do nothing with their lives other than wait hat-in-hand for the White House to spoon feed bits of self-important propaganda. The only saving grace was that sometimes stand-up comic might hit a funny bone, or some other nerve. But then the dinner would wind up with the sitting president trying his own hand at telling jokes on themselves. (The only line I remember was from GW Bush: "This is an impressive crowd: the have's and have-more's. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base.") As I recall, Trump broke tradition, and was a no-show. For some reason, the only president who had worked as a professional comic didn't have the confidence to risk appearing. Their initial idea this year was Amber Ruffin, but the timid Fourth Estate peremptorily cancelled her, yet still had the gall to pose their dinner as a celebration of free speech. And what better way to do this than by giving themselves awards for their courage? I wouldn't normally bother with this, but of all the stories they could have broke even from their rarefied perches, these are the ones they chose:

1. Aldo Thompson of Axios won The Aldo Beckman Award for his coverage of the coverup of Biden's decline while in office.
2. The Award for Excellence in Presidential Coverage Under Deadline Pressure (Print): Aamer Madhami and Zeke Miller of the AP, for reporting on the White House altering its transcript to erase Biden calling Trump supporters "garbage."
3. The Award for Excellence in Presidential Coverage Under Deadline Pressure (Broadcast) Rachel Scott of ABC News, for her coverage of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
4. The Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage by Visual Journalists: Doug Mills of the New York Times, for his photograph of Biden walking under a painting of Abraham Lincoln.
5. The Katherine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability: Reuters, for its series on the production and smuggling of the deadly narcotic fentanyl.
6. Collier Prize for State Government Accountability: AP for its series, "Prison to Plate: Profiting off America's Captive Workforce."
7. Center for News Integrity Award: Anthony Zurcher of the BBC for his coverage of the fallout from Biden's handling of the Gaza War.

So, Gaza is bad, because it looks bad for Biden, but everything looks bad for Biden, and Trump was only newsworthy as a sympathetic victim. [PS: I looked at some of Zurcher's reporting, which was pretty anodyne. You get no sense of the pain and agony at the root of the story, because all anyone cares about is how it inconveniences the handful of political figures the reporter is assigned to cover.]

Nathan Taylor Pemberton: [04-28] Why the Right Fantasizes About Death and Destruction: "In Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism, he attempts to diagnose the apocalyptic nature of conservatism around the world." There is probably something here, although the tendency to psychologize issues is always suspicious. On the other hand, when he offers Israel as an example, it's easy enough to connect the dots (my emphasis added):

Israel's drift to the far right can be explained, he thinks, by its embrace of free-market neoliberal doctrine, which, beginning in the 1970s, effectively yanked off the restraints on Zionism's ethnonationalist urges. Hollowed-out unions, crippled welfare systems, and an ineffectual liberal opposition allowed a far-right ruling coalition to gain control of Israeli society without dissent. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) this, crises abound there. Israel is among the most unequal societies in the Western world. A sense of hyper-victimization is rampant in the populace. The country's "liberal" democracy is a contradictory sham, no more than a two-tiered apartheid system permitting only second-class citizenship to Arabs. Worst yet, Zionism's promise to deliver an ethnically pure "homeland" to Jews is a delusional lie, in part because Palestinians continue to persist in both their opposition and their sheer existence. As a result, endless war is the only political program on offer. (It's the only thing capable of delivering "moral regeneration," as Seymour puts it.) For flailing states like Israel, disaster nationalism is a way in which to "metabolise" the dysfunction. This is the dreamwork that keeps afloat the fantasy of ever-growing economies, of safer borders, of purer societies, and of returning to the way that things once supposedly were. What is less clear, after the deaths of over 50,000 Palestinians and the near-total destruction of Gaza, is whether any number can quench these urges once the dreamwork is fully set in motion.

The American right has been building and peddling its own version of this dreamwork from Reagan through Trump, although come to think of it, the disorienting fantasies go back to the ridiculous Birchers and Randians in the 1950s, which led to the Goldwater campaign in 1964. The popular breakthroughs came with Nixon, who claimed support from a "silent majority," and Reagan, who promised deliverance from the unsettling troubles of the 1960s and 1970s. His "it's morning in America" offered us a tranquilizer to mask the pain he administered, as many Americans turned to comforting fantasies. Even when it wore off, Americans were left dazed and confused -- a condition only made worse when Democrats like Clinton and Obama tried to sell their own branded versions of American fantasyland rather than expose what the right was actually doing.

I never for a moment bought into Reagan's spiel: my stock line at the time was "the only boom industry in America is fraud." If you missed the moment, the book I recommend is Will Bunch: Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, mostly because he sees right through Reagan and cuts him no slack -- unlike the more "nuanced" but still useful books by Rick Perlstein and Gary Wills (both did better with Nixon, especially the latter's Nixon Agonistes, as he was a much more complex, arguably even tragic but in no sense sympathetic, figure). I had so little respect for Reagan that I long resisted the idea that his election delineated an era in American history: even though my days as a starry-eyed American idealist ended quite definitively in the late 1960s, I couldn't fully accept that America was capable of making such a bad turn. I only let go of that naivete when I realized the extent to which Clinton and Obama saw themselves as perfecting an idealized Reaganite dream. Only just today, about 50 pages into Carlos Lozada's The Washington Book, did it occur to me that Obama's presidency was mostly an attempt to write a happy ending to the Reagan Revolution and rescue the American Dream. He, of course, failed, as the American people had watched the same movie but chose instead the Trump ending, where the bad guys triumph and burn the whole set down.

This might be a good point to mention:

• Steve M: [04-29] Even When Republicans Were Voting for Mainstream Candidates, Trumpism Is What They Wanted: Skip the piece that sets this up, where "Jonathan Chait tries to imagine a normal Trump presidency," and go straight to the meat of the argument:

  In the pre-Trump years, even when Republican voters settled on Mitt Romney and John McCain as party standard-bearers, they craved more, perking up in 2008 only when the charismatic demagogue Sarah Palin joined the ticket and embracing would-be authoritarians Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012 before Mitt Romney's money sank their campaigns. Trump is the kind of president they've always wanted, the fantasy avenger from the QAnon posts so many of them binge-consumed during the height of the COVID pandemic.

• Steve M: [04-28] We Have to Save Ourselves From Trump, Because Ambitious Careerists Won't: "That's why the second-term Trump resistance came from the bottom up. The rest of us have less to lose." He's contrasting us to the media and political hacks (including businesses, nonprofit orgs, and law firms) who Trump is so focused on intimidating. But much of the "bottom up" resistance has everything to lose, with few if any options to just play along (like most of the careerists can, and many are doing).

• Steve M: [04-27] You Know What Else People Discuss Around Their Kitchen Tables? Life-Threatening Illnesses. Of the "specific issues" mentioned below, the one with the most anti-Trump polling is "Reducing federal funding for medical research," with 21% support, 77% opposed.

  Trump's numbers are especially bad on specific issues . . . If establishment Democrats are worried about attacking Trump in his areas of strength, maybe they should stop worrying -- he no longer seems to have areas of strength. But if they want to be cautious, you'd imagine that they'd want to go for the areas where he's weakest. But that doesn't seem to be the case. The most timid Democrats are locked into a rigid formula. Talk about nothing, except the economy and Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. Never veer from this path.

  My explanation for this is that all politicians have three jobs: talk to donors to raise money, which mostly involves promising to make them more money, and that they have to do almost continuously; talk to voters, but that only really matters in the run up to an election, and by then it's usually easier to slam their opponents than to promise anything substantial; and, once elected, address and solve real problems, but that's hard (especially after your commitments to donors and voters, and with every special interest represented by hordes of lobbyists) and failure is easy to explain and who really notices anyway? Republicans have it a bit simpler, because their donors and base want different things and the latter rarely realizes when they're in conflict. As for fixing things, no one expects much from Republicans other than lower taxes (and other favors to the rich).

  The economy is a safe topic for Democrats, because they can legitimately promise to make the rich richer, which is what donors want to hear. Medicare/medicaid is also safe, because it doesn't bother donors, and helps save capitalism from its more inhumane effects, thus forestalling the spectre of revolution. (Republicans disagree here, because they have so little respect for little folk they don't see any risk to their dominion.) Democrats also find it safe to talk in generalities -- like norms, due process, autocracy vs. democracy -- which, again, donors accept, while most people have trouble translating such abstractions to their everyday lives. That seems to be the point, as anything more explicit runs the risk of upsetting some donor or lobbyist.

  For Democrats, this fear of saying anything unsafe is drummed in from the start. It comes from the donors, and from the party consultants (who are basically conduits to donors), and it is reinforced by the media, ever vigilant for a gaffe or any form of hypocrisy, not least because they know the Republican attack machine is always ready to pounce. The most obvious example of donor bias right now concerns Israel. Well over half of Democratic voters are appalled by the genocide in Gaza and want to see the US pressing hard for a ceasefire [see: 7 in 10 Democrats Say US Should Restrict Aid to Israel], but fewer than 1-in-10 elected Democrats are willing to say so in public. One problem here is that playing it safe rarely helps Democrats, because Republicans are just as happy exploiting it as proof of corruption and hypocrisy. Democrats have no answer for that. On the other hand, Trump seems to be immune to such charges, because everyone acknowledges that he lies all the time, and lots of people see his corruption as cunning (or at least don't see that it hurts them).

  So, sure, Democrats need to learn to talk better to ordinary folk about everyday issues. It might help to spend less time courting donors and more time speaking (and listening) to the public. They need to get their emotional signals straight, which can include outrage when the occasion calls for it (which with Trump is pretty damn often). They've got a lot of work to do. We need at least to see them trying. As long as they are, we need to cut them some slack. Politics isn't easy. Otherwise, politicians could do it, and clearly they can't.

• Steve M: [04-26] The GOP is a Niche Party. So much for the 18-29 Republican wave.

• Steve M: [04-24] Trump's Approval Seemed to Have a High Floor, but Not Anymore. Interesting thing in the chart here is how support for Trump on inflation has fallen almost exactly in line with support for his tariffs. The argument that tariffs would cause higher prices seems to have stuck. (On the one hand, it's obvious; on the other, why did anyone think Trump would do anything to fight inflation other than start a recession?)

Branko Marcetic: [04-28] How Joe Biden Gave Us a Second Trump Term: A Current Affairs interview with just about the only writer who bothered in 2020 to publish a book on the Democratic Party presidential nominee, Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. More recently, Marcetic has written a two-part assessment of Biden's term [01-17]: At Home, Joe Biden Squandered Countless Opportunities, and On Foreign Policy, Biden Leaves a Global Trail of Destruction. I don't really feel like rehashing all this now, but it's here for future reference.

Herb Scribner/Praveena Somasundaram: [04-29] Trump administration fires Holocaust Museum board members picked by Biden: "The White House said it will replace former board members, including former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, 'with steadfast supporters of the State of Israel'." All part of their redefinition of "genocide" according not to what is done but to who does it, so they can convert the horror most people feel when faced with genocide to antisemitism that might convince diaspora Jews to move to their supposedly safe haven in Israel. Not that they had much to worry about with Biden appointees, but Trump likes this idea so much he wants to hog all the credit for promoting it. Recall that the US Holocaust Museum was created by Jimmy Carter as a sop to get Israel to sign the peace deal with Egypt. Of course, Americans were horrified by the Nazi Judeocide, but it also had the convenience of swearing eternal memory there while deliberately overlooking holocausts much closer to home.

Zack Beauchamp: [04-29] How Trump lost Canada: "Trump's '51st state' talk brought Canada's Liberals back from the dead -- and undermined a key American alliance."

Nick Turse: [04-30] The First Forever War: "The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Later."

Scattered tweets:

• Matt Huber [04-28]: responding to a Cory Booker tweet: "We must stand up and speak out, not because something is left or right, but if it is right or wrong."

  I really do blame Obama for convincing a generation of Democrats that you can will your way into power via platitudes.

• Sam Hasselby [04-29]: responding to quotes from Mike Huckabee: "I believe Israel is a chosen place, for a chosen people, for a chosen purpose." "There is no explanation for the USA other than there was a God who intervened on behalf of the colonists." "Our alliance is so strong because it is not political, it is spiritual."

  There is vastly more anti-semitism in American evangelicalism than there is in the Ivy League, including Mike Muckabee the US Ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a real end-timer millenarian. He expects Jesus Christ to return in the Second Coming, in which all Jewish and Muslim . . . [his ellipses]

• Caitlin Johnstone [04-28]:

  The word "antisemite" has become so meaningless that now whenever someone uses it you have to ask them "What kind? The Hitler-was-right kind or the stop-bombing-hospitals kind?"

• Drop Site News [04-28]: Headline: "REPORT: Biden Official Admit They Never Pressured Israel for Ceasefire, as Israeli Leaders Boast of Playing Washington": Long multi-part tweet, and credible as far as it goes, but where's the actual report? I'm seeing lots of interesting stuff on their website, including The Ongoing Gaza Genocide and the State of "Ceasefire" Negotiations, and Netanyahu Promises the "Final Stage" of Gaza Genocide Will Lead to Implementation of "Trump's Plan", but nothing that matches this story. What I am seeing are multiple tweets attacking AOC, arguing that her "lying about Joe Biden working for a ceasefire will haunt her for the rest of her career."

One more tweet: [04-21] This started as a bullet item above, but turned into its own section:

Daniel Lambert: [Image from National Review reads: "Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap projected an antisemitic message onstage at Coachella this weekend. It read: 'Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. It is being enabled by the U.S. government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes. F*** Israel, Free Palestine.'" The two statements are unequivocally true, way beyond any conceivable doubt. The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow: it's not one that I personally endorse -- but it is not uncommon or unnatural that when two countries commit and rationalize genocide, that other people would denounce the aggressors -- most want them to be stopped, and many want to see them punished, both for their own crimes and as a warning to others -- and would find themselves in sympathy with the victims.

But the only conclusions that actually matter are the ones backed with power. Even prominent politicians who clearly oppose genocide have little if any effect as long as Netanyahu's administration has enjoyed blank check support from Biden and Trump, and both political establishments are isolated from public disapproval. The idea of treating any criticism of Israel as antisemitism is a cynical smoke screen to deny, and increasingly to banish, dissent from current political policy. If anything is antisemtic, it is the attempt to link all Jews everywhere to the genocidal policies of Netanyahu and his allies in Israel. While most people can see through this ploy, the net effect is surely to promote more antisemitism -- which for Zionists is actually a feature, as they depend on antisemitism to drive Jews from the diaspora to Israel. (Which fits in nicely with the desire of traditional antisemites on Europe and America.) The thing to understand here is that the people who are trying to define criticism of Israel (and American policy supporting Israel) are not just acting in bad faith, but are promoting widespread, indiscriminate anti-Jewish blowback.

As such, they are acting against the best interests of most Jews worldwide, and against however may Jews who disagree with Netanyahu and his mob within Israel. If your prime interest is solidarity with Palestinians, you're unlikely to care about this antisemitism line -- either you recognize it as rubbish, or perhaps you take the bait and start making your own generalizations about Jewish support for Israel. But if you actually care about Israel, even if you're very reluctant to acknowledge its long troubled history, you need to recognize that this ploy it first and foremost a scheme to keep you in line and under control. Netanyahu has build his whole career on making and keeping enemies. He knows how to use their hate for his own purposes. What he can't handle is his (well, Israel's) friends turning on him, because when they do, he's finished, and so is his genocidal war. This antisemitism ploy is a thin reed to hang his political future on, not least because it's patently ridiculous, but as long as Trump is cashing Adelson's checks, the fix seems to be in -- giving them the illusion of winning even while public opinion is heading steadily the other direction.

By the way, consider this piece:

• Isaac Chotiner: [04-22] The Biden Official Who Doesn't Oppose Trump's Student Deportations: "Why the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt blames universities for 'opening the door' to the Trump Administration's professed campaign to tackle antisemitism." Lipstadt is a good example of someone who has built her career on exaggerating the importance and prevalence of antisemitism in America, which makes her the perfect sucker for this line of attack. By the way, Nathan J Robinson tweeted about this article:

  Many liberals would happily get on board with huge parts of the authoritarian agenda if it was presented a little less crassly. That's why I think Trump is ultimately foolish and will fail. He doesn't understand that many liberal elites could very easily be allies of fascism.

  Harvard for instance didn't really want to fight Trump and would have struck a deal with him if he'd been just a little more delicate. These people are naturally capitulators to authoritarianism, not enemies of it. Trump is so stupid that he forces them to be his adversaries.

  Perhaps that is because Trump isn't self-conscious enough to see fascism as an ideological agenda. For him, it's just a bundle of his personality's irritable mental gestures. He doesn't care whether anyone else agrees with him, as long as they let him have his way. Of course, over time he is increasingly surrounded by followers who do believe in fascism-for-fascism's sake (Miller and Bannon from his first term, practically everyone this time).

PS: Kneecap published a statement, so let's file it here:

Since our statements at Coachella -- exposing the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people -- we have faced a coordinated smear campaign.

For over a year, we have used our shows to call out the British and Irish governments' complicity in war crimes.

The recent attacks against us, largely emanating from the US, are based on deliberate distortions and falsehoods. We are taking action against several of these malicious efforts.

Let us be absolutely clear.

The reason Kneecap is being targeted is simple -- we are telling the truth, and our audience is growing.

Those attacking us want to silence criticism of a mass slaughter. They weaponize false accusations of antisemitism to distract, confuse, and provide cover for genocide.

We do not give a f*ck what religion anyone practices. We know there are massive numbers of Jewish people outraged by this genocide just as we are. What we care about is that governments of the countries we perform in are enabling some of the most horrific crimes of our lifetimes -- and we will not stay silent.

No media spin will change this.

Our only concern is the Palestinian people -- the 20,000 murdered children and counting.

The young people at our gigs see through the lies.

They stand on the side of humanity and justice.

And that gives us great hope.

I'll note that while much of what they've said is indeed "absolutely clear," two lines are open to wide interpretation: "Fuck Israel" and "Free Palestine." I personally wouldn't read anything more than the minimum into such phrases. "Fuck Israel" goes beyond opposing genocide to expressing contempt for the rationalizations Israel's supporters offer for their racism and genocide. "Free Palestine" expresses the hope that Palestinians can live in peace and freedom in the lands they call home. I see no reason they can't enjoy that freedom in lands also inhabited by Israelis, but that seems to be up to the Israelis, whose desires to kill and expel Palestinians are no longer latent within Zionist ideology, but have been shamelessly exposed over the last 18 months. That anyone could interpret such coarse slogans as meaning that Palestinians seek to do unto all Israelis what some Israelis are currently doing pretty indiscriminately to all Palestinians in Gaza and many in the other Occupied Territories just shows how hegemonic Israel's paranoid propaganda has become.

The one quibble I have with Kneecap's statement is that I wouldn't stop at "20,000 murdered children" as I am every bit as offended by the countless murdered adults -- even the so-called "militants" (which Israel seems to blanket define as any male 15-60, a typically gross generalization; not would I exempt actual militants -- while I have no more sympathy for them than I have for Israel's, or anyone's, soldiers, I have no doubt but that they were driven to fight by Israeli injustice, and that nearly all of them would put down their arms if given the chance to live in a free and just society). In any case, the solution is never to kill your way to "victory." It is to establish a fair and equitable system of justice, while letting past fears and hates subside into history.

When I opened this file, I left myself an extra day to add a few new pieces. In particular, I was thinking that as Trump's regime passes its 100-day mark, we'd be deluged with summaries, and that would be a good way to close. Trump himself celebrated the milestone with a rally -- see Trump rallies supporters in Michigan to mark 100 days in office -- where he bragged: "We've just gotten started. You haven't seen anything yet."

By the way, the "100 days" benchmark was largely invented in response to the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's first term, in 1933. For a good history, see Jonathan Alter: The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. (There is a new piece by Alter below.) Roosevelt had won a landslide election in November, which also produced large Democratic majorities in Congress (also, many of the Republicans who survived, especially in the Senate, were on the progressive side of the GOP), but couldn't take office until March. During that period, Herbert Hoover not only remained as president, he doubled down on doing nothing to stop the depression. Roosevelt was Hoover's polar opposite: a politician with a strong belief that government could and should act dramatically to help people and improve the economy, but with few fixed ideas about what to do, a willingness to try things, and to make changes according to whatever worked best. The most immediate problem there was the banking system, which was nearing total collapse. His handling of the banking crisis was probably the single most brilliant exercise of presidential power ever. He did three things: he declared a "bank holiday," briefly closing the banks to halt the panic that was causing banks to fail due to runs on savings; he went on the radio, and patiently and expertly explained to people how banking works, and why they need to show some patience, so he could reopen the banks without triggering a panic; and he passed a major bill regulating the banking system (known as Carter-Glass, the law that Bill Clinton repealed, leading to the collapse of the financial system in 2008), which included Federal Deposit Insurance (a rare case where the very existence of insurance prevents it from ever having to pay out). That was just one of 15 bills, many major, that Roosevelt signed in his 100 days. He went on to do much more during his long presidency (including Social Security, and leading the fight in WWII), but those 100 days were especially remarkable: unprecedented, and a yardstick that no later president has some close to matching.

Trump, in contrast, has passed no significant legislation, nor has he made any remotely successful efforts to mold public opinion. What he has done has been to use (and abuse) his executive powers to an extraordinary, unprecedented degree, further exposing the long-time shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch, and the inability of Congress and/or the Courts to function as any sort of limit on presidential power (largely due to Trump's absolute domination of the Republican Party, which enjoys narrow majorities in Congress and an effectively packed Court system).

Not a lot of really good summaries to date, but here are a few more pieces:

• Aliya Uleuova/Will Craft/Andrew Witherspoon: [04-30] Trump 100 days: tariffs, egg prices, Ice arrests and approval ratings -- in charts.

• Sasha Abramsky: [04-29] The First 100 Days of Self-Dealing Trump's Thugocracy.

• Jonathan Alter: [04-29] Trump's First 100 Days: Roosevelt in Reverse: "FDR calmed and unified the country: Trump has terrified and further divided us."

• Amnesty International: [04-30] President Trump's First 100 Days: Attacks on Human Rights, Cruelty and Chaos.

• Jamelle Bouie: [04-30] The New Deal Is a Stinging Rebuke of Trump and Trumpism: The FDR standard, again, which should be measured by quality as well as quantity. Trump, with his 100 executive orders on day one, clearly has the quantity, but many of those are tied up in the courts, and most are subject to repeal as cavalierly as they were instituted. As for quality, one way to measure it this early in the game might be to compare polling, which is starkly down for Trump so far. We don't have comparable figures for Roosevelt, but it's a fairly safe guess that he was more popular after 100 days than when he started. Four years later he was reelected in the largest electoral landslide to that point. Also by Bouie:

  • Jamelle Bouie: [04-26] Trump Doesn't Want to Govern: "He wants to rule."

  • Jamelle Bouie: [04-23] One Way to Keep Trump's Authoritarian Fantasy From Becoming Our Reality: "Trump wants you to think resistance is futile. It is not." Also (omitting a parenthetical I don't think helps):

    Cooperation with a leader of this ilk is little more than appeasement. It is little more than a license for him to go faster and push further -- to sprint toward the consolidated authoritarian government of Trump's dreams. . . .

    The individuals and institutions inclined to work with Trump thought they would stabilize the political situation. Instead, the main effect of going along to get along was to do the opposite: to give the White House the space it needed to pursue its maximalist aims. . . .

    Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be if no one stands in the way. But every time we -- and especially those with power and authority -- make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration's authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.

    I'll add that just as Trump's been using his first 100 days to see what he can get away with, the opposition is also testing what works, and adjusting as we go. Trump offended some very powerful interests with his tariff fiasco. He got an electoral rebuke in Wisconsin, and another one in Canada. The honeymoon with the press is starting to wear thin. No doubt he has already done a lot of damage, and will continue to do so, but the more he does the more he exposes his moral and political bankruptcy, and that can only draw more opposition.

• Martina Burtscher: [04-30] How Trump 2.0 Overturned Years of Climate Progress in 100 Days.

• John Cassidy: [04-28] From "America First" to "Sell America": "Donald Trump's first hundred days have been an unprecedented economic fiasco."

• Thomas B Edsall: [04-22] Trump Is Insatiable. That's possibly the single most damning thing you can say about a political figure. You're admitting that you can't deal with him rationally. Sooner or late, the only recourse you're left with is to stop him. Needless to say, it doesn't take many paragraphs before the Hitler analogies start appearing. There may well be many differences between Trump and Hitler, but insatiability is the one big thing them have in common, and the one thing no one can afford to overlook. Also:

  • Thomas B Edsall: [04-29] How Does a Stymied Autocrat Deal With Defeat? My first reaction was that Hitler slunk into his bunker and killed himself (right after killing the newlywed Eva Braun), but Edsall doesn't go there. He solicits input from his usual circle of consultants, who offer bits of insight like "Trump is a coward who has convinced the world he is brave." That's one vote for retreat, but the only one.

• Ed Kilgore: [09-29] Trump Wasted First 100 Days on Indulging His MAGA Base. "The 47th president could have build a successful administration from his 2024 victory." Not really. Not only was competence not in his nature, it would have been off-brand. Perhaps some other Republican would have used the office to exploit the Democrats' bipartisanship instincts, secure in the knowledge that the Republican attack machine would cut him some slack, but with Trump it was always going to be all about the graft. The only question would be how discrete it would be, or as it turns out, how obviously stupid and insanely chaotic? Which leads us to:

  • Errol Louis: [04-29] What Will It Take to Stop Politicians From Insider Trading? "From Donald Trump to MTG, corruption is taking on new heights." The answer is probably the end of capitalism and the containment of ego, neither of which seems thinkable let alone possible. Of course, voters could ultimately hold politicians responsible for serving in the public interest, but the entire system, including the media, is stacked against that.

• Michael Kruse: [04-28] The Worst Hundred Days: This starts with notes on FDR's 100 days, LBJ's substantial but somewhat slower legislative accomplishments, and Eisenhower's rather different approach to his first 100 days, and finds Trump faring poorly by every measure.

• Andrew Marantz: [04-28] Is It Happening Here? "Other countries have watched their democracies slip away gradually, without tanks in the streets. That may be where we're headed -- or where we already are." Longer and deeper than a mere "100 day" review, but that's what the Trump piece amounts to, against a backdrop of Orbán and How Democracies Die.

• Schuyler Mitchell: [04-29] How Trump's 100 Days Built Off the Far Right Blueprint of Project 2025.

• David Remnick: [04-27] One Hundred Days of Ineptitude: "Now we know that Donald Trump's first term, his initial attempt at authoritarian primacy, was amateur hour, a fitful rehearsal."

• Silky Shah: [04-28] Trump's First 100 Days Show Immigrant Jails Are Authoritarian Testing Grounds.

• Alex Shephard: [04-29] Think Trump's Unpopular Now? Just Wait.

• Michael Tomasky: [04-28] In 100 Days, Trump Has Invented Something New: Clown-Show Fascism.

• Nate Weisberg: [04-28] Donald Trump Is Following the Sam Brownback Playbook: "The former Kansas governor's radical economic agenda undermined the state's prosperity, decimated vital government services, tanked his popularity, and put a Democrat in power. Could the same fate await the current president?" I don't think this piece is very accurate in terms of what Brownback did and Trump is doing, nor in terms of prognosis: true that Kansas elected a Democratic governor after Brownback left to work in the Trump State Department, and true that he was pretty unpopular when he left, but Republicans retained control of the state legislature, often with "veto-proof" majorities.

• Nathan J Robinson: [01-20] Do We Need a Second New Deal? This has nothing to do with the 100 days assessment, but it does give you a pretty good sense of how Roosevelt managed his first 100 days and the whole New Deal, so is worth a mention here.

Let's close with a quote from Carlos Lozada: The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, p. 61, from 2015, when he read "The Collected Works of Donald Trump":

Instead, I found . . . well, is there a single word that combines revulsion, amusements, respect, and confusion? That is how it feels, sometimes by turns, often all at once, to binge on Trump's writings. Over the course of 2,212 pages, I encountered a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random.

Elsewhere, such qualities might get in the way of the story. With Trump they are the story. There is little else. He writes about his real estate dealings, his television show, his country, but after a while that all feels like an excuse. The one deal Trump has been pitching his entire career -- the one that culminates in his play for that most coveted piece of property, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- is himself.

I don't want to quibble, but I'm having trouble fitting "respect" into this puzzle. Everything else, sure, and you could skip 2,000 pages and still get there. There is much more quotable here, but it looks like you can find the original article here. For a more recent reading of Trump's oeuvre, see John Ganz: [04-07] Dog Eat Dog: "The books of Donald Trump." Most of us know orders of magnitude more about Trump now than we did ten years ago, but with little more than his ghost-written books, Lozada's picture is already as complete and astute as Ganz's. That suggests he's extraordinarily shallow and transparent to anyone who gives him the least bit of critical thought. Which leaves one wondering why millions of voters can't see through him? Or do they just not care?

Current count: 180 links, 11956 words (14518 total)

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Thursday, April 17, 2025

I wound up spending much of today processing and responding to the news that Francis Davis has died. Nate Chinen's piece, cited below, is beautifully written and covers much of what needs to be said. I will probably write more over the next couple weeks, but at the moment, I'm having trouble composing myself. I do much appreciate the notes I've seen so far, and will go back over them in due course. One side effect of this is that I took a good look at obituaries so far this year, and came up with the fairly long list below. The biggest surprise for me was another notable jazz critic, Larry Appelbaum, who has voted in every Jazz Critics Poll since its inception, so I counted him as another old and dear friend.

As these occasional posts are never really done, their timing is pretty arbitrary. But I figured I had enough saved up, and might as well call it a day. (Well, it slipped a day, so I wound up adding a few things, but nothing major.)

Select internal links:

• Eric Levitz: With Matthew Yglesias
• Hamilton Nolan: Capital losses
• Ben Ehrenreich: You Don't Get Trump Without Gaza
• Paul Krugman: Various articles
• Richard Silverstein: Boycotting America
• TJ Dawe: President Donkey Kong
• Eric Levitz: On tariffs
• Alac MacLeod: Attacking Yemen
• Jeffrey St Clair: Roaming Charges
• Dean Baker: Various articles
• Garrett Graff + No More Mister Nice Blog
• Ed Kilgore: Various articles
• Francis Davis + other obituaries

Eric Levitz: [01-10] Have the past 10 years of Democratic politics been a disaster? "A conversation with Matthew Yglesias." I found this tab open from back in January, but never really got through it, and still haven't. At some point, I want to go back over all of Levitz's "Rebuild" pieces, as I think they're about half right, and the wrong half is probably the more interesting, at least to write about. Given the interviewee, this one is probably more than half wrong.

Yglesias is a very smart, very productive guy who has from the very beginning always been one step ahead of where internet punditry is going. I read all of his Vox stuff with great interest, most of what came before, but not a lot of what came after. He's always had a good feel for where the neoliberal money was going, and with his Substack newsletter, his Bloomberg columns, and his hyper-Friedmanesque One Billion Americans book, he's clearly arrived as an oracle for the cosmopolitan liberal set. Still, in glomming onto his own special donor class, he's kind of lost touch with everyone else. His prescription that what Democrats need is to give up on the left gestures of Hillary-Biden-Harris and return to solid Obama moderation is incredible on every front.

David Klion: [03-10] The Loyalist: "The cruel world according to Stephen Miller." Review of Jean Guerrero's book, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Jeremy R Hammond: [03-27] How Trump Greenlighted the Resumption of Israel's Gaza Genocide.

David A Graham: [04-01] The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come: "The now-famous white paper has proved to be a good road map for what the administration has done so far, and what may yet be on the way." Note that Graham has a 160 pp. book on this coming out April 22: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.

Hamilton Nolan: [04-01] Divergence From the Interests of Capital: "Trump will ultimately make rich people poorer. Why?" This is a fairly quick overview, and he didn't even get to some big things, like climate change. Just who do you think owns all that beach front property that's going to get liquidated? Who needs to be able to afford disaster insurance? What about capital investments in in things like agriculture that will have to move as climates shift? And then, when it all goes to hell, whose heads will be on the line when the mob rises up? Since Clinton, Democrats have been telling their rich donors that they're better off with Democrats in power, and they have at least 30 years of data to prove their point. But are the rich listening? Some, but most still prefer the Republicans, because by degrading and humiliating the poor, they make the rich feel more important, more powerful, richer.

Batya Unger-Sargon: [04-02] I Used to Hate Trump. Now I'm a MAGA Lefty. "The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American Dream in 60 years. That's why I support him." That's all I could read before hitting the paywall -- looks like "TheFreePress" isn't free after all.Author "appears regularly on Fox News," and has published two books: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (2021), and Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women (2024), both on right-wing Encounter Books. For more of her spiel, look here. If you want to take this more seriously than it deserves:

Kyle Kulinski/Nathan J Robinson: [03-25] 'MAGA Lefty' Is Not a Thing.

Ben Ehrenreich: [04-03] You Don't Get Trump Without Gaza: "Fascism doesn't just appear. It must be invited in -- and the bipartisan repression of the anti-genocide movement did just that." This is a brilliant piece, setting up its main argument with a recap of Brecht's Arturi Ui, about the improbable rise of a Trump-like -- sure, he was thinking of Hitler, but he hadn't seen Trump yet -- to take over Chicago gangland's "Cauliflower Trust":

Rot, famously, starts at the top. Joe Biden, sleepy guardian of empire and whatever remained of the liberal world order, had stayed comatose on nearly every issue of import to his constituents. But the genocide seemed to bring him briefly and sporadically back to life. It was as if funding and propagandizing for Israel's slaughter were the only aspect of the job that still got his blood moving. He was, as Brecht wrote of Dogsborough, "Like an old family Bible nobody'd opened for ages--till one day some friends were flipping through it and found a dried-up cockroach between the pages." The rest of the political establishment, Democrats and Republicans both, didn't need to be told to follow Biden's lead. The very few exceptions -- we see you, Cori, Ilhan, Rashida -- were disciplined and marginalized.

In an extraordinary show of class unity for a nation supposedly irreparably divided on party lines, our homegrown Cauliflower Trust closed ranks. It was almost as if American upper management, regardless of religion or politics, instinctively understood that maintaining the right of an ethnocratic settler-colonial outpost to exterminate an unruly subject population was essential to its own survival. Or perhaps they were more cunning and saw a ready-made opportunity to take down the left.

The major newspapers, television networks, and virtually all the prestige magazines did their part, boosting the credibility of nearly every outrageous lie invented by Israeli military propagandists while smearing protesters as antisemites, Hamas stooges, and terrorist sympathizers. "It doesn't matter what professors or smart-alecks think," pronounced Brecht's Arturo Ui, "all that counts is how the little man sees his master." . . .

And here we are. The obscene weaponization of antisemitism helped bring actual Nazis to power.

Much more quotable here, including "The Atlantic, the thinking man's propaganda organ for the exterminatory wars of empire." I don't recall reading that particular Brecht play, but I've read many, and recognize the title. In my relative ignorance, I've been thinking of Trump more in terms of Ubu Roi, but farce, no matter how grotesque, can only last in an environment deprived of power.

Ofer Aderet: [04-04] Looking Back, Israeli Historian Tom Segev Thinks Zionism Was a Mistake: "For decades, historian Tom Segev has critically documented momentous events involving Jews, Israel and its neighbors. Recently, he has also looked back at his own life story. Now, at 80, he weighs in on the current state of the nation."

Yair Rosenberg: [04-04] Trump's Jewish Cover Story: "The Trump administration has not surgically targeted these failings at America's universities for rectification; it has exploited them to justify the institution's decimation." I have no doubt that most Jews in America -- perhaps even most of those who wholeheartedly defend Israel's decimation of Gaza -- feel uneasy about being used as the pretext for Trump's wholesale attack on freedom of speech at elite universities, but the author doesn't just say that, he repeats blatant slanders -- e.g., "those behind Columbia's encampment repeatedly cheered Hamas's murders of civilians" -- against students whose "crime" was nothing more or less than protesting against Netanyahu's continuing systematic crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the unconditional support Biden provided (a policy which Trump has continued, as he had promised to do).

Rob Lee: [04-06] We Still Live in Nixonland: An Interview with Rick Perlstein. Some interesting notes on his writing process, although it's hard to imagine the massive notes his actual books are reduced from. Still no date on the much-promised leap into the "last 25 years" (Bush II to Trump, skipping Reagan's presidency, Bush I, and the anti-Clinton insanity, which could easily fill several volumes).

Spencer Ackerman: [04-07] El Salvador and the Dark Lessons of Guantanamo: "CECOT, the Salvadoran slavery-prison now used for migrant renditions, reflects 2002-4-era Gitmo -- with some updates."

John Ganz: [04-07] Dog Eat Dog: "The books of Donald Trump." One of those "I read this shit so you don't have to," in case you ever felt the need. Also:

DD Guttenplan/John Ganz: [04-21] John Ganz on the Books of Donald Trump: Podcast audio (no transcript).

Andrew Cockburn: [04-07] The fix is in for new Air Force F-47 -- and so is the failure: "Just wait for the unstoppable lobby preventing any future effort to strangle this boondoggle in the cradle."

Paul Krugman:

• [04-07] Political Styles of the Rich and Clueless: "There are none so blind as those that will not see." This is the first time I've read Krugman on Substack, and it's about par for his New York Times columns. Best line: "great power often enables great pettiness." Which itself is kind of petty given what Trump and Musk levels of power have been doing.

• [04-10] Trump Is Stupid, Erratic and Weak.

• [04-13] Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? "Trump's tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse." This explains the formula used for calculating each nation's tariffs (aside from the 10% minimum, applied even to uninhabited islands where trade is already perfectly balanced at zero).

• [04-16] Why Trump Will Lose His Trade War: "His people don't know what they're doing or what they want."

• [04-17] Law Firms, Trade Wars and the Weaknesses of Monarchs: "Unrestrained presidential power will diminish America." I have no idea how these pro bono law services deals are going to work -- who is going to decide which cases they cover, and why -- but they are deeply disturbing. I don't even know what the threat was that compelled large, independent firms to cave in like they did. The gist seems to be that Trump is personally running an off-the-books slush fund, which the companies are feeding, either to gain favor or for fear of some kind of reprisal. I'm not aware of anything remotely like this ever being done before. Krugman cites two articles, which don't help much:

  • Jasper Ward/Mike Scarcella: [03-21] Trump withdraws order targeting Paul Weiss, says law firm promised free legal work.

  • New York Times: [04-16] Law Firms Made Dealw With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them. "To avoid retribution, big firms agreed to provide free legal services for uncontroversial causes. To the White House, that could mean negotiating trade deals -- or even defending the president and his allies."

Richard Silverstein: [04-08] Why the world should boycott Trump's America. I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure the logic works. Boycotts are more likely to cause self-harm than to intimidate their targets, especially ones that pile arrogance on top of a sense of victimhood. Israel is the prime example here, but the US shares both traits, plus two more novel factors: massive size, which would take an incredibly huge boycott to move, and heterogeneity (for lack of a better word), which makes it hard to focus pain on the people actually responsible for the offense. No nation is democratic enough that inflicting pain on its poor will have any real effect on its leaders. Boycotts and sanctions are more likely to rally support for the rulers, while marginalizing internal opposition, and squandering any influence and leverage you might actually have. The cases where such tactics have actually worked are few and far between. About the only thing that can be said for them is that they give one the satisfaction (or moral smugness) of doing something where there are no practical alternatives. On the other hand, if one actually does have leverage -- as, say, Japan does in hosting US bases, or the US does in supplying Israel arms -- wouldn't it be much better to use that leverage to mitigate bad behavior than to strike a mere public stance of moral merit?

• Jonathan Cook: [03-24] The new fascism: Israel is the template for Trump and Europe's war on freedom.

Vanesse Ague: [04-09] Big Ears Festival 2025 Reminds Us to Open Ourselves to Wild and Wonderful Sounds.

TJ Dawe: [04-09] I Didn't Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong: I'm not sure whether the quality of thinking declined dramatically in 2024 or was never really there in the first place. It could just be that we were lulled into complacency, knowing that even "the most powerful person in the world" wouldn't possibly be allowed to disrupt, much less destroy, business as usual. After all, we had "checks and balances" -- not just a Constitution designed to obstruct change, but a system of campaign finance and lobbying to make sure no reform got too radical. After all, the system had proven robust enough to contain Trump in his first term. Why not let the people have some fun with the illusory power of their votes?

I'm not into politics. Never have been. That's why it was so refreshing to have a candidate who wasn't the same old same old, but a raging animated ape.

Donkey Kong might not be the most sophisticated public speaker, but it sure was entertaining to go to his rallies. None of the usual bunk about policy and budgets. Just two hours of roaring and chest-pounding. No one gets a crowd going like that monkey! Or donkey. Whatever he is.

But for all the talk from pundits about how we'd see a new side of Donkey Kong once he took office, well, not so much. Turns out we got exactly what we voted for.

Some of this I can explain through a model that I've long had about how the presidency operates. At first, the job seems overwhelming, so an incoming president is effectively a prisoner of his staff. Sure, they're supposed to be his staff, but they immediately become independent agents, able to limit and filter his choices, and each new person they get him to pick further limits his options. I could give you examples from any presidency since FDR (who, for reasons we don't need to go into here, was a rather different case from another era), but Trump I offers by far the most ludicrous examples, starting with Reince Priebus and the so-called "adults" -- at least they were able to derail some of Trump's more outrageous whims, like H-bombing hurricanes, or "solving" the pandemic by no longer counting deaths.

Still, over time, presidents reclaim the power of the office, which in principle they had all along. They tune out tasks they can delegate, and start to press for their own way on matters they care about. Even the most devious staff remind them they're in control, and they can replace anyone who doesn't suit them. Where most presidents start with administrations of old party regulars, they gradually wind up with personality cults. Clinton and Obama offer good examples of this -- which is probably why their personal successes correlate with partisan ruin -- but they at least valued competency. Trump demands even more sycophancy, but with him it's untethered to reality. Trump may be some kind of genius at political messaging -- at least in the Fox universe -- but that's all he knows and/or cares about.

This model usually works smoothly through a second term, but before that ends, the president has turned into a lame duck, and often not just metaphorically, dulling the ego inflation. Some presidents (like Wilson, Eisenhower, and less dramatically Reagan) are further slowed by health issues. But Trump, at least for the moment, is supercharged. His four years out of office have given him all the publicity he had as president but saddled him with none of the responsibility for the many things he would have screwed up. It also gave Republicans time to sort themselves out so Trump has been able to start his second term with a full slate of fanatic followers and enables. This is a combination we've never seen before, and hardly anyone is prepared for what's coming. Donkey Kong is a fanciful metaphor for what's happening. It only seems funny because we know it's not real. But it's hard to come up with anything more real that more accurately reflects the depth of thought that Trump is putting in, because nothing like this has ever worked before.

Melissa Gira Grant: [04-10] The sickening Reason Trump's Team Treats ICE Raids Like Reality TV: "This isn't only about entertainment for sadists. Kristi Noem's right-wing content creation allows the administration to terrorize more people than then can logistically deport." The one thing you can be sure of with Trump is that if he/they do something that looks bad, that's because they want it to look bad. Thinking through implications and consequences is way beyond them, but they live and breathe for gut reactions.

Timothy Noah: [04-10] The Sick Psychology Behind Trump's Tariff Chaos: "This isn't trade strategy. It's Munchausen syndrome by proxy." Clever, but groping for reasoning where little exists.

Eric Levitz: [04-10] The problem with the "progressive" case for tariffs: "Democrats shouldn't echo Trump's myths about trade." I've been somewhat inclined to humor Trump on the tariff question, not because I thought he had a clue what he was doing, or cared about anything more than throwing his presidential weight around, but because I've generally seen trade losses as bad for workers, and because I've never trusted the kneejerk free trade biases of economists. The one caution I always sounded was that tariffs only make sense if you have a national economic plan designed to take advantage of the specific tariffs. That sort of thing has been done most successfully in East Asia, but Americans tend to hate the idea of economic planning (except in the war industry), so there is little chance of doing that here. (Biden's use of tariffs to support clean energy development, semiconductors, etc., tried to do just that. How successfully, I don't know, but they were sane programs. Trump's is not.)

Nonetheless, Levitz has largely convinced me, first that tariffs are a bad tool, and second that they are bad politics. If I had to write a big piece, I'd probably explain it all differently, but our conclusions would converge. There are other tools which get you to the ends desired much more directly. As for the politics, it really doesn't pay to humor people like Trump. We went through a whole round of this in the 1980s and 1990s when conservatives were all hepped up on markets, and Democrats thought, hey, we can work with that. Indeed, they could -- markets tend to level out, making choices more competitive and efficient, so it was easy to come up with policies based on market mechanisms, like carbon credit trading, or the ACA.

Several problems there: one is that real businesses hate free markets, which is why they do everything possible to rig them, and dismantling their cheats is even harder once you agree to the market principle in the first place; second is that it shifts focus from deliberate public interest planning, where you can simply decide to do whatever it is you want to do, and the "invisible hand," which turns out to require a lot of greasing of palms; third is that when you implement market-based reforms, folks credit the market and not the reformers, so you don't build up any political capital for fixing problems. Obama got blamed for every little hiccup in ACA, most of which were the result of private companies gaming the system, and got none for delivering better health care while saving us billions of dollars, which the program actually did do.

One of the points I should have worked in above is that Trump's tariffs are not going to produce "good manufacturing jobs." Even if he does manage to generate more domestic manufacturing, it will only be in highly automated plants with minimally skilled workers, who will have little if any union leverage. And even that is only likely to happen after the companies have shaken down government at all levels for tax breaks and subsidies, along with the promise of continuing tariffs to keep their captive market from becoming uncompetitive.

I should also note that the main problem with the trade deals that Clinton and Obama negotiated had nothing to do with reducing tariffs. The real problem was that they were designed to facilitate capital outflows, so American finance capital (much of which, by the 1990s, was coming back from abroad) could globalize and protect their business interests from regulation by other countries, while ensuring that other countries would have to pay patent and copyright tribute to IP owners. The result was a vast expansion of inequality not just in the US but everywhere.

On the other hand, if what we wanted to do was to reduce inequality and improve standards of living everywhere, a good way to start would be by negotiating a very different kind of trade deal, as Stiglitz has pointed out in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (2006), and Making Globalization Work (2006).

Sasha Abramsky: [04-11] America Is Now One Giant Milgram Experiment: Back in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram "sought to understand whether ordinary Americans could be convinced to inflict pain on strangers -- in the parameters of the experiment, escalating electric shocks -- simply because a person in authority ordered them to do so." He found that they could, would, and did, which is to say they'd be as willing to follow Nazi leaders as "the Good Germans" under Hitler. This is one more facet of why the Trump/Fascism analogies continue to haunt us. Sure, Hitler was sui generis, but the history of his and others' fascist regimes has many parallels with right-wing reactionaries here and now.

Liza Featherstone: [04-11] Why Billionaire Trumpers Love This Dire Wolf Rubbish: "No, dire wolves are not 'back.' But pretending they can be brought back is a good excuse to gut regulations that protect real endangered species."

• DT Max: [04-07] The Dire Wolf Is Back: "Colossal, a genetics startup, has birthed three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal's extinct ancestors. Is the wooly mammoth next?"

Cory Doctorow: [04-11] The IP Laws That Stop Disenshittification: I trust I'm not alone in not being able to parse that title. The main subject is anticircumvention laws, which are extensions to IP laws (patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc.) which prevent you not only from copying and/or reselling products, they also aim to keep you from figuring out how they work, especially so you can repair them. Personally, I'd go even further, and tear down the entire IP edifice. But laws that force you to serve the business interests of monopolists are especially vile, on the level of slavery.

Melody Schreiber: [04-11] Measles Is Spreading, and RFK Jr. Is Praising Quacks: "For every semi-endorsement of vaccines, the Health and Human Services secretary seems to add several more nonsensical statements to muddy the waters."

Alan MacLeod: [04-11] With Yemen Attack, US Continues Long History of Deliberately Bombing Hospitals. The history lesson goes back to "Clinton's war on hospitals," and on into Latin America. Other articles found in this vicinity, by MacLeod and others:

• [02-18] USAID Falls, Exposing a Giant Network of US-Funded "Independent" Media. I'm reminded here that genocide historian Samantha Power was head of USAID under Biden, which raises questions about the corruption of power (to what extent did her political career move her from critic to enabler of genocide?). Turns out, I'm not the first to have wondered (and turns out, she did):

  • Jon Schwarz: [2023-12-15] Samantha Power Calls on Samantha Power to Resign Over Gaza: "If Power, the USAID administrator, would take her own genocide book seriously, she would step down over Israel's assault on Palestine." Power didn't resign, and remained head of USAID until Jan. 20, 2025, when Trump was inaugurated.

  • Christopher Mott: [2024-01-23] The Gaza war is the final nail in the coffin of R2P [Responsibility to Protect]: "The doctrine [advocated by Samantha Power] was always a la carte, evident in the silence of the most strident humanitarian interventionists today."

  • John Hudson: [2024-01-31] USAID's Samantha Power, genocide scholar, confronted by staff on Gaza: "A prominent advisor to President Biden, Power was challenged publicly over the administration's policy, with one employee saying it has 'left us unable to be moral leaders'."

  • Jonathan Guyer: [2024-10-04] The Price of Power: "America's chief humanitarian official rose to fame by speaking out against atrocities. Now she's trapped by one."

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [2024-12-19] 'Humanitarian superstar' Samantha Power admits Gaza is a loss.

  • Robbie Gramer/Eric Bazail-Eimil: [01-19] What Samantha Power Regrets and Her Advice to the Trump Administration: "Here's an exit interview with America's top aid official after confronting a turbulent series of humanitarian crises." There's much we can deride or even ridicule here, but two quotes jump out at me: "Well I'm looking forward to hearing who my successor will be." Of course, there is no successor, as the department has been demolished. Such naivete was endemic, even among establishment insiders whose very careers depended on recognizing what was happening. And on Israel: "US policy about events on the ground, the work has mattered and the work has made a difference. Has it made enough of a difference? Without that pushing, a horrific situation would have been even worse." This sounds like something one might say about Auschwitz, which by forcing people to work allowed some to survive, as opposed to Treblinka, which was a pure killing machine that nobody escaped. But rather than dwell on the fine line between what happened and how much worse it could have been without the humanitarian anguish of the Biden administration, the more important point is that by not ending the war well before the election, Biden has left it as unfinished business for Trump, who has zero humanitarian compassion, virtually assuring that the situation will become even more dire, and ultimately even more shameful for the Israelis responsible for it, and for the Americans who enabled it.

• [02-28] Chainsaw Diplomacy: Javier Milei's Argentina Destruction Is Nightmarish Model for Musk, DOGE.

• [03-25] Betar: The Far-Right Hate Group Helping Trump Deport Israel's Critics: I was surprised to find that Jabotinsky's fascist group from the 1930s still exists, although it's probably a revival, like the iterations of the Ku Klux Klan.

• Chris Hedges: [04-14] Israel Is About to Empty Gaza.

• Robert Inlakesh: [04-17] Before Trump Bombed Yemen, Biden Displaced Over Half a Million People -- and No One Said a Word.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-11] Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs? Short answer to his question is: the bond market. Wasn't that the same excuse Clinton gave for his lurch to the right after winning in 1992? (Although he has a long quote showing that Clinton's "lurch" was lubricated by Wall Street money at least a year earlier.) One quote: "Trump's really emphasizing the poor in Standard and Poor's, as if he wants to make Poor the new Standard." Another: "Those MAGA people are going to be so broke after Trump's tariffs start to bite they'll have to rent the libs instead of owning them." Also:

• Jeffrey St Clair: [04-18] Roaming Charges: Trump's Penal Colony.

Dean Baker: [04-13] The Trump Plan: Unchecked Power to Total Jerks: Of many posts worth reading this week, we'll start with the highest-level, most self-evident title. Also see, all by Baker:

• [04-07] Trump's Tariffs Open the Door to Medicare for All: The weakest assumption here is that Democrats want M4A. No doubt it would be popular with most voters, but the politicos first have to get past their donors and consultants and media mavens, all dead set against. Plus you have to have enough Democrats winning to overcome absolute opposition from Republicans, who will be against anything that might make Democrats look competent and helpful.

• [04-09] Donald Trump's Big Wealth Tax: Irony alert here: destroying wealth, as Trump did in tanking the stock market, isn't actually a tax, because the government didn't collect any revenue for its trouble. A real tax collects revenue that can be redistributed and/or reinvested, that can be put to work to help people and the nation.

• [04-09] Our Huge Trade Deficit with China Does NOT Give Us the Upper Hand in Tax (Tariff) War. I pretty much agree with this, but would add one more point: while China trades a lot with the US, China also trades a lot with everyone else, so while Trump tariffs may reduce their trade with the US, they can make most of that up on trade to other countries (especially ones that, like China, will be trading less with the US). Also, China's withdrawal from the IP tribute system could set off an avalanche.

• [04-10] Why Can't the New York Times Get Basic Numbers on Trade Right?

• [04-10] Fun With Numbers: Who Got Rich Over Trump's Tariff Cave? "I will add that Musk and Trump have just fired about anyone in a position to investigate whether there was any insider trading and would likely fire anyone still employed who tried."

• [04-11] Five Facts About Trade You Don't Read in the Newspaper.

• [04-13] Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Insists Trump's Team Are All Idiots: "The combination of both incredibly bad judgement, and the inability to admit a mistake, is not a promising path for economic policy."

• [03-14] Billionaires Won't Save Local News. Here's What Will. "Praying for beneficent tycoons is not the answer. We need the government to step up." This, of course, ignores the hopefully temporary problem of getting a government that cares whether the public is informed and knowledgeable.

George Monbiot: [04-13] Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature: And which truth is that? He blames economic inequality, and I have no doubt that's the underappreciated problem, but what is the mechanism by which impoverished people gravitate toward demagogues who will only make them poorer and more miserable?

Garrett Graff: [04-15] Has America Reached the End of the Road? "Donald Trump has forced the one crisis that will tell us who we are." Author calls his blog Doomsday Scenario. (Graff's book Raven Rock was about Cold War plans to preserve essential elements of government in the event of nuclear war.) I'm afraid I'm a bit jaundiced regarding posts like this: I've been watching the train wreck of American democracy at least since the mid-1960s, so I tend to be a bit impatient with people who only think to scream right now. Many similar posts on the site, if you still need to catch up (and yes, it's serious this time, not that it ever wasn't). I was steered to this one by No More Mister Nice Blog, which continues as one of the best blogs anywhere:

• [04-16] Even Under Fascism, Personnel Is Policy.

• [04-13] The Media Cares About Trump's Effect on Business More Than It Cares About His Effect on Democracy and Human Rights.

• [04-10] What Looks Like Insider Trading Could Also Be Trump's Usual Deranged Policy.

• [04-05] When You Oppose a Tyrant but Think His Main Opponents Are Icky: A New York Times gabfest doesn't like Trump, but doesn't like opposing him either.

• [04-01] "We Are God in Here": "Trump isn't the only one giving off serial killer vibes. So are Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr." And: "Whatever motivates these people, I think we need to look beyond history and political science to understand it."

Ed Kilgore:

• [04-16] Team Trump's Addiction to Overkill: This one is fairly easy: they want to be seen as making emphatic moves, because they think their fan base wants to see bold commitment. They're less into actually breaking things that will come back to haunt them. The more they overreach, the more likely they will fail, but that not only shows how hard they're working, but how deviously hysterical, and how entrenched, their enemies are.

• [04-15] Trump Sees Defying Courts on Deportations As Good Politics. Why let details like legalilty get in the way of a good PR stunt?

• [04-14] MAGA's Class Warfare Against Knowledge Workers Is Personal: The picture identifies Trump and Musk as "the Marx and Engels of the MAGA revolution." Note that the class doing the warring is the one on top, pushing back and kicking down at the idea that their lessers should think it their job to think for themselves.

Nia Prater: [04-16] The Trump Administration Starts Targeting Democrats for Prosecution: First up, NY Attorney General Letitia James.

Nate Chinen: [04-16] Francis Davis, a figurehead of jazz criticism, has died. This is a very substantial review of the eminent jazz critic's life and work, published before I could even compose myself to post a brief notice on the Jazz Critics Poll website. I will try to write something more in due course, but start here.

Obituaries: [04-16] Back when I was doing this weekly, I wound up having enough notable obituaries to have a regular section. Since I stopped -- not just writing but reading newspapers -- I've been blissfully ignorant of lots of things I had previously tracked (not least the NBA season; I only looked up who was playing in the Super Bowl the day before, when my wife anounced her intention to watch it). However, I did finally take a look at the New York Times Obituary page today. I only decided to collect a list here after I ran across a surprise name that I felt I had to mention (long-time jazz critic Larry Appelbaum; I started the search looking for Francis Davis, whose obituary wasn't available, but should be soon). So I've gone back and combed through the page to compile a select list (or two, or three). The first just picks out people I know about, but who (in general) weren't so famous that I knew they had died. The second are more people I wasn't aware of, but possibly should have been, so I can partially compensate by bringing them to your attention. Finally, the third is just a checklist of names I did recognize but didn't include in the first two.

• [04-10] Michael Hurley, a Singer Both Eccentric and Inspirational, Dies at 83: Ok, yes, I did hear about him, but I'll start off with an exception, as this was just last week, and Have Moicy! is an all-time favorite record.

• [04-09] Tracy Schwarz, Mainstay of the New Lost City Ramblers, Dies at 86: I'm not a huge folk music fan, but their two compilations (The Early Years and Out Standing in Their Field) essential.

• [04-09] Xavier Le Pichon, Who Modeled Movement of Earth's Crust, Dies at 87: One of the major architects of the theory of plate tectonics.

• [04-08] Robert W McChesney, Who Warned of Corporate Media Control, Dies at 72: He did more than warn us: he made it clear how it works and where it goes wrong, in a series of books including The Political Economy of Media, The Death and Life of American Journalism, and Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. In 2013, he wrote one about How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America, drawing that conclusion from the $10 billion spent on the 2012 election, which seems positively quaint compared to 2024.

• [04-06] Amadou Bagayoko, Half of Malian Duo Who Went Global, Dies at 70: That would be Amadou & Mariam.

• [04-06] John Peck, Underground Cartoonist Known as The Mad Peck, Dies at 82: I didn't recognize him at first, but a quick read brought back waves of recognition, including his Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, which is prominent on one of my more accessible book shelves.

• [03-14] Kevin Drum, Influential Early Political Blogger, Dies at 66. Not someone I ran across often, but I found about 20 references to him in my blog/notebooks. Also see, at Mother Jones: [03-12] Goodbye, Kevin Drum. His blog is here: first of 702 pages.

• [03-11] Larry Appelbaum, Who Found Jazz Treasure in the Archives, Dies at 67: "He helped turn the Library of Congress into a leading center for research into the history of jazz, and made some surprising discoveries of his own." He's been a Jazz Critics Poll voter since its inception, although last year's ballot was a bit short.

• [02-12] Christopher Jencks, a Shaper of Views on Economic Inequality, Dies at 88: I haven't run across him much lately, but he was very prominent in the 1970s, as one of the first to take a serious look at the effects of increasing inequality.

• [01-29] William E Leuchtenburg, Scholar of FDR and the Presidency, Dies at 102: Much of what I learned about American history came from John Garraty's big book of interviews with eminent historians. Way back in the 1960s, Leuchtenburg had already established himself as the authority on the New Deal period.

• [01-29] Stephan Thernstrom, Leading Critic of Affirmative Action, Dies at 90: I read his early book, Poverty and Progress, and thought he was one of the most interesting young historians of the period. Sad that he turned into a right-wing crank.

• [01-21] Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95: Of course, I did hear of his death, but he was too important to me personally to relegate to another list.

• [01-04] Tom Johnson, Minimalist Composer and Village Voice Critic, Dies at 85: I've cited his obituary previously.

Second list (names I wasn't aware of but who seemed especially noteworthy):

• [04-15] Elsa Honig Fine, 94, Dies; Historian Promoted Black and Female Artists: "As the founder of Woman's Art Journal and the author of influential textbooks, she documented the work of many accomplished artists who had been ignored."

• [03-01] Hazel N Dukes, Longtime Civil Rights Salwart, Dies at 92: "She was president of the national NAACP in the early 1990s and headed the organization's New York State Conference from 1977 until her death."

• [03-30] Linda Williams, 78, Dies; Took a Scholarly Approach to Pornography. But first a pioneer in feminist film studies.

• [03-20] Jeffrey Bruce Klein, a Founder and Editor of Mother Jones, Dies at 77: "He was one of four journalists who started the muckraking progressive magazine in 1976. He returned as its editor in chief in the 1990s." I can't say as I ever really got into this magazine, but Ramparts was very big for me in the late 1960s, and I remember another subscribing to another successor magazine, Scanlan's Monthly.

• [03-06] L Clifford Davis, Who Fought to Desegregate Texas Schools, Dies at 100: "As a civil rights lawyer who faced resistance and threats, he challenged school districts that tried to defy the Supreme Court's 1954 ban on school segregation."

• [02-19] Gerd Stein, Beat Era Poet and Multimedia Artist, Dies at 96: "An Aquarian Age savant, he was a founder of the artists' collective USCO, which helped define the 1960s with psychedelic, sensory-overloading installations and performances."

• [02-04] Gene Barge, R&B Saxophonist Who Played on Landmark Hits, Dies at 98: Discogs credits him with 1 album, 3 singles, and 800+ credits, but bombs out when I click for the listing. The label Jasmine has a series of compilations organized around session musicians, and he would be a good candidate.

• [01-13] Stuart Spencer, Political Pioneer Who Helped Propel Reagan's Rise, Dies at 97: "One of the nation's first campaign consultants for hire," which makes him by far the least admirable person on this list, but possibly one of the most consequential. Reagan was a horror story, one that still haunts us, not just for what he did but for his proof of the fickleness of the American voting public and of the media that one once trusted to expose such plots. Unclear whether Spencer was a cause or just an early symptom of this.

Finally, other names I recognize (no links, but easy enough to look up; * don't have NYT obituaries but noted in Wikipedia and/or Jazz Passings), grouped roughly by categories: Actors/Movies: Richard Chamberlain, Gene Hackman, Val Kilmer, David Lynch, Joan Plowright, Tony Roberts; Music: Eddie Adcock, Susan Alcorn, Roy Ayers, Dave Bargeron, Clem Burke, Jerry Butler, Marianne Faithfull, Roberta Flack, George Freeman*, Irv Gotti, Bunky Green*, Garth Hudson, David Johansen, Gwen McRae, Melba Montgomery, Sam Moore, Mike Ratledge*, Howard Riley*, Angie Stone, D'Wayne Wiggins, Brenton Wood*, Peter Yarrow, Jesse Colin Young; Politics: Richard L Armitage, David Boren, Kitty Dukakis, Raul M Grijalva, J Bennett Johnston, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alan K Simpson; Sports: George Foreman, Lenny Randle, Boris Spassky, Jeff Torborg, Bob Uecker, Bob Veale, Fay Vincent, Gus Williams; Writers (Fiction): Barry Michael Cooper, Jennifer Johnston, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tom Robbins, Joseph Wambaugh; Writers (Non-Fiction): Edward Countryman, Jesse Kornbluth, David Schneiderman.

Saree Makdisi: [04-17] Trump's War on the Palestine Movement Is Something Entirely New: "Never before has a government repressed its citizens' free speech and academic freedom so brutally in order to protect an entirely different country." The "different country" bit might be right, but one could counter that under Miriam Adelson they're just separate fronts for the same trust. But everything else we've seen as bad or worse in the post-WWI and post-WWII red scares, including the use of deportation and travel bans. What is most useful here is the reminder that pro-Zionists have been compiling lists and pressing academic institutions to cancel critics of Israel for a long time now.

Current count: 134 links, 7428 words (9320 total)

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Sunday, April 6, 2025

Seems like a good day to print out my accumulated file of scraps and links, making use of the one-day window between yesterday's initial attempt at a catch up Book Roundup and tomorrow's regularly scheduled Music Week, before checking out for cataract surgery on Tuesday, and whatever disoriented recovery follows that.

I quit my long-running weekly Speaking of Which posts after the election, figuring I had shot my wad trying to exercise what little influence I might have had, and realizing I had little stomach for what was almost certainly to come. I've usually done a pretty good job of following the news, but I've never been a junkie. I learned early on that the sure sign of addiction was that withdrawal was painful. My wife and her father were news junkies. We took a long car trip to the Gaspé Peninsula once -- quite literally the ends of the earth -- and I noticed how twitchy they became as they were deprived of their news routines (so desperate they clamored even for bits of radio in French they hardly understood; I, of course, had my CD cases, so I usually resisted requests for radio). This became even more clear to me when I spent 4-6 weeks in fall 2008, in Detroit working on her father's house after he passed. I only noticed that the banking system had collapsed one day when I stopped to pick up some food, and glimpsed a bit of TV news where I noticed that the Dow Jones had dropped 5000 points from last I remembered. I had no clue, and that hadn't bothered me in the least.

So I figured I could handle a break, especially in the long stretch of lame duck time between election and inauguration, when speculation ran rampant, and everyone -- morose, paranoid losers as well as the insufferably glib winners -- would only double down on their previous expectations. I had made plenty of pre-election predictions, which would be proven or disproven soon enough. I made some minor adjustments in my final post, nothing where I could that the doom and gloom wasn't inevitable, but also remaining quite certain that the future would be plenty bad. As I was in no position to do anything -- and, let's face it, all my writing had only been preaching to the choir -- I saw nothing else to do.

And I've always been open to doubts, or perhaps just skeptical of certainty. So when, just before the election, my oldest and dearest comrade wrote -- "From what you wrote, I think the Republicans/Trump are not as evil as you think, and the Democrats are not as benign as you hope" -- I felt like I had to entertain the possibility. I knew full well that most of my past mistakes had been caused by an excess of hope -- in particular, that the far-from-extravagant hopes I once harbored for Clinton and Obama had been quickly and thoroughly dashed. (Curiosly, Biden entered with so little expectations that I found myself pleasantly surprised on occasion, until his war fumbling led him to ruin -- pretty much the same career arc as Lyndon Johnson, or for that matter Harry Truman.) Of course, I could have just as easily have favored the Republicans with hope. On some level even I find it hard to believe that they really want to destroy their own prosperity, or that their wealthy masters will allow them to sink so low.

I also understood a few basic truths that advised patience. One is that most people have to learn things the hard way, through the experience of disaster. This really bothers me, because as an engineer, my job (or really, my calling) is to prevent disasters from happening, but the temptation to say "I told you so" rarely if ever helps, so it's best to start over from scratch. (FDR's New Deal wasn't a masterplan he had before the Crash. His only firm idea after the Crash was that government should do something fast to help people. He found the New Deal by trial and error, but only because he was open to anything that might work, even ideas that others found suspiciously leftish.)

The second is that what people learn from disasters is very hard to predict, as the brain frantically attempts to find new order from the break and dislocation -- which even if generally predicted often differs critically in details. What people "learn" tends very often to be wrong, largely because the available ideas are most often part of the problem. To have any chance of learning the right lessons, one has to be able to respond to the immediate situation, as free as possible of preconceptions. (By "right" I mean with solutions that stand the test of time, not just ones that gain popular favor but lead to further disasters. Japan's embrace of pacifism after WWII was a good lesson learned. Germany's "stab-in-the-back" theory after WWI wasn't.)

The third is that every oppression or repression generates its own distinctive rebellion. Again, there's little value in trying to anticipate what form it will take, or how it will play out. Just be aware that it will happen, prepare to go with (or in some cases, against) the flow. (Nobody anticipated that the response to the Republican's catastrophic loss in 2008 would be the Tea Party -- even those who recognized that all the raw materials were ready to explode couldn't imagine rational beings doing so. This is a poor example in that the disaster felt by Republicans was nothing more than hallucination, whereas Trump is inflicting real pain which even rational people will be forced to respond to, but that only reiterates my point. And perhaps serves as a warning against paranoid overreaction: the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, was a real event which caused real pain, but Israel's lurch into genocide, which had seemed inconceivable before despite being fully overdetermined, is another example.)

So I knew not only that the worse Trump became, the sooner and stronger an opposing force would emerge. And I also knew that to be effective, it would have to come from somewhere beyond the reach of my writing. I may have had some ideas of where, but I didn't know, and my not knowing didn't matter. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that yesterday's Democratic Party leaders are toast. The entire substance of their 2024 campaign (and most of 2020 and 2016) was "we'll save you from Trump," and whatever else one might say about what they did or didn't do, their failure on their main promise is manifest. But I'm happy to let them sort that out, in their own good time. I'm nore concerned these days with understanding the conditions that put us into the pickle where we had to make such terrible choices. And putting the news aside, I'm free now to go back to my main interest in the late 1960s -- another time when partisan politics and punditry was a mire of greater and lesser evils, when the prevailing liberalism seemed bankrupt and defenseless against the resurgent right -- which is to think up utopian alternatives to the coming dark ages.

More about that in due course. But in everyday life, I do sometimes notice news -- these days mostly in the course of checking out my X and Bluesky feeds -- and sometimes notes. They go into a draft file, which holds pieces for eventual blog posts (like this one). I used to keep a couple dozen more/less reliable websites open, and cycle through them to collect links. I still have them open, but doubt I'll hit up half of them in the afternoon I'm allotting to this. So don't expect anything comprehensive. I'm not doing section heads, although I may sublist some pieces. Sort order is by date, first to last.

Mike Konczal: [02-02] Racing the Tariffs: How the Election Sparked a Surge in Auto and Durable Goods Spending in Q4 2024: "An extra 188,500 total cars sold anticipating Trump's tariffs?" I've been thinking about buying a new car for several years now, but simply haven't gotten my act together to go our shopping. Usually, waiting to spend money isn't a bad idea, but this (plus last week's tariff news) makes me wonder if I haven't missed a window. I still have trouble believing that the tariffs will stick: popular opinion may not matter for much in DC, but the companies most affected have their own resources there. By the way, Konczal also wrote this pretty technical but useful piece: [02-14] Rethinking the Biden Era Economic Debate.

Robert McCoy: [03-11] The Right Is Hell-Bent on Weaponizing Libel Law: "The 1964 Supreme Court decision affords the press strong protections against costly defamation lawsuits. That's why a dangerous new movement is trying to overturn it." The idea is to allow deep-pocketed people like Trump to sue anyone who says anything they dislike about them. Even if you can prove what you said is true, they can make your life miserable. This is presented as a review of David Enrich: Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

Janet Hook: [03-18] Michael Lewis's Case for Government: Lewis's The Fifth Risk was one of the best books written after Trump won in 2016, not least because it was the least conventional. Rather than getting worked up over the threats Trump posed to Americans, he focused on the people who worked for the government, in the process showing what we had to lose by putting someone like Trump in charge. His The Premonition: A Pandemic Story took a similar tack, focusing on little people who anticipated and worked to solve big problems on our behalf. This reviews his new book Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a set of profiles of government workers mostly written by his friends.

Thomas Fazi: [03-24] Europe's Anti-Democratic Militarization: "Europe is being swept up in a war frenzy unseen since the 1930s. Earlier this month, the European Union unveiled a massive $870-billion rearmament plan, ReArm Europe." The proximate cause of this is Trump, whose election lends credence to doubts that the US will remain a reliable partner to defend Europe against Russia. These fears are rather ridiculous, as the US is almost solely responsible for turning Russia into a threat, but also because the reason the US became so anti-Russia was to promote arms sales in Eastern Europe (and anti-China to promote arms sales in East Asia, the main theater of Obama's "pivot to Asia"). There are many things one could write about this hideous turn -- Europe has been ill-served by its obeisance to America's increasingly incoherent imperial aims, so the smart thing there would be to become unaligned -- but one key point is that the center-left parties in Europe have given up any pretense of being anti-war, anti-militarist, and anti-imperial, so only the far right parties seem interested in peace. Even if they're only doing so because they see Putin as one of their own, many more people can see that interventionism, no matter how liberal, is tied to imperialism, and they are what's driving refugees to Europe. You shouldn't have to be a bigot to see that as a problem, or that more war only makes matters worse. Or that "defense" is more temptation and challenge than deterrence.

Jeet Heer: [03-25] Group Chat War Plans Provide a Window Into Trump's Mafia State: "American foreign policy is now all about incompetent shakedowns and cover-ups." On the Jeffrey Goldberg "bombshell", the events he reported on, and the subsequent brouhaha, which is increasingly known as the Signal Scandal (or Signalgate), more focused on the lapse of security protocol than on the bad decisions and tragic events those involved wanted to cover up. Jeer reduced this to five "lessons":

1. Trump is running a mafia state.
2. Pete Hegseth is a bald-faced liar -- and it doesn't matter.
3. The war on Yemen made no sense and was conducted without consulting Congress or allies.
4. The Trump administration really hates Europe -- but stil wants to fight wars on its behalf.
5. The contradictions of America First are resolved by Mafia-style shakedowns.

Some more articles on this:

• Phyllis Bennis: [03-27] Bombing Yemen: Signalgate Deserves to Be a Major Scandal: "But the assault on Yemeni civilians the hapless conspirators discussed in their private chat group is an even bigger disgrace -- though so far the press haven't paid much attention."

• Brian Beutler: [03-26] The Everything Scandal: "This week's signal disclosures should infect every corner of the Trump administration, but Democrats will have to press the case relentlessly." Think BENGHAZI!

• Connor Echols/Robert Wright: [03-28] The Untold Stories of the Signal Snafu. The authors try to refocus on four points:

  1. The flippancy of the conversation
  2. Who got hit by the strikes
  3. The not-so-new approach to the Middle East
  4. Goldberg's checkered past

• Jeffrey St Clair: [03-28] Roaming Charges: The Goldberg Variations.

• David S D'Amato: [04-04] Beyond Signalgate: Understanding the Real Scandal in Yemen.

Darlene Superville: [03-27] Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for programs with 'improper ideology': Oh great, not only are the federal employees who act as custodians of our national history subject to arbitrary dismissal and possibly rendering, now they have to spend every day of the next four years arguing with Trump's goons about political correctness!

• David Remnick: [04-06] At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump takes aim at history: "The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere."

Liza Featherstone: [03-28] Welcome to the Pro-Death Administration: "From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn't really government's business anymore." Title was too easy, given the anti-abortion cult's "pro-life" conceit. Still, although there are certain kinds of death the Trump administration unabashedly favors -- capital punishment, bombing Yemen, providing blank check support for Israeli genocide -- the clear point of the article is the administration's extraordinary lack of concern for public health and any kind of human welfare. What's hard to say at this point is whether this frees them from any thought about the consequences of their actions, or their thoughtlessnes and recklessness is the foundation, and carelessness just helps them going.

Saqib Rahim: [03-28] Trump's pick for Israel Ambassador Leads Tours That Leave Out Palestinians -- and Promote End of Days Theology: Mike Huckabee, who started as a Baptist minister, became governor of Arkansas, ran for president, and shilled for Fox News, has finally found his calling: harkening the "end of days." Most critics of America's indulgence of Israeli policy find it hard to talk about Christian Zionist apocalypse mongering, probably because it just seems too insane to accept that anyone really believes it, but Huckabee makes the madness hard to ignore. That he's built a graft on his beliefs with his "Israel Experience" tours is news to me, but unsurprising, given the prevalence of conmen in the Trumpist right. On the other hand, "erasing Palestinians" is just par for the course. Huckabee's own contributions there have mostly been symbolic, which doesn't mean short of intent, but as US ambassador he'll be well on his way to an ICC genocide indictment. Too many more horror stories on Israel to track, but these stood out:

• Sarah: [03-31] A long tweet that starts "You will never de-Zionize the United States without confronting the religious ideology that underpins it," then goes on to explain dispensationalism (but not the premillennial and postmillenial variations).

• Lorenzo Tondo/Malak A Tantesh/Julian Borger: [03-31] Israel killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers one by one, says UN: "Workers on a mission to help colleagues were buried in mass grave in southern Gaza."

• Jonah Valdez: [03-25] Attacks on Hamdan Ballal's village ramped up after he won an Oscar:

Jackson Hinkle: [03-31] tweet: Entire text reads: This is one of the most evil people in history." Followed by picture a smiling (and younger than expected) Barrack Obama. I don't know who this guy is, but he obviously doesn't know jack shit about history, even of the years since his subject became president.[*] But the bigger problem is what happens when you start calling people evil. It's not just that it throws you into all sorts of useless quantitative debates about lesser or greater evils, the whole concept is akin to giving yourself a lobotomy. You surrender your ability to understand other people, and fill that void with a command to act with enough force to get other people to start calling you evil. But to act with such force one needs power, so maybe what's evil isn't the person so much as the power?

[*] Hinkle appears to be a self-styled American Patriot (note flag emoji) with a militant dislike of Israel, succinctly summed up with a picture of him shaking hands with a Yemeni soldier (Google says Yahya Saree) under the title "American patriots stand with Yemen," along with meme posts like "Israel is a terrorist state" and "Make Tel Aviv Palestine again." So I suppose I should give him a small bit of credit for not inventing Obama's "evil" out of whole cloth (like Mike McCormick, whose latest book on Obama and Biden is called An Almost Insurmountable Evil), but all he does is take sides -- his feed also features pure boosterism for Putin and Gaddafi, as if he's trying to discredit himself -- with no substance whatsoever.

Rutger Bregman: [03-31] What I think a winning agenda for Democrats could look like: This was a tweet, so let's quote it all (changing handles for names, for clarity):

1. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders-style economic populism. Tax the rich, expand public services, balance the budget. Skip the ideological fluff: no anti-capitalism and degrowth blabla, just good old-fashioned social democracy.
2. David Shor-style popularism: relentlessly double down on your most popular policies. Universal Pre-K, affordable child care, higher minimum wage, cheaper groceries, cheaper college, cheaper prescription drugs.
3. Yascha Mounk/Matthew Yglesias-style cultural move to the center: moderate on immigration, tone down identity politics, admit men & women are different, stop the obsessive language policing, explicitly distance yourself from far left cultural warriors. Reclaim patriotism. Be smart on crime: no 'defund the police' but more cops and better cops who solve more crimes. Be the party of cleaner streets, fewer guns, and public order.
4. Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson-style YIMBY/abundance agenda. Slash red tape, defy silly rules and procedures. Declare an emergency if necessary. Shovels in the ground, make a big show of building affordable housing and clean energy (livestreams etc.). Set targets and deadlines. Be the party of progress that (visibly!) builds.
5. Build a big tent of progressives, moderates and independents. Unite in opposition to Trump. Attack him when he engages in economic arson (tariffs etc) and democratic arson (blatant disregard for due process, civil liberties etc.), and when it highlights your strengths: competence, solutions, basic human decency.

And most importantly of all:

Win elections. Then do the right thing. (In that order.)

In other words, everybody's right, let's try it all, only, you know, win this time. The thing is, this prescription is pretty much what Harris tried in 2024, and somehow she still lost. Her approximate grade card on these five points: 70/90/90/80/90 -- sure, she could have bashed the rich more, but they reacted as if she did, and Bregman pulls as many punches on this score as she did, so it's hard to see how they could have landed; and her "big tent" extended all the way to Dick Cheney -- the people who were excluded were the ones who had misgivings about genocide (although I suppose the Teamsters also have their own reason to beef).

The problem is that even when Democrats say the right things -- many advocating policies which on their own poll very favorably -- not enough people believe them to beat even the insane clowns Republicans often run these days. Their desperate need is to figure out how to talk to people beyond their own camp, not so much to explain their better policy positions as to dispel the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and establish their own credibility for honesty, probity, reason, respect, and public spirit.

Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen through introspection. (I remember describing 9/11 as a "wake-up call" for Americans to re-examine their consciences and resolve to treat the world with more respect and care -- and, well, that sure didn't happen.) As Bregman's list of oracles shows, the standard response to a crisis of confidence -- which is the result of the Harris defeat, especially for anyone who believed she was saying and doing the right hings -- isn't self-reflection. It's a free-for-all where everyone competes with their own warmed-over pet prescriptions: the names in 1-4 have been kicking their policy ideas around for years, looking for any opportunity to promote them (although only Sanders and AOC have any actual political juice, which Bregman wants to tap into but not to risk offending his neoliberal allies; 5 is another reminder to water down any threat to change).

I should note Nathan J Robinson's response here:

I see "pretend foreign policy doesn't exist in order to avoid the awkward subject of whether or not Democrats support genocide" continues to be part of the plan.

If Democrats can't figure out that war is bad, not just morally but politically, they will lose, and deserve to lose, no matter how bad their enemies are, even on that same issue. (Sure, it's a double standard: as the responsible, sensible, human party, Democrats are expected to behave while Republicans are allowed to run crazy.) If Democrats can't figure that much out, how can they convince people that public services are better than private, that equal justice for all is better than rigging the courts, that protecting the environment matters, and much more?

By the way, I've read Bregman's book Utopia for Realists, and found it pretty weak on both fronts. (Original subtitle was The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, which was later changed to And How We Can Get There).

I also saw a tweet where Bregman is raving about the new book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I wrote a bit about the book for an unpublished Book Roundup, which I might as well quote here (I'll probably rewrite it later; I haven't committed to reading it yet):

Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance (2025, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster): I've seen many references lately to "abundance liberalism," which this seems to be the bible to. It comes at a time when Democrats are shell-shocked by the loss to Trump -- especially those who are congenitally prejudiced against the left, and still hope to double down on the neoliberal gospel of growth. I sympathize somewhat with their "build" mantra, but isn't the problem somewhat deeper than just providing cutting through the permitting paperwork? While it's true that if you built more housing, you could bring prices down, but the neoliberal economy is driven by the search for higher profits, not lower prices. Democrats have been trained to think that the ony way they can get things done is through private corporations (e.g., you want more school loans, so hire banks to administer them; you want better health care for more people, pay off the insurance companies), which is not just wasteful, it invites further sabotage, and the result is you cannot deliver as promised. Similarly, Democrats have been trained to believe that growth is the magic elixir: make the rich richer, and everyone else will benefit. They're certainly good at the first part, but the second is harder to quantify. Perhaps there are some details here that are worth a read, but the opposite of austerity isn't abundance; it's enough, and that's not just a quantity but also a quality.

I should cast about for some reviews here (some also touch on Marc J Dunkelman: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress -- and How to Bring It Back; other have pursued similar themes, especially Matthew Yglesias):

• Matt Bruenig: [03-24] What the "Abundance Agenda" Leaves Out: Reviews other reviews, adding: "It's a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have."

• Tony Dutzik: [03-20] The problems of Abundance: Klein and Thomson "offer a prescription for what ails America. Unfortunately, they misdiagnose the disease." He lists problems that cannot be solved (that are, if anything, aggravated) by abundance: "the ecological impacts of a high-throughput consumer economy; our failure to replace the sense of meaning and purpose once drawn from work that has since been automated away; the tech-driven stratification of society and accelerating concentration of wealth."

• Paul Glastris/Nate Weisberg: [03-23] The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals: "What the Democratic Party's most buzzed-about policy movement gets right -- and wrong."

• Henry Grabar: [03-10] May I Have Some More? "How two stars of the wonk left are making abundance the new Democratic buzzword."

• Dylan Gyauch-Lewis: [2024-11-26] The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism's Rebrand: "The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money." This is based on a conference that predates the book, but mentions it as forthcoming.

• Malcolm Harris: [03-18] What's the Matter with Abundance? "The last thing society needs is more stuff."

• Janos: [03-27] Book Review: Abundance: "the abundance agenda won't go far without an advocacy plan or acknowledgment of the right's hostility to it."

• Noah Kazis: [03-27] Make America build again: "Over-regulation has rendered progressive change impossible, argue the authors of this clear and rigorous book. But what about the tradeoffs?"

• Mike Konczal: [03-18] Review of Abundance and Why Nothing Works for Democracy Journal, with Further Thoughts.

• Eric Levitz: [03-20] A new book suggests a path forward for Democrats. The left hates it. "Cutting red tape is a social justice issue."

• Samuel Moyn: [03-18] Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again? "In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson prod fellow liberals to think beyond their despair over Trump's return to power."

• David Schleicher: [03-20] What left-wing critics don't get about abundance.

• Nate Silver: [03-26] America probably can't have abundance. But we deserve a better government.

• Zephyr Teachout: [03-23] An Abundance of Ambiguity: "Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that a world of plenty awaits us if we reform zoning and environmental laws and everyone moves to San Francisco. But that can't be the whole plan, right?"

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [03-03] Do Democrats need to learn how to build? "Liberals have long emphasized protections over progress. Champions of the 'abundance agenda' think it's high time to speed things up."

• Julian E Zelizer: [03-04] An "Abundance Agenda" for Government Is the Anti-DOGE: "Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's progressive vision for how to make government great again."

Jessica Piper/Elena Schneider: [04-02] Why Wisconsin's turnout suggests serious trouble for the GOP right now: 'Democrats keep overperforming in down-ballot elections, and the Wisconsin results suggest it's not just about turnout." I knew that night that Musk's attempt to buy a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin had failed, but I hadn't looked at the numbers, which were pretty huge.

Ori Goldberg: [04-02] tweet:

Reminder:

1. There is no "war" in Gaza. No one is fighting Israel.
2. Israel is engaged in eradication. The only justification Israelis need is the totality of the eradication.
3. Eradication is a crime in every shape or form. Those engaging in it and enabling it are criminals.

I'm also seeing tweets about and by Randy Fine, a Republican who won a House seat from Florida this week. About: "AIPAC's Randy Fine calls for 5 year prison sentences for distributing anti-Israel flyers, calling it a hate crime." By: "There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood." I can kind of understand, without in any way condoning or excusing, where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir are coming from, but I find this level of callousness from Americans unfathomable (and note that Lindsey Graham is one reason I'm using the plural).

Sean Padraig McCarthy: [04-02] tweet:

The Zionist project is so extreme, so violent, so beyond the pale of civilization that nothing progressive can coexist with it. It will drag all your pro-worker, pro-healthcare politics into the abyss. We need anti Zionist political leaders.

Matt Ford: [04-03] Take Trump's Third-Term Threats Seriously: Don't. It's hard to tell when he's gaslighting you, because lots of stuff he's serious about is every bit as insane as bullshit like this. The first thing here is timing: this doesn't matter until 2028, by which time he's either dead or so lame a duck that not even the Supreme Court will risk siding with him. But even acknowledging the threat just plays into his paranoid fantasies, a big part of what keeps him going.

Bret Heinz: [04-03] Rule by Contractor: "DOGE is not about waste and efficiency -- it's about privatization." I'm not sure I had a number before, but "Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on last year's elections." That's a lot of money, but it's tiny in comparison to this: "Overall, Musk's business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support."

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-04] Roaming Charges: Welcome to the Machine. Tariffs, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have to provide a sublist of tariff articles, so I might as well hang it here. Personally, I've never had strong feelings on tariffs or free trade. I have long been bothered by the size of the US trade imbalance, which went negative around 1970, about the time that Hibbert's Peak kicked in and the US started importing oil. I thought that was a huge mistake, that should have been corrected with substantially higher gas taxes (which in addition to throttling consumption and reducing the trade deficit would also have had the effect of blunting the 1970s price shocks). In retrospect, a tariff would have had a similar effect, and probably stimulated more domestic production, which would have had the unfortunate side effect of making oil tycoons -- by far the most reactionary assholes in America -- all that much richer. But tariffs aren't very good for equalizing trade deficits: by targeting certain products and certain nations, they can lead to trade wars, which hurt everyone. A better solution would be a universal tax on all imports, which is keyed to the trade balance. That clearly identifies trade balance as the problem, with a solution defined to match it, and disincentivizes retaliation. Perhaps even easier would be to simply devalue one's currency, which makes imports more expensive (without the clumsiness of a tax) and exports cheaper. But no one talks about these things, probably because few of the people involved seem to worry much about trade imbalances. They have their own reasons, and they don't want to talk about them either.

The classic rationale for tariffs is to protect infant industries from competition from cheaper imports. This makes sense only if you have a national economic plan, which the US has traditionally refused to do. (Biden has actually done things like this; e.g., to promote US manufacturing of batteries, but Trump has no clue here. Republican tariffs in the 19th century effectively did this, although they never called it this.)

Nor do I regard the issue as especially major. I think the people who have sounded the alarm over Trump's tariff plans have often exaggerated the danger. While the immediate effects, like the stock market tumble, seem to justify those fears, if he stays the course, businesses will adjust, and while the damage will still be real, it won't be catastrophic. But it seems unlikely that he will hold out. The reaction from abroad just goes to show how much American power has slipped over recent decades. When Biden was sucking up to Europe and the Far East, they were willing to humor him, because it cost them little, and the predicability was comforting. Trump offers no such comforts, and is so obnoxious any politician in the world can score points against him, or become vulnerable if they don't. While backing down will be embarrassing, not doing so will be perceived as far worse. I don't think he has the slightest clue what he is doing, and I suspect that the main reason he's doing it is because he sees it as a way to show off presidential power. That still plays to his fan base, but more than a few of them are going to get hurt, and he has no answer, let alone sympathy, for them.

A few more articles (hopefully not many, as this is already a dead horse):

• Kate Aronoff: [04-02] Trump's Tariffs Aren't Going to Work How He Thinks They Will: "Supposedly, this is all going to revive domestic manufacturing. But the evidence for that is slim, and it wouldn't happen overnight -- especially not without other policies."

• Dean Baker: [04-05] Ignoring Patent Monopolies: Free Trade Retaliation Against Trump. One reason the US can afford to run trade deficits is that the world returns a big chunk of that as tribute to patent and copyright holders. Shutting off that revenue stream would be an easy way to retaliate against American greed. Also by Baker: [05-03] Dr. Trump's Crazy Tariff Formula.

• David Dayen: [04-03] They're Not Tariffs, They're Sanctions: "Stop trying to place coherence on a policy that's really just a mob boss breaking legs and asking for protection money."

• Robert Kuttner: [04-02] Trump's Tariff Fantasy: "His projection of a US manufacturing boom behind tariff walls leaves out retaliation by other countries and a trade war."

• Dominik A Leusder: [04-04] On "Liberation Day," Trump Signed America Up for Stagflation.

• Timothy Noah: [04-02] Only One Thing Explains Trump's Tariff Madness: "Don't fall for the 'coherence fallacy.' The president believes (mistakenly) that he's figured out how to get rid of the progressive income tax."

• Michael Tomasky: [04-04] Donald Trump Really Is a Lot Dumber Than We Thought. Like, a Lot! "His reading of American history is shockingly stupid, even for him." This is about his tariffs, but you can reuse the title endlessly.

• Ian Boudreau: [04-06] Tweet:

  Bill Ackman freaking out about tariffs and saying "this isn't what we voted for" is as clear a crystallization of conservative self-delusion as you could ever ask for. Yes it is you idiot, you voted specifically for this! He talked about this NON STOP.

David Dayen: [04-04] No Personnel Is Policy: "The Trump administration is accomplishing through layoffs what it couldn't accomplish through Congress."

There are certainly plenty of more normal ways Trump is changing the government, old standbys like hiring lobbyists to oversee the industries they once worked for. But just immobilizing government through staff cuts is somewhat new, at least at the level that Trump has employed it. Prosecutorial discretion is an established way to shift government priorities. But most of these agency depopulations make it impossible for the federal government to fulfill its statutory responsibilities, even though these agencies have been established and authorized and funded by Congress. When you make these offices nonfunctional, you're not taking care that the laws are faithfully executed.

More on Musk and DOGE:

• Meagan Day: [04-05] Elon Musk's Goal Isn't Efficiency -- It's a Liquidation Sale.

Elie Honig: [04-04] Trump's war on big law. Not that I have any sympathy for the law firms Trump has tried to shake down -- least of all for the ones who so readily surrendered -- but this is one Trump story I had little if any reason to anticipate. Trump must be the most litigious person in world history -- James D Zirin even wrote a book about this, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits. One good rule of thumb is that anyone involved, even inadvertently, in 1% of that many lawsuits is unfit for office.

Branko Marcetic: [04-04] Trump Promised Free Speech Defense and Delivered the Opposite. Hard to believe that anyone fell for that one.

Current count: 69 links, 6281 words (7446 total)

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Thursday, March 20, 2025

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday working outside on my shed. I got the screening done on the door side, and got the ramp treated with linseed oil and firmly attached to the shed -- it had been loose all these years, slid out of place, and was rotting around the edges, so work I've long been meaning to do. I expected a cold front on Wednesday to disrupt my work. We got some rain when it came through, and a tiny bit of snow when it settled down towards freezing.

I was plenty sore from the work, and wanted no part of the cold, so I resolved to stay inside and fiddle with trivial computer tasks. I updated software, which involved rebooting and restarting Firefox. I found I had a bunch of extra tabs open to various articles that looked promising, so I thought, why not just plug them into one of my Daily Log notebook entries, so I can close them. Then it occurred to me that it would be a bit easier just to create a blog post for them. It wouldn't be part of a series, just a scattered one-shot, like my recent Hobsbawm posts. I didn't finish in one day, so took a second. So this is it.

Pieces are sorted by date, with some clusters underneath a lead article. The tabs were mostly opened based on links from X or Bluesky, or sometimes from mail. I've made very little effort to sort through my usual array of sources. I've rarely looked for further articles, and haven't singled out any topics I wanted to pick on. I don't have any real agenda here. I'm just seeing where the wind blows me.

Select internal links:

• Stephen Semler on how Trump got elected
• Eric Levitz on Trump and Ukraine
• John Ganz on the Fascism (non-)debate
• Joel Swanson on "what are we allowed to say?"
• Robert Christgau on politics: Section in original, but I expanded on a part my wife found confusing, then expanded it again.
• Vijay Prashad on Israel

Ryan Cooper: [01-06] Bluesky Proves Stagnant Monopolies Are Strangling the Internet: I kept this open, and eventually followed its advice and signed up to Bluesky, although I have to admit I'm not hugely impressed by Cooper's case.

David Dayen: [01-17] The Essential Incoherence of the End of the Biden Presidency: "One reason the president goes out with low approval ratings is that his agenda was internally contradictory."

Stephen Semler: [01-24] How the most unpopular US president got reelected. Picky editor that I am, I would have changed that to "elected a second time." Let's start with a quote:

Winning wasn't Harris's primary concern; winning without the left and anti-war movement was. At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal -- the left's numbers aren't overwhelming, and the anti-war movement's numbers are depressingly underwhelming. However, this overlooks the widespread appeal of their core ideas, particularly among working-class voters.

And it's no wonder: working-class well-being is acutely compromised when an administration prioritizes warfare over promoting the general welfare. In contrast, those in the top income brackets are far more insulated from such trade-offs. If your goal is to win as many votes as possible, compromising on policy with leftists and peace activists is essential, even if you find them annoying.

If there was ever a time for a Democratic candidate to invite those groups to the table, it was 2024. But Harris shut them out, ignoring an abundance of polling and well-being data practically begging her not to. Her choice ultimately led millions of would-be Democratic voters to stay home on Election Day, sealing her fate and, by extension, the rest of ours.

Semler focuses more than I would on economic effects of war -- coming out of WWII, many Americans (especially Democrats) saw guns and butter not as exclusive but as linked, although the effect has steadily reduced over time, especially participation. On the other hand, the risks associated with foreign wars have grown, and support for politicians who have blundered into wars has dwindled. Even if Biden wasn't in his 80s, his inability (or unwillingness) to end wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine cast doubts on his competency.

Semler does make points about the end of pandemic relief measures as a contributor to widespread economic hardship. Democrats did a very poor messaging job around them: first in not taking adequate credit for the measures -- which Trump only agreed to because the stock market was tanking -- and in not blaming Republicans for loss. Granted, they were meant to be temporary, but most worked well enough they should have been refashioned into more permanent programs. Had Democrats campaigned on them in 2022, they might have gotten a more favorable Congress, and extended them further, leading to a better story for 2024. A better Congress (including ending the filibuster) could also have implemented measures for limiting price gouging and excessive interest rates -- failing to do so, which one could blame squarely on Republicans (and a couple lobbyist-owned "Democrats"), had a big impact on the 2024 election. Instead, Democrats campaigned on the status quo as their big accomplishment, instead of as a work in progress where the big obstacle is too many Republicans in power.

Semler's big thing is making charts ("visualizing politics through a class lens"). Some more recent posts:

• How Biden set the stage for GOP budget cuts
• Why the "DOGE dividend" polls well -- and why it shouldn't
• Where DOGE isn't cutting [03-13]

Rhoda Feng: [01-28] Pulled in All Directions: Review of Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I don't watch his TV show, but I have read his two previous books -- Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) and A Colony in a Nation (2017) -- and in both cases was impressed by his ability to take big subjects and focus them into tight arguments. This could be another one, but the topic risks being too amorphous to focus on -- I'm reminded of James Gleick's Faster, another great idea that the author, coming off a series of brilliant books, couldn't quite handle. Unclear from the review how much he made out of it, but picking Apple as a villain was a start I can relate to.

Thomas Frank: [02-19] Why the Democrats Fear Populism: Interview by Nathan J Robinson, of the author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), which taunted Republicans for never delivering on their promises (and inadvertently turned them into a more more dangerous party), and Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016), which chided Democrats for their own failures to deliver promised change (much less successfully), and which tried to remind Democrats that populism was originally a party of the left. Like Frank, I'm a history-minded Kansan, so I know the Populist Party, and have deep sympathies for them -- unlike your fancy elites (including Hofstadter), who tried to write the people off as bigots and fools.

Eric Levitz: [03-01] The twisted appeal of Trump's humiliation of Zelenskyy: "Why some conservatives took pride in a national disgrace." I don't think there is any issue where mainstream Democrats think they have a bigger popular advantage over Trump than Ukraine/Russia -- and are more wrong about it. Most Americans want to see the war end, either because they understand that war is bad for everyone or because they realize that a prolonged stalemate is all risk with no possible reward. But Ukraine has become an issue that the so-called Defense Democrats are very passionate about, and not just because many of them blame Putin for Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss. They had already pivoted against Putin from back when Clinton was Secretary of State, seeing the vilification of Putin as their meal ticket to another profitable Cold War, but with Putin's "election interference" and Trump's surprise win, they increasingly came to see Trump and Putin in each other's image. While Republicans had few problems with using Russia as a threat to sow fear and sell arms to Europe, they started to react when Democrats made Zelenskyy out to be their hero in impeaching Trump.

While Biden and Zelenskyy generally escaped blame for Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Biden had little trouble getting Republican votes to funnel massive amounts of arms to Ukraine, Biden's nonchalance about ending the war eventually trademarked the Democrats as the war party, paving the way for Trump's 2024 comeback win. Although there was no reason to think that Trump would be anything but worse than Harris on Israel/Palestine -- anyone who voted against Harris on that count did so from sheer spite, in total disregard for what was well known by then about Trump and his backers -- it wasn't unreasonable to hope that Trump would be able to put the Russia/Ukraine war to rest. That he hasn't done so shows us that he's as deluded in his own way about the war as Biden is in his. But also that he'd rather play the conflict for his fans than to do anything serious about it.

By the way, I think Levitz's explanations for Trump's "twisted appeal" are off base. Trump's performance -- and let's face it, the whole thing was staged as such -- appealed to his base because they want to see Trump in full bully mode. That's big part of why they voted for him. And Trump knows that his berating of Zelenskyy will drive Democrats crazy, reinforcing their commitment as the war party. (Which, needless to add, has once again worked like a charm, as when Slotkin spent a big part of her Trump rebuttal speech on Ukraine when she could have attacked Trump on firmer grounds.) I really doubt that Trump cares one whit about Bannon's Putin-friendly International Brotherhood of Fascists. (Bannon may well make good money off his hustle, but the autocrats themselves are mostly content to rule their own roosts: after all, their real enemies are their own people.)

Needless to say, just because Levitz misunderstands Trump doesn't make Trump right. (The right doesn't love Putin or Modi or Millei, not like they love Trump; at most, they envy that they are able to do things to their enemies that Americans cannot. They probably don't love Netanyahu either, but the envy there is really severe.) As diplomacy, Trump's performance was a complete disaster. He could have worked Zelenskyy over in private, then took a deal to Putin that could have let everyone come off smelling, well, not great but a good deal less rotten. As it is, he's squandered a big part of his influence with Zelenskyy, while exposing himself to the argument -- which admittedly doesn't bother him, because it's central to his Trump Derangement Syndrome defense -- that he's in Putin's pocket. Not only has he blown his chance to act as the great mediator -- and probably pick up a Nobel Peace Prize, like Teddy Roosevelt did for brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 -- he's given both Zelenskyy and Putin fresh angles to break up NATO, or at least to cut the US out of the equation. (Which would be a big deal, as the whole reason for NATO these days is to sell overpriced US arms to countries that don't need them. And arms sales was a major focus of Trump I, although Biden far exceeded him in that regard.)

Some more articles from Vox, which used to be my primary go-to source, but often these days I can't read at all:

• Eric Levitz: [03-18] This is why Kamala Harris really lost: "TikTok is making young voters more Republican?" I read this in the newsletter, but can't read it as a link, so we'll skip it for now. The gist of it is that the higher the voter turnout, the more dumb, uninformed, and often just careless or even contemptible people vote, and the latter favor Trump by large margins. I noticed this some time ago, but now there is more data to back it up. I'll write more about this, and possibly much more of Levitz's "The Rebuild" newsletter series, which is an important subject, even if he often mangles it. PS: Levitz's main source is David Shor, interviewed by Ezra Klein here: [03-18] Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won. Also see [03-18] "Angry Moderate" Sounds Okay to Me. I don't want to get carried away with quoting, but here's a teaser: "How hard is it for moderate and progressive Democrats to find common ground when the Trump administration is doing things like this?" [Linked article title: Proposal would force millions to file Social Security claims in person]
• Zack Beauchamp: [03-19] The Trump right's pro-Israel antisemitism: "The MAGA movement loves Israel -- but is increasingly hostile to Jews."
• Eric Levitz: [03-20] The left's misguided critique of abundance liberalism: "Cutting red tape is a social justice issue."

Kenny Stancil: [03-05] The Case for a Shadow Cabinet: "High-energy progressives can provide a compelling daily account of everything going wrong and coordinate opposition to the Trump-Musk nightmare." I've mentioned this before -- I loved the idea first time I heard of it as regular practice in the UK -- and endorse it once again. One thing I would do is instead of staffing it with Congressional office holders, I'd set up non-profit foundation (which, sure, one would have to guard against donor capture) and hire experts and staff for each position. Democrats need a go-to person on each issue, all the more so as Trump "floods the zone" with his bullshit.

• Kim Phillips-Fein: [2019-03] The Bitter Origins of the Fight Over Big Government: "What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us." Stancil offered this piece as an example of how a president-elect used that position against a lame duck.

• An Impeachment Drive Would End in Failure. It Might Be Worthwhile Anyway. Argues "Yes, there should be a well-maintained web page listing all of Trump's impeachable offenses since January 20, and it should be the basis for a House effort to impeach Trump that, ideally, would be sponsored by every Democrat in the House." Actually, I don't care whether anyone in the House sponsors the articles, as past experience suggests not only that they have no chance of conviction but that they can be weaponized against Democrats. But it would be good to have a website with all the proper legalese and supporting documents that anyone can link to. You could set up a court with judges, moving cases through various stages with prosecutors and defenders filing briefs, as some cases are likely to be stronger than others. Of course, no need to limit it to Trump, although his entire administration reflects back on him.

Stephen Prager: [03-05] You Really Can Just Do Things: "When Republicans take power, they abuse it. When Democrats take power, they refuse it." I've probably see a hundred pieces urging Biden to use executive powers to just sign an order, which he failed to do out of some respect or fear for some "norm" somewhere. One thing we're likely to see more and more of is arguments that Democrats should be willing to do any arbitrary crap that Republicans try, but the brands are so asymmetric that it's not even clear that's a good idea, let alone that it would work. Much will now depend on whether the Republican-packed courts will side with Trump, especially on cases where there is no precedent that they should. Democrats don't have that margin for error. Even though Biden did less than many Democrats wanted, much of what he did do didn't get past the courts.

Scarlet: [03-06] Party of None: How Democrats Lost the Working Class: Part One: A Brief History of the Democratic Party; and [03-14] Part Two: The Well Funded Road to Hell.

Jeffrey St. Clair: [03-07] Roaming Charges: Political Personality Crisis in America: He's the one "pundit" I have been reading consistently during the long winter of discontent. Here he starts with a Max Horkheimer quote, after a title that recalls the late David Johansen.

John Ganz: [03-07] The Juggler: "Understanding Trump's Economic Moves." Title comes from a line from Marx, about Louis Napoleon III, also the subject of his "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce":

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon's successor, by springing constant surprises -- that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d'état in miniature every day -- Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion . . . produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous.

Dean Baker: [03-14] Trump Tariffs and the Dollar as the World Reserve Currency. This is a bit wonkish, but good if you're interested. Also [03-20] The Masses Were Saying Things Were Good, Not the Democrats, a title which confused me, but the first paragraph got me interested (with the last line after the ellipsis):

The best way to get published in an elite media outlet is to say that the people were right in thinking things were bad in 2024, and the Democrats were wrong in trying to tell people things were good. Both parts of that line are wrong, but hey, when did outlets like the New York Times ever care about accuracy? . . .

It would be good if news outlets showed a little more skepticism towards people who claim to know about people's well-being, but have no data to support their claims.

Kayla Gogarty: [03-14] The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces: "A new Media Matters analysis found 9 out of the top 10 online shows assessed are right-leaning." That supposedly was a big part of Trump's success, but Trump would be the natural beneficiary of rage-fueled pitches to folks with little grasp of issues and little concern for their effects on others. I've seen arguments that we need to create our own counterprogramming to fill this space without own bullshit. On the other hand, consider:

• John Ross/Nathan J Robinson: [03-17] MeidasTouch Turns Democrats' Minds to Slop: I don't have time or interest in podcasts or videos (or whatever this is), but I did watch a couple episodes, and they don't seem nearly a dumbed down as what I've run across on the right[*]. (One was aimed at Fox, but mostly to quote Trump officials, so not exactly head-to-head comparisons.) One thing I don't doubt that that there's an untapped market for anti-Trump snark. What's questionable is whether it helps, or like most partisan programming, just fortifies the base.

  [*] Rereading this, I'm tempted to ask how could they be? If you know and care about the real world, as anyone on the left by definition does, you cannot help but be more coherent and accurate than the insane drivel that is routinely spouted by the right. The notion that there is any left media approach that "turns Democrats' minds to slop" assumes a false symmetry between left and right that anyone on the left should realize is not just wrong but fundamentally so. (Not to say that there are no Democrats with minds full of slop.)

John Ganz: [03-17] There Was Never Any "Fascism Debate". Maybe not a debate in the proper sense, but there certainly was a lot of blathering, with lots of people spouting their pet theories while talking past one another. Even this article, which is subtitled "They Refused to Engage," manages to slip past its supposed opponents without landing even glancing blows. I don't know why I keep being drawn into this question, but after kicking this article around, I finally broke down and ordered Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a 2024 book edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, even though it's missing as much as it includes. (I ordered the cheaper pre-election hardcover as it appeared to be identical to the post-election paperback, although the post-election case has gotten much more compelling.) So I'll probably write more about this in the future -- indeed, I probably already have elsewhere.

One side comment here for now: after Scott Lemieux mentioned "professional anti-anti-Trump pundits," I recalled Dan Nexon's comment here on "the anti-anti-Trump left," I started wondering what the hell (or more specifically, who) they were talking about. I don't have a good answer (although I made some notebook notes in researching). Provisional conclusion is that no such people exist, as least in significant quantity. It's possible that some confusion is caused by two other groups: right-wing trolls who react to criticism of Trump by belittling the critics (e.g., by diagnosing them with Trump Derangement Syndrome), possibly because they can't think of any credible defense of Trump; and those who are so focused on the evils of US foreign policy that they ignore or (naively, I suspect) defend Trump's schizophrenic posturing. The trolls may be "professional pundits" (in the sense of getting paid to spout nonsense), but they are not from the left. I have doubts about the others, too, but the solution is not to simply counterattack but to respond with clear thinking.

Of course, you don't have to be a leftist to oppose Trump. Pretty much everyone has plentiful reasons if only they can cut through the thicket of propaganda and bullshit to see them. We leftists are just much quicker to seeing Trump and his followers for the danger they present, because we sense immediately that they want to kill us, while non-leftists are often in denial until it's too late. There only was one Hitler in history, and he set an impossible standard for other would-be Führers to live up to, but once you allow that there can be a current generalization beyond the historical specifics of his club with Mussolini, you can start to discern the type, and to see analogies take shape, evolve, and permutate. And within that framework, you can anticipate actions, ask questions, consider how best to stop him (and realize how important it is to do so). Nobody is going to change their mind about Trump just because you -- or for that matter, John Kelly -- call him a name. But you might decide that he's crossed some line and become so dangerous that you need to overcome your reluctance to form a Common Front to stop him. And you might recall that even that sacrifice isn't guaranteed to work.

Part of the problem is that very little (if any) of what we grasp of current events can be perceived as such. It is filtered through our memory and far-from-perfect understanding of history. Here one big problem is that most people don't remember much, and much of what they've been told is wrong. Even the history of Nazi Germany, which is about as famous and notorious as anything 80-90 years old can be, is recalled by very few people, and most who have even an inkling do so through distorted clichés -- like the oft-repeated capitulation at Munich. But those of us who do know some history are likely to start wondering whether Jan. 6 wasn't Trump's Beer Hall Putsch -- an unlikely thought at the time, but where else have we seen the coddling of criminality by the courts, leading to installation in power arranged by rich elites and the abuse of that power not just to "violate norms" but to run roughshod over law and order? Maybe you can find some better-fitting obscurity, but no other analogy gets the blood pumping faster than fascism.

PS: I also ran across this (partly because Bessner seemed to be tagged as an anti-anti-Trump leftist):

• Daniel Bessner/Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: [2024-04-18] Liberals' Heated Fascism Rhetoric Sidesteps Self-Reflection.

  The fascism framework is inherently backward-facing, always either relying on historical comparisons to validate its analogy or fixating on a return to the alleged "norms" that existed before Trump's presidency. In other words, the single-minded identification of fascism prevents liberals from developing an attractive vision for the United States' future. Even if Biden defeats Trump in November, absent such a vision the Democratic Party will be stuck in the rut of cosplaying apocalyptic scenarios every time a Trump-esque candidate runs for office, with little extra energy to devote to hammering out a compelling political alternative.

• Daniel Bessner: [02-20] Donald Trump Is Dismantling Liberal Internationalism: Bessner is interviewed by John-Baptiste Oduor, following Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference. It's hard for anyone who has long been critical of US foreign policy not to have mixed feelings about the "America First" retrenchment that Trump and Vance are presenting. America's ability to direct the world has long been diminishing, its good sense even faster, so some sort of retreat has long been in the cards, but Trump's preference for bluster and erratic bullying and his lack of skill let alone interest in diplomacy are likely to add danger to any change.

Connor Echols: [03-18] Oligarchy in overdrive: "Two months into his second Term, Trump is making mere plutocracy seem quaint." There's a chart here where 48% of "likely voters" say the US is moving toward oligarchy.

Matt K Lewis: [03-17] Democrats have four theories to beat Trump. Wish them luck: Actually, wish them better theories. I'm a sucker for clickbait like this because I've thought a lot about tactics over the past year, both upside and downside of November 5. And while I don't claim to have the answers, it's pretty clear to me that these aren't them:

1. Cross your fingers and wait for Trump to self-destruct
2. Work hard
3. Stop being culturally out of touch
4. Pray you can find a rock star

Eventually, rather than picking one, he throws his hands into the air and calls for a combination of all four. But read the fine print and watch them disintegrate: "This is the Tik Tok era, baby." "If they want to win, they need to talk like normal human beings again." "Politics is now show business, and Trump understands this. He's not a candidate -- he's a spectacle." Democrats need "someone like The Rock, Mark Cuban or Stephen A. Smith." (Link added for Smith, because I had to look him up, which in itself makes me doubt he's a "rock star.") And remind me again how effective Cuban was on the campaign trail with Harris?

Joel Swanson: [03-18] What Are We Allowed to Say? "How Trump's Department of Education has made it harder for me to teach Jewish Studies." The idea, of course, is to make it difficult to teach anything that goes against the Trump party line. The campaign against anything or anyone that remotely smacks of Woke or DEI is just the first front of attack, an easy way to show who's the boss now, without having to split many hairs. I didn't say "any" here, because as this article points out:

This directive, however, came with a large asterisk: We are still permitted to educate students about antisemitism. Antisemitism education, in other words, receives a special carve-out from broader anti-DEI policies. Jews get to be the special minority group receiving temporary protection from the government.

This is problematic for both obvious and subtler reasons. (Designating Jews as a privileged class sets them up for further backlash, as the author notes in his discussion of "the court Jew," although I can think of further examples; doing so to deflect criticism of genocide is disingenuous and even more likely to backfire.) Among other things, this article pointed me to several other pieces worth noting:

• "They see an administration cutting funding for necessary academic research to make examples of universities, even when that will hurt Jewish students": Sharon Otterman/Liam Stack: [03-07] White House Cancels $400 Million in Grants and Contracts to Columbia: "The Trump administration blamed the university's failure to protect Jewish students from harassment during protests last year over the war in Gaza."

• "When the Trump administration is telling German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of government": Jim Tankersley: [02-15] Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech: "Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have challenged decades-long approaches to political extremism that were designed to prevent another Hitler."

• "and appointing officials with long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to high office": Konstantin Toropin: [03-06] Pentagon's No. 2 Spokesperson Has Long History of Antisemitic, Bigoted Social Media Posts: About Kingsley Wilson. This also led to more Military.com news items:

  • Navajo Code Talker Videos, Photos, Stories Removed to Comply with Trump Diversity Purge [03-18]
  • Highest-Ranking Black Medal of Honor Recipient Erased in Pentagon DEI Purge [03-17]
  • Pentagon Pushes Ahead on Cutting 60,000 Civilian Workers Using Firings, Resignations and Hiring Freeze [03-18]
  • William D Hartung: [03-18] A Manhattan Project for AI Weaponry? I was surprised to read in the introduction that Trump in his first days replaced the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the top officers in the Navy and Coast Guard. The former is black; the other two women. It's customary for high-ranking civilian jobs to turn over when a new administration arrives, but how often do presidents get rid of top military officers?

Kenny Stancil: [03-19] DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans: I haven't been following news and/or opinion site for months now, but based on rare sampling it's possible that The American Prospect has been the most reliable source of solid news about the extraordinary damage the Trump administration is inflicting on the American people. Some headlines:

• Hannah Story Brown: Trump's Energy Czar Is All In on AI: "Doug Burgum is the perfect conduit for Big Tech and Big Oil's joint agenda."
• Ryan Cooper: Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History; Also: Donald Trump Is Going to Destroy American Manufacturing
• David Dayen: The Government Funding Law Damages the Legal Pushback on Trump: "Here's why Chuck Schumer's cave-in was beneficial to Trump's legally shaky slashing of spending and the federal workforce." Also: How Social Security Administration Cuts Affect You
• Suzanne Gordon/Steve Early: Doug Collins's Cancel Culture: "The VA secretary is targeting the wrong contracts to eliminate waste and inefficiency."
• Hassan Ali Kanu: Conservatives Have Big Plans for D.C. Public Schools
• Robert Kuttner: The Coherence in Trump's Incoherence: "Let's look a little deeper."
• Harold Meyerson: The Musk-Bezos War on Collective Bargaining; also Trump Rips Up the Government's Agreement With Its Workers: Trump trashed the contract with airport security screeners
• Toni Aguilar Rosenthal: The Texas Model: "Wealthy oil and gas interests getting politicians to do their bidding: coming to a federal government near you." Also: The Clean Air Act Is Under Attack
• Kenny Stancil: Trump's Attack on Government Capacity Will Fan the Flames of the Home Insurance Crisis

James K Galbraith: [03-19] Trump's Economics -- and America's Economy: "You can't make America great again by wrecking the government."

Jasmine Mooney: [03-19] I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped: "I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was lucky." I have no idea how many stories like this are coming to light -- Mahmoud Khalil's is by far the most publicized one, probably because the Trump goons figure that targeting a Palestinian gives them the best possible spin on a policy they intend to target far more broadly, and indiscriminately. The Wikipedia page on Khalil notes: "Several journalists and human rights organizations have noted similarities between this law and McCarthyism." No doubt, but this is much more similar to the CIA "renditions" of suspected terrorists on foreign soil -- except that it's being done here in America to legal residents. McCarthyism, as far as I know, never involved kidnapping. It was a systematic program of slander, meant to bully people into "naming names," encouraging discrimination against those named, and thereby spreading the slander, aiming at isolating and marginalizing the entire political left, solidifying support for the anti-communist Cold War, and dividing and demoralizing the labor movement. The Trumpist campaign against DEI and other signs of "wokeness" has more in common with McCarthyism, at least as concerns its individual targets, although the political agenda is much the same. Related here:

• Alan MacLeod: [03-11] Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal is Former Israeli Spy: Keren Yarhi-Milo, in photo with Hillary Clinton.

• Anna Betts: [03-14] Pro-Israel group says it has 'deportation list' and has sent 'thousands' of names to Trump officials: "Betar US is among far-right groups supporting Trump effort to deport students involved in pro-Palestine protests." I didn't realize that Jabotinsky's fascist mob from the 1930s is still extant, although I do know that Netanyahu is directly descended from it (through his father, who was Jabotinsky's secretary).

• Eli Clifton: [03-18] The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns: "Miriam Adelson is more than a funder of the Maccabee Task Force, she's also its president."

Vijay Prashad: [03-20] Israel's Hellish Attack on the Palestinians on 18 March: Opening paragraph:

On 18 March 2025, Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire agreement and bombed several sites in Gaza. It is estimated that at least 400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died by Israeli bombs. Journalists in Gaza report that of those dead, 174 are children. Once more, entire families have been wiped out. The head of the United Nations organisation for Palestine (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said that the Israelis have fuelled 'hell on earth'. Amnesty International's Secretary General Agnès Callamard described the situation as 'the hellish nightmare of intense bombardment'. The word 'hell' is on everyone's lips. It defines the situation in Gaza at present.

Within days of the Gaza uprising of Oct. 11, 2023, I concluded that Israel has crossed whatever line separates genocide from whatever it is you call the state of menace and siege that existed in Gaza from the 2006 withdrawal until then: "occupation" didn't seem right, with no ground presence, and no semblance of control, but the barriers Israel erected between Gaza and the world, along with the threat of instant death always present (and periodically illustrated, lest anyone doubt Israel's resolve). Baruch Kimmerling got the concept right in his 2003 book, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, but it takes some effort to realize just how thin the line is between stripping a people of all political rights and killing them. It now seems clear that as soon as Sharon sealed the border Gaza was fated to end this way. The only question was timing. When would some small group of Palestinians to flip their switch from patient cruelty to frenzied slaughter? Or when would the pervasive racism of Israelis finally erode their inhibitions against committing genocide? The Oct. 11 revolt was marginally larger and more invasive than previous acts of desperation, but that hardly explains the qualitative shift in Israel's behavior. Under Netanyahu, Israel was already aching to take it all, to finish Gaza off once and for all. They hardly debated at all.

Since the uprising I wrote about the genocide every week until I shut down Speaking of Which after the November election. (By the way, my original term was the more literal "prison break," but the desperation behind it reminded me more of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1944, when doomed Jews finally fought back against Nazis -- I won't even claim any irony to the sides, as that had flipped 20, 40, possibly 60 years ago.) Since then, I haven't even checked out my most reliable source, Mondoweiss. I knew what to expect, including that the nominal ceasefire of Biden's last days in office wouldn't last once Trump returned. In particular, I predicted that Trump would approve of the eventual forced transfer of the last Palestinians in Gaza to somewhere. (Ok, I wasn't thinking of Uganda, but sure, I get the joke, even if I don't laugh.) And yes, even on this, his absolute worst issue, I already miss Biden. So this article just explains one small bit. I don't feel any need to search out more, although I did have one open tab, so I might as well slot it here:

• Sondos Asem: [03-05] How a future Gaza would look under Egypt's $53bn plan: "The scheme, endorsed by the Arab League, seeks to reshape the urban landscape of the Palestinian enclave and achieve 'sustainable development.'"
• Sean Matthews: [03-04] US silent as Israel heaps scorn on Arab League's Gaza ceasefire plan: "Egyptian official says Cairo crafted plan with Trump in mind and that Cairo could take lead in destroying Hamas's missile stock."

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