Draft file opened 2024-11-06 2:00 PM.
Finally posted 2024-11-11 10:00 PM.
Added a couple small bits on 2024-11-12.
Also added a few more bits, all the way up to 2024-11-18,
but I swear, that's the end of it.These later bits have green change bars,
as opposed to red for the earlier adds.
Trump won.
I don't know why. I cannot fathom why anyone, much less
an outright majority of voting Americans, could stand him, or could
in any way identify with him, let alone entrust him with great power.
It is not inconceivable to me that this result was rigged, with every
voting machine in the country shaving several points in his favor --
and that all the election denial hoopla of 2020 was just misdirection,
while they worked on perfecting the software.
Or, I suppose, it's possible that a thin majority of the American
people have become so soul-deadened, demented, and/or deranged that they
wish nothing more than to inflict this guy on the rest of us. In which
case, the obvious answer is "to dissolve the people and elect another."
The phrase comes from a
Bertolt Brecht poem, a bit of Communist Party humor, not really
applicable here, but it does convey the disconnect when you realize
that the people you got are not the ones you imagined or hoped for.
We need better politicians, but we also need to become better people,
not least to stop them from the temptation to gaslight us.
Personally, I was delighted when Kamala Harris ran away with the
Democratic nomination. I didn't think of her in terms of categories
or attributes, and was always annoyed when people brought up "first
woman," etc., like some kind of milestone. She just seemed like a
generic American -- at least in the America I know, which includes
many years of living in Kansas, as well as some in New York, New
Jersey, and Massachusetts. I knew that she wasn't a leftist, that
she was a shrewd and calculating politician, and that she circulated
easily among friends in high places. But she seemed personable and
relatable, flexible, nimble, like someone who could recognize problems
and try to do things to fix them. She seemed much better to me than
her predecessors (going back at least to 1992).
Besides, I'm old enough that I'm no longer enamored of utopia, nor
patient for the long struggle, so I wasn't inclined to criticize.
Surely, I figured, she must know what she's doing? And if not, if
she blew it, we could unload on her then. But why give Trump any
comfort from division. He was such a clear and present evil -- a
word I normally abjure, but why beat around the bush here? -- that
nothing could budge my vote from Harris. And now, like Hillary
Clinton, and unlike -- no matter how little regard you have for
him, Joe Biden -- she has committed the unpardonable sin of losing
to Trump.
Still, as I'm writing this intro, I don't feel like tearing into
her campaign or other shortcomings. As I collect links, I'm sure I
will nitpick here and there. But it's still hard for me to see why
she lost, or what else she could have done about it. That wasn't the
case with Hillary Clinton: her faults, both personal and political,
were obvious from the start, and the sanctimonious scapegoating for
her loss only heightened her flaws. I could reconcile myself with
the theory that Americans had candidates they disliked, but could
only vote one of them off the island, and they chose her, because
they knew her better. Surely, this year those same voters would
dispatch Trump? Even as his polls held up, I expected a last gasp
break toward sanity.
That it didn't happen suggests a much deeper problem, which
brings us back to the voters. Or should, if I could figure it
out. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that America has been
in some kind of moral decline since approximately when I was
born -- in 1950, the week before Chinese volunteers entered
the Korean War and reversed the American advance, forcing a
stalemate, which American sore losers still refuse to accept.
Sure, Americans committed many sins before I was born, but
we could aim for better, and teach our children to make a
better world. The Hays Office made sure that the good guys
wore white hats, and triumphed in the end. I certainly grew
up believing in all that, seriously enough that when events
proved otherwise, I protected my ideals by turning against
the actual America. But what I never lost was the notion
that in the end, it will all turn out well.
We may not be at the end yet, but Trump sure seems like a
serious turn for the worse. He's four years older than I am,
but came from a completely different class and culture, and
at each step along the way he had different reactions and made
different choices, always breaking bad, which sometimes meant
embracing deteriorating social morality, and often accelerating
it. Oddly enough, he's the one who poses as a pious patriot.
Stranger still, lots of people believe him, perhaps because he
allows them to indulge their own vile impulses.
As far as I can tell, there are two types of Trump voter. On
the one hand, there are people who actually like him, who get
off on his arrogance and nastiness, and who like to see other
people hurt. (I've previously noted two types of Christians:
those who hope to help their fellows, and those who are more
focused on consigning those they disapprove of to hell. Trump
is practically a messiah for the latter group.) The second type
are party-liners, who will always vote Republican, no matter
how much they may disapprove of the candidate. The two groups
overlap, but each group extends the other, nudging a minority
up toward 50%.
Elite Republicans may not love Trump, but they'll do anything
to win -- their whole graft depends on it -- so they go along,
figuring they can control the damage (as well as profit from it).
This is much like the conservatives in Weimar Germany figuring
they can control Hitler -- meanwhile, Trump resembles Hitler at
least in his political pitch (his ability to rouse the passions
of people for whom economic conservatism has little appeal). Such
fascism analogies resonate for some people, especially on the left,
who know the history, but are meaningless to those who don't --
most Trump voters, although he seems to have some staff who revel
in it, as they keep sending dog whistles, not least to provoke
charges that never seem to work.
There is a certain genius to Trump/Republican politics, in how
they've manage to flip attacks into accolades: charges that would
discredit any normal candidate only seem to make Trump stronger,
and that rubs off on the rest of the Republicans. The key element
here has been the extraordinary success of partisan broadcasting,
keyed to fear, flattery, and rage: the net effect has been to sow
distrust and deny credibility to anything Democrats say or do,
while championing Republicans as defenders of true America. The
result is a tribe that has come to reject facts, reason, and/or
any hint of moral purpose: all are rejected as tools of the devil.
Trump adds very little of substance to this toxic infosystem,
but he does offer some kind of charisma or style, and disinhibition
(which passes for candor if you buy it, or cluelessness if you don't),
and serves as a lightning rod for attacks that only confirm the
bond between him and his fans. This can be very confusing for all
who are immune to or wary of his charms: his appeal makes no sense
to us, and meaningful response is nearly impossible. On the other
hand, they counter with the same logic and even more fervor, making
even less sense to us. The double standards are mind-boggling. For
example, one might try making a case that Trump has been unfairly
targeted by prosecutors, but how do you square that with his threats
to do much more of the same, and the "lock her up" chants?
But it's not just that Trump Republicans are easily deluded and
controlled by their media. That feat is built on top of much deeper
social trends that go back at least to the 1940s, with the founding
of the military-industrial complex and the extension of American
hegemony to serve global capitalism, with its attendant red scares,
both foreign and domestic. Americans had an idealized picture of
themselves coming out of WWII, which made the world Trump and I
grew up in. But the task of protecting capital turned into nasty
business, and we started to divide into one camp that relished the
fight, and another appalled by it. We started seeing films where
bad guys were recruited to do dirty work for supposedly good guys,
who turned bad themselves. Before long, American presidents were
ordering assassinations, kidnapping, and torture. Trump started
out with his Nazi-symp father, his apprenticeship under Roy Cohn,
and his mobster connections. He fit right in. He only had to wait
until America became rotten enough to embrace him. Bush's Global
War on Terror made that possible.
Well, the other part of the equation is the rise of the super
rich, made possible by the ideological attack on the notion of
public interest, and by the assertion of "greed is good," and the
general belief that "might makes right" (i.e., anything you can
get away with is fine). The richer the supers got, the more they
leveraged their wealth through lobbies, PR firms, donations, and
media to turn government to do their bidding, further increasing
their wealth. They usually rented their spokesmen, but Trump,
having personified great wealth on TV, gave them a new angle: he
could have it both ways, claiming their authority while pretending
to be free of their influence.
I'm not sure how much of the election any of this explains,
although it may help explain why Democratic attack ads don't seem
to be drawing any blood. As with Republican attack ads, they may
do nothing more than confirm one's own virtues (or vices if that's
your thing). But it does make one wonder if raising money isn't
overrated.
We could, of course, look into the many ways Democrats have
contributed to their downfall. The losers are always quick with
thoughts, so a fair number of them will show up in links below.
I may have more to say on this below, but for here I'll pass,
except to point out a couple of fundamental dynamics:
There is a deep divide and conflict within Democratic ranks,
between corporate/neoliberal and populist/democratic tendencies;
they both share a fear of the right but are deeply distrustful of
each other. That produces acrimony, as you'll see below.
Democrats are subject to higher expectations than Republicans.
Democrats are expected not just to win elections, but to address
issues successfully, and are held accountable for any failures.
Republicans only have to win, and there are few strictures on
how low they can go to win. When they do win, they can readily
screw up, but are rarely held accountable.
Democrats are also held to higher ethical and moral
standards. Republicans may even embrace their own's misbehavior,
while excoriating Democrats for the same faults. (Thus, for
instance, Hillary Clinton is horribly corrupt, but Donald Trump
is just a rogueish businessman.)
Democrats believe in public service, in representing all
people, and as such they credit Republicans with legitimacy where
Republicans deny any to Democrats, and seek to cripple them wherever
possible. Republicans see politics as a zero-sum game.
The net effect is that Democrats campaign at a severe handicap.
Republicans can lie, cheat, and steal, but Democrats can't -- and
in many cases don't even know how. Democrats want to be liked, even
by Republicans (and especially by the rich), so they are careful
not to offend. (Even so, a casual reference to "garbage" gets blown
up sky high, while Republican references to "vermin" get laughed
away.) Republicans can exaggerate for effect, while Democrats pull
their punches, and that muddies their messages. Democrats cede
critical ground in arguments, seemingly legitimizing Republican
stands, which only become more extreme. The media love loud and
brusque, so they lap it up, amplify it, spread it everywhere,
dispensing with reason and nuance, and especially reality (the
most boring subject of all).
Then there are structural factors. America is divided into
states, districts, precincts, all of which can be gerrymandered,
as Republicans were quick to turn to their advantage. The Senate
is grossly undemocratic, and the filibuster there has made it
impossible for Democrats to pass meaningful reforms, even on
the rare occasions when they seem to have majority power. The
Republicans have packed the courts, which they're increasingly
using to restrict executive power by Democrats, and to increase
it by Republicans. Many judges are protected from any oversight
by lifetime appointments. Many reforms, as well as redress by
impeachment, require supermajorities, which Republicans use to
lock themselves in power, even if they lose popular support.
(Orban's system in Hungary has made extensive use of this, and
is widely cited by Republicans as a model for America -- although
in may have originated here, much like Nazi, South African, and
Israeli race laws drew on American precedents.)
But the biggest structural problem of all is money. Republicans
worship it -- even poor ones are defined by their deference or
indifference to great wealth -- and the rich thank them for their
service. The single most certain prediction for a second Trump
term is yet another round of tax cuts for the rich. Next up is
another round of regulatory loopholes, give-aways, and subsidies
to needy (or just greedy) businesses. Lobbyists took Washington
in the 1980s, and have only grown ever since. Republicans run
"revolving door" administrations where lobbyists are as likely
to work for the government as against it. The net effect is that
government is as likely to work against the public interest as
for it.
Republicans love this, because it reinforces their message
that government is inefficient, wasteful, and useless, and should
be shrunk (and ultimately "drowned in the bathtub"), except they
never actually do that, at least as long as they can use it to
feed their political machine.[*] While this is mostly done with
money, Republicans are also looking forward to using their power
in other ways: in turning the civil service into a patronage system
for political operatives; in aligning information services with
their political messaging; and in using coercive powers to suppress
heresy and dissent, to punish their enemies, and to empower (or at
least pardon) their allies.
When Democrats talk so piously and nebulously about the "death
of democracy," this is what they are actually referring to. Only
it's not a future threat, something that might be avoided if only
enough people would vote for a Harris, a Biden, a Clinton, an
Obama. It's been happening for a long time -- I used to see 1980
(Reagan) as the turning point, but now that I see it less in policy
terms than as a mental disorder, I see much more originality and
continuity in Nixon (which has the advantage of making Johnson's
Vietnam the breaking point -- it certainly was what turned my own
life upside down -- instead of the nascently-Reaganesque Carter).
Maybe with Trump redux, Democrats will finally realize that they
have to fight back, and stop trying to pass themselves off as
some kind of prophylactic, a thin barrier to limit the contagion.
Which brings us back to money. As I said, Republicans worship
it. But so do Democrats: maybe not all of them, but virtually all
of the kind that run for higher office, because the system is
rigged so that only those with access to money can run serious
campaigns. (Bernie Sanders is the exception here, and he did
come up with a novel system of small donor support, but when
he came to be viewed as a threat, big donors dumped tons of
money -- Michael Bloomberg more than $500M; compare that to
the $28M he spent this year for Harris against Trump -- to
quash his campaign.) Harris is no exception here. She raised
more money than any Democrat -- or Republican for that matter --
ever. And she lost. So maybe money isn't the answer?
I'm not going to try to tell you what Democrats should do
instead, but maybe they should start by waking up and looking
at the real world we're living in, a world that they are at
least in some substantial part responsible for creating. And
that means they need to re-examine their worship of money.
There's much more that can be said about this, but I've droned
on long enough. I should leave it here.
[*] That machine, by the way, is a thing of wonder, which I
don't think has ever been fully dissected, although there is a
lot of literature on various aspects of it. If Machiavelli were
here, he would write a letter offering advice on how an aspiring
young Republican could rise to a position of great power and
influence. (As Gramsci noted, real princes didn't need such
guidance. The point of the book was to expose their machinations
to those with no such experiences.) This would not only lay out
the topography of institutions, but the networking, the lexicon
of coded language, the spin, and ultimately the psychology of
why anyone would want to be a Republican in the first place --
something I still find incredibly alien even though I often take
great pains to try to understand others in their own terms.
As of Saturday afternoon, I have 144 links, 15438 words.
I was planning on not posting until Monday, so I have time to
make another round or two, but I have enough feedback on the
election to offer a few bits of speculation about the future.
I put little stock in them, given how poorly my predictions
have held up. But I can hedge a bit by offering a couple of
alternatives.
On several occasions, notably 1992 for the Republicans,
and 2016 for the Democrats, incumbent parties seem to have
felt permanently entitled to the presidency, and took their
defeats bitterly, lashing out blindly. The level of vitriol
Republicans directed at Bill Clinton after 1992 was almost
unprecedented in the never-very-polite lore of American
politics, and set a pattern that they repeated after 2008
and 2020 (arguably the most over-the-top, but by then their
character was expected, and the sore loser took personal
charge of the rage).
While Democrats didn't behave that atrociously after 2016,
when pretty much everyone expected Hillary Clinton to easily
defeat Donald Trump, her followers reacted with dismay and
a massive round of accusations and scapegoating -- especially
directed at Russia, although there were many other factors at
work, including how distasteful and provocative Trump was, and
that Clinton supporters still had a chip on their shoulders
over the strong Bernie Sanders challenge to what organization
Democrats expected to be a cakewalk.
Democrats' opinion of Trump has only sunk lower with four
years in power and four years plotting his comeback. But so
far, reaction has been mild, other than the inevitable shock
and sadness. Trump's margin has been sufficient that it's
hard to doubt his win. And while Harris seemed promising at
the Convention, that may have largely been relief that Biden
was out, the assumption that his administration had a good
story that was simply poorly communicated, and the pretty
conviction belief that Trump was such damaged goods that
most Americans would be glad to be rid of him. But it was
never really love for Harris, who's proved to be an easy
(and rarely defended) target for post-mortems. This also
suggests that we misread Trump -- that our loathing of him
isn't shared by enough Americans to beat him -- so maybe
this isn't a good time to go ballistic on him (as we did
in 2016).
Trump's margin opens one new possibility that we haven't
considered, which is that if he governed competently, he
could actually consolidate his power and become regarded
as a significant American president. Admittedly, we have
no reason to expect this. His first term was a disaster of
unfathomable dimensions. He's spent most of the four years
since scrambling to stay out of jail. And his campaign theme
has been redemption and revenge. If he attempts to put into
practice even a significant share of what he campaigned on,
evaluations of his legacy should sink as far below the scale
of American presidents as Caligula and Ivan the Terrible.
But will he? I wouldn't bet against it, but it's just
possible that having won, as ugly as that whole campaign has
been, he'll change course. I don't mean to suggest that he
won't be as bad as his voters want him to be on signature
issues like immigration. But now that he's president, why
should he adopt austerity budgets and demolish services,
just to prove that government doesn't work. If he does that,
he'll be blamed, and if he doesn't, he'll reap the credit.
Plus the whole Fox machine is behind him, so who's going to
complain? Certainly not the Democrats, who are always ready
to help a Republican president do a good deed. (Remember when
they foolishly thought "No Child Left Behind" would better
fund education?) He's promised a better ACA. Why not rebrand
it like he did with NAFTA, adding a couple tweaks that most
Democrats can get behind, and magically turning it into the
Republican program it always was? He'd be a hero, whereas
had he done any of Paul Ryan's plans, he'd be a goat.
The big difference between Trump now and then isn't just
that he has some experience to learn from, but that this
time he gets to pick his own staff. In 2016, he left that
mostly to Pence and Priebus, who saddled him with a bunch
of assholes even he couldn't stand, including the so-called
"adults in the room." This could, as most of us feared, be
for the worse, but Trump was always hemmed in by regular
Republicans, ranging from the Koch-controlled Ryan to the
Blob-heads in the national security racket. One big reason
he won the 2016 primaries was that he disagreed with hardcore
economic orthodoxy. But as a neophyte Republican, he got stuck
with a bunch of crooked, deranged incompetents, and their rot
killed his whole administration. Granted, he wasn't smart
enough to figure it out in real time, and he may still not
be, but the new crew were competent enough to run a winning
campaign this time. We shouldn't exclude the possibility that
they're competent enough to manage him, or to let him manage,
some level of competency. For which he'll handle the PR, as
that's his thing, and it will probably be more hideous than
the actual administration, which above all else has to keep
business booming and profits soaring.
One area where he has a mandate and some real power to act
is foreign policy, where Biden has been utterly disastrous.
It's well past time to settle the Ukraine War, which needs a
bit more art and tact than he's shown so far, but is doable
without looking like too much of a surrender to Putin (but if
the Democrats scream treason, that'll probably make it more
popular). The obvious deal there is status quo on the ground,
and dial back sanctions as stability and security is ensured.
The US actually needs a cooperative relationship with Russia,
and that means undoing the sanctions. He needs to do that
without looking like a Russian stooge, but Putin seems to be
more sensitive to how Trump looks than Trump himself.
Israel is a different matter. He'll give Israel whatever
they want, with no complaints or pretense of humanitarian
concern. At some point, he'll broker a deal with Egypt, the
Saudis, Syria (via Putin), and maybe even Iran, to send the
rest of the Palestinians Israel hasn't killed already into
permanent exile. Maybe he'll get Israel to concede Lebanon,
and that will be the end of it. It's a horrible solution,
but in some ways it'll be a blessing. The Democrats were
just going to drag it out. [*]
I could go around the world, but in foreign policy, there
is virtually nothing he can do (other than start a war, e.g.
with China) that wouldn't be an improvement over Biden. In
general, he'll depress trade and immigration, and disengage
in the internal affairs of other countries. He could easily
negotiate peace deals with North Korea, Iran, even Cuba and
Venezuela. He doesn't care about human rights in those places.
(Biden didn't either, but the pretense was killing.) BRICS
will continue to grow, Europe will go its own way, and the
American people will be just fine. (Maybe fewer cheap goods
and less cheap labor, but nowhere near the scare levels that
liberal economists like to predict.) If Democrats complain
about this, they'll only dig themselves deeper graves. The
era of American global hegemony is ending. Protracting it
will only make a bad thing worse.
By the way, Vance is a creep, but he's much smarter, and
much savvier both on foreign and domestic policy than Pence
ever was. Plus, as the heir-apparent, he has incentives not
to turn the administration into the dumpster fire that Pence
left with. I could go on and on, but you should get the idea
by now. Having shown he can win, legitimately (as these things
go), Trump has little reason to destroy democracy. He could
even build on the majority he already has. He faces two dangers:
one is his own bad instincts; the other is the idiot nihilism
of much of the Republican Party. But he owns that party now,
and the rank-and-file are basically followers, controlled by
the propaganda machine, and the apparatchiki are just hired
hands: they do what they're told.
Again, I have very little confidence that Trump will do any
of this -- even on Israel, where he will continue to do whatever
Netanyahu wants, but Netanyahu is used to and even seems to like
it being a forever war, so he may not press that hard.
So it's really just up to him. As for the Democrats, all they
can do is react. It's hopeless for me to try to advise, as none
of them are ready to listen. They first have to figure out who
they are, who they want to represent, and what they want. But
this game of conning both the donors and the voters is wearing
awfully thin.
[*] I could add some caveats and nuance here, but the key point
is that this is what the dominant political coalition of Israel
actually wants, and that Trump, both by temperament and in light
of his donor support network, is unlikely to offer any resistance
to anything Israel demands -- even more so than Biden-Harris, who
as Democrats felt the need to express humanitarian concerns and
their commitment to democracy. Trump has no such concerns, and
may even see the mass expulsion of Palestinians as an exemplary
model for his own mass expulsion of "illegal immigrants." But
any number of things could limit this "ethnic cleansing." I'll
leave this to your imagination, assuming you have enough to see
that public opinion all around the world will increasingly shift
as Israel approaches genocide's "final solution" -- even in the
US, which should be of some concern to Trump, although his first
instinct will be to fight and suppress it. He will see it as an
opportunity to break pro-Israel donors away from the Democratic
Party, solidifying his support, but freeing Democrats from having
to toady for Israel, as Harris did and paid for. But ultimately
opinion could turn against Trump/Israel here. The tide could
even turn in Israel as the costs of war and isolation mount. And
a massive influx of Palestinian exiles will be welcome nowhere:
the US and EU go without saying, but public opinion makes this
a tough sell in the Arab autocracies, which could blow up under
the strain -- and which have their own major financial pipeline
to Trump (e.g., Kushner's billion dollar slush fund).
I think
the most likely scenario is that Gaza is totally crushed and
depopulated, but that Israel is pressured to dial back its
apartheid and ethnic cleansing measures in the occupied areas
(including parts of pre-1967 Israel, where Palestinians are
20% of the population, and have barely-nominal citizenship)
to pre-October 2023 levels. But a wide range of scenarios are
possible. While Trump's election strengthens Netanyahu, they
are fighting a perilous uphill battle (against a world which
has been inexorably decolonising ever since 1945), where they
may well wind up just retreating into their fortress-castles.
[**]
[**] MAGA is clearly such a retreat, on many fronts (e.g.,
they want to return to a world where stern fathers can spank
naughty daughters). Most of their beliefs should be resisted,
but their retreat from neoliberal/neoconservative foreign
policy is overdue. The world has changed since WWII, when
America extended its hegemony over the "free world" and set
up its quasi-holy war against the enemies of capital. Most
of the capital that American armed and propaganda forces so
fiercely defend isn't even American any more, and what is isn't
of much value to most actual Americans. (A precise accounting
of that capital may depend on how you account for Elon Musk,
who I'd argue is case proof that not all immigration is good).
Moreover, America's defense of that capital has lost much of
its effectiveness, as American soldiers have given up the fight
(why risk ruining their lives for oil moguls?), as corruption
has made the war machine prohibitively expensive, and as the
world itself has become increasingly unconquerable. (Phrase
comes from Jonathan Schell's 2003 book, The Unconquerable
World.)
Neoliberals will accuse Trump et al. of "isolationism,"
because that's the slur they deployed against a previous
generation of (mostly) Republicans, who were wary of their
schemes for one world market, dominated by American capital,
and regimented by American arms. Although the US rarely had
much of a standing army before 1939, Americans were widely
engaged in the world, mostly through trade, not insignificantly
through missionary work, but only rarely through imperialist
adventures (1898 counts, as does the subsequent "gunboat
diplomacy"). This willingness to engage the world on fairly
equitable terms, including the resistance to European imperialism
announced in the Monroe Doctrine, the pursuit of Open Door Policy
to break up imperial monopolies, and the "arsenal of democracy"
which defeated the final campaigns of Germany and Japan: all this
earned Americans considerable good will around the world, which
America's post-WWII abuse of power has only turned into a "legacy
of ashes" (to borrow the title of Tim Weiner's history of the
CIA). While the "isolationist" taunt will impress subscribers of
Foreign Policy, it's a spent term, a piece of liberal cant
that will produce more backlash than agreement.
While the "defense Democrats" have been ascendant against Trump
and for Biden, I can only hope they will be seen as bankrupt now,
and that Democrats will revert to something more like Roosevelt's
Good Neighbor Policy (a kinder, gentler redressing of Gunboat
Diplomacy, not that it changed things much), and a renewed
interest in the UN, which the neocons sought so hard to trash.
Also, I do not expect Trump to be consistent here: even if his
tendency is to withdraw, institutional support for militarism
and world dominance remains strong, at least as much in the
Republican Party as in the Democratic, and it's easy to play
on his ego as "the leader of the free world," especially when
all he has to do is to follow friendly bribes.
I woke up Monday morning with the thought that I could finally add
a third intro here, where I talk about what Democrats should do now
that they've been driven from national power. I always planned on a
final chapter to my political book where I would offer what I saw as
practical political advice to save the world. (Well, in some versions
of that book, I tacked on an extra section, which would describe the
dystopia that would ensue if Democrats fail and allow Republicans to
do all they've wanted. That much, at least, I'll spare you spoilers
for.) So I have given this subject a fair amount of thought, and if
I had the time (and were still so inclined) I could write about this
at considerable length. However, with Monday slipping away from me,
and no desire whatsoever to face this file on Tuesday, I'll try to
keep this very brief: some reflections and scattered tidbits, but no
structure, and no cheerleading. I'm not trying to sell my advice.
I'm just throwing it out there.
Monday evening, I find I haven't written this section, and no
longer have time. I think I did make many of the points I've been
thinking about under various articles, so I'll leave it to you
to ferret them out. Anything involving money, credibility, and
trust is likely to be relevant. The biggest problem Democrats
have is that lots of people don't trust them -- on lots of things,
including avoiding war. They have to figure out how to fix that.
And funny thing, beating the Republicans at fundraising and at
advertising and celebrity endorsements and "ground game" isn't
doing the trick.
Why so many of those people trust Republicans instead is way
beyond me, but there is considerable evidence that they do. There
is also ample evidence that trust in Republicans is foolish and
sometimes plain stupid, but until Democrats get their house in
order, distrust in them takes precedence. One saving grace may be that
most Americans really hate corruption, and they don't much care
for incompetence either. Republicans are up to their necks in
both. Now if you can just show them, you should be able to score
points. But it's hard to do when you're corrupt and incompetent
as well.
One thought I'm pretty sure I didn't get to yet concerns "woke."
I think of it as something like satori, a state of mind that if
you're lucky, you find yourself in through no discernible effort
of your own. It's good to be woke, but only you can know that.
What it is not is a license for an inquisition, which is how
most of the anti-woke have been trained to view it. And it's
not that they disapprove of inquisitions in general. It's just
that they prefer their own.
Top story threads:
Election notes: Some general pieces here,
then more specific ones on Trump (why he won, and how horrible that
is) and Harris (why she lost, and who cares) following, then sections
on the Senate (flipped R), House (undecided, but probably still R),
and other issues below.
Washington Post:
2024 turnout is near the 2020 record. See how each state compares.
I've seen references to a drop in voter turnout in 2024, especially
relative to 2020, but this data shows a pretty close match, with 9
states posting new highs (44 year window). Trump won those states
5-4, with all of his wins in battleground states. Of 5 states with
turnout under 55%, 4 were among Trump's biggest margin states (WV,
AR, MS, OK), while the lowest one anywhere was Hawaii.
[11-06]
The global trend that pushed Donald Trump to victory: "Incumbents
everywhere are doing poorly. America just proved it's not exceptional."
I still have, and haven't read, his book, so I know that this is his
turf, and he likely has something interesting to say about the rest
of the world -- something I, like most people, don't know a hell of
a lot about -- but I don't see how this could possibly work: it just
seems like another correlation pretending to be a cause. No need to
deal with this now, but I will note one line: "Three different exit
polls found that at least 70 percent of Americans were dissatisfied
with the country's current direction, and they took it out on the
current ruling party." Links in that line to the following:
Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered
1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden.
The nation's most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional
1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis
of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete.
The drop-off spanned demographics and economics. It was clear in
counties with the highest job growth rates, counties with the most
job losses and counties with the highest percentage of college-educated
voters. Turnout was down, too, across groups that are traditionally
strong for Democrats -- including areas with large numbers of Black
Christians and Jewish voters.
The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia,
made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds
of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
William Bruno: [10-23]
Why foreign policy is the biggest issue this November: "From
Gaza to Ukraine, this election will have world-spanning consequences.
Now more than ever, we need to push for an anti-war, anti-imperial
foreign policy." This came out before the election, so its tactical
advice, like "hold Harris accountable," is moot, but the core issues
are certainly important.
Thomas Frank: [11-09]
The elites had it coming. Of course, he's mostly talking about
Democrats, although fellow traveler Dick Cheney gets as many nods
as Barack Obama.
Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump's appeal -- and they
failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole
world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the
best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out
of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing.
But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation.
Their most brilliant minds couldn't figure him out.
Trump's first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled
by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal
pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could
into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but
also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate,
knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out,
who we are.
So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning
rather than defiance. . . . But eventually, mourning either
starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and
if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will
differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating
the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What's
left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering
his government is going to visit on us. . . .
Ultimately, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence.
If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government
will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic
relief they're craving. . . . We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled
a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he
will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt
that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He
could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism
the way George W. Bush -- whose re-election also broke my heart --
discredited neoconservatism.
The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system
will still be standing, and whether Trump's opponents have built an
alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism.
That will be the work of the next four years -- saving what we can
and trying to imagine a tolerable future.
One nit here is that no matter how discredited she thought
neoconservatism was when Bush-Cheney departed, it still rules
the roost, as Biden showed us with his disastrous cultivation
of wars, and Harris underscored by welcoming Dick Cheney to
her campaign. Even as some especially notorious individuals
were put to pasture, the institutions supporting them remain
unchecked and unexamined. I'm also less certain of Trump's
incompetence. Much will depend on whether he hires competent
people who can keep his trust without blundering. Sure, he
did a very bad job of that during his first term.
Heading into Tuesday's vote, a large majority of voters said that
the country was on the wrong track and that they were disappointed
with the candidates on offer. A plurality of voters said that
regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things
worse. Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not
make them proud of America.
The blame for this grievous state of affairs lies with the
Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which played a game of
chicken with the electorate, relying on apocalyptic threats about
the end of democracy to convince people that they had no choice
but to vote as instructed. Both candidates offered up policies
that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet
for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their bases.
For one candidate, that contemptuous strategy succeeded. But it
fails the American people.
For all his populist posturing, Mr. Trump put forward tax breaks
that favor the wealthy, championed tariffs that would almost certainly
raise grocery prices, bad-mouthed overtime pay, praised firing striking
workers and largely stayed mum while his allies discussed destroying
the Affordable Care Act. He insisted abortion be left up to the states
even though most Americans, including many Republicans, think it should
be legal everywhere, and pledged to oppose any new gun restrictions
even though an overwhelming majority of Americans say they should be
stricter.
And what were Trump acolytes to be given in return for greenlighting
this unpopular agenda? Elon Musk promised a period of economic pain.
Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump would bend the country over his knee and
give it a "spanking." Why would any sign on? Because it was either that,
they were told, or nuclear war under Ms. Harris. Some choice. . . .
What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage
situation. Our major parties represent the interests of streaming
magnates, the arms industry, oil barons, Bitcoin ghouls and Big
Tobacco, often without even pretending to heed the needs of voters.
A political system like that is fundamentally broken.
I skipped over the corresponding list of indictments against
Biden and Harris, which struck me as (relatively speaking) small
potatoes, but most show that the inordinate influence of money
isn't limited to Republicans. The first paragraph cites two
pieces on the threat to "end democracy":
Doug Henwood: [11-08]
It was always about inflation: "Simply put, Donald Trump owes
his reelection to inflation and to the fact that the Biden administration
did little to address the problem in a way that helped working-class
families."
I often say that the Democrats' political problem is that they're a
party of capital that has to pretend otherwise for electoral purposes.
This time they hardly even pretended. Kamala Harris preferred
campaigning with the inexplicably famous mogul Mark Cuban and the
ghoulish Liz Cheney to Shawn Fain, who led the United Auto Workers
to the greatest strike victory in decades. Those associations
telegraphed both her policy instincts and her demographic
targeting: Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs.
Like Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the strategy failed, only
worse. At least Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million.
Harris even lost among suburban white women, a principal target of
this twice-failed strategy.
The simplest explanation, though, may be the most compelling: This
was a classic "change" election in which the "out" party had an
advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the
outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very
unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and
also because the GOP chose a rival whose constant demonstration of
his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest.
In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by
endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by
denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated;
and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same
people and institutions they did.
Nobody for a moment doubted that Trump would bring change. And
indeed, his signature Make America Great Again slogan and message
came to have a double meaning. Yes, for some it meant (as it did
in 2016) a return to the allegedly all-American culture of the 20th
century, with its traditional hierarchies; moral certainties and
(for some) white male leadership. But for others MAGA meant very
specifically referred to the perceived peace and prosperity of the
pre-pandemic economy and society presided over, however turbulently,
Trump. When Republicans gleefully asked swing voters if they were
better off before Joe Biden became president, a veritable coalition
of voters with recent and long-standing grievances over conditions
in the country had as simple an answer as they did when Ronald
Reagan used it to depose Jimmy Carter more than a half-century ago.
The "better off" question is close to meaningless, as most
people can't really tell, but as we've seen, are inclined to
accept whatever their political orientation dictates. Unlike, say,
the pandemic of 2020, or the financial meltdown of 2008, or the
deflationary recession of 1980, or the great one of 1929-32 (is
that what MAGA means?), there is little objective reason driving
voters to change. Granted, there may be unease driven by slower,
almost tectonic forces (like climate change), but few people think
them through, and those who do tend to prefer orderly change over
the kind of disruption Trump promises.
David Sirota: [11-07]
Election 2024: How billionaires torpedoed democracy: "Both parties'
2024 campaigns claimed to be about 'saving democracy.' Yet both parties
ended up bought and paid for by billionaires."
Jeffrey St Clair:
[11-06]
Chronicle of a defeat foretold: "What does history repeat itself
after it does farce?" He's very harsh on Harris here. One thing I
find curious is an uncredited chart, which if I'm reading it right
says that 24% of respondents think Democracy in the US is secure,
vs. 74% threatened. Harris leads secure 59% to 39%, but trails in
the larger threatened group, 46% to 53%. But isn't securing democracy
supposed to be her issue? As an issue, it's nebulous enough that
Trump was able to deflect it by claiming that Democrats were the
real threat to democracy (after all, they're the ones rigging the
polling and the voting!). Democrats could bring up fascism, but
the response is simply, you're the real fascists, and who
else really knows any better?
This is an aside, but fits here as well as anywhere. I haven't
found an article making this point so far, but could Kelly's fascism
comments have been a plant? (Like one of Roger Stone's dirty tricks?)
If Trump's operatives know that being charged with fascism will only
solidify their support -- not because their supporters identify with
fascism, but because they see it as stereotypically leftist infantile
name-calling (unlike "libtard," which they know is just a joke). But
mainstream Democrats generally shy away from such a loaded term, so
how do you get someone like Harris to use it? You give her permission,
by allowing her to quote someone like Kelly. This whole notion of
"permission" is sick and pernicious. There's a quote somewhere about
how the Cheney endorsements of Harris give Republicans permission
to vote against Trump: it becomes something real Republicans can do
without surrendering their identify. Harris may have had some doubt
about "fascism," but she couldn't resist the Cheney honey trap, as
she saw it as a way to steal some significant slice of Republican
votes, putting her over the top. I have no reason to believe that
Kelly and the Cheneys were plants, other than that they precisely
had that effect. That they did, of course, was Harris's gaffe (and
yeah, I'm following
Kinsley rules here, otherwise I would have said "blunder").
[11-08]
The crack-up. Title from F Scott Fitzgerald. Selected bits:
This "white wave" electorate didn't reject progressive ideas;
they rejected the candidate who failed to advocate them for fear of
alienating Big Tech execs and Wall Street financiers. Voters in both
Alaska and Missouri approve increasing the minimum wage to $15.
Voters approved paid sick leave in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska.
Voters in Oregon approved a measure protecting marijuana workers'
right to unionize. Alaska voters banned anti-union captive audience
meetings. Arizona voters rejected a measure that lowered the minimum
wage for tipped workers. Massachusetts approved the right of rideshare
workers to organize for collective bargaining. New Orleans voters
approved a Workers Bill of Rights. Voters in Arizona, Colorado,
Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York approved measures
granting a state constitutional right to abortion.
Harris lost the popular vote by five million votes. Jill
Stein only garnered 642,000 votes, just 25,000 more than RFK, Jr.,
who'd long since withdrawn. In no state did Stein get enough votes
to cost Harris the state. Good luck blaming the Greens (which says
much about the politically emaciated condition of the Greens). Even
in Wisconsin (where Harris lost by only 31,000 votes), Stein, who
captured only 12,666 votes, didn't fare well enough to be blamed
(or credited) for costing Harris the state. In Pennsylvania, Harris
lost by 165,000 votes. Stein collected only 33,591 votes. In Michigan,
where Stein had her best showing in a battleground state, winning
44,648 votes (0.8%), Harris lost to Trump by 82,000 votes.
Murtaza Hussain: "Suppressing the Bernie movement in 2016
effectively destroyed the Democratic Party. That was a turning
point year GOP also had an insurgency with Trump but they ultimately
worked with him to some new kind of synthesis. The Democrats never
got past their decrepit ancien regime."
Some of you may remember that it was the Obama brain trust,
irritated at Trump's role in promoting the birther conspiracy, who
worked feverishly in 2011 to make Trump the face of the post-Tea
Party GOP. Obama's former campaign manager and policy guru, David
Plouffe later explained the thinking: "Let's lean into Trump here.
That'll be good for us." That worked out about as well for the
Democratic base as the bank bailouts.
By the way, St Clair also wrote
The wolf at the door, which is a fund drive piece, but also a
history of a publication that's still bristling with anger 30 years
after inception. There's not just a lot to be angry about today,
but much more coming down the pike. Be sure of that.
Raja Abdulhaq: {11-07]
Instead of looking inwards, white liberals are blaming Arab Americans
for Trump's victory. My impression is that there is less deflection
and scapegoating now than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton and her fans
felt more entitled, were less inclined to admit their own errors, or
to credit that Trump had tapped into something they had missed. But
anti-genocide voters made the point of being conspicuous, setting
themselves up for just this kind of reaction.
Sami Al-Arian: [11-08]
Trump did not win this election. Harris was defeated by a Gaza-inspired
boycott. I think the author is taking too much credit for something
that no one should be proud of. That the boycott existed at all is a
blight on Harris's campaign. She could have done a few simple things
to neutralize it, like listening to them, and explaining how much worse
a Trump win would be for Palestinians. Showing concretely how Trump
would be worse could have worked on virtually every issue, but she
very rarely did it, opting instead for generic slanders (like "fascist")
that were easily deflected.
Jacob Magid: [11-01]
On campaign trail for Harris in Michigan, Bill Clinton defends Israel's
war in Gaza: "Recalling efforts to broker peace during his own
presidency, Clinton urges voters in crucial swing state to think
'what you would do it if was your family' killed on October 7."
So he went to one of the cloest swing states, the one with the
highest share of Arab-American voters in the nation, and this was
his pitch? The likelihood of anyone there having relation suddenly
killed was about 100 times greater by Israel since October 7 than
by Hamas on that day. But at least his speech got reported on . . .
in Israel. What can matter more than that?
Mitchell Plitnick: [11-09]
The role of the Gaza genocide in Kamala Harris's loss: "The cause
of Kamala Harris' disastrous failure in the 2024 presidential election
will forever be debated, but there are good reasons to believe the
Israeli genocide in Gaza played a significant role." This misses what
I've always suspected of being the most important one, which is that
Gaza is the sort of bad news that makes people, especially ones who
don't really know much about the subject, recoil against incumbents.
Harris had an opportunity to set out a more independent policy.
Instead she doubled down. In every speech which addressed these
issues, she emphasized her unshakable support for Israel. She
offered little for the Palestinians being slaughtered there,
aside from bromides about being heartbroken at the suffering.
She claimed she was "doing everything possible" to end the war
and free the Israeli hostages. While she refused to do anything
concrete.
[11-05]
Election Day 2024: awful but cheerful. I had this in an open tab,
discovered too late to make even the first update, but as next week's
not coming, I figured I should go ahead and file it.
More disappointing is Harris' mush-mouthed foreign policy. First, on
the genocide in Gaza. Certainly she and Bibi will never hug like he
and Joe did, but not once has she suggested the radical demolition
of State Department dogma, not merely received and Methuselan but
venomous. Next, she supports "border security" and "tighter"
immigration. If she has explained in any public address how the
forcible removal of illegal immigrants from jobs, schools, churches,
and putting them in camps, as the Trump campaign has vowed, will,
apart from its grotesque moral horror, devastate the economy that
Trump vows to heal. The depressing part is how Harris might point
to the Democratic polity's hardening position on immigration; in
times of economic doubt, blame foreigners.
Only a few hours had passed since Donald J. Trump was elected president,
when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, announced that
he had already spoken to the U.S. president-elect, noting he was "among
the first" to call him.
It was further evidence of the enthusiasm Mr. Netanyahu's right-wing
government feels -- it had already been celebrating Mr. Trump's victory
since breakfast local time on Wednesday as if it had just won the
American election itself.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's ultranationalist minister of national
security, posted a festive "Yesssss" on social media, along with
emojis of a flexed biceps muscle and the Israeli and American flags,
even before the last polls had closed in Alaska.
Peter Baker: [11-06]
'Trump's America': Comeback victory signals a different kind of
country: "In the end, Donald J. Trump is not the historical
aberration some thought he was, but instead a transformational
force reshaping the modern United States in his own image."
This piece came out immediately after the election was called,
showing once again that no one beats the New York Times when it
comes to sucking up to those in power.
More than half of Trump's supporters don't believe he'll
actually do many of the things he claims he'll do (mass deportations,
siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals),
while more than half of Harris's supporters hope she'll implement
many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she
won't. And that pretty much sums up this election.
What we should add to St Clair's observation is that the Trump
understanding was much more credible than the Harris take. Trump
lies all the time, sometimes just to provoke a reaction. Harris,
well, doesn't have Trump's track record, but she's a politician,
and how far do you trust politicians, especially to do the right
thing?
John Cassidy: [11-11]
Donald Trump's victory and the politics of inflation: "Joe
Biden's strong record on jobs and Kamala Harris's vow to reduce
the cost of living couldn't prevent the Democrats from succumbing
to a global anti-incumbency wave." One thing that bothers me in
virtually every article this week that even mentions inflation
is that no one seems to have a clear understanding of what it
is, of how it works, of what is bad (and in some cases good)
about it, of what can and should be done about it. I can't do
it justice here, but I do want to stress one point: it creates
both winners and losers. Good government policy would try to
limit the winners (perhaps by taxing off their windfall) and
to compensate the losers (the "cola" in Social Security is one
example of this). The press seem to buy the notion that it is
an always bad, which mostly means that they are carrying water
for the side that wants less inflation (e.g., for bankers, which
is largely why the Fed is so hawkish against inflation). I
wouldn't say that there was no real inflation coming out of
the pandemic: I suspect that some inflation was inevitable,
but the winners and losers (and therefore who felt the pain,
and who needed help) were largely determined by pricing power,
which has been tilted against workers and consumers for some
time, but became more acute when inflation was added to the
mix. Policies limiting monopolies and price gouging would have
helped, but Biden and Harris got little credit for them, even
from supposedly liberal economists. Trump offered nothing but
an outlet for rage. Why anyone thought that might be any kind
of solution is way beyond me, but according to polls, many
people did. They were deceived. Whether they ever learn from
such mistakes remains to be seen.
Jelani Cobb: [11-07]
2016 and 2024: "We will be a fundamentally different country
by the end of the next Administration." Indeed, we already are.
Historians will long scratch their heads that a Republican candidate
who -- despite an inability to string a coherent sentence together,
being grossly underqualified and rife with extramarital affairs --
would go on to not only win election but become one of the most
popular presidents in US history.
Turns out the subject here was Warren Harding, elected president
in a 1920 landslide. How it advances an understanding of Trump isn't
clear, but even stranger stories ensue.
David Corn:
[11-04]
Trump and his voters: they like the lying: "He's a con man whose
deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect. The question won't fade:
How does he get away with it?" "Trump is demonstrating that he does
not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive
(for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy."
[11-06]
America meets its judgment day: "Trump's victory signals a
national embrace of the politics of hate and a possible fascist
future."
Ben Davis: [11-09]
None of the conventional explanations for Trump's victory stand up
to scrutiny: "This election has blown a hole in the worldviews
of both leftists and centrists. The pandemic may be a more important
factor." This piece covers a lot of ground, quite sensibly. The
section on Covid is really about something else:
I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation:
the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost
overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid,
almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest
policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and
for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety
net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely
generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash
transfers from the American government.
Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of
lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly
experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough
liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for
their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the
labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than
feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump's term, the
American standard of living and the amount of economic security
and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and,
with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when
Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and
unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of
the economy.
I've often thought that the Democrats took way too little credit
for the first big pandemic relief bill, which Pelosi and Schumer
largely wrote and pushed through, while Trump had to acquiesce
because he was mostly worried about the falling stock market.
The sunsetting made it palatable to Republicans, and made sense
given that it was relief for an emergency. Democrats figured
they could run on extending key parts of it, but did they? Not
really. Worse than that, Trump claimed credit for the immediate
effects, then blamed inflation on the act's largesse. Democrats
were, once again, screwed coming and going, mostly for not
following McConnell's formula of just letting the country go
to hell, just so voters would blame the incumbent president.
David Dayen: [11-08]
The triumphant return of corruption: "A look at the biggest stock
gainers since Trump's election shows that paying tribute to the next
president will have its benefits." He identifies several especially
large gains, from outfits like MoneyLion (up 61%, "investors believe,
correctly, that consumer protection, which made a comeback in the
past four years, will be destroyed again"), CoreCivic (up 72%, a
"private prison" company), GEO Group (up 61%, another "private prison"
contractor), and Coinbase (up 41%, "the crypto exchange"). "We can
get ready for four years of pay-to-play deals, corporate back-scratching,
and a public unprotected from scam artists."
John Harris: [11-10]
From Trump's victory, a simple, inescapable message: many people
despise the left: "The tumult of social media and rightwing
propaganda has successfully cast progressives as one judgmental,
'woke' mass." I don't doubt his point, but the examples mostly
make me think that most of the people who "hate the left" have
little if any idea what or whom the left is. That suggests some
kind of communication problem, which makes most sense in the US,
where we don't have our own party, and are often stuck under the
dead carcass of a Democratic Party, whose leaders hate us as much
as the right thinks it does. But there must be more to the story
than that: some deep, dark psychological factors that are never
really acknowledged and near impossible to dislodge There must
be a literature researching this. We certainly have research on
why people become fascists, which overlaps significantly with
hating the left. On the other hand, my own study of history has
shown that everything decent and valuable that has ever happened
in America has its origin in the left. Why can't anyone else see
that?
David Hearst: [11-07]
Trump has a choice: Obliterate Palestine or end the war:
Most likely he won't even think of it as a choice, but simply
following the directions of his donors. The question is whether
he can see the many downsides of doing so. He has several odd
talents, but clear thinking and foresight aren't among them.
Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for
Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian
national cause.
And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump's first term as
president, the US was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right --
the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.
Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington
became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the
former US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly
aligned.
Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy
by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the US
embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing
down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington;
he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the
nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the
most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.
Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was
Trump's sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.
This was -- and still is -- a serious attempt to pour concrete
over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place
a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make
Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the
wealth of the Gulf.
This led directly to the Hamas revolt, and the Israeli reprisal,
not just collect punishment but a systematic plan to render Gaza
uninhabitable, so credit him there, too. As I noted in my intro,
I expect he will simply cheer Netanyahu on to "finish the job."
I don't think he has any idea what that entails, how it will look,
and how it will reflect back on America, and on him personally.
Nor do I think he cares. He's one of those guys who strictly lives
in the present, trusting his instincts will never fail him.
There is much more to this piece, including a concluding section
on "Hope for the future," where he notes: "It may be that as Biden
departs, we have seen the party's last Zionist leader. That in itself
is of immense significance for Israel."
He is a third-rate businessman and fourth-rate entertainer, a husband
to fashion models, a wannabe standup comedian who cannot land a punch
line but floats language out into the air, hoping it will cohere, then
flare, though it usually wanders into vapor and fog. As with much
current standup, it can get raunchy and crass, but the MAGA people
accept this lack of dignity. I was struck with puzzled admiration at
his forty minutes of quiet swaying to "Ave Maria." It was like
performance art. He also did a skit at McDonald's and one in a
garbage truck. He will do most anything to avoid talking about
actual governing, which he does not know that much about. He perhaps
understands that most voters don't want to discuss that and want to
just leave it to their elected officials. We are a country that is
about money and entertainment. Trump was running as the embodiment
of these. One PBS commentator used a Hollywood metaphor to explain
him: Trump is a franchise blockbuster, familiar and splashy; Harris
is an independent art-house film with subtitles.
Elie Mystal: [11-07]
There's no denying it anymore: Trump is not a fluke -- he's America:
"The United States chose Donald Trump in all his ugliness and cruelty,
and the country will get what it deserves." This is certainly one
viewpoint. Still, I have to ask, how many people didn't understand
the choice this clearly? And for those who did not, why not?
We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism,
racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a
better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers
in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked
white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better,
safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead,
we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires
who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid. . . .
Everyone who hates Trump is asking how America can be "saved"
from him, again. Nobody is asking the more relevant question: Is
America worth saving? Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures.
A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children
to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited,
its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be
hunted doesn't really deserve to be "saved." It deserves to fail.
Trump is not our "retribution." He is our reckoning.
Rick Perlstein:
[11-05]
Garbagegate, with a twist: "The media's penchant to balance the
two parties and control the narrative didn't quite work when it came
to a Trump insult comic's comments about Puerto Rico."
[11-13]
How to hear a fascist: "Trump was supposed to be in decline, losing
it. He lost it all the way to the White House."
Timothy Snyder: [11-08]
What does it mean that Donald Trump is a fascist? "Trump takes
the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should
expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult
of January 6th martyrs." This is an article that we must admit,
he's competent to write, but hardly anyone else is competent to
read. I bookmarked it because it's an issue I take some perverse
interest in. I haven't read it yet, because I doubt that I'll
learn much -- e.g., I already knew the Marinetti story, and
that's pretty obscure -- and the rest will probably just be
annoying.
Asawin Suebsaeng/Tim Dickinson: [10-03]
'American death squads': inside Trump's push to make police more
violent: "Trump's recent call for a 'violent day' of policing
is part of his plan to push cops to be as brutal as possible and
shield them from accountability." Pre-election piece I should have
noticed earlier (or should have been better reported).
Michael Tomasky: [11-08]
Why does no one understand the real reason Trump won? "It wasn't
the economy. It wasn't inflation, or anything else. It was how people
perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer."
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media --
Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News
Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers,
iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network
(Christian radio), Elon Musk's X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan's,
and much more -- sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed
their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made
it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing
media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times.
Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no
influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper's Harris endorsement).
Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed
in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its
wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. . . .
I think a lot of people who don't watch Fox or listen to Sinclair
radio don't understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume
that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That
happens sometimes. But more often, it's the other way around. These
memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump
agenda.
I haven't even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much
to say. Yes -- inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great
in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October,
is "the envy of the world." But in the right-wing media, the horror
stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often
followed that lead. Allow me to make the world's easiest prediction:
After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won't take Fox News and Fox
Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic
indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the
"roaring Trump economy" will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as
some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on
the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts
as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly
denounced.)
Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my "Ulan Bator
question." If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in
the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn
about Kamala Harris? "You would know that she is a very stupid person,"
Gertz said. "You'd know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden.
That she's a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care
about you."
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he's been "the target
of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years," that he is under constant
assault; and most importantly, that he is "doing it all for you."
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side's
view of things. It's simply "the news." This is what people -- white
people, chiefly -- watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust
that you've seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or
even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel
lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought
to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one
television is tuned to Fox. That's reach, and that's power. And then
people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart,
right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch
their local news and it's owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a
clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper,
if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben
Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never
see this stuff.
Also, this ends with another key point/example:
The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and
this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday,
voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that
raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all
Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office,
the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats.
Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat
Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate,
by 14 points.
The reason? The right-wing media. And it's only growing and growing.
And I haven't even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other
platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days.
The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and
understand this and do something about it before it's too late, which
it almost is.
Also, some more speculative pieces on what a second Trump term
might do (some issue-specific, some more general). Most of these
assume Trump will try to do what he campaigned on, but I suggested
an alternative scenario in the second section of the intro (but
even it doesn't argue against most of the forebodings here):
Matt Bruenig: [11-07]
What does Trump's win mean for the NLRB? "Donald Trump will
probably sack National Labor Relations Board general counsel
Jennifer Abruzzo, who has been friendly to unions, on day one
of his presidency."
Tim Dickinson:
'You can't despair. Because that's what they want.' "Experts tell
Rolling Stone what resisting authoritarianism in America will
look like in Trump's second term." And if you have a subscription,
you can find out what they have to say.
Jonathan Freedland: [11-08]
Think you know how bad Trump unleashed will be? Look at the evidence:
it will be even worse. I can think of many risks, but I'd hardly
put "the end of Nato" second (or anywhere) on my list. It's not going
to happen, because NATO is really just an arms sales cartel, and
Trump loves a good racket. His threats to withdraw from NATO were
just meant to shake down more tribute. He won't back out, not least
because that would only incentivize Europe to build up their own
arms cartel.
For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against
the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation.
"Liberal democracy," he says, "offers moral constraints without
problem-solving" -- a lot of rules, not a lot of change -- while
"populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints." Magyar,
a scholar of autocracy, isn't interested in calling Donald Trump a
fascist. He sees the president-elect's appeal in terms of something
more primal: "Trump promises that you don't have to think about
other people."
Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling
power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for
their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to
restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in
charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal
inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one's own group and heap
hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak
up for themselves. Magyar calls this "morally unconstrained collective
egoism."
While there are people in Trump's circle who look to Orban as a
guide to how to lock into power, Trump has many other sources of
inspiration, even without cracking open his copy of Mein Kampf.
For instance, the crypto-creep in El Salvador,
Nayib Bukele, who was reelected with 84% of the vote, his
popularity largely credited to his war on gangs. That's the sort
of publicity Trump would gladly kill for.
Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of
expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer . . .
in their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,
they contended that "Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that
reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and
dangerous weaknesses in accountability."
And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high.
"The often-feckless Trump," they wrote, "also revealed deeper fissures
in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president
might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump -- but much more
skillfully, and to even greater effect." . . .
A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral
presidential powers to a new level. . . . New York Times reporters
Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman
reported that Trump "and his associates" plan to "increase the
president's authority over every part of the federal government that
now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of
independence from political interference by the White House."
Ken Klippenstein: [11-12]
Read the leaked Rubio dossier: "Trump camp details 'lightweight'
Marco Rubio's liabilities." I restrained myself from noting
reports that Rubio is in line to become Secretary of State, but
couldn't resist reporting this.
Paul Krugman: [11-11]
Why Trump's deportations will drive up your grocery bill:
Seriously, a week after the election, and this is the best he can
do? Alternate title: "Did you know that the pennies you saved on
groceries were paid for by exploiting undocumented immigrant labor?"
At least he paid off the "tarrifs will drive inflation" story he's
already done a dozen times.
Avery Lotz: [11-10]
Trump rules out Haley, Pompeo admin posts: No surprise with
Haley, who still has a lot of sucking up to do. Pompeo, however,
was always so good at it. The mark against him, beyond his very
brief presidential campaign, could be policy. He is remembered as
one of Trump's stealthiest hawks, and was especially influential
in sabotaging Trump's North Korea diplomacy. Suppose Trump
remembers that?
Rachel Maddow: [11-10]
Dead last: "Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With
Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet." More than you, or I at
least, need to read right now about Huey Long, Spiro Agnew, and
anti-corruption hero Viktor Navalny (who is inconveniently dead).
This sounds like an AI distillation of her recent books, which
sound like they were written by someone else -- not that, by this
point, we have any idea what her authentic self might sound like.
Branko Marcetic:
[11-02]
Trump is planning a third red scare: "Donald Trump and his allies
aren't making a secret of it: if they win, they're going to launch a
campaign of repression to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement and
the organized left."
[11-08]
Trump is planning a presidency of, by, and for the rich: "Now
that the 'pro-worker' GOP led by Donald Trump holds the reins of
government, what does it plan to do? A program of handouts for big
business and austerity for the rest of us."
David Remnick: [11-09]
It can happen here: "Everyone who realizes with proper alarm
that Trump's reëlection is a deeply dangerous moment in American
life must think hard about where we are."
Tony Romm: [11-11]
Trump eyes pro-crypto candidates for key federal financial
agencies: "The incoming administration has explored new personnel
and policy that can deliver on Trump's campaign promise to turn the
United States into the 'crypto capital of the planet.'" Something
else that Trump is going to do that is going to be really horrible,
although in this case not without an element of farce.
Jennifer Rubin: [11-11]
Trump can keep campaign promises or be popular. Not both. This
is pretty much what I said in my second intro. The problem here is
that Republicans don't see the need to be popular, or even want to.
They want to rule. They want to be feared. And they think that they
can extort and/or terrorize enough people to vote for them that,
with their other dirty tricks, they can stay in power, and do all
the sick and demented things they've been dreaming of. Remember
the 2000 election? Lots of pundits thought that Bush, with his
"compassionate conservatism" spiel, and coming off a relatively
moderate record as governor of Texas, would show some modesty --
he had, after all, lost the popular vote, and only won when the
Supreme Court prevented a recount in Florida -- and tack to the
center. But as soon as Bush was inaugurated, Cheney took over
and declared that Republicans had come to power with a purpose,
and they were going to do everything they wanted, just the way
they wanted it. Getting re-elected wasn't his department. He was
there to break things, and that's exactly what he did. (Then,
somehow, Rove managed to wangle Bush a second term anyway, despite
the fact that nearly everything he had done in his first was
massively unpopular.)
Joel Warner: [11-07]
What can we expect from a second Trump presidency? "From unleashing
more dark money in politics to expanding fossil fuel production and
assaulting reproductive rights, here's some of what we can expect from
a second Donald Trump administration.
PS: Trying to wind up on Monday, I'm starting to see a
number of early appointments (e.g.,
Trump picks Rep. Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations),
which are beyond the scope of this post and section, as well as damn
near impossible for me to keep up with. I will say that they do show
that he's actually thought about transition and administration this
time (unlike in 2016), he has a plan, and is executing it quickly.
This certainly argues against the notion that he might not govern
as viciously as he campaigned. I should also note that the Wade
story above shows that he intends to dominate Congress (or bypass
them wherever possible), rather than have to negotiate with anyone
(even mainstream Republicans). He is basically confirming the fears
of all those who predicted that Trump would turn the presidency
into a dictatorship.
PPS: I know I said I wouldn't do this, but here's a brief
general survey of the first two weeks of Trump appointments:
Alex Skopic/Stephen Prager: [11-21]
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here: "Trump's staff picks
are a rogue's gallery of cranks, oligarchs, religious fanatics, and
alleged sexual abusers. He's not 'draining the swamp,' he's deepening
it and adding more snakes." Section heads: The Warmongers (start with
Rubio); The Oligarchs (start with Musk); the Quacks (start with RFK
Jr.); The Climate Vandals (less famous, with fracking Chris Wright,
Lee Zeldin, and Doug Burgum); and Miscellaneous Depravity (picture
of Kristi Noem, but she's not the only one).
At the last count, more than 76 million Americans voted for Donald
Trump to be president. Some of them are probably your friends,
relatives, classmates, neighbors, and co-workers. But when you
cast an eye over the list of his appointees, you have to wonder:
is this truly what they thought they were voting for? A government
composed of billionaires and lobbyists, crackpots who think the
concept of medical science is suspect, and foreign policy hawks
who are just itching to go to war with Iran or China? Tabloid
celebrities like Dr. Oz and Linda McMahon being placed in charge
of whether you get healthcare and education or not? It seems
unlikely. Rather, it seems Trump -- who's built his entire career
on lies, scams, and fraud -- has scammed the American people again,
promising to sweep into Washington and clean it out when really
he's going to do the opposite.
This is the time for everyone to do their election autopsy, where
everyone pushes their preferred story of what went wrong for the
Harris campaign. Mine will focus on what I consider the simplest
and most obvious, the media painted a picture of a bad economy
which was virtually impossible for the Harris campaign to overcome.
And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the alternative reality
folks at Fox, I mean the New York Times, Washington Post, and other
bastions of the establishment media.
Just to provide context, there is little doubt that people's views
of the economy were hugely important in determining the vote. Exit
polls consistently put the economy as the
number 1 or
number 2 issue in people's minds as they went to vote. And those
rating the economy as a top issue voted for Trump by a huge margin.
I find it completely unfathomable why anyone worried about the
economy would look to Republicans (especially Trump) for relief.
History, as far back as Herbert Hoover, is unanimous on this point,
at least for most (working/middle class) people -- higher-income
people may have done relatively better with Republicans, but with
the possible exception of the top 1% (at most), they too have fared
better with Democrats. Or you could look at policy preferences, which
again favor Democrats by a huge margin. As Baker points out, a big
part of people's evaluation of the economy is simply partisan, but
that doesn't explain why a majority (actually well above the actual
vote) thought better of Republicans.
Baker continues:
At the most basic level, the media have continually chosen to highlight
the negative about the economy. University of Wisconsin political
science professor Mark Copelovitch did an
analysis last year showing that mentions of "inflation" and
"recession" dwarfed mentions of unemployment, even as the latter
was hitting record lows and we never had a recession.
The inflation we did see was part of a worldwide burst of inflation
related to the pandemic, where the US rate was little different than
the inflation seen in countries like France and Germany. We were told
people don't blame the pandemic, they blame Biden. That is undoubtedly
true, but that is because the media didn't remind people that the
inflation was due to the pandemic in the same way they always reminded
people that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was "disastrous." . . .
Most people are not getting their news from the New York Times or
Washington Post, but the information presented in these outlets does
spread to other news outlets and to social media. When people hear the
bad economy story in the elite media they help its spread elsewhere.
It's true that most regular consumers of these outlets supported
Harris, but that misses the point. . . . They helped to advance a bad
economy story that was at odds with reality. Given the importance of
perceptions of the economy in people's voting, it would have been all
but impossible for Harris to overcome this negative economy story, and
she didn't.
Jonathan Chait: [11-06]
Why America rejected the Biden-Harris administration: "It's not
that people love Trump. Democrats simply failed." As usual, Chait
swims in his own tide:
The seeds of Harris's failure were planted eight years ago, when the
Democratic Party responded to Trump's 2016 victory not by moving
toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away
from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting
blinders on the Democrats' decision-making elite.
So, after Hillary Clinton failed, they should have moved further
to the right? How was that even possible? No mention of what the
Democrats did in 2018, after moving so far into left-wing peril.
(They won both houses of Congress.) But Chait then claims Biden
in 2020, who "won because he abstained from that rush to the left,
keeping him closer to where the party's voters had remained" --
maybe he should recheck his old columns complaining about Biden
getting hoodwinked trying to appease Sanders voters?
Maureen Dowd: [11-09]
Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics: Inevitable
that someone would bring this up. Who are these "normal people"? And
when does one ever get a chance to really talk with them? Yet
somehow, they always show up to second guess you.
Liza Featherstone:
[11-01]
The far right's weird obsession with Kamala Harris's IQ.
This is a good example of the sort of thing that Republicans
routinely say and believe that makes no sense at all, but
clearly shows how detached from reality their world is.
You should know what I didn't hear during the hours speaking to US
voters. I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned
stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities
being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than
1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false:
the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.
After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris
and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply
too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women,
despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters
just didn't care.
For reasons that I'm sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks,
people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls,
I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.
Donald Trump had bet on a sense of aggrieved masculinity as the
return path to power, and while there's much we don't know about
who turned out to vote and why, his strategy did not alienate
white women in the numbers Harris needed to win. Misogyny and
racism should receive due attention in postmortems to come, but
they can't explain Tuesday on their own. The story is more
complicated, and dire. Though she spoke of freedom, of forward
motion, of change, voters did not trust her to deliver. Some
will blame the left for this, but Harris tried centrism as did
Biden and Clinton before her, and that didn't work, either.
Leftists do not control the Democratic Party and never have;
only consider the party's intransigence on Gaza. If the Democratic
brand is poison now, blame its grifter consultants, who never fail
out of politics no matter how many pivotal races they lose. Blame
Harris, too, whose message was simply too anemic to overcome decades
of Democratic failure.
[11-12]
Bigotry is not the answer to Donald Trump: There's a Seth Moulton
quote in here that is horrible not because he's slandering trans
people (maybe he wanted to, but I doubt he's referring any actual
people) but because it shows how clueless some Democrats can be
when it comes to facing Republican talking points. Democrats have
to get much smarter at that. Some decent humane principles wouldn't
hurt, either.
Even so, the Democratic Party's problems did not start with Harris
or with her economic policy, or with a few pro-trans remarks that
she made before she ran for president. The party's inconsistency --
its refusal to reliably champion working Americans -- left trans
people vulnerable to attacks from the right. Had voters believed
that Democrats would lower the costs of housing or health care or
other basic necessities, perhaps Harris would have won, or at least
run a closer race. Instead she courted elites, as generations of
Democrats have done before her, and handed the country to an
aspiring tyrant.
Now some Democrats and their liberal supporters would rather
help Trump divide the working class against itself than admit the
party failed. Liberals project their own intellectual and moral
failings onto the left, which they accuse of rigidity and a certain
wishful thinking. When Maureen Dowd
wrote that "woke is broke" in her post-election diatribe, she
imagined a country that is nothing more than a mirror of herself.
When the hosts of Morning Joe
read her column on air in its tedious entirety, they revealed
themselves, not some hidden truth in the national soul. Their
conclusions are far too convenient to be realistic. How lucky for
Dowd that voters share her exact biases, that their enemies are
her enemies and their fears her fears.
Democrats need to deal with the electorate they have, but they
can and should do so without denigrating trans and nonbinary people.
Liberals and electeds who say the party should move further to the
right do so because they aren't interested in serving the working
class. They'd rather absolve themselves while avoiding the hard
work of introspection. That way lies a political dead end. If the
Democratic Party is to be fit for purpose, it will have to offer
voters real answers, not technocracy or elitism or scapegoats.
Trans people didn't cost Democrats the election. Liberals did
that all by themselves.
[11-08]
The debate over what Democrats do now hinges on one question:
"There are two ways of interpreting Harris's loss." Actually, there
are lots of ways to interpret the loss. The question isn't which one
is right. (Even if you could do that, what good would it do you? A
book? A posh job in academia, or at some think tank?) The only real
question is: what, given the new reality, do you do about it? And
no single Democrat is going to answer that. As Will Rogers explained
back in the 1930s: "I am not a member of any organized political
party. I am a Democrat." Today's Democrats aren't more organized
or ideologically coherent than they were in Rogers' day. Ever since
the Civil War, the Republicans have been the core party -- calling
themselves the G.O.P. was brilliant, shape-shifting PR -- and the
Democrats were whatever fell off the margins: tariff-adverse traders
and bankers, big city immigrant machines, neo-Confederates, rural
populists, any stray Catholics or Jews. Under FDR, they picked up
labor support, and briefly became the majority, but Republicans
never lost their conceit that they are the one true American party,
and as they became more conservative, they evened up the balance by
welcoming white racists (while Democrats attracted blacks and other
estranged minorities, while losing their older ethnic groups to the
Republican melting pot).
After losing Congress in 1994 and 2010, Democratic presidents
could consolidate their control over what was left of the Party,
and respond to the losses in a coherent manner -- which guided
both Clinton and Obama to second terms, but offered damn little
help for other Democrats (either politicians or the party base).
But this loss, like the McCain loss in 2008, leaves the Party with
no leadership. Harris has liquidated her political capital, as
have her predecessors (Biden, Obama, the Clintons), who were all
very much (in retrospect, much too much) of her campaign.
Which basically sets up a free-for-all to see who can rise
up and lead a revived Democratic Party. Sure, some pundits and
consultants are going to advise accommodation to the right winds,
but who among the rank-and-file really wants to compromise on
abortion bans, book burning, or genocide arming? At some point,
you have to decide that enough is enough, that the right and
the rich already have much more than they deserve, and that we
have to fight back. And as that happens, new leaders will rise
from the ranks. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is once again setting
an example of a politician who intends to defend us -- from Trump,
of course, but also from the defeatists in our own ranks.
After the utter disaster of the Bush-Cheney regime in 2008,
the Republican grandees were left aimless and speechless. Then
the Tea Party broke out, and moved the Party radically to the
right. The Tea Party didn't take over the Party, but the Party
revived, largely on their energy, and bounced back remarkably
fast. This will be harder for Democrats, because everything is
harder for Democrats, but it won't be for lack of issues and
critical analysis. And if the money powers get in the way, we
need to learn to live without them, and show them to be the
villains they actually are.
[11-15]
The left's comforting myth about why Harris lost: "Progressives
need an accurate autopsy of Kamala Harris's campaign, not an
ideologically convenient one." Too late to mount a critique of
this one, but that may be a worthy future project, especially
as Levitz expands on his ideas in his new
The Rebuild newsletter. I shouldn't get too defensive about
Levitz's seeming turn against "the left," as the real bottom
line here is how to make the Democratic Party more viable in
general elections. The left needs an effective Democratic Party
to implement our preferred policies (which are the best policies
for everyone -- that's why we prefer them). But the Democratic
Party also needs a strong left to keep them focused on real
problems, steering away from the temptations of donors and
their special interests.
Answering those questions will require Democrats to analyze their
predicament with open minds. If we seek ideologically comforting
explanations for the party's problems -- rather than empirically
sound ones -- the coalition will march deeper into the wilderness.
Unfortunately, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris's
loss, virtually
every
Democratic faction has produced its share of motivated reasoning.
In future newsletters, I plan to take issue with some centrists'
analysis of the party's difficulties. But today, I want to explain
why I worry that the left is allowing wishful thinking to cloud its
vision of political reality.
Since November 5, some progressives have drawn a sweeping lesson
from Trump's second victory: Harris's loss proves Democrats gain
little from
"moderation"
or
"centrism"
and must
"embrace
radical policies" in order to compete. I admire many of the
writers making this argument. But their confidence in this
narrative strikes me as wildly unfounded.
It is true that Harris
pivoted to the center on border security, crime, and, to a
lesser extent, economics. There are plenty of sound arguments --
both moral and political -- against Democrats moderating on
specific issues. Yet it's hard to see how anyone could be
confident that Harris lost because she moderated, much less
that her loss proved that moderation is electorally
counterproductive as a rule.
I habitually respond to world events by imaging the kind
of book I'd like to write about them. I've had a practical
political book in mind at least since the 2004 election where
I would methodically detail how Republicans are evil-hearted,
lame-brained bastards leading us to ruin, and try to convince
Democrats that they could not only win elections but actually
solve problems by drawing on left ideas. While my faith in
the healing power of those ideas remains, the 2024 election
has demolished my faith that better ideas can win elections.
So that kills off the old book concept, and intrdouces a new
one: What We Learned From the 2024 Elections. I don't
know the answer to that yet, but I what I suspect is that it
has very little to do with issues and policies, and even less
with the left-right axis, but turns around credibility and
trust, on how you talk to people.
Milan Loewer: [11-05]
If Harris loses today, this is why: "To win working-class voters --
and possibly today's election -- Democrats need to attack economic
elites. But the Kamala Harris campaign hasn't consistently offered
an anti-elite counter to Donald Trump's right-wing populism." On
the other hand, Republicans are very adept at channeling rage
against elite Democrats. Why can't Democrats turn the tables on
the some of the most entitled, selfish, greedy people in America?
Nate Cohn: [11-02]
Why are Democrats having such a hard time beating Trump? "The
national political environment just isn't as conducive to a Harris
victory as many might imagine." I don't really buy the argument for
a global tide toward conservatism, and there's much else I'd nitpick
in his left-and-right momentum survey, but he's certainly right that
Harris leaned against progressive policies that just four years ago
Biden leaned into, and that undermined both the Democrats' credibility
and the message that Trump and the Republicans are nihilist lunatics
with no plans that could actually solve anything.
Branko Marcetic: [11-06]
Democratic Party elites brought us this disaster. I'm tempted
to quote lots of this rant, but can't quite hone in on any single
section. I also rather doubt that the Trump vote is being driven
by economic hardship -- not least because Trump's offering nothing
to help, whereas Harris actually is. The problem there seems to be
that mass of people who believe Trump on everything and Harris (or
any other Democrats) on nothing.
As a general rule, politicians campaign for donors early on, and
make amends to donors after the election, but during the closing
stretch, they focus on trying to appeal to voters. That's the point
when, for Democrats at least, their messaging leans left, toward
things that might actually help people. Voters have good reason to
be skeptical, and I can think of cases where it didn't work well,
but at least the politician is showing them some respect. I can't
say as I was paying a lot of attention, but I didn't notice Harris
doing that this campaign. Rather, they were raising money like crazy,
and she doesn't seem to have taken the necessary step of changing
that money into votes. I think that goes back to credibility, which
has been in short supply since Clinton started triangulating. Even
if it seemed to be working, as with Clinton and Obama, you look
back years later, and see what the donors got out of the process,
but can't remember what you got.
Clinton like to quote Harry Truman as saying, "if you want to
live like a Republican, you have to vote Democratic." Problem
there is that when folk start living like Republicans, they start
voting Republican, so you lose them -- especially the snots who
will kick the ladder out so no one else can follow them (which,
by the way, seems to be part of the problem why Democrats are
losing Latino voters). Meanwhile, the people who didn't make it
up start blaming you, and some of them vote Republican (or just
don't vote) just to spite you, so it's lose-lose.
Nicholas Nehamas/Andrew Duehren: [11-09]
Harris had a Wall Street-approved economic pitch. It fell flat.
"The vice president vacillated on how to talk about the economy,
and ended up adopting marginal pro-business tweaks that both
corporate and progressive allies agreed made for a muddled message."
I wonder if her late start didn't have something to do with this.
She wound up spending way too much time talking to donors, and not
enough to voters. She adopted much of what the former told her,
and little from the latter. Most campaigns shift from one focus
to the other (then the donors get a second shot after the votes
are counted), but she was relentlessly, obsessively fundraising
up to the very end. That worked to raise a lot of funds, but
they never managed to turn those funds into votes -- possibly
because the interests aren't the same. Or maybe she had enough
time and help to figure things out, but just liked the donors
more. And wanted more to impress them, perhaps because that's
where her personal future lies (now more than ever).
Polgreen: On Tuesday we found out that the nation really,
really wanted a change. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency,
but Republicans took the Senate and made gains in blue states like my
home state of New York and big gains in New York City, too. . . .
McMillan Cottom: I don't live in New York full time, I live
in the South. I spent a lot of time with working-class people, people
living in the mountains and rural parts of the country. And I also saw
a sort of acceptance and integration of Donald Trump's vision of an
America where no one has to give up anything to win. And it appeals
a lot to Hispanic voters, to working-class voters, especially
working-class men. It appealed a lot to people in rural parts of
the state of all races. That concerned me and concerned me the
entire campaign.
Polgreen: I think I was a bit more optimistic, in part
because, to me, this election really turned on this question of
who has a stake in the system as it currently exists and who feels
that they could benefit from just blowing it all up. . . .
I think I felt hopeful that here we had a generic Democrat who
had these plain vanilla policies that were not that exciting. They
tried to address around the edges some of the issues that people
needed from government.
I thought maybe that could work. Maybe there's just enough chaos,
just enough of a sense that this is too dangerous. That gamble was
just wrong, and ultimately you were right.
McMillan Cottom: Again, I take no pleasure in that because
if I am right, I am right because I thought -- and now have evidence --
that the anger that Americans feel cannot be directed toward the truth.
More interesting things in here, including:
Polgreen: The other thing is that we are living in this
zero-sum moment where people think giving something to someone else
means taking something away from me.
There was that moment where JD Vance was talking about how if
immigrants made countries rich, then Springfield, Ohio, would be
the richest city in the world, and the United States would be the
richest country in the world. Well, news flash, the United States
is the richest country in the world. . . .
McMillan Cottom: One of the things that JD Vance is
actually very good at that Donald Trump is not good at, is he
figured out how to take something that is a problem about
relative differences and make it feel like an absolute loss.
The point here isn't that Vance is really clever, but that he
finds a way to get back to his basic campaign proposition. He's
not unique -- I've seen Bernie Sanders do this many times, but
the secret here is not dogged repetition, but having a point to
get back to. Continuing:
McMillan Cottom:
But that relative loss, despite the fact that objectively, they
are still doing OK, is enough when turned into anxiety and fear
and aggression, which Donald Trump is very good at doing, feels
like an emotional catharsis. And then JD Vance comes behind and
says, "Not only are you losing, but yes, your loss is coming
because someone else is gaining."
What we do not have on the other side, to your point, is either
a center or center-left and, I'd even argue, a Democratic center-right
story that captures that emotion in the same kind of way.
Also:
Polgreen: Yeah. And I think that the idea that the Democratic
Party has to work within a set of defined rules of the existing order
is just a brain disease.
I had initially skipped over all the New York Times pundits, until
I was pointed here by:
What this suggests to me is that millions of voters didn't think
they were voting on a choice between chaos and stability. They
think both parties destabilize the country. So they chose Trump's
promise of a form of destabilization they found appealing over the
status quo, which they see as an unappealing destabilization.
In the famous
meme, a supporter of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party
says, "I never thought leopards would eat MY face." Donald Trump
won because millions of voters think Democratic policies lead
leopards to eat their faces, and Trump's policies will make leopards
eat the faces of people they don't like.
In particular, young men of all ethnicities think liberal culture
has created a pro-queer gynocracy that's eating the faces of straight
males. They want leopards to eat the faces of people they think are
benefiting in this culture. . . .
A majority of Hispanic men
appear to have voted for Trump despite the fact that some will be
caught up in his crackdown on undocumented immigrants. These Trump
voters believe that only the undocumented will have their faces eaten,
and they're fine with that. (Harris campaigned on a border crackdown,
so she didn't talk much about how heavy-handed Trump's immigration
policies are likely to be.)
Trump chose popular victims of the leopards -- women, trans people,
immigrants, criminals. Democrats could have chosen the rich, but
bashing the rich reportedly scares some moderates. It sets off alarm
bells in the "liberal" commentariat and reduces the big-money
contributions that are necessary for Democrats to run one of our
country's staggeringly expensive presidential campaigns.
Eeyore: I was right to be pessimistic, and it's clear
that I should have remained pessimistic even after Kamala Harris
entered the race.
Democrats and Republicans agree that Democrats are bad
[longer quote to follow]
Maybe ground game is meaningless
But didn't voters think Trump is crazy?
Which brings me to Biden: But the race might have been
different for her or Biden if Biden had been able to persuade
voters that he cared and was working hard to make their lives
better [but he couldn't, and she wouldn't].
And also, America is massively sexist: I don't think
I'll live to see a female president. There are too many trad
Christians and too many whiny boy-men -- and they just elected
the biggest whiny boy-man of them all.
The point about Democrats cited a comment from
Frank Wilhoit that is worth quoting here:
People vote their emotional compulsions, which, by definition, are
purely destructive; that is why all voting is negative-partisan.
Trump will get one vote: his own. The votes that are recorded as
his will be votes against, not Kamala Harris, but the Democratic
Party and its constituencies. Comparably, Harris will get no votes at
all; the votes that are recorded as hers will be votes against,
not Trump, but the Republican Party and its constituencies.
History is on the side of the Republicans here, because they
understand what is going on; that is why they focus exclusively
upon degrading the Democratic brand. We do not understand. . . . We
should have spent every moment of the past forty-five years screaming
total rejection of the "conservative" pseudophilosophy, and nothing
else. . . .
It is too late now; one cannot suddenly "discover" a problem that
has been in being for decades and try to whip up any urgency around it.
Waleed Shahid: [11-18]
The left didn't sink Kamala Harris. Here's what did. "It's easier
to blame activists, but far more powerful forces have led Democrats
to neglect the real crises facing Americans." Much of this is to be
expected, but the ending is stirring:
History reveals that oversimplified approaches often sidestep the
harder questions. Success doesn't come from rejecting the complexity
of a diverse coalition but from learning to navigate it. To win,
Democrats must inspire the public in a fractured information age,
engage meaningfully with the cultural shifts around race, gender,
family, and migration, make democracy work despite obstructionists
like Manchin and Sinema, and -- most critically -- deliver tangible
results that improve people's lives. And if the corporate, status
quo -- loving forces within the party are standing in the way of
that mission, they must be moved aside.
Success will come not by pointing fingers but by telling a story
of transformation -- with clear villains, bold vision, and conviction
that democracy can, indeed, make a difference.
The first part of the last line could use some editing: you do
need to point fingers, but at the clear villains that are essential
to your story. The one thing you have to grant Republicans is that
they're good at identifying villains. It shouldn't be hard to name
our own:
Greedy, arrogant billionaire donors (or more broadly but also
more succinctly, the 1%). These are the people who feel entitled
to run the world.
Right-wing media. These are the people who will lie and cheat
and play any imaginable games to control your minds.
The theocrats who want a new inquisition, to force you to live
as they think you should. These are the people who will take away
your rights and freedom.
The scammers, scoundrels, crooks and frauds. These are the
people who will steal whatever else you have left.
That's not a lot of people, but they have a big impact on very
many lives. And bear in mind that the goal in identifying these
villains isn't the all-too-popular wish to "lock them up" or to
"take them out." The goal is to significantly reduce their power
over and impact on everyone else.
Norman Solomon: [11-07]
Democrats ignored every warning and the results are catastrophic:
"Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the
Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and
planet are truly beyond comprehension."
Andrew Prokop:
[11-06]
One striking pattern hidden in the election results: "Were voters
rejecting Democrats -- or just the Biden-Harris administration?" Or,
I have to ask, just Harris? I haven't entertained the possibility,
at least in print, that they simply don't trust a person with any/all
of her attributes, which most obviously include: woman, color, from
California, both parents immigrants. None of that bothers me, nor
does it bother most people, and nearly all of the people who think
of such things were going to vote Trump anyway, but if you can't
win the kind of landslide you deserve on issues alone, maybe think
about that. As for the pattern:
But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there's a striking
pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or,
put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than
Trump.
[11-06]
Why Kamala Harris lost: "Trump won because Harris inherited a
tough situation from Joe Biden -- and ultimately could not overcome
it." I'll nominate this piece for a bracket elimination tournament
to find the most intellectually lazy explanation for the loss. He
offers three reasons: a global trend ("in the years since the pandemic,
incumbent parties have been struggling in wealthy democracies across
the world"); "Biden's unpopularity" (which Harris "had to figure out
what to do about that"); and "Harris's own record," by which he means
Harris's 2019 presidential campaign, when she "embraced progressive
policy positions that Democrats now view as politically toxic."
As I've said, I don't know what the answer is, but it's got to be
something more than that. As for the "tough situation" Biden left
Harris in, his only detail was that Israel-Gaza had "divided
Democrats' coalition." (I'd submit that it didn't divide the
coalition that actually identified as Democrats, but it turned
off a lot of other voters that Harris needed.)
[11-11]
The debate over why Harris lost is in full swing. Here's a guide.
"Was she a weak candidate? Was it Joe Biden's fault? Did Trump have
unexpected strength? Or was it a global trend?" This appeared too
late for me to explore, but I have one suggestion: instead of looking
for things that might have moved the needle a point or two, start
from the assumption that Trump (and most Republicans) were be any
objective criteria so bad they should have lost by at least 10,
possibly 20 points, and see if you can identify any problems at
that scale? I'd start with money and media structure, and then
consider the difficulties of establishing trust against those
odds. Harris wasn't a weak candidate so much as one not strong
enough to overcome those bigger obstacles. Same for Biden, who
had some additional weaknesses that Harris only partly made up
for. We can go on down the list, but we keep coming back to what
happened to the world to make Trump seem credible, while Harris
was ultimately judged by many to be some kind of phony.
Nathan J Robinson: [11-06]
Once again, the Democratic leadership has failed us all:
"In 2016, we warned that Hillary Clinton's campaign was not resonating
with Americans. In 2024, we warned about Kamala Harris, and we were
ignored again. Now, the worst has happened. So, what do we do? A
leftist analysis can help us chart a path forward."
Since we're here, let's file some "I told you so" links cited in
the article:
[10-23]
Is Kamala blowing it? "Her campaign began with huge fanfare.
Now she's slipping in the polls and making seemingly obvious
mistakes. What's going on?"
[08-21]
Politics should not be parasocial: "We are electing a head of
state who will wield immense power and control a massive nuclear
arsenal. 'Policy' is not peripheral or dispensable, it's the only
thing that really matters."
[04-02]
What Trump understands about war: "Donald Trump's militarism
is even worse than Biden's. But he's keeping relatively quiet on
Israel-Palestine, probably because he knows the public doesn't
like war."
Bret Stephens: [11-06]
A party of prigs and pontificators suffers a humiliating defeat:
I can't stand Stephens, who even spoils his conversations with Gail
Collins -- their latest,
The Trump era never really ended, has a title that could develop
into interesting analysis, but doesn't. This piece, too, is mostly
crap, but he gives you a good taste of how the Republican mindset
caricatures Democrats. (Do you suppose his Harris endorsement was
another plant? He doesn't seem to have the faculties to have based
it on reason -- well, as he explains later in the piece, his first
reason for voting for Harris was Ukraine, followed by trade policy.
The only time Republicans ever go bipartisan is when they suspect
an opportunity to make Democrats look bad to their voters.)
Here's a sample:
The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was
part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections
many Americans have to various progressive causes. [bogus examples
follow, starting with trans athletics]
The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom.
But the politics of today's left is heavy on social engineering
according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the
forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions
of Americans who want to live and let live but don't like being told
how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which
explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive
disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.
Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat
him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy
ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. [more bogus examples]
And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly
since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or
less intact.
Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness,
pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but
how's that ever going to be a winning electoral look?
This is massively unfair, but it's the bread and butter of
right-wing media, so Democrats have to get better at handling
it. That doesn't mean inching closer to Republicans, not least
because that never works, but better framing is possible, and
trust-building is essential. I don't see that working with a
hack like Stephens, but most people are more open-minded than
him (or minded, for that matter).
Bernie Sanders: Sanders
endorsed and campaigned for Harris. After the election he
posted this:
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has
abandoned working class people would find that the working class has
abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is
Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership
defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
And they're right.
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of
Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth
inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for
weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now
than they were 50 years ago.
I don't have the links handy, but right after Sanders
made his statement about Democrats abandoning the working class, I saw
a bunch of flak on Twitter charging Sanders with hypocrisy because
during the campaign he praised Biden's record for labor (most pro-labor
president since . . . ?). Pretty low bar, but during a campaign you
take what you can get. Afterwards, you go back to what you want, which
is a candidate who is more effective for working people. Sanders wants
that. His detractors don't seem to.
Natalie Shure: [11-12]
Bernie would have won. Seriously. "Trump keeps winning because
the Democratic party refuses to be the party of the working class."
Sanders has one thing that few Democrats have, which is credibility.
The counterpoint is that if the Democratic Party had nominated Sanders,
rich Democrats like Michael Bloomberg would have bagged the election,
throwing it to Trump -- much like previous generations of Democratic
elites did to Bryan (1896) and McGovern (1972).
Jared Ryan Sears:
[reply to a
tweet that featured Sanders' post-election statement, the one
with charging the Democrats with abandoning the working class]:
Unions are the strongest they've been in decades.
Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.
The child tax credit was expanded.
A minimum corporate tax was enacted.
A tax on stock buybacks was added.
High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.
Millions of jobs were created.
Unemployment has remained low.
Manufacturing returned to the US.
Prescription prices were lowered.
More Americans have healthcare than ever before.
-Billions were given to student debt relief.
-The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered
Cobra payments, and even directly gave Americans money.
Let's stop pretending that nothing was done by this administration
when it inherited a pandemic, a migrant crisis, and high inflation and
managed not only to address all of those issues through Republican
obstruction but accomplished much more as well.
There's always more to do, and mistakes happen, but to act like
Democrats abandoned the working class is ridiculous.
Lots of comments follow, some agreeing with Sanders, but most
attacking him, the vitriol especially strong from points farther
left -- attacks on his endorsements of Clinton/Biden/Harris (I
always filed those under "go along to get along," a game he's
played rather skillfully) and charging him with genocide (he did
reflexively support Israel after the Oct. 7 revolt, but as it
became clear that Netanyahu's game plan was genocide, he has
shown exceptional clarity and bravery in opposing US arms to
further that genocide). I've generally insisted that people of
the left are good-hearted, well-meaning, and thoughtful, but
by evidence here, at least a dozen are simple-minded assholes,
not unlike thousands (or millions?) on the right.
PS: On second thought, I think these comments were to
Sanders' original thread, not to the Zachary Carter tweet that
led me to it. It is quite possible that he is heckled like this
all the time, and that the "extreme left" attacks are deceptive
trolls. Sorry for opening that can of worms.
Resisting and coping:
I've generally put
the "what comes next" pieces under Trump (second section), but the
corresponding "what do we do now" pieces are likely to have nothing
to do with Harris (not that the idea doesn't crop up in the various
pieces critical of the Harris campaign). I wasn't really expecting
to do this section, but found one piece, and thought there may be
more (e.g., I moved the Ganz piece in from elsewhere).
John Ganz: [11-06]
I hope I'm wrong: "About Trump and other things." Many
worthy thoughts in this post:
There's a political lesson there, too, though, that applies to the
present moment: having a clear vision of things, even if it is
unpleasant or dark, beats no vision or an unclear one. Trump's
campaigns had a clear mythos: a story about what America is and
was and where it is going. No Democratic candidate that's run
against him has been able to articulate an opposing vision. This
is not particular to this or that candidate, although all of them
had individual weaknesses. We can litigate that forever. But it's
really a problem of American liberalism: liberalism is unsure of
itself and ameliorative, it's not a bold vision of the future as
it once was in its heyday under LBJ or FDR. Trumpism may be reactionary,
but liberalism too, has become too backward-looking -- look at my
references in the previous sentence. It longs for an old age of
consensus instead of gamely going to war to win a new one. American
liberalism has also become a land of smug statisticians and wonks
who want to test every proposition and shrink from striking out in
a new direction, from testing rhetorical appeals in the public arena
rather than the statistical survey. Trump and his campaigns were
willing to venture boldly and that's part of what appealed to people.
He said, "Follow me and make history," a dubious claim made by others
before him, but it excites people.
He also admits that his command of the history of fascism may
not have helped:
Antifascism is a century-old tradition now and the critics of who see
in it a longing to recreate an old order are on to something. It's a
politics of memory and meaning that are fading from this world. But
it at least has a certain imaginative dimension, it's an ethos: its
mythical core contains a struggle between good and evil. Unfortunately,
it doesn't resonate at this moment. For voters for whom "democracy"
was an issue Harris was the obvious choice, but that wasn't enough
people. It's perhaps too idealistic, too abstract and airy, and not
focused enough on practical issues, although for me it's a social
democratic impulse, uniting the struggle for democracy and people's
day-to-day needs. In any case, it's not a story that the American
people get anymore.
He also points out that "resistance" has its legacy rooted in the
struggle against fascism, which may not be the best model right now.
In particular, Trump's popular margin has given him a clear path to
power, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, who used their demagoguery to
gain a power base, but in the end resorted to force to seize power.
Nicole Narea: [11-16]
Democrats got wiped out in 2004. This is what they did next.
"The last time Democrats lost the popular vote spurred a reckoning."
Both times the presidential race was close, but was combined with
Republicans winning both sides of Congress, leaving a leadership
vacuum in the Party. Howard Dean campaigned to run the DNC, and
worked hard to rebuild it from the grass roots up, leading to a
major success in 2006. After that success, Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama seized the throne, turning the party back into an
extension of their personal campaigns, and left the rest of the
party for dead, but that's another story.
Sub-sections here:
They pursued a 50-state strategy
Democrats reevaluated their messaging
Democrats sought to become a party of ideas
Last section is "the limits of political strategy," so some
caveats.
Nathan J Robinson: [11-14]
Here's the silver lining: "Horrible Republican policies are
inevitably unpopular and will generate backlash. As Trump's presidency
becomes a chaotic failure, a new left movement can rise." While it
is a near certainty that Republican policies will fail to solve the
problems they target (even by their own measures), and that they will
generate backlash that will propel a Democratic resurgence (assuming
we still get to vote -- a risk Republicans are all too aware of). But
his "the dog that caught the car" metaphor is dead wrong. Republicans
know exactly what they want to do with the car once they've caught it.
And while Bush in 2000, Reagan in 1980, and Nixon in 1968 offer some
precedents, Trump is moving much more aggressively than any previous
president-elect.
Robinson further
tweeted: "this is not to diminish the terrible harm that will be
done. It's going to be utterly awful, but it may spark unexpected
popular uprising that lead to a transformative political movement."
I responded:
The "dog that catches the car" metaphor doesn't work here. Trump may
seem clueless -- I've quipped that he doesn't know how to devise "dog
whistles"; he's just a dog who responds to them -- but his crew know
exactly what they want to do, and are doing it at record speed.
Another commenter, perhaps facetiously: "Thank you for your role
in giving the American people this convenient accelerant. When you
think about it, in the end it was Hitler who brought lasting democracy
to Germany after the war."
Timothy Shenk: [11-08]
It's time to resist the resistance: "Resistance" in the sense of
reflexive opposition that focuses on Trump personally:
The origins of Resistance politics go back over a decade, even before
Mr. Trump entered politics. In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines
as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama's team seized
the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican
opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager
turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. "Let's really
lean into Trump here," Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. "That'll be
good for us."
And it was, for a while -- so good that when Mr. Plouffe joined
Kamala Harris's campaign over the summer, it still seemed like the
basis for a winning coalition. . . .
But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the
rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It's
reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms
of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under
assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that
needs protecting.
Robert Wright: [11-08]
How to fight Trump mindfully. This is good, but that he's actually
quoting himself from seven years ago is a bit inauspicious:
The premise of the Mindful Resistance Project is that understanding
and addressing the root causes of Trumpism is important -- so
important that we shouldn't let Trump's antics and outrages get in
the way of this mission. To put a finer point on it: 1) We need to
respond to each day's news about Trump wisely -- with moral clarity
and forceful conviction but with awareness of the way overreactions
to his provocations can play into his hands. 2) Meanwhile, we need
to get a deeper understanding of the forces that led so many people
to vote for Trump. These forces include globalization, demographic
change, the loss of jobs through automation, and a political
polarization that is grounded partly in the tribalizing tendencies
of social media. This polarization is also grounded in what you might
call the psychology of tribalism, in cognitive biases that afflict
us all -- so fostering an understanding of how our minds work will
be among the goals of this project.
Senate:
Nia Prater: [10-07]
Where does control of the US Senate stand? As of Thursday,
Republicans defeated Democratic incumbents in Ohio and Montana,
and picked up the seat in West Virginia (not reported here), with
races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada still undecided (with
Pennsylvania looking like another Republican gain).
House of Representatives:
I thought I'd
have more in this section, including specific races, but I never
even got around to looking at the numbers.
Gerry Condon: [11-10]
November 11 was originally Armistice Day, a peace holiday:
I didn't realize the holiday until I got a bunch of email this
morning offering special deals to veterans -- reminding me that
my "service," which mostly consisted of trying to get and keep
us out of bullshit wars, is still very much unappreciated.
Condon's a member of Veterans for Peace, so he deserves
thanks on both counts.
Ed Kilgore: [11-07]
The pro-choice ballot winning streak ends: "Voters in Florida,
Nebraska, and South Dakota rejected constitutional amendments
protecting abortion rights." In Florida, the amendment got 57% of
the vote, but 60% was required to pass.
On the other hand, abortion-rights initiatives won in seven states,
including four carried by Trump. Margins of victory in these red
states ranged from 4 percent in Missouri to 16 percent in Montana,
22 percent in Arizona, and 28 percent in Nevada.
Three blue states predictably passed sweeping abortion-rights
measures by comfortable margins. In Colorado (62 percent "yes") and
Maryland (74 percent "yes"), state constitutional amendments were
approved providing for unconditional abortion rights. In New York,
abortion rights were advanced via a much broader "equal-rights
amendment" that won 62 percent (despite earlier fears it was in
trouble).
Griffin Eckstein: [11-09]
Jones calls for "Nuremberg Two" against Democrats following Trump
win: "The conspiracy theorist and radio host said the Trump DOJ
had a mandate from God to prosecute Dems." The subhed is no surprise,
but the invocation of "Nuremberg" shows a mind-boggling level of
ignorance (specifically, about Nazi Germany) and contempt for truth,
and indeed for everyone. Of course, that's hardly news with this
guy.
John Herrman: [11-08]
Big Tech's loyalty era: "Elon Musk's big bet paid off. Tech
leaders are adjusting -- and warming -- to a new reality."
Timothy Noah: [11-08]
Dump Twitter: "If you stick with Elon Musk, you're complicit."
Whatever you call it, the social media site was Musk's primary tool
to elect Trump. In Bloomberg's Tech Daily newsletter for November 7,
Kurt Wagner writes that Musk "turned his feed into a Trump-inspired
billboard for his more than 200 million followers," that it "became
a major source of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories," that Musk
"re-shared posts from the former president's supporters, not all
of them accurate," and that Musk turned X into "a much more powerful
version of Truth Social."
Still, hard for me to see how shutting down my account, with
3000 posts, 650 followers, and 49 following, is going to make a
dent in Musk's bottom line, much less his brain.
John Feffer: [10-30]
The cruelty of crowds: "The far right has weaponized the
Internet."
[11-07]
Why Bidenomics failed to win the white working class: "The
administration bet that subsidies to rebuild American manufacturing
would bring voters back to the Democratic Party while lowering
emissions. That bet has failed."
[11-05]
The underestimated power of the climate voter: "New data suggests
environmentally motivated voters might matter mmore than previously
thought. But their priorities haven't gotten much airtime this
election season."
There was a real inflation backlash (even though chart shows
that "overall wage growth has outpaced inflation")
The job market is tougher (chart shows: "more people are
facing long-term unemployment")
Americans have less money and are taking on more debt
(chart: "Americans are saving less after the pandemic"; doesn't
look like much less, after a big spike during the pandemic, but
credit card debt and delinquency rates are up)
By the way, here's more on the credit card thing:
Steve M: [11-08]
The election explained, in two charts. I probably missed the
significance of this because I don't have any credit card debt,
and had no idea the interest rates were this high (21.9%, up
from a little over 14% just a year ago?). Part of the problem
has to do with Biden reappointing Trump's Fed Chair pick, but
the larger part is that we got rid of the anti-usury laws that
used to provide a cap on this kind of loansharking. Harris could
have came out with an anti-usury platform, and when questioned
about it, told folk to look it up in the Bible. That, plus
writing off most student debt -- which only exists due to
political malfeasance, and which while Biden attempted some
remedies, Harris hardly ever talked about -- would have had
much broader and more tangible appeal than the silly notion
of exempting tip income (a Trump idea that Harris adopted
and helped legitimize -- every time you create a haven for
untaxable income, you undermine our ability to tax the rich.
How hard would it have been to point out that if we taxed
rich folk at levels they had to pay before they paid off
politicians for their tax cuts, people who depend on tips
to make up for subminimal wages, as well as everyone else
who is underpaid in America, could be taxed less, and get
better benefits in the bargain?
By the way, M. points out (and I can relate, not least
by being a bit older):
Ordinary people were already struggling more than their parents,
then inflation struck in 2021. It hurt incumbent parties all over
the world.
But the two charts at the top of this post show how the economy
looks to people who were already struggling to pay their bills
every month when inflation hit. In all likelihood, they pulled
out credit cards to buy necessities, and now they can't pay those
credit cards off.
My wife and I can afford to pay our credit card bills in full
every month, but I don't look down on people who can't. If your
family is bigger than ours, if you're younger (we're in our sixties),
if you've ever had a stretch of unemployment or big medical bills,
you have it harder than we did. If you went to college or grad
school in the past twenty years, you'd be shocked at how small
our student loan burden was in the 1970s.
By economists' criteria, this is a booming economy. It's pretty
sweet for people who can afford it. But I completely understand
that it doesn't look so sweet if you're living paycheck to paycheck.
I tried to run a one-person business for a while in my twenties
and early thirties and got myself in debt. It sucks. It sucks to pay
a partial bill and see no decrease in the debt because the interest
keeps compounding and compounding. I managed to get out of that debt
and never looked back, but when you're in the thick of it, it's
miserable.
If you've never been in that situation, count your blessings. If
you think everyone who gets into debt is a bad person, well, I guess
I was a bad person.
Wiley Nickel: [11-11]
What should Democrats do now? Form a shadow cabinet. "The venerable
British institution of the opposition would serve America well today."
I've loved this idea ever since I first found out about it. It's more
natural in a parliamentary democracy than it would be in America, but
it could be done here, and it would give Democrats some leadership
visibility in each specific area of government. Nickel is proposing
drawing the cabinet from Congress members, which would make it a lot
like the committee minority members. I think it would be better for
the DNC to organize and raise money for a shadow government, mostly
of technical experts (which could include some notables, like Pete
Buttigieg in Transportation, or Robert Reich in Labor, or former
members of Congress), selected by the Democratic caucus in Congress,
possibly adding Democratic governors, maybe even party chairs in the
underrepresented-but-still-important red states.
Osita Nwanevu: [11-08]
The long Obama era is over: "The democrats must learn to speak
to voters who don't believe in the politics of old and aren't
interested in returning to it." I never thought of there being
any "Obama era," probably because he made so little effort at
delineating it from the "Clinton era," which he jumped the line
on to little if any practical effect. The more customary term
for them both, on through Biden and Harris, is "neoliberalism,"
except that one already lost its cachet before Biden.
The long Obama era is over. The familiar homilies -- about how there
are no red states or blue states and Americans share a set of common
values and working institutions novelly and externally threatened by
agents of chaos like Trump -- never described political reality. They
now no longer work reliably even as political messaging. The hunt
should be on for alternatives.
The word "homilies" is striking here. Obama specialized in them,
as if he had to constantly remind us that he was utterly conventional,
someone who could be counted on to always say the correct thing. I
remember my surprise at one point when Trump made fun of Obama for
always ending his speeches with "God bless America." It's the most
anodyne statement ever for an American politician, and yet it gives
these yokels, who claim to put God and America above all else, an
excuse to laugh at him.
Stephen Semler:
[09-10]
US child poverty nearly tripled between 2021 and 2023: This
seems like a possibly big deal, not just on the headline topic
but on a wide range of economic issues. The key here is a chart
of "several key US anti-poverty measures expired or were eliminated
after 2021." As the chart makes clear, most of them started with
the pandemic of 2020, while Trump was president, and ended 2021-23,
while Biden was president. Only the last two items started after
Biden became president (child care provider grants, WIC increase).
One might read this chart and think Trump was the champion of
welfare expansion, and Biden its nemesis. The truth is different:
all of the items were pushed by Democrats, mostly by Pelosi and
Schumer when they crafted Trump's first pandemic relief bill. To
mollify Republicans, they were sold as emergency measures and they
included sunset clauses. Democrats tried to extend some of them
(things like the eviction and foreclosure bans were never going
to be extended), but were frustrated by Republicans plus the
sandbagging of a few Democrats (notably Manchin and Sinema, who
held the deciding votes on many issues). Biden's support for
the measures was less clear, but it's grossly simplistic to
blame him for not being able to extend such useful programs.
The child poverty figures are especially striking, dropping
from 12.6% to 5.2% from 2019 to 2021, then rebounding to 12.4%
immediately after ending the child tax credit. The lower figure
shows what could easily be done with a bit of political will,
but that's just one of many metrics here. Few people appreciated
that it was the Democrats who made these remarkable changes happen,
in part because Democrats who wanted to work with Trump shied away
from taking credit. (Trump's subsequent bills were much weaker and
less effective.) But also because Democrats didn't want to see them
as a first start toward a massive expansion of social benefits, as
something to build the future on. The pandemic was a very unusual
period in American history -- one that deviated so far from the
expectations of both political parties that neither seems to be
able to deal with it. Republican delusions are expected, but seems
like the Democrats can't wait to forget either, even though if
they could, they might discover that they by and large behaved
with the care and concern we hope for from the political system,
but rarely get. Why couldn't they campaign on that?
[11-06]
A couple charts to explain a Harris loss: The two charts are:
"US food insecurity increased 40% since 2021" ("number of people
living in food insecure housholds" increased from 33.8M to 47.4M),
and "Poverty in the US increased 67% since 2021" ("number of people
living below the poverty line" increased from 25.6M to 42.8M).
Both of these charts, which measure pretty much the same thing,
show 2020-21 dips before the 2022 rebound. The 2021 columns show
the effects of pandemic relief programs, which had sunset clauses
and were allowed to lapse, mostly due to Republican opposition
(plus a couple bad Democrats). As I noted above, Democrats didn't
claim much credit for the improvement, nor blame Republicans for
the later pain, which allowed people who didn't know any better
to flip the roles. As Semler notes:
Why did I consider her defeat likely? Because Harris ran on an
anti-populist economic agenda and an anti-antiwar foreign policy
platform, and neither of those things poll well.
Paul Waldman: [11-10]
Voters punished Biden for problems he didn't cause and effectively
addressed: But for some reason couldn't talk coherently about,
some of which can be attributed to age, some to his usual awkwardness,
but also also to the problem that Democrats have to speak both to
donors and to voters, two groups that want to hear different things,
a task that even the most eloquent of Democrats have trouble pulling
off. Alternate title, which I clicked on before arriving here, is
"Trump is about to take credit for Biden's accomplishments."
Matthew Yglesias: [11-12]
A Common Sense Democrat manifesto: This seemed monumental enough to
sneak in the day after. I was pointed here by Jonathan Chait, who
tweeted: "I think (or at least hope) this will be an important
reference document going forward." (Nathan Robinson heckled back:
"shouldn't you probably shut up for a while," with a link to Chait's
October 8 article:
The race is close because Harris is running a brilliant campaign:
"Stop complaining; the centrism is working.") Chait probably likes
it because Yglesias's neoliberalism is showing, and because it's
written in ways that signal anti-left bias. But the "principles"
aren't so bad:
Different people have different views and different priorities, and
principles need to be loose enough to accommodate some differences.
But I also don't want these to be total platitudes; I want some
people to read them and think, "Fuck this, I don't agree." Over the
next few weeks, I'll share posts elaborating on each one individually,
but in the meantime, these are the principles I'd like to see the
Democratic party embrace:
Economic self-interest for the working class includes both
robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.
The government should prioritize maintaining functional
public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.
Climate change -- and pollution more broadly -- is a reality
to manage, not a hard limit to obey.
We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their
character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting
discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that
elevate anyone's identity groups over their individuality.
Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy
must acknowledge that reality and uphold people's basic
freedom to live as they choose.
Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position
of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.
Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing
alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.
Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate
funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not
their workforce or abstract ideological projects.
All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government
requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American
citizens.
Before getting to his list, Yglesias explains (and here I'll add
my comments in brackets):
Being a Democrat should mean caring more than Republicans about the
lives of poor people, about equal rights and non-discrimination,
about restraining big business in matters related to pollution and
fraudulent practices, and about protecting social insurance for the
elderly and disabled. [I'd add everyone else to "poor people," but
you could just say 99% if villains are politically useful. Proper,
not means-tested, social insurance becomes more valuable as you go
up the income scale.]
These are important progressive ideas, and because they are
important progressive ideas, I think that anyone who identifies as
a leftist or a progressive should vote for Democrats. [So why try so
hard to drive us away? The charge that leftists are all-or-nothing
is easily disproven.]
But that doesn't mean that Democrats' agenda should be driven by
those on the far left [or the right, or corporate neoliberalism, or
identity groups, or any faction; it should be driven by problems and
practical solutions]. A big-tent Democratic coalition needs leftists.
But left-wing candidates are rarely winning tough elections, and too
often, they're not improving governance of the solidly blue places
where they're elected. [Leftists face many obstacles from entrenched
forces, including donor-seeking Democrats, but even so, is this really
a valid generalization?] . . .
Most elected Democrats are not, themselves, actually that far left,
and when faced with acute electoral peril, they swiftly ditch ideas
like defund the police or openness to unlimited asylum claims [which
are effectively caricaturs of leftist ideas, propagated to militate
against the left]. But what they haven't generally done is publicly
disavow the kind of simplistic disparate impact analysis that leads
to conclusions like policing is bad. Similarly, the Democrats are not
a degrowth party. [Degrowth is an idea that deserves consideration,
but isn't a left political position.] When good GDP numbers come in,
Joe Biden and his team celebrate them -- they believe in taking credit
for strong growth. But even without being a degrowth party, Democrats
are heavily influenced by the views of major environmentalist
organizations that do have a degrowth ideology at their core.
Critics on the right charge that Democrats are in the grips of
radical ideology, but the truth is more boring: Many elected officials
are just not particularly rigorous thinkers (think of how much
backbench Republicans have shifted on various policies since Trump
took over). Most only really understand a few issues and do a lot
of going along to get along. . . .
Winning elections is important, because if you don't win, you
can't govern. [But if you win on the basis of bad ideas that don't
work, your governing will have accomplished nothing, and you'll
lose again -- at least until the other party reminds people of
their own incompetence.]
The Republican Party is basically just a racket: they lie, cheat,
and steal, whatever it takes to ascend to power, so they can lie,
cheat, and steal some more. Democrats have to run against Republicans,
but they are also expected to tell the truth, to work earnestly for
the public good, and to deliver tangible results. Democrats need the
left, not just as reliable votes against Republicans, but because
the left has useful ideas to solve or at least ameliorate problems
that bedevil us. This repeated cycle of "centrist" or "neoliberal" --
Chait prefers the former term, while Yglesias is one of the few who
actually embraces the latter -- blaming the left for many failures
of the high-roller Democrats they favor needs to stop. Democrats
need to figure out how to sell viable solutions to the people,
and to deliver them once they are elected. Since most of those
solutions come from the left, they need to stop demonizing the
left, and start treating us as respectable and honorable.
PS: Chait just wrote
A farewell to New York, so with his new gig at The Atlantic,
I guess I won't have him to kick around any more. One more reason not
to subscribe.
Israel: This has been my top section
ever since Oct. 7, 2023, only pushed down due to the election.
David Hirst: [11-04]
Gaza genocide: Is Israel going mad? "Netanyahu gave religious
Zionists power. In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond, they
now feel they are enacting God's design for His chosen people.
This will not end well." Worse, it will not end. I could wind up
quoting much of this piece. It is hard for Americans, including
ones who think they know Israel, to really get a grip on these
people and what they are doing.
[10-25]
The attempt to justify mass killing: "Political commentator
Konstantin Kisin says he has heard both sides and carefully
concluded that Israel's war in Gaza is just. Let's examine his
arguments."
[11-05]
The killing of Gaza's children: "Trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa
on what he and his medical colleagues saw in Gaza and why this is
a problem of American foreign policy." An interview.
Juan Cole: [11-10]
What rough beast? "President Biden's Gaza policy leaves the
Middle East in flames. Although you can certainly blame Biden
for not knowing any better, I'm struck by how many disastrous
Biden moves here were actually initiated by Trump: especially
the cancellation of the Iran JCPOA, and the Abraham Accords
scheme to detach Arab support from the Palestinians. While we
knew that much of what Trump did in his first term would only
impact us later on, it's still shocking how hard these moves
kicked back.
[11-01]
What will a second Trump presidency mean for the Middle East?:
Posted pre-election: "The choice to not vote for someone as deeply
complicit in genocide as Kamala Harris must be respected. But we
can't afford to be naive about what it means if Donald Trump
returns."
Maged Mandour: [11-05]
How Arab autocrats enabled Israel's Gaza genocide: "Defeating
the Arab democracy movement left autocratic states hollowed out and
often reliant on US and Israeli support to survive. Palestinians
cannot expect help anytime soon."
Lubna Masarwa: [11-05]
Israel's UNRWA ban will be devastating for Palestinians: "Israel
wants to erase the only agency that recognises Palestinian refugees
and the right of return of their descendants, but it will never bury
the Palestinian struggle."
Craig Mokhiber: [11-05]
Turmoil at the ICC as fears rise over Israel and the US interference:
"The delay in issuing ICC warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav
Gallant, followed by the replacement of the presiding judge, has
raised serious concerns about the court's functioning and possible
machinations behind the scenes."
David Broder: [11-09]
Israeli fans meant it when they chanted "death to Arabs":
"Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rioting in Amsterdam chanted slogans like
'There are no schools in Gaza, as there are no children left.' Far
from just extremist provocations, their slogans tell the truth
about Israeli war aims."
Dan Sabbagh: [11-17]
Biden lifts ban on Ukraine using US weapons to strike deeper into
Russia. This is an appalling decision, even before you consider
the transition scenario. Is Biden gambling that Putin won't strike
back, because Trump is coming along soon enough? Is he trying to
poison the well for Trump? At least there's a precedent for that:
Bush sending troops into Somalia after losing to Clinton in 1992.
It took Clinton more than a year to untangle that, by which time
Al-Qaeda had turned on the US. As Richard D Wolff
tweeted:
US allows a lame duck President, too old to ru n again to escalate
the Ukraine war by permitting long-range missiles that risk nuclear
war with Russia. Makes Dems the "pro-war party" that will lose more
elections. And if Trump now ends the Ukraine war? Is Biden blind
too?
Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:
Van Jackson: [10-02]
Liberalism has a Heather Cox Richardson problem: I've had this tab
open for more than month, and just found it as I was preparing to reboot.
Had I noticed earlier, I would have included it here, so how [11-24],
why not? It's pretty good, at least up to the point where we slam into
the paywall. It centers on a Richardson tweet:
Important to remember that U.S. alliances and partnerships underpin
the rules-based international order. Weaken the U.S. and you destabilize
that order, opening the door for dictators with imperial ambitions.
Everywhere.
I'm not going to tear this apart, or just laugh at it. Too late
for that. Let's just quote Jackson:
I don't doubt that she believes what she's saying. Her first book,
after all, was called The Greatest Nation of the Earth.
But this is ruling-class propaganda -- not true at all. She's
very much out of her depth pontificating about America in the world.
And she has, under the veil of opposing Trump, made herself the
voice of the powerful, which is why she gets to go on the talk
shows and get paid all the while.
I try to be sympathetic toward shitlib/cringe lib sentiments
because 1) I don't want to live in an illiberal society,
and 2) they represent the largest share of the Popular Front for
democracy that I'm trying to will into existence. No shitlibs,
no antifascist coalition.
And I'm not mad that she supports Ukraine, or that she wants
to critique Republicans for opposing support for Ukraine. Those
are both reasonable -- almost commonsense -- positions.
But her rationale for both supporting Ukraine and condemning
Republicans lacks self-awareness, and not in a harmless way but
in a way that threatens the democracy that she's dedicated her
pen to protecting against Trumpism.
I'd be interested in reading what comes after "Let me explain,"
I can't see myself ever using "shitlib" again, but I do recognize
the type: to quote from
Urban Dictionary:
Shitlibs are self-serving rich elite politicians who are subscribers
of neoliberal economics and governance. The support more deregulation
for big business and corporations, but more regulation and inceased
taxes for smaller businesses and workers. They support outsourcing,
illegal immigrant labor, lower wages, more free trade and privatization
(when it benefits them). They often lie about their support of
egalitarian and socially liberal ideas but never really enact them.
They are often side with tech and media corporations and receive
donations from them regularly. They also support more war and
interventionism abroad.
I don't like "neoliberal" either, but that's the more common
term.
Lukas Scholle: [11-09]
Germany's coalition collapsed, but recession is here to stay:
"German chancellor Olaf Scholz has dismissed his finance minister,
Christian Lindner, pitching the country toward elections. Economic
woes will be at the center of the campaign -- yet proposals for a
break with austerity are are conspicuously absent."
As nations gather at this year's talks, which are scheduled to run
until Nov. 22, delegates will also have to contend with their
countries' failure so far to deliver on the central pledge of
last year's negotiations. The United States, for one, is producing
more oil than any country, ever -- a trajectory expected to accelerate
when Trump returns to the White House.
Other stories:
Kyle Chayka: [10-30]
The banality of online recommendation culture: "A recent surge
of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension
of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations." I didn't have time
to write about this piece last week, and don't have time now, but
being a guy who both writes and consumers self-styled "consumer
guides," this is obviously up my alley. Also as a software engineer,
I might note that I was thinking about algorithmic approaches to
sharing preference information before many of the better known
systems for aggregating such data became available -- none of
which, needless to say, I find particularly useful.
Ruby Justice Thelot: [09-11]
In praise of gatekeeping: "Why we need gatekeepers to resist cultural
hyper-optimization." I found this in an open tab next to the Chayka
article, so thought I should keep it. I'm not sure that the specifics
matter to me. Also, the phrase is a bit loaded. The people I know (or
at least the ones I follow) are more likely to be door-openers than
gatekeepers.
Nate Chinen: [11-12]
Roy Haynes, a giant of jazz drumming, is dead at 99: "An irrepressible
force who remained relevant over the court of a seven-decade career, he
had a hand in every major development in modern jazz."
Current Affairs: [10-17]
What is the myth of American idealism: Robinson, interviewed
by two of his staff, on the book he co-authored with Noam Chomsky.
Nathan J Robinson: [11-07]
How standard US history misrepresents the world: 'Reviewing a
standard US educational text on international relations to show
how the Chomskyan approach calls into question what seems like
common sense." For example, consider "a typical book by a member
of the US foreign policy establishment, The World: An Introduction,
by Dr. Richard Haass."
Stephen M Walt: [11-15]
Noam Chomsky has been proved right: "The writer's new argument
for left-wing foreign policy has earned a mainstream hearing."
Current Affairs: [11-08]
How America imagines a 'world of enemies': "Osamah Khalil on
how, both domestically and abroad, American elites have conjured
existential nemeses who must be dealt with through never-ending
militarization."
Ezra Klein: [11-09]
The book that predicted the 2024 election: I noticed this book
in one of my
roundups, but didn't
believe it enough to even comment. Interview with Ruffini, in
light of the election, where there appears to have been a black
and (larger) hispanic shift toward Trump, at least among males.
The implication here is that shift swung the election. I'm not
sure of the numbers, nor how that works, but I do think that
racism has changed significantly over my lifetime, including
a shift in who gets respect and who doesn't. I always recall
the book title, How the Irish Became White, as showing
that racism is more about power than pigmentation. As we've
seen many times, starting perhaps with Clarence Thomas's Supreme
Court confirmation, even the most racist Republicans will vote
for a black person with the right credentials. I recall Lyndsey
Graham saying just that. On the other hand, it's hard to tell
any difference between how Republicans regard black Democrats
vs. how they used to regard all blacks.
Chatter
Joshua Frank: [10-24]
I wrote a book on how John Kerry blew the 2004 election by catering
to the right, ignoring the antiwar vote, and outhawking Bush. Twenty
years later, Kamala Harris is following the same losing playbook.
Aaron Maté: [10-27]
If I were the Harris campaign I'd be playing this clip of Trump
refusing to support a minimum wage hike on loop. Instead they're
palling around with the Cheneys and yelling "fascist" at every
turn.
David Sirota: [10-29]
This is so far beyond parody that you could convince me it's a bit.
[Response to Hillary Clinton: New Yorkers: Donald Trump may
have Madison Square Garden, but we have Carnegie Hall.]
David Klion: [10-31]
I'm confused why the Harris campaign thinks it's a good idea to send
Bill Clinton to Michigan days before the election to lecture Arab and
Muslim voters on the ancient Jewish claim to "Judea and Samaria."
Matt Duss: [10-31]
It's ridiculous for Trump to claim to be the anti-war candidate and
it's also ridiculous that that lane has been left wide open for him.
Eric Levitz: [11-96]
Interesting how much rightwing propaganda outperforms leftwing
propaganda across formats. It's not just that Fox beats MSNBC and
the right dominates radio: As Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Rogan
illustrate, podcasters tend to discover they can maximize their
audience by moving right.
The Onion: Breaking News: The Onion on the verge of collapse
after not being able to make up stuff that is more idiotic than
the current reality in our political lives in these United States!
Rick Perlstein: [11-12]
Don't quit Twitter. Ignoring fascist spaces is bad. Silence impliles
assent, shuts down witness of the lies they're devising & the
plans they're hatching. Don't initiate threads; the algo will just
bury them. Tell the truth in threads, like leafletting an occupied
French village.
Jeet Heer: [11-12]
[Comment in response to Wally Nowinski, who offered a chart I can't
read, and said: "Old white folks moved toward Kamala. Every other
group moved towards Trump."]
This is exactly the result you would get if you ran a pro-system,
pro-status quo, hug-the-Cheneys campaign: improvement from those
most invested in the system, alienating everyone else.
[Actually, I find this interesting, perhaps because I belong to
the "old white folks" demographic. Could it be that we weren't
tuned into social media, so missed a lot of the lies, while we
relied on more conventional news sources? Or maybe his point is
to lambast us, while blaming the groups with the largest shifts
to Trump (topped by black men) on the Harris campaign?]
db: [11-13] [illustration is House map, showing Republicans
with 218 seats, clinching the majority, vs. 208 for Democrats]
We did it! Worst possible world. thank you Kamala, thank you Joe,
thank you Barack, and thank you to the DNC for strangling left
populism in the crib and all but assuring this outcome! Couldn't
have done it without you!
Rick Perlstein: [11-14]
I have decided that I hate the adjective "unserious" as shorthand
for "evil person who is stupid and dangerous and wrong about
everything." The people it is purported to describe are plenty
serious.
Dean Baker: [11-15]
It's pretty funny to hear Trump boasting about his huge mandate. No
Democrats has ever been elected president with a smaller mandate.
I guess we can't expect a reality TV show star to be very good with
numbers.
[Later amended: "sorry, forgot about John Kennedy."]
David Sirota: [11-24]
In retrospect, the campaign was effectively over when Democrats
decided that their final October Surprise was touting Liz Cheney
and aggressively attacking rather than just ignoring Jill Stein.
Looking back, everyone shoulda realized this was Dems surrendering.
Ken Klippenstein [11-23]
Bill Clinton: "in demonizing all establishments and all people who
wear a tie like you and me to work and have a good education, we
are breaking down the legitimacy of . . . people who actually know
things that are very important for us today and very important for
our continued growth and prosperity and harmony."
Nathan J Robinson commented: "[I] wrote a 300 page book
on why Bill Clinton is awful and I can assure you that 'wearing a
tie' is not one of the listed offenses."
Nathan J Robinson: [11-22]
I'm grateful that The Atlantic and New York magazine have paywalls
because they function as a kind of quarantine for bad opinions,
making sure they don't escape and infect those not already affected
by them.
[Further down, I found an
Atlantic tweet quoting Elizabeth Bruenig: "Trump is in touch
with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms,
and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal
barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an
opportunt one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its
signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense
of these tendencies and their implications for politics."
First line seems true, and worth thinking about. Second line
is an example of what passes for thinking in intellectual
circles, but isn't really. I can't say that Freud never had
an interesting idea, but his hit/miss ratio was about random,
and his misses inadvertently self-revealing.]
Matt Duss: [11-23]
It should be noted that the policy area where progressive groups
were able to have arguably the least influence, Israel-Palestine,
is the one that ultimately destroyed Biden's legacy.
Jon Schwarz: [11-26]
The 35% jump in Tesla's stock price immediartely after the election
shows that investors believe the US government will soon be completely
corrupt.
Allen Lowe [11-07]
Facebook post that somehow I managed to see on [11-15], but worth
keeping for later:
One of the most annoying results of the election are those who are
now standing up and saying the Democrats are gone and corrupt and
that's it. Well, I'm not going to join the party of Jill Stein. And
the Democrats still have a demographic advantage and still won a
large percentage of the votes, and I don't care what you think,
they are the only hope. Even Bernie Sanders agrees.
So I don't want to hear about how the billionaires would've won
either way. I want to hear about how Biden basically eliminated 50%
of child poverty only to be rebuffed by the Republicans when the law
wasn't renewed. I want to hear about this huge infrastructure bill
which is employing so many people and helping to make unemployment
incredibly low. I want to hear about social welfare which flourishes
under the Democrats because the agencies make appointments staffed by
good people who take care of poor and disabled people. The Republicans
staff them with people bent on destroying them and harming people like
my disabled son.
I thought we learned our lessons during the prior Trump administration,
when those who had told us that Hillary and Trump were the same slunk
into the corner with their tails between their legs. Now they're coming
out to try to tell us this is what they predicted all along.
Ridiculous, but it does show that many of them secretly hope the
United States will sink into oblivion so a revolution will rise from
the ashes. More people have to suffer so they can justify their own
hallucinatory politics.The only thing that will rise from the ashes
is more death and destruction.
Some good comments, like this one by Brian Simontacchi:
I think this is relevant to our conversation yesterday, so I'll just
chime in and rebut a couple of your points:
Biden did some very good things, shockingly. My expectations weren't
high initially. He exceeded them easily
As long as they try to prevent this outcome, I'll be supportive of
Democrats and hold their feet to the fire at the same time. I can walk
and chew gum
Billionaires always win. Why spend all that money for no return?
I think it's clear no lessons have been learned at all
I feel like you're working backwards from the conclusion that the
outcome determines the causality. I don't think that. I think people,
highly susceptible to misinformation and visceral tribalism, are
easily manipulated, and Trump and his echo chamber are quite good
at pressing those buttons. I think people change their minds with
what they think is happening in the news and to them, and they don't
care as much about a global or local responsibility to stability, if
they ever did. When the billionaires make the global economic trends,
they determine which professions and trades are most distressed and
how those people will likely respond in an election. Its all
coordinated; things will get worse before they get worse.
I'm just here to diagnose trends and be honest. I have no soft
spot for billionaires or politicians. I want peace for my neighbors
but I have to understand what's happening. Frankly, I have no loyalty
to either party, only to harm reduction which I can't even impact
from a blue state. If we can't have consistent progress, I'll settle
for harm reduction, even though that is not my ultimate goal, or my
responsibility to successive generations.
I hope we can talk about this amicably. If we can't, I'll cease
and desist.
Robert Christgau: [11-20]
Xgau Sez: Very late addition here, his answer to Carola Dibbell's
question: "Any takes on the election, Robert? PS: I'd rather you
not include your ongoing mea culpa for admiring Harris's articulateness,
which you now recognize might have lost voters who thought she sounded
too educated."
First of all, Harris was one of the most fluent prose stylists ever to
run as a plausible presidential candidate--which despite her own
considerable oratorical skills doesn't mean she was as impressive a
speaker as Lincoln, Obama, Washington it says here, or the fireside
FDR or as purely brilliant intellectually as at the very least
Madison, who did after all play a major role in conceiving the
Constitution we say we fight for and the Trumpers hope to wreck. She
was also arguably the handsomest, especially if dumb-ass Warren
Harding's square-jawed thing didn't turn you on. But what both
impressed me and led me astray was what the polls told us was the
50-50 race it clearly wasn't--at least not in the electoral college. I
was confident ordinary voters saw her brains and looks as an
attractive positive, which they clearly didn't. On the contrary, let's
specify the obvious. She was Black and female and both cost
her. Sexism and racism. Definitive? Maybe not, and we'll never know
how big they were for sure. (It is also worth bearing in mind, just as
a quirky oddity if you prefer, that what I'd estimate were the two
most intelligent plausible presidential candidates of my and your
lifetimes were both of part-African heritage.)
But in addition I'll note that my biggest personal political gaffe
is that I never glimpsed the economic factors I have no doubt cost
Harris big because that seems to be how it worked all over the
pan-Covid world. About that I was ignorant, to my and so many of my
allies' disgrace. I've also been paying more mind than I ever thought
I would to what is now, evocatively, labeled bro culture. As someone
who would always rather read, listen to music, or both than resort to
YouTube and/or the podcast world, I ignore both the way I avoid Rush
and Kansas reissues, living without that market share, which for me is
negligible economically--but not, it would seem, electorally. Now those
motherfuckers scare me.
Although I've long followed electoral politics in considerable
detail, I don't have the expertise or vanity to make any
prognostications here. I'm glad MSNBC is operative because I find it
comforting--especially for the nonce Lawrence O'Donnell, whose detailed
firsthand knowledge of DC in particular I've been finding informative
and on occasion comforting.
I can imagine three or four different responses to this, with
the big one possibly, albeit slowly, evolving into a full-fledged
book project on What We Learned From the 2024 Election,
but even though I have a few ideas, I don't think we can say we've
learned much yet. I do think it helps to realize that we really
need to ask two different questions: what could Harris have done
differently to swing a
1.6% election margin the other way? and
what could Democrats have done to win the landslide that should
have been possible given Trump's
historic low favorability: 44.7% (-8.6) on Nov. 2; as low as
38.0% (-17.5) on Jan. 10, 2023? I'd be the first to admit that to
get the landslide they deserve, Democrats need to tell a better
story: one that make it clear to most people (and here we're
talking 60-70%, not 50.01%) how horrible Republicans are --
that part should be pretty easy -- and how Democrats can be
believed and trusted to do much better things (ok, that's the
hard part).
Harris didn't have that story, and couldn't, because Democrats
haven't been aiming for landslides (much less to be the party of
the 99%) for, well, donkey's years. They've been chasing donor
money with promises of growth satisfying everyone, while using
the Republican threat to keep their base in line (while wooing
supposedly moderate suburbia): a delicate balancing act, and
one that risks exposing themselves as two-faced. Harris's story
was what the Democrats bequeathed her with. We can debate about
how well she sold it, and whether small shifts in emphasis and
focus could have helped. (I think she had a big problem with
Biden's wars. Others point to economics and/or cultural issues,
which could have been handled better, but I regard as much less
decisive.) But all the way to the end, I was happy with her as
a candidate, and I expected her to win.
That she didn't, I blame on the people (and the media, but
let's not go there). But in a democracy, you can't blame the
people. You can't, in Brecht's phrase, "dissolve them and elect
another." You have to figure out how to deal with them, to break
through the highly polarized media bubble that insulates them
from such obvious truths as that Trump is a greedy liar who has
no practical understanding of how the world works and who is
ultimately only concerned with his own vanity. You have to ask:
why can't at least half of the people see that? You can't seriously
think that the people who voted for him did so because they knew
all that and still liked him?
Conversely, how can a large segment of Trump's voters think of
Harris as a "low IQ" tramp who slept her way to the top and/or is
trying to pass herself off as black because she thinks that makes
her cool? There's something seriously wrong with these people,
but you shouldn't say that, because they're every bit as much of
"the people" as you are, and because attacking them just backfires
on you -- e.g., "deplorables" or "trash," nor does it help to
point out that they routinely say much worse things about you.
Nor does it help to try to cozy up to them by feigning agreement
on marginal issues (like Kerry's goose hunting photo-op, or Harris
waving her gun).
I think this can be done, both personally -- I know a fair
number of these people and get along with them reasonably well,
although even in Kansas, and even in my family, most of my time
is spent in a social bubble that extends to my left as well as
to my right - and politically (which is not my job, and safe to
say, never will be). But self-hating is always a bad look. And
it's not necessary, even if it worked, which it doesn't. We
shouldn't have to, or expect to, change to escape a political
trap. But we do need to stop taking our prejudices and neuroses
out on other people.
A couple things about Christgau's letter still bother me.
His assumption that being "Black and female and both cost her"
suggests a race-and-sex consciousness that most Republicans
seem to have moved beyond (perhaps symbolically or cynicly,
and with no real concessions to equality). Even if it is still
a factor -- one might argue that race had some impact on the KY
and NC gubernatorial elections, where black Republicans in red
states ran and lost to white Democrats, but the margins were
thin, so the effect couldn't have been large -- it's not one
that does us any good to dwell on (not just because doing so
attacks people can also turn people off as condescending).
I have less of an idea what to say about
bro culture -- I had to look it up to get a definition,
and even so I can't say that it applies to anything I've ever
been part of. Still, unless it's meant to excuse assault or
rape, or you try to translate it into the realm of politics,
I don't see problem. "Different strokes," you know? Isn't that
something we support? Maybe if we were less terrified of other
people, they'd learn to cut us some slack, too?
As for MSNBC, I wouldn't know, as I never watch it, but my
wife tells me that "O'Donnell is the worst" ("even worse than
Maddow"), and that the whole place is a den of Clinton-Obama
DNC orthodoxy ("Hillary-bot," "anti-Bernie" über alles), i.e.,
the same ideas and elitist strategies that keep letting the
Republicans back in the door -- after Bush and Trump showed
conclusively that they really have no clue how to govern, even
to preserve the status quo.
But I understand the "comforting" feeling. For the last eight
years I've taken much comfort from watching the anti-Trump late
shows (Kimmel, Colbert, Meyers: monologues, not celebrity guest
talk), not so much because of what they said -- which could be
problematical -- as because their audiences were at least as
partisan, and it felt good to be in the company of ordinary
people who react to these outrages the same way I do. As a
leftist from way back -- my initiation was a mid-1960s tabloid
called The Minority of One -- I'm used to losing and
lonely isolation, with my ideas rejected not on their merits
but as a kneejerk reaction to the direction they're coming
from (generally, like all leftists, a commitment to peace,
justice, and equality). So it was nice not to feel so totally
isolated for once.
Since the election, I've given up on watching those shows, as
well as giving up on network news, my local paper, and even most
of the center-to-left-leaning sources I faithfully collated for the
Speaking of Which years. But I'm still here, and we're still
here, and we're just a couple points short of inching back into
majority power, which should be easy enough to make up as people
increasingly realize what a complete train wreck of a political
juggernaut they've handed power to. But what's driving all this
has nothing to do with that I did or did not write over the past
20 years -- words that are still
online, very few of which I have any
regrets about (most errors were on the optimistic side, where
I'm more inclined to blame the world than to admit my own fault).
But right now, I have no optimism whatsoever that people (let
alone Democrats) will start reading me and learn some new tricks.
But if they want to survive the Trump debacle[*], they're going
to have to look at the real problems, then come up with solutions
and credible ways of talking about them; they're going to have to
find ways to talk to everyone, to appeal to their better natures,
and to their various hopes; they're going to have to win elections,
deliver results, and make this a better world for as many people
as possible.
One thing I've learned over recent years is that there are a
lot of smart and good people already working on this. I've noted
some of them, especially in my
Books posts, and I have no doubt but there is much more I
haven't noticed -- needless to say, there is also no shortfall
of nonsense in the Books posts. On the other hand, as much of the
post-mortem analysis cited above shows, learning the hard way is
often even harder than you expect. Especially given that the
lessons that should have been learned from the 2016 loss and
the 2020 win have thus far only produced a second, even more
heartbreaking, loss.
PS: A couple days after writing this, I woke up feeling I should
say something more about "comfort" in such times. I've never been one
to beat myself up over what the world does, especially in spite of my
best efforts. And I've always striven to make my own life as comfortable
as possible. But I'm finding little comfort in familiar political haunts
right now. It was easy after 2016 to blame the loss on the candidate,
because I had many of the same misgivings -- just more sense than to
think that Trump might be the answer. Biden's 2020 win allowed us to
overlook Trump's stronger-than-expected performance, but that too was
easily rationalized. But none of those explanations really work here.
Harris wasn't a bad candidate. History hasn't vindicated Trump. The
usual metrics did not suggest a Trump win (even a close one). But
something happened, which calls into question some of our fundamental
assumptions about how politics works. And until we figure that out,
we should be uncomfortable. That's the only thing that keeps us from
falling back into the same old rut.
My new problem with the late shows is that I suspect that their
style of talking about Trump is counterproductive. I've slowly grown
more aware of how attacking Trump only seems to validate him in the
hearts and minds of his fans. But I never imagined the effect would
be as strong as it evidently is. We need to regroup, and recalculate.
As best I recall, I've been pretty consistent in
believing that
Biden, and later Harris, would defeat Trump, but I saw one scenario
as particularly ominous: if the wars in Ukraine and Israel drag on
through election day (as they have now done), I predicted that many
voters would desperately search for an alternative, which could tip
the election to Trump. I relaxed my prediction a bit when Harris
replaced Biden, figuring she would be seen as less culpable, but she
was in Biden's administration, was involved in much of its disastrous
foreign policy, and made little if any effort to distance herself
from its failures. Worse still, she started campaigning with hawks
like Liz Cheney.
I figured I should go back and find the quotes. I've found several
bits I wrote on a possible Trump win, so I'll include them here.
The main one was from July 24 (actually quoting a July 18 letter),
but we'll keep them in order, starting with this one (I'm adding
bold in a couple spots):
June 22, 2024:
I find it impossible to
believe that most Americans, when they are finally faced with the
cold moment of decision, will endorse the increasingly transparent
psychopathology of Donald Trump. Sure, the American people have
been seduced by right-wing fantasy before, but Reagan and the
Bushes tried to disguise their aims by spinning sunny yarns of
a kinder, gentler conservatism.
Even Nixon, who still outranks Trump as a vindictive, cynical
bastard, claimed to be preserving some plausible, old-fashioned
normality. All Trump promises is "taking back" the nation and
"making America great again": empty rhetoric lent gravity (if
not plausibility) by his unbridled malice toward most Americans.
Sure, he got away with it in 2016, partly because many people
gave him the benefit of doubt but also because the Clinton spell
wore off, leaving "crooked Hillary" exposed as a shill for the
money-grubbing metro elites. But given Trump's media exposure,
both as president and after, the 2024 election should mostly be
a referendum on Trump. I still can't see most Americans voting
for him.
That doesn't mean Trump cannot win, but in order to do so, two
things have to happen: he has to make the election be all about
Biden, and Biden has to come up seriously short. One can ponder
a lot of possible issues that Biden might be faulted for, and
come up with lots of reasons why they might but probably won't
matter. (For example, the US may experience a record bad hurricane
season, but will voters blame Biden for that and see Trump
as better?) But we needn't speculate, because Biden already has
his albatross issue: genocide in Gaza. I'm not going to relitigate
his failures here, but in terms of my "optimistic view," I will
simply state that if Biden loses -- and such an outcome should be
viewed not as a Trump win but as a Biden loss -- it will be well
deserved, as no president so involved in senseless war, let alone
genocide, deserves another term.
So it looks like the net effect of my optimism is to turn what
may look like a lose-lose presidential proposition into a win-win.
We are currently faced with two perilous prospects: on the one
hand, Biden's penchant for sinking into foreign wars, which he
tries to compensate for by being occasionally helpful or often
just less miserable on various domestic policies; on the other,
Republicans so universally horrible we scarcely need to list out
the comparisons. Given that choice, one might fervently hope for
Biden to win, not because we owe him any blanket support, but
because post-election opposition to Biden can be more focused
on a few key issues, whereas with Trump we're back to square
one on almost everything.
But if Biden loses, his loss will further discredit the centrist
style that has dominated the Democratic Party at least since Carter.
There are many problems with that style, most deriving from the need
to serve donors in order to attract them, which lends them an air of
corruption, destroying their credibility. Sure, Republicans are
corrupt too, even more so, but their corruption is consistent with
their values -- dog-eat-dog individualism, accepting gross inequality,
using government to discipline rather than ameliorate the losers --
so it comes off as honest, maybe even courageous. But Democrats are
supposed to believe in public service, government for the people,
and that's hard to square with their individual pursuit of power
in the service of wealth.
So, sure, a Trump win would be a disaster, but it would free the
Democrats from having to defend their compromised, half-assed status
quo, and it would give them a chance to pose a genuine alternative,
and a really credible one at that. I'd like to think that Democrats
could get their act together, and build that credible alternative
on top of Biden's half-hearted accomplishments. It would be nice
to not have to start with the sort of wreckage Trump left in 2021,
or Bush left in 2009, or that other Bush left in 1993 (and one can
only shudder at the thought of what Trump might leave us in 2029).
But people rarely make major changes based on reasoned analysis.
It usually takes a great shock to force that kind of change --
like what the Great Depression did to a nation previously in love
with Herbert Hoover, or like utter defeat did to Germany and Japan
in WWII.
If there was any chance that a Trump win in 2024 would result
in a stable and prosperous America, even if only for the 51% or
so it would take for Republicans to continue winning elections,
we might have something to be truly fearful of. But nothing they
want to do works. The only thing they know how to do is to worsen
problems, which are largely driven by forces beyond their control --
business, culture, climate, war, migration -- and all their lying,
cheating, and outright repression only rub salt into the wounds.
When people see how bad Republican rule really is, their support
will wither rapidly.
The question is what Democrats have to do to pick up the support
of disaffected Trumpers. One theory is to embrace the bigotry they
showed in embracing Trump. A better one would be promise the grit,
integrity, independence, and vision that Trump promised by couldn't
deliver on, partly because he's a crook and con man who never cared,
but largely because he surrounded himself by Republicans who had
their own corrupt and/or deranged agendas.
July 18, 2024:
For what little it's worth, here's my nutshell take on Biden:
If he can't get control of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza by
early October, he's going to lose, no matter what else happens.
For people who don't understand them, they're bad vibes, so why
not blame the guy who was in position to do something about them.
That may be unfair, but that's what uninformed voters do. And if
you do understand them (which I think I do), Biden doesn't look
so good either. He sees Ukraine as a test of resolve, and Israel
as a test of loyalty, and those views are not just wrong, they
kick in his most primitive instincts.
Otherwise, the election will go to whichever side is most
effective at making the election into a referendum on the other
side. That should be easy when the other side is Trump, but it
gets real hard when most media cycles focus on your age and/or
decrepitude. That story is locked in, and isn't going away. When
your "good news" is "Biden reads from teleprompter and doesn't
fumble," you've lost.
Even if Trump's negatives are so overwhelming that even Biden,
incapacitated as he is, beats him (and surely it wouldn't be by enough
to shut Trump up), do we really want four more years of this?
September 1, 2024:
Nia Prater: [08-27]
RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are joining the Trump transition team:
I noted this story last week, dismissing it with "sounds like something,
but probably isn't." Here I should note that while it probably isn't,
it could actually be something. Kennedy and Gabbard have a lot of traits
that discredit them as presidential candidates, but the one thing they
do have is pretty consistent antiwar track records, which they are not
just committed to, but are eager to use against Biden and Harris, who
are not exactly invulnerable to such charges. Moreover, they can say
that they left the Democratic Party because they opposed how hawkish
the Party had become -- so hawkish that even Trump would be a safer
and more sensible foreign policy option. It remains to be seen how
credible they'll be, because, well, on most other issues they're nuts,
but on this one, they could be more credible than Trump himself to
people with real concerns. I've said all along that if Biden doesn't
get his wars under control, he will lose in November. The switch to
Harris gives Democrats a partial reprieve, but the one thing she is
most seriously vulnerable on is the suspicion that Democrats are
going to continue saddling us with senseless and hopeless foreign
wars. Kennedy and Gabbard could be effective at driving that point
home -- sure, not to rank-and-file Democrats, who are generally
much more dovish than their leaders, and who are even more wary of
Republicans on that count, but to the "undecideds," who know little,
even of what little they know.
September 9, 2024:
Robert Wright: [09-26]
Is Trump a peacenik? No, but if you're worried that Biden
(now Harris) is a bit too fond of war, he says a vote for him
will save you from WWIII. And given that American politicians
of both parties have long and ignominious histories of lying
about wanting peace while blundering into war, and given how
little reliable information there is about either, there may
be enough gullible but concerned people to tilt the election.
Wright reviews some of the contradictions here, and there are
much more that could be considered.
I've been worried about just this prospect all along, and
I remain worried. I don't have time to explain all the nuances,
but very briefly, Biden has done a very bad job of managing US
foreign affairs, failing to make any progress dealing with a
number of very manageable hostilities (North Korea, Venezuela,
Iran, many others) while letting two crises (Ukraine, Gaza)
drag into prolonged wars that he seemingly has no interest in
ever resolving (at least he doesn't seem to be putting in any
effort). The only good thing you can say about his handling of
Afghanistan is that he dodged the worst possible option, which
was to stick around and keep losing. And while he's made money
for the arms and oil industries, both have made the world a
much more dangerous place. And then there's China -- do we
really need to go there?
One might reasonably think that anyone could have done a
better job than Biden has done, but we actually know one person
who had every same opportunity, and made them all worse: Donald
Trump, the president before Biden. Is there any reason to think
that Trump might do better with a second chance? The plus side
is that he may be more wary this time of relying on the "deep
state" advisers who steered him so badly. (Biden, too, was
plagued by their advice, but he seemed to be more in tune with
it -- the only changes Biden made in US foreign policy were to
reverse Trump's occasional unorthodox lapses, especially what he
viewed as softness on Russia.)
On the other hand, Trump brings
a unique set of disturbing personal characteristics to the job:
he cares more about perception than reality; he wants to be seen
as very tough, but he's really just a whiney bitch; he's majorly
ignorant, and incoherent on top of that; he's impetuous (but he
can usually be talked down, because he rarely has any reasons
for what he wants to do); he's vain and narcissistic; he has
no empathy with people he meets, so has no idea how to relate
with them (e.g., to negotiate any kind of agreement); he has
no sympathy for other people, so he has no cares for anything
wrong that could happen; he has a weird fascination with using
nuclear weapons, so that's one of the things he often has to
be talked down from; I know I already said that he's ignorant
and implied that he's clueless, but he's also pretty stupid
about how most things in the modern world actually work. He
does, however, have a keen interest in graft, and a passing
admiration for other right-wing demagogues, if only because
he admires their art and sees them as his peers. About the
only thing I can see as a positive is that he doesn't seem
to feel any personal need for war to prove his masculinity --
for that he's satisfied abusing women.
I'm sure there are more, but these at least make the point.
After Harris took over, I hoped that she might be held less
responsible, and other factors would give her a chance. I also
resisted all the hectoring from the left, figuring that's just
what we normally do, even if it's not helpful at the moment.
Besides, I knew that I couldn't really do anything about it:
that the forces in motion were way too powerful for whatever
I think to make any difference at all. So I just went with it.
But now I'm left with all these doubts: about my own judgment
and understanding, about other people, about the whole notion of
sides. I'm getting old, and tired, and frustrated. And while it's
premature to say that we have no future, I can't see any viable
path for me to continue working like this.
Therefore, this is my last Speaking of Which post.
Probably ever, at least not for quite some well. I have a
Jazz Poll to
run, and that's going to be enough of a time sink to last me
to January. I'll keep posting
Music Week,
probably as long as I'm able, possibly with a new burst of
energy but more likely with diminishing returns. The political
book I've contemplated for twenty-some years now is definitely
dead. Much of it would have been practical advice on how Left
Democrats might more effectively frame issues. Clearly, I'm in
no position to do that.
I may consider writing up more "blue sky" policy ideas. I've
always been very fond of Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays and
Practical Proposals, which gives me the perfect subtitle.
But each chunk of that would take considerable work to research
and whip into shape, and I have little confidence of doing that.
The more serious writing project would be to return (or restart)
the memoir. I don't know that will be of any interest, but it's
a subject I know, have thought about, and often find myself
slipping into, and it could be a springboard for anything else
I wanted to slip in.
The other obvious project would be to go back and review the
several million words I've written (most collected
here, from the founding of the
notebook and/or
blog up to some point in 2022) and
see what can be packaged into something useful. A couple people
have looked at this, and thrown their hands up in the air. When
I look, I see lots of things that still strike me as worthwhile,
but I, too, have little idea what to do with them. My ideal
solution would be to find an editor willing to work on spec,
but I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that.
If anyone is interested in nattering on about this life
decision, you can contact me through the little-used
question form.
Original count: 265 links, 26798 words (31647 total)
Current count:
345 links, 37102 words (43518 total)
Trying to wrap this up Monday afternoon, but I keep sinking into
deep comments, like the
Müller entry below, to which I could easily
add another 3-5 paragraphs. Now I need to take a long break and do
some housework, so I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to add much
before posting late this evening. We're among the seeming minority
who failed to advance vote, so will trek to the polls tomorrow and
do our bit. As I've noted throughout (and even more emphatically in my
Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Harris vs. Trump), I'm voting for
Harris. While Kansas is considered a surefire Trump state -- the
silver lining here is that we're exposed to relatively little
campaigning -- around my neighborhood the Harris signs outnumber
the Trump signs about 10-0 (seriously, I haven't seen a single
one, although I've heard of Harris signs being stolen). Not much
down ballot activity either, although if I find any more Democrats,
I'll vote for them (minimally, our state legislators, who are
actually pretty good).
In the end, it got late and I gave up. Perhaps I'll add some more
tidbits tomorrow, but my more modest plans are to go vote, stop at
a restaurant we like after voting, and finish the bedroom trim paint.
Presumably there'll be a Music Week before the day's done, but not
really a lot to report there.
Soon as I got up Tuesday, I found myself adding a couple "chatter"
items, so I guess I'm doing updates on Election Day. In which case,
I might as well break my rule and include a sample of the extremely
topical items that will become obsolete as soon as they start counting
ballots. I'll keep them segregated here:
Ellen Ioanes: [11-05]
How a second Trump presidency could reshape the world: "If Trump
wins this election, the world might never be the same." No time for
details, but given this assignment, I would have written a very
different article: not necessarily more critical of Trump, but
based on a very different understanding of America's and the world's
thinking about how it all works (or doesn't).
[10-31]
Day 391: Israel kills 200 Palestinians in Gaza in a single day:
"There are no more hospitals in northern Gaza as Kamal Adwan Hospital
goes out of service. In Lebanon, Hezbollah's new Secretary General,
Naim Qassem, says the movement will not negotiate before a
ceasefire."
Anis Germani: [11-04]
Is Israel using depleted uranium to bomb Lebanon? "Israel's use
of 80 bunker-buster bombs to assassinate Hasan Nasrallah has raised
concerns that it is using depleted uranium in its bombardment of
Lebanon. We need an impartial investigation given Israel's track
record of using prohibited weapons."
[11-01]
Israel's mass killing campaign in Gaza is escalating: "The
last ten days of October saw an escalation in Israel's campaign
of mass killing across Gaza, including in so-called 'safe zones.'
The overall pattern of Israel's assaults points to an extermination
campaign."
Qassam Muaddi:
[11-01]
Israel is hitting a wall in Lebanon. What is its endgame?
"Israel's military campaign in souther Lebanon is failing. As
Israel runs out of options, the US is scrambling for a way out
of the Lebanese quagmire -- including by reviving hopes for a
Gaza ceasefire." I don't trust anyone's reporting on ground
operations in Lebanon, but "quagmire" implies that Israel is
stuck, which I doubt. My impression is that Israel's bombing
and ground operations in Lebanon are wanton and capricious --
things that they mostly do for the hell of it, perhaps to degrade
Hezbollah, or simply to show the Lebanese people the peril they
blame on Hezbollah, but nothing they can't retreat and regroup
from if the going gets a bit sticky. One report cited here:
Amos Harel: [Israel's defense chiefs say fighting
in Gaza and Lebanon has run its course. Does Netanyahu agree?
The implication here is that Israel's defense leaders are finding
it increasingly difficult to justify further operations on defense
grounds. That they are continuing is a purely political directive,
coming from Netanyahu, for purely political ends.
Connor Echols: [10-29]
Nation building is back! "Israel is breaking the Middle East,
and the US is lining up to rebuild it." Well, talking about it,
with lots of strings, including Israel calling all the shots.
Echols used to be a staff writer for Responsible Statecraft,
but seems to have landed in Robert Wright's
Nnzero Substack.
Nada Elia: [11-01]
On vote shaming, and lesser evils: "I will not be shamed into
voting for a candidate who supports the genocide of the Palestinian
people, and no one who supports progressive issues should be either."
Hers is a vote against Harris -- not sure in favor of who or what --
and I think we have to respect her conviction, even if one disagrees
with her conclusion. We need people opposed to genocide more than we
need voters for Harris, not that the two need be exclusive. Elections
never just test one red line, so they require us to look beyond simple
moral judgments and make a messy political one. Agreed that Harris
fails on this red line -- as does her principal (and only practical)
opponent, arguably even worse[*] -- but there are other issues at play,
some where Harris is significantly preferable to Trump, none where
the opposite is the case. I don't have any qualms or doubts about
voting for Harris vs. Trump. But I respect people who do.
[*] Harris, like Biden (with greater weight of responsibility),
is a de facto supporter of Israel committing genocide, but she
does not endorse the concept, and remains in denial as to what
is happening (unaccountably and, if you insist, inexcusably, as
there is little room for debating the facts). Trump, on the other
hand, appears to have explicitly endorsed genocide (e.g., in his
comments like "finish the job!"). Both the racism that separates
out groups for collective punishment -- of which genocide is an
extreme degree -- and the penchant for violent punishment are
usually right-wing traits, which makes them much more likely for
Trump than for Harris. And Trump's right-wing political orientation
is more likely to encourage and sustain genocide in the future, as
it derives from his character and core political beliefs.
Some other pieces on the genocide voting conundrum (probably
more scattered about, since I added this grouping rather late):
Yousef Munayyer: [11-04]
The Harris campaign's missed opportunity on Palestine voters:
"If it seems hard to understand the Palestine voter, it is likely
because they have been living very different lives from most
Americans over the past year."
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover
the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows
orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions,
be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where
they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says
are used by Hamas.
They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given
off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them
information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel's
unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for
the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors.
Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay
with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families,
for assassination.
At least 134 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West
Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned,
according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the
deadliest period for journalists since the organization began
collecting data in 1992.
Wamona Wadi: [11-03]
CNN finally covered the Gaza genocide -- from the point of view of
Israeli troops with PTSD: Don't laugh. That's a real thing, a
form of casualty that's rarely calculated, or for that matter even
anticipated, by war planners. It should be counted as reason enough
not to start wars that can possibly be avoided, which is pretty much
all of them. Perhaps it pales in comparison to the other forms of
trauma unleashed by war, but it should be recognized and treated
the only way possible, with peace.
Videos: I have very little patience
for watching videos on computer, but the one with Suárez came
highly recommended, and the title shows us something we need to
be talking about now. When I got there, I found much more, so
I noted a few more promising titles (not all vetted, but most
likely to be very informative).
Election notes: First of all, I'm deliberately
not reporting on polling, which right or wrong will be obsolete in a
couple days, and saves me from looking at most of this week's new
reporting. Two more notes this week: this section has sprawled this
week, as I've wound up putting many pieces that cover both candidates,
or otherwise turn on the election results, here; also, I'm struck by
how little I'm finding about down-ballot races (even though a lot of
money is being spent there). I'm sure I could find some surveys, as
well as case stories, but Trump-Harris has so totally overshadowed
them that I'd have to dig. And even though for most of my life, I've
done just that, I feel little compulsion to do so right now.
Thomas B Edsall: [10-30]
Let me ask a question we never had to ask before: A survey of
"a wide range of scholars and political strategists," asking not
who will win, but who will blamed by the losers.
John Herrman:
Democrats are massively outspending the GOP on social media:
"It's not even close -- $182 million to just $45 million, according
to one new estimate." As I recall, Republicans were way ahead on
social media in 2016 (with or without Russian contributions), and
that was seen as a big factor. (But also, as I recall, Facebook's
algorithms amplified Trump's hateful lies, while Democratic memes
were deemed too boring to bother with.)
Howard Lisnoff: [11-01]
We're in some deep shit: Now that's a clickbait title, as you
have to click to get to anything specific, of which many subjects
are possibilities. Turns out it's mostly about Jill Stein: not what
you'd call an endorsement -- his own view is summed up in the Emma
Goldman quote, "if voting changed anything they'd make it illegal" --
but using anti-Stein hysteria as a prism for exposing the vacuousness
of the Democrats, as if Trump wasn't in the race at all (his name only
appears once, in a quote about 2016). Links herein:
Matt Flegenheimer: [10-23]
Jill Stein won't stop. No matter who asks. "People in Stein's
life have implored her to abandon her bid for president, lest she
throw the election to Donald Trump. She's on the ballot in almost
every critical state." This piece is, naturally, totally about
how she might siphon votes from Harris allowing Trump to win,
with nothing about her actual positions, or how they contrast
with those of Harris and Trump. Even Israel only gets a single
offhand mention:
Her bid can feel precision-engineered to damage Ms. Harris with
key subgroups: young voters appalled by the United States' support
for Israel; former supporters of Bernie Sanders's presidential
campaigns who feel abandoned by Democrats; Arab American and
Muslim voters, especially in Michigan, where fury at Ms. Harris
and President Biden has been conspicuous for months.
The Sanders comment seems like a totally gratuitous dig --
he is
on record as solidly for Harris even considering Israel, and
few of his supporters are likely to disagree. The other two points
are the same, and have been widely debated elsewhere (including
several links in this post), but the key thing there is that while
Stein may benefit from their disaffection, she is not the cause of
it. The cause is American support for genocide, which includes
Biden and Harris, but also Trump, Kennedy, and nearly everyone in
Congress.
Glenn Greenwald:
Kamala's worst answers yet? A 38:31 video with no transcript,
something I have zero interest in watching, although the comments
are suitably bizarre (most amusing: "Consequences of an arrogant
oligarchy and descending empire").
Dan Mangan: [11-02]
Shock poll shows Harris leading Trump in Iowa. An exception to
my "no polls stories" policy. My wife mentioned this poll to me, as
a possible reason to vote for Harris in Kansas where she had been
planning on a write-in.
Clara Ence Morse/Luis Melgar/Maeve Reston: [10-28]
Meet the megmadonors pumping over $2.5 billion into the election:
The breakdown of the top 50 is $1.6B Republican, $752M Democratic,
with $214M "supportive of both parties" (mostly crypto and realtor
groups). The top Democratic booster is Michael Bloomberg, but his
$47.4M this time is a drop in the bucket compared to the money he
spent in 2020 to derail Bernie Sanders.
Nicole Narea: [11-01]
2024 election violence is already happening: "How much worse
could it get if Trump loses?" I'm more worried about: how much
worse could it get if Trump wins? It's not just frustration that
drives violence. There's also the feeling that you can get away
with it -- one example of which is the idea that Trump will pardon
you, as he's already promised to the January 6 hoodlums. Nor should
we be too sanguine in thinking that frustration violence can only
come from the right. While rights are much more inclined to violence,
anyone can get frustrated and feel desperate, and the right has
offered us many examples of that turning violent.
Margaret Simons: [11-02]
Can democracy work without journalism? With the US election upon
us, we may be about to find out: "Most serious news organisations
are not serving the politically disengaged, yet it's these voters
who will decide the next president." Seems like a good question,
but much depends on what you mean by journalism. Although I have
many complaints about quality, quantity doesn't seem to be much
of a problem -- except, as compared to the quantity of PR, which
is over the top, and bleeding into everything else. As for "soon
find out," I doubt that. While honest journalism should have
decided this election several months ago, the commonplace that
we're now facing a "toss up" suggests that an awful lot of folks
have been very poorly informed. Either that, or they don't give
a fuck -- (not about their votes, but about what consequences they
may bring -- which is a proposition that is hard to dismiss. There
are many things that I wish reporters would research better, but
Donald Trump isn't one of them.
Margaret Sullivan: [11-04]
The candidates' closing campaign messages could not be more different:
Well, aside from automatic support for America's global war machine,
extending even to genocide in Israel, and the unexamined conviction
that "the business of America is business," and that government's
job is to promote that business everywhere. But sure, there are
differences enough to decide a vote on: "There is hateful rhetoric
and threats of retribution from one side, and messages of inclusion
and good will from the other." But haven't we seen this "bad cop,
good cop" schtick before? Or "speak softly, but carry a big stick"?
These are the sort of differences that generate a lot of heat, but
very little light.
Matt Stopera: [11-02]
5 celebrities who endorsed Trump this week, and 1 celeb who renounced
their Trump endorsement: Endorsing Trump: Jake Paul, Buzz Aldrin,
Mel Gibson, Bret Favre, and the McCloskeys (the gun-toting couple in
St. Louis that tried to intimidate Black Lives Matter marchers). The
switch from Trump to Harris: Nicky Jam (reggaeton star). But before
all that, a couple non-headline Harris endorsements: Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Nancy Sinatra, and Jennifer Aniston.
Trump:
The New Republic: [10-21]
The 100 worst things Trump has done since descending that escalator:
"Some were just embarrassing. Many were horrific. All of them should
disqualify him from another four years in the White House." I ran this
last week, but under the circumstances let's run it again. If I had
the time, I'm pretty sure I'd be able to write up 20+ more, many of
which would land in the top 20. For instance, Israel only merits 2
mentions, at 76 and 71, and the latter was more about him attacking
George Soros: no mention of moving the embassy to Jerusalem, or many
other favors that contributed to the Oct. 7 revolt and genocide.
Ditching the Iran deal came in at 8, but no mention of
assassinating Iranian general Qasem Soleimani (I hope I don't
need to explain why). There is only one
casual reference to Afghanistan (22. Escalates the drone war), none
that he protracted the war four years, knowing that Biden would be
blamed for his surrender deal to the Taliban. He gets chided for his
being "pen pals with Kim Jong Un," but not for failing to turn his
diplomacy into an actual deal. Not all of these items belong in a
Trivial Pursuit game, but most would be overshadowed by real policy
disasters if reporters could look beyond their Twitter feeds.
If the first Trump term was akin to the random destruction of a toddler,
a second would be more like the deliberate demolition of a saboteur.
With the benefit of four years of governing experience and four more
years of planning, Trump and his team have concluded that the problem
with their first game of Jenga was that they simply did not remove
enough of democracy's blocks.
I do not think that, over the course of four more years, Trump could
use these plans to successfully build a fascist state that would jail
critics and install himself in power indefinitely. This is in part
because of the size and complexity of the American state, and in part
because that's not really the kind of authoritarianism that works in
democracies nowadays.
But over the course of those years, he could yank out so many of
American democracy's basic building blocks that the system really
could be pushed to the brink of collapse. . . .
A second Trump term risks replacing Rawls's virtuous cycle with
a vicious one. As Trump degrades government, following the Orbánist
playbook with at least some success, much of the public would
justifiably lose their already-battered faith in the American
system of government. And whether it could long survive such a
disaster is anyone's guess.
While "toddler" is certainly apt, eight years later he hasn't
changed that aspect much, and in many ways he's even regressed.
His narcissistic petulance is ever more pronounced, which may be
why many people dismiss the threat of a second term as hysteria.
No matter how naughty he wants to be, even as president he can't
do all that much damage on his own. He looks like, and sounds
like, the same deranged blowhard he's always been, but one thing
is very different this time: he and his activist cult have found
each other. As president, he will empower them from day one, and
they'll not only do things he can only dream of, but they will
feed him new fantasies, carefully tailored to flatter him and
his noxious notions of greatness, because they know, as we all
should realize by now, that job one is stoking his ego.
No doubt much of what they try will blow up before it causes
real harm -- nobody thinks that, even with a Republican Senate,
Big Pharma is going to let RFK Jr. destroy their vaccination cash
cow -- and much of what does get promulgated and/or enacted will
surely blow back, driving his initially record-low approval rates
into the ground. But he knows better than to let GOP regulars
construct "guard rails" with responsible "adults in the room."
The loyalty of everyone he might hire now can be gauged by their
track record -- both what they've said in the past, and how low
they can bow and scrape now (Vance is an example of the latter,
of how to redeem yourself in Trump's eyes, although I'd surmise
that Trump's still pretty wary of him).
Aaron Blake: [11-01]
Trump's latest violent fantasy: "Trump keeps painting pictures
of violence against his foes despite allegations of fascism. And
Republicans keep shrugging."
Sidney Blumenthal: [11-02]
Donald Trump's freakshow continues unabated: "Trump insists on
posing as the salient question of the election: are you crazier
today than you were four years ago?"
Kevin T Dugan: [11-01]
Wall Street's big bet on a Trump win: "Gold, bitcoin, prisons, and
oil are all thought to be the big moneymakers for the financial class
if Trump wins another term." More compelling reasons to sink Trump.
Steven Greenhouse: [10-30]
Trump wants you to believe that the US economy is doing terribly. It's
untrue: "Despite his claims to the contrary, unemployment is low,
inflation is way down, and job growth is remarkably strong." But unless
you're rich, can you really tell? And if you're rich, the choice comes
down to: if you merely want to get richer, you'd probably be better
off with the Democrats (who have consistently produced significantly
higher growth rates, ever since the Roaring '20s crashed and burned),
but if you really want to feel the power that comes with riches, you
can go with one of your own, and risk the embarrassment. And funny
thing is, once you've decided which side you're on, your view of the
economy will self-confirm. From any given vantage point, you can look
up or down. That's a big part of the reason why these stories, while
true enough, have virtually no impact (except among the neoliberal
shills that write them).
Eight years wiser and with four years to plan, Trump, Miller, and
the rest of MAGA are telling us they plan to occupy America. They
are itching to use the military to terrify, subjugate, and ethnically
cleanse. The only liberation will be for their violent desires and
that of their Herrenvolk who went wild at mentions of mass deportations.
They loved the idea.
Also by Gupta:
[10-29]
Night of the Fash: "At Madison Square Garden with Trump and his
lineup of third-rate grifters and bigots." An earlier, shorter
draft.
[11-04]
Kamala says she'll "end the war in Gaza": "For opponents of
Israel's genocide, sticking to principles gets results. But for
Harris, her flip-flop is a sign of desperation." I don't really
believe her -- it's going to take more than a sound bite to stand
up to the Israel lobby -- but I would welcome the sentiment, and
not just make fun of her. It may be desperate, but it's also a
tiny bit of timely hope, much more plausible than the magic Trump
imagines.
[11-03]
Trump's final days on the campaign trail: "Under assault from all
sides, in the last weeks of his campaign, the former President speaks
often of enemies from within, including those trying to take his life."
[10-19]
Inside the Republican National Committee's poll-watching army:
"The RNC says it has recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to
observe the voting process at precincts across the country. Their
accounts of alleged fraud could, as one Trump campaign official
put it, "establish the battlefield" for after November 5th."
Chris Hooks: [11-02]
The brainless ideas guiding Trump's foreign policy: "Conservatives
recently gathered in Washington to explain how they would rule the
world in a second Trump term. The result was incoherent, occasionally
frightening, and often very dumb." My first reaction was that one
could just as easily write "The brainless ideas guiding Democrats'
foreign policy," but then I saw that the author is referring to a
specific conference, the Richard Nixon Foundation's "Grand Strategy
Summit."
Now, as the race enters the homestretch, Musk is trying to clinch
Trump's victory with a bracing closing argument: If our side wins,
you will experience severe economic pain.
If elected, Trump has vowed to put Musk in charge of a "government
efficiency commission," which would identify supposedly wasteful
programs that should be eliminated or slashed. During a telephone
town hall last Friday, Musk said his commission's work would
"necessarily involve some temporary hardship."
Days later, Musk suggested that this budget cutting -- combined
with Trump's mass deportation plan -- would cause a market-crashing
economic "storm." . . .
This is one of the more truthful arguments that Musk has made
for Trump's election, which is to say, only half of it is false.
If Trump delivers on his stated plans, Americans will indeed suffer
material hardship. But such deprivation would neither be necessary
for -- nor conducive to -- achieving a healthier or more sustainable
economy.
After discussing tariffs and mass deportation, Levitz offer a
section on "gutting air safety, meat inspections, and food stamps
will not make the economy healthier." He then offers us a silver
lining:
Trump's supporters might reasonably argue that none of this should
trouble us, since he rarely fulfills his campaign promises and will
surely back away from his economically ruinous agenda once in office.
But "don't worry, our candidate is a huge liar" does not strike me
as a much better message than "prepare for temporary hardship."
Carlos Lozada: [10-31]
Donald and Melania Trump were made for each other: Basically
a review of her book, Melania. The title could just as
well read "deserve each other," but that suggests a measure of
equality that has never been remotely true.
Melania's relationship with Donald is among the book's haziest features.
She depicts her initial attraction to him in superficial terms: She was
"captivated by his charm," was "drawn to his magnetic energy" and
appreciated his "polished business look." He was not "flashy or dramatic,"
she writes, but "down-to-earth." And though we know how he speaks about
women in private, Melania writes that "in private, he revealed himself
as a gentleman, displaying tenderness and thoughtfulness." The one
example she offers of his thoughtfulness is a bit unnerving: "Donald
to this day calls my personal doctor to check on my health, to ensure
that I am OK and that they are taking perfect care of me."
Branko Marcetic: [10-31]
'Anti-war' Trump trying to outflank Harris at critical moment:
"It may be a cynical strategy, but he seems to have read the room
while she has chosen a more confused, if not hawkish, path." This
has long been my greatest worry in the election.
Michael Galant: [2021-01-20]
Trump the anti-war president was always a myth: "Let the
record show: Trump poured fuel on our endless wars and kicked
diplomacy to the curb." By the way, the Marcetic piece led me
to an old (but still relevant) one:
Jan-Werner Müller: [11-04]
What if Trump's campaign is cover for a slow-motion coup?
"Even if Trump can't really mobilize large numbers of people to
the streets, just prolonging a sense of chaos might be enough."
Why are people so pre-occupied with imagining present and future
threats that have already happened? I'm sorry to have to break
the news to you, especially given that you think the election
tomorrow is going to be so momentous, but the "slow motion coup"
has already happened. Trump, while easily the worst imaginable
outcome, is just the farce that follows tragedy. The polarization
isn't driven by issues, but by personality types. A lot of people
will vote for Trump not because they agree with him, but because
in a rigged system, he's the entertainment option. He will make
the other people suffer -- his very presence drives the rest of
us crazy -- and Trump voters get off on that. And a lot of people
will vote against him, because they don't want to suffer, or in
some rare cases, they simply don't like seeing other people suffer.
Harris, actually much more than Biden or Obama or either Clinton,
is a very appealing candidate for those people (I can say us here),
but is still can be trusted not to try to undo the coup, to restore
any measure of real democracy, let alone "power to the people."
Here's a way to look at it: skipping past 1776-1860, there have
been two eras in American history, each beginning in revolution,
but which fizzled in its limited success, allowing reaction to set
in, extending the power of the rich to a breaking point. The first
was the Civil War and Reconstruction, which gave way to rampant
corruption, the Gilded Age and Jim Crow, ultimately collapsing
in the Great Depression. The second was the New Deal, which came
up with the idea of countervailing powers and a mixed economy with
a large public sector, mitigating the injustices of laissez-faire
while channeling the energy of capitalism into building a widely
shared Affluent Society.
But, unlike the Marxist model of proletarian revolution, the
New Deal left the upper crust intact, and during WWII they learned
how to use government for their own means. The reaction started to
gain traction after Republicans won Congress in 1946, and teamed
with racist Democrats to pass Taft-Hartley and other measures,
which eventually undermined union power, giving businesses a freer
hand to run things. Then came the Red Scare and the Cold War, which
Democrats joined as readily as Republicans, not realizing it would
demolish their popular base. Dozens of similar milestones followed,
each designed to concentrate wealth and power, which both parties
increasingly catered to, seeing no alternative, and comforted with
the perks of joining the new plutocracy.
One key milestone was the end of the "fairness doctrine" in the
1980s, which surrendered the notion that there is a public interest
as opposed to various private interests, and incentivized moguls to
buy up media companies and turn them into propaganda networks (most
egregiously at Fox, but really everywhere). Another was the end of
limits on campaign finance, which has finally reduced electoral
politics to an intramural sport of billionaires. (Someone should
issue a set of billionaire trading cards, like baseball cards,
with stats and stories on the back. I googled, and didn't find
any evidence of someone doing this.) Aside from Bernie Sanders,
no one runs for president (or much else) without first lining up
a billionaire (or at least a near-wannabe). They have about as
much control over who gets taken seriously and can appear on a
ballot as the Ayatollah does in Iran.
The main thing that distinguishes this system from a coup is
that it's unclear who's ultimately in charge, or even if someone
is. Still, that could be a feature, especially as it allows for
an infinite series of scapegoats when things go wrong -- as, you
may have noticed, they inevitably do.
Andrew Prokop: [09-26]
The Architect: Stephen Miller's dark agenda for a second Trump
term: "Miller has spent years plotting mass deportation. If
Trump wins, he'll put his plans into action." I think the most
important thing to understand about Miller isn't how malevolent
he is, but that he's the archetype, the exemplar for all future
Trump staff. He clearly has his own deep-seated agenda, but
what he's really excelled at is binding it to Trump, mostly
through utterly shameless flattery.
Dylan Scott: [10-30]
The existential campaign issue no one is discussing: "What happens
if another pandemic strikes -- and Trump is the president." Mentions
bird flu (H5N1) as a real possibility, but given Trump's worldview
and personal quirks, one could rephrase this as: what happens if any
unexpected problem strikes? I'm not one inclined to look to presidents
for leadership or understanding, but the least we should expect is the
third option in "lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way." Trump
is almost singularly incapable of any of those three options. Moreover,
where most people manage to learn things from experience, Trump jumps
to the wrong conclusions. Case in point: when Trump got Covid-19 in
2016, he could have learned from the experience how severe the illness
is, and how devastating it could be for others; instead, he recovered,
through treatment that wasn't generally available, and came out of it
feeling invincible, holding superspreader events and ridiculing masks.
I've long believed that a big part of his polling bounce was due to
people foolishly mistaking his idiocy for bravura.
Michael Tomasky: [11-04]
Donald Trump has lost his sh*t: "There is no 'context' for
performing fellatio on a microphone. He's gone batty. The only
remaining question is whether enough voters recognize it."
Melody Schreiber:
Trump unleashing RFK Jr. on public health would be a disaster:
"Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer with a chilling past, says Trump has
promised to name him head of Health and Human Services. The Trump
camp has denied this -- unconvincingly."
[11-04]
The Americans prepping for a second civil war: "Many now believe
that the US could descend into political violence. Some are joining
survivalist communities, canning food -- and buying guns."
Andrew Marantz: [11-01]
The Tucker Carlson road show: "After his Fox show was cancelled,
Carlson spent a year in the wilderness, honing his vision of what
the future of Trumpism might look like. This fall, he took his act
on tour."
Timothy Noah:
How Republicans get away with fleecing their own voters: "Democrats
are highly responsive to voter sentiment. Republicans are not, yet they
win reelection anyway." This could have been an interesting article,
especially if someone figured out why Republicans seem to be so willing
to vote against their own interests, or even if it was just about their
eagerness to suck up Trump merch. But are the Democrats actually better,
at least in terms of attentiveness? They campaign on donor-approved,
poll-tested issues, but rarely entertain anything else, even if it
actually has a lot of popular support.
Harris:
Eric Levitz: [10-22]
If Harris loses, expect Democrats to move right: "Even though
Harris is running as a moderate, progressives are likely to get
blamed for her defeat." I haven't read this, as it's locked up as
a "special feature for Vox Members," but the headline is almost
certainly wrong, and the subhed is very disputable -- I've already
seen hundreds of pieces arguing that if Harris fails, it will be
because she moved too far to the right, and in doing so risked
discredit of principles that actually resonate more with voters.
(And if she wins, it will be because she didn't cut corners like
that on abortion, but stuck to a strong message.) No doubt, if
she loses, the Democrats and "centrist" who never miss a chance
to slam the left will do so again -- you can already see this in
the Edsall piece, op. cit. -- but how credible will they be this
time? (After, e.g., trying to blame first Sanders then Putin for
Hillary Clinton's embarrassing failure in 2016.)
If Harris loses, she will be pilloried for every fault from
every angle, which may be unfair, but is really just a sign of
the times, a rough measure of the stakes. But if Trump wins,
the debate about who to blame is going to become academic real
fast. Republicans are not going to see a divided nation they'd
like to heal with conciliatory gestures. They're going to plunge
the knife deeper, and twist it. And as they show us what the
right really means, they will drive lots of people to the left,
to the people who first grasp what was going wrong, and who
first organized to defend against the right. And the more Trump
and his goons fuck up (and they will fuck up, constantly and
cluelessly), the more people will see the left as prescient and
principled. The left has a coherent analysis of what's gone wrong,
and what can and should be done about it. They've been held back
by the centrists -- the faction that imagines they can win by
appealing to the better natures of the rich while mollifying the
masses with paltry reforms and panic over the right -- but loss
by Harris, following Clinton's loss, will leave them even more
discredited.
As long-term politics, one might even argue that a Trump win
would be the best possible outcome for the left. No one (at least,
no one I know of) on the left is actually arguing that, largely
because we are sensitive enough to acute pain we wish to avoid even
the early throes of fascist dictatorship, and possibly because we
don't relish natural selection winnowing our leadership down to
future Lenins and Stalins. But when you see Republicans as odious as
Bret Stephens and
George Will endorsing Harris, you have to suspect that they
suspect that what I'm saying is true.
Stephen Prager/Alex Skopic: [11-01]
Every Kamala Harris policy, rated. This is a seriously important
piece, the kind of things issues-oriented voters should be crying out
for. But the platforms exists mostly to show that Harris is a serious
issues-oriented candidate, and to give her things to point to when
she pitches various specific groups. Anything that she wants will be
further compromised when the donor/lobbyists and their hired help
(aka Congress, but also most likely her Cabinet and their minions)
get their hands on the actual proposals. Given that the practical
voting choice is just between Harris and Trump, that seems like a
lot of extra work -- especially the parts, like everything having
to do with foreign policy, that will only make you more upset.
Nathan J Robinson introduced this piece with an extended
tweet, making the obvious contrasts to Trump ("a nightmare on
another level"). I might as well
unroll his post here:
The differences between a Trump and Harris presidency: An unprecedented
deportation program with armed ICE agents breaking down doors and tearing
families from their homes in unfathomable numbers, total right-wing
capture of the court system, ending every environmental protection.
Workplace safety rules will be decimated (remember, the right doesn't
believe you should have water breaks in the heat), Israel will be given
a full green light to "resettle" Gaza, all federal efforts against
climate change will cease, international treaties will be ripped up . . .
There will be a war on what remains of abortion rights (if you believe
the right won't try to ban it federally you're the world's biggest sucker),
protests will be ruthlessly cracked down on (with the military probably,
as Tom Cotton advocated), journalists might be prosecuted . . .
Organized labor's progress will be massively set back, with Trump
letting policy be dictated by billionaire psychopaths like Elon Musk
who think workers are serfs. JD Vance endorsed a plan for a massive
war on teachers' unions. Public health will be overseen by RFK
antivaxxers . . .
If you think things cannot be worse, I would encourage you to expand
your imagination. Trump is surrounded by foaming-at-the-mouth
authoritarians who believe they are in a war for the soul of
civilization and want to annihilate the left. I am terrified and
you should be too.
Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:
Ana Marie Cox: [11-01]
Tim Walz has broken Tucker Carlson's brain: "The former Fox News
host is so flummoxed by Kamala Harris's running mate that he's
resorting to immature, homophobic schoolyard taunts."
Ralph Nader: [11-04]
The Democratic Party still can adopt winning agendas. Obviously,
the "there is still time" arguments are finally moot for 2024, not
that the principles are wrong. This makes me wonder what would have
happened had Nader run as a Democrat in 2000, instead of on a third
party. Sure, Gore would have won most of the primaries, but he could
have gotten a sizable chunk of votes, possibly nudged Gore left of
Lieberman and Clinton, and if Gore still lost, set himself up for
an open run in 2004.
Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:
Nina Burleilgh: [10-31]
Justice Alito's royalist cosplay: "He's hanging out with Princess
Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and donned a Savoy-blue wool cape to
become a Constantinian knight."
Kim Bhasin/Alessandra Migliaccio: [03-27]
How Michael Rubin ended up holding all the cards: "Hijacked
contracts. Scuttled public offerings. Sealth acquisitions. The
Fanatics CEO famous for his Hamptons white parties has become
the most feared dealmaker of his generation." I only found this
because I was searching "billionaire trading cards," and temporarily
confused
this one with
another Rubin. For all of his graft and his many services to the rich,
the latter seems to only be worth a measly
$200 million, whereas Forbes pegs Michael Rubin at $10.6 billion.
Barry C Lynn:
The antitrust revolution: "Liberal democracy's last stand
against Big Tech." The Harpers article referred to in the
interview, previously critiqued by Levitz in:
The one big thing progressive critics of Big Business get wrong:
"Corporate power isn't the cause of every social problem." (This
argument is supposed to convince us that corporate power isn't
ever a problem?)
Constant Méheut/Josh Holder: [10-31]
Russia's swift march forward in U kraine's east: In maps
and charts. Not a huge amount of territory, but since May the
only significant gains have been by Russia.
Julian E Barnes/Eric Schmitt/Helene Cooper/Kim Barker: [11-01]
As Russia advances, US fears Ukraine has entered a grim phase:
"Weapons supplies are no longer Ukraine's main disadvantage, American
military officials say." Surprising pessimism, coming from the American
Pravda.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [10-30]
Nuland & Maddow back at the red string conspiracy board:
"The former State Department official tells MSNBC that Trump, Elon,
and Putin are "all on the same team." I really hate this argument.
I don't like Putin any more than you do, but the US needs to come
up with some way to live and work with Russia, and personal and
political vilification just gets in the way. Even if the intent
here is simply to slam Trump, which in itself if a worthy job,
what's implicit is a hardening of the conflict with Putin, and
that only makes already difficult matters worse.
Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:
Ezra Klein: [11-01]
Are we on the cusp of a new political order? Interview with
Gary Gerstle, author of
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World
in the Free Market Era. I've noted him as a "big picture"
historian, but I've never read him. But he makes a fair amount of
sense in talking about neoliberalism here, even though I resist
rooting it my beloved New Left. But I can see his point that a
focus on individual freedom and a critique of the institutions of
the liberal power elite could have served the reactionaries, not
least by pushing some liberals (notably Charles Peters) to refashion
themselves, which proved useful for Democratic politicians from
Jimmy Carter on. This sort of dovetails with my argument that the
New Left was a massive socio-cultural success, winning major mind
share on all of its major fronts (against war and racism, for women
and the environment) without ever seizing power, which was deeply
distrusted. That failure, in part because working class solidarity
was discarded as Old Left thinking, allowed the reactionaries to
bounce back, aided by neoliberals, who helped them consolidate
economic power.
Gerstle offers this quote from Jimmy Carter's 1978 state of the
union address:
Government cannot solve our problems. It can't set our goals. It
cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or
provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities
or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate
goodness.
One thing I'm struck by here is that four of these sentences
immediately strike us as plausible, given how little trust we still
have in government -- a trust which, one should stress, was broken
by the Vietnam War. However, the other sentence is plainly false,
and Carter seems to be trying to pull a fast one on us, disguising
a pretty radical curtailment of functions that government is the
only remedy for: eliminating poverty (spreading wealth and power),
providing a bountiful economy (organizing fair markets and making
sure workers are paid enough to be consumers), reducing inflation,
saving cities, curing illiteracy (schools), providing energy (TVA,
for example; more privatization here, not the best of solutions,
but kept in check by regulation -- until it wasn't, at which point
you got Enron, which blew up).
But once you realize you're being conned, go back and re-read
the paragraph again, and ask why? It's obvious that government can
solve problems, because it does so all the time. The question is
why doesn't it solve more problems? And the answer is often that
it's being hijacked by special interests, who pervert it for their
own greed (or maybe just pride). Setting goals, defining vision,
and mandating goodness are less tangible, which moves them out of
the normal functioning of government. But such sentences only make
sense if you assume that government is an independent entity, with
its own peculiar interests, and not simply an instrument of popular
will. If government works for you, why can't it promote your goals,
vision, and goodness? Maybe mandates (like the "war on drugs") are
a step too far, because democracies should not only reflect the will
of the majority but also must respect and tolerate the freedom of
others.
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The Message: I'm finally reading this book, so linking it
here was the easiest way to pick up the cover image. It took a
while to get good, but the major section on Israel/Palestine is
solid and forceful.
Semipop Life: [11-03]
Herstory often rhymes: "Doechii, Allen Lowe, Sabrina Carpenter,
Jonathan Tetelman, and more!"
Chatter
Dean Baker: [11-03]
quick, we need a major national political reporter to tell us Donald
Trump is not suffering from dementia, otherwise people might get the
wrong idea. [on post quoting Trump ("we always have huge crowds and
never any empty seats") while panning camera on many empty seats.]
Jane Coaston: [11-04]
Every white nationalist is convinced that almost every other person
is also a white nationalist and that's a level of confidence in the
popularity of one's views I do not understand.
Rick Perlstein comments:
I have a riff about that in my next book. I call it "epistemological
narcissism": right-wingers can't imagine anyone could think differently
than themselves. They, of coruse, only being different in having the
courage to tell the truth . . .
Iris Demento: [11-05]
Happy crippling anxiety day [followed by bullet list from 1972:
"Nixon Now" - Richard M. Nixon, 1972 (also, "Nixon Now, More
than Ever" and "President Nixon. Now more than ever")
"Come home, America" - George McGovern, 1972
"Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion for All" - 1972 anti-Democratic
Party slogan, from a statement made to reporter Bob Novak by Missouri
Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (as related in Novak's 2007 memoir, Prince
of Darkness)
"Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You" - Popular anti-Nixon slogan,
1972
"They can't lick our Dick" - Popular campaign slogan for Nixon
supporters
Remembering 1972, I contributed a comment:
1972 was the first time I voted. I hated Nixon much more than I hate
Trump today. (Not the word I would choose today; maybe I retired it
after Nixon?) I voted for McGovern, and for Bill Roy, who ran a
remarkable campaign against the hideous Bob Dole, and for Jim Juhnke
against our dull Republican Rep. Garner Shriver. Those three were
among the most decent and thoughtful people who ever ran for public
office in these parts. I voted for whatever Republican ran against the
horrible Vern Miller and his sidekick Johnny Darr. In a couple cases,
I couldn't stand either D or R, so wasted my vote with the
Prohibitionist (a minor party, but still extant in KS). Not a single
person I voted for won. I was so despondent, I didn't vote again until
1996, when I couldn't resist the opportunity to vote against Dole
again. (I was in MA at the time.) I've voted regularly since
then. After moving back to KS in 1999, I got another opportunity to
vote for whatever Republican ran against Vern Miller, and we beat him
this time (although for the most part, my winning pct. remains pretty
low).
Paul Krugman: [no link, but cited in a post called
Trump could make contagion great again]
I expect terrible things if Trump wins. Until recently, however,
"explosive growth in infectious diseases" wasn't on my Bingo card
[link to article on RFK Jr. saying "Trump promised him 'control'
of HHS and USDA]
Local tags (these can be linked to directly):
music.
Original count: 135 links, 9115 words
Current count:
160 links, 10343 words (13232 total)
I've been trying to collect my thoughts and write my up
Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Harris vs. Trump. I posted an early
draft -- just the top 10 list -- on Monday afternoon at
Notes on Everyday Life, then blanked out and didn't get to the
second part ("Top 5 Reasons Electing Harris Won't Solve Our Problems")
until Tuesday afternoon (and well into evening). I updated the NOEL
draft that evening, and finally posted the file in the blog. That
pushes this file out until Wednesday, and Music Week until Thursday
(which still fits in October).
As of Tuesday evening, this week's collection is very hit-and-miss
(100 links, 6023 words), typed up during odd breaks as I juggled my
life between working on my birthday dinner, writing the endorsement,
and struggling with my big remodeling project.
The endorsement could
do with some editing, although my initial distribution of the link
has thus far generated almost no comment (one long-time friend wrote
back to disagree, having decided -- "even in a battleground state" --
to vote for Jill Stein). A year ago I still imagined writing a book
that might have some small influence on the election. In some ways,
this piece is my way of penance for my failure, but the more I got
into it, the more I thought I had some worthwhile points to make.
But now it's feeling like a complete waste of time.
The
birthday dinner did feel like I accomplished something. The Burmese
curries were each spectacular in their own way, the coconut rice nice
enough, the ginger salad and vegetable sides also interesting, and the
cake (not Burmese, but spice-and-oats) was an old favorite. I should
follow it up with a second round of Burmese recipes before too long,
especially now that I've secured the tea leaf salad ingredients.
Slow but tangible progress on the bedroom/closet remodel. Walls are
painted now, leaving trim next. Paneling is up in closet, where I still
have the ceiling and quite a bit of trim. [Wednesday morning now:] I've
been meaning to go out back and polyurethane the trim boards, so I can
cut them as needed, first to shore up the ceiling. But it's raining,
so I'll give that pass for another day, and probably just work on this
straggling post. Laura's report of morning news is full of gaffes by
Biden and Hillary Clinton, who seem intent on redeeming the dead weight
of their own cluelessness by imposing it on Harris. With "friends"
like these, who needs . . . Dick Cheney?
Posting late Wednesday night, my usual rounds still incomplete.
I'll decide tomorrow whether I'll add anything here, or simply
move on to next week (which really has to post before election
results start coming in). For now, I'm exhausted, and finding
this whole process very frustrating.
Top story threads:
Israel:
Mondoweiss:
[10-21]
Day 381: Israel pummels northern Gaza amid intensifying extermination
campaign: "Israel's conditions for a ceasefire with Lebanon
include allowing the Israeli army to continue operating in Lebanese
territory. Meanwhile, Israel steps up its extermination campaign in
northern Gaza, targeting its last remaining hospitals."
[10-24]
Day 384: Israel continues to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza:
"The ongoing extermination campaign in northern Gaza is displacing
Palestinians from shelters as dozens of residents have been abducted
by the Israeli army. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut's
southern Dahiya district."
Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-25]
Survivors of north Gaza invasion report Israeli 'extermination'
campaign: "Survivors of the ongoing Israeli extermination campaign
in north Gaza describe how the Israeli army is separating mothers from
children before forcing them south, executing civilians in ditches,
and directly targeting hospitals and medical staff."
Shatha Hanaysha: [10-25]
'Our freedom is close': why these young Palestinian men choose armed
resistance: "I met resistance fighters from the Tulkarem Brigade
for an interview in the alleyways of Tulkarem refugee camp in the
occupied West Bank. They talked about why they fight against Israel,
and what their dreams are for the future." This is disturbing. I find
it impossible to feel solidarity or even sympathy with people who
would fight back against Israel, even if purely out of self-defense.
But it is understandable, and has long been predicted, every time
Israel has renewed its war on Gaza (going back at least to 1951):
virtually all people, when oppressed, will fight back. That they
should do so, why and why, is mostly a function of the people who
are driving them to such desperate measures. We'd see less of this
if only we were clear on who is responsible for setting the conditions
that make such rebellion seem like the only recourse, especially if
we made it clear that we'll hold those who control an area as the
sole ones responsible for the rebellions they provoke. Sure, I can
think of some cases where control was nebulous and/or revolts were
fueled by external forces, but that is not the case with Israel in
Gaza. Israel is solely responsible for this genocide. And if armed
resistance only accelerates it, that is solely because Israel wants
it that way.
[10-24]
Israeli army continues attempts to empty northern Gaza: "Following
the Israeli army's claim to have displaced 20,000 Palestinians from
Jabalia, local sources tell Mondoweiss that most of the displaced have
relocated to other places in northern Gaza."
[10-29]
Why Israel outlawed UNRWA, and what it could mean for Palestinian
refugees: "Israel has banned the work of the UN agency for
Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in Israel and East Jerusalem. The move
could have a major impact on the agency's life-saving work and is
part of an ongoing campaign to erase Palestinian refugee rights."
Jonathan Ofir: [10-28]
Israeli journalists join the live-streamed genocide: "A mainstream
Israeli journalist recently blew up a house in Lebanon as part of a
news report while embedded with the military. The broadcast shows how
mainstream genocidal activity has become in Israeli society."
Christiaan Triebert/Riley Mellen/Alexander
Cardia: [10-30]
Israel Demolished Hundreds of Buildings in Southern Lebanon, Videos
and Satellite Images Show: "At least 1,085 buildings have been
destroyed or badly damaged since Israel's invasion targeting the
Hezbollah militia, including many in controlled demolitions, a New
York Times analysis shows." Same tactics, reflecting the same
threats and intentions Israel is using on Gaza, except that you
can't even pretend to be responding to an attack like Oct. 7.
Hezbollah is being targeted simply because it exists, and Lebanon
is being targeted because Israelis make no distinction between
the "militants" they "defend" against and any other person who
lives in their vicinity. The numbers in Lebanon may not amount
to genocide yet, but that's the model that Israel is following.
The plan, dubbed "Project Esther," casts pro-Palestinian activists
in the U.S. as members of a global conspiracy aligned with designated
terrorist organizations. As part of a so-called "Hamas Support Network,"
these protesters receive "indispensable support of a vast network of
activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal --
the destruction of capitalism and democracy," Project Esther's authors
allege.
This conspiratorial framing is part of a legal strategy to suppress
speech favorable to Palestinians or critical of the U.S.-Israel
relationship, by employing counterterrorism laws to suppress what
would otherwise be protected speech . . .
To achieve its goals, Project Esther proposes the use of
counterterrorism and hate speech laws, as well as immigration
measures, including the deportation of students and other
individuals in the United States on foreign visas for taking part
in pro-Palestinian activities. It also advocates deploying the
Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law placing disclosure obligations
on parties representing foreign interests, against organizations that
the report's authors imply are funded and directed from abroad.
In addition, the document also suggests using the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to help construct
prosecutions against individuals and organizations in the movement.
The RICO act was originally created to fight organized crime in the
U.S., and particularly mafia groups.
It occurs to me that the same laws and tactics could be used to
counter Israeli political influence -- that that anyone would try
that -- and that the audit trail would be much more interesting.
Azadeh Shahshahahani/Sofía Verónica Montez: [02-26]
Complicity in genocide -- the case against the Biden administration:
"Israel's mass bombardment of civilians in Gaza is being facilitated,
aided and abetted by the United States government." Older article
I just noticed, but figured I'd note anyway. Reminds me that the
only proper response to the "genocide" charge is to stop doing it.
That at least enables the argument that you never meant the complete
annihilation of everyone, because you stopped and left some (most?)
target people still alive. Needless to say, the argument becomes less
persuasive over time, where you've repeatedly missed opportunities
to say this is enough, "we've made our point."
[10-12]
Yom Kippur: Atoning for genocide: "Let's make something clear
from the start: Jews don't have to apologize for Israel's sins.
Israelis must do that."
[10-25]
Is Israel carrying out de facto ethnic cleansing? "A pro-settlement
Israeli group and some Israeli lawmakers gathered a couple miles from
northern Gaza's blasted neighborhoods to rally around settling Gaza."
[10-30]
The world beyond the election: So much for democracy vs. autocracy.
The Biden framing was mostly horseshit, mostly because America has
never cared whether other countries practiced democracy, not least
because we don't do a good job of it ourselves, and are certainly
willing to throw it out the window if the polls look unfavorable.
But also I suppose it was a subtle dig at Trump, who's always been
Team Autocracy. That the ardor seems to have faded is less a change
of view than acknowledgment that it hasn't worked so well. Then
there is this line: "Biden once framed the successful defense of
Ukraine as a rejection of a world 'where might makes right.'" But
what is the US "defense" of Ukraine but an exercise in might making
right? And if that case isn't clear cut enough for you, what else
can you make of Israel?
[10-22]
The Shift: Poll shows Trump with slight edge among Arab American
voters: The poll was from
Arab News/YouGov. The split was 45% for Trump, 43% for Harris, and 4% for
Jill Stein. Of chose, 29% chose Gaza as their biggest issue. Both
candidates got 38% when asked "who would be better for the Middle
East," but respondents thought Trump was more likely "to successfully
resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict" (39% to 33%). A recent poll from
Arab American Institute produced similar results. For more on
recent Arab-American polling:
Richard Eskrow: [10-18]
Dems are afraid Gaza will cost them the election. They're not afraid
enough.
Many people are critics of Harris for not taking a strong stand
against Israel's genocide, but Arria relays a case where Israel's
supporters are attacking Harris for not being supportive enough:
It seems pretty clear that Harris was referring to the humanitarian
crisis in Gaza and not the student's reference to genocide, but this
didn't stop pro-Israel voices from attacking the Vice President.
"A very dangerous precedent,"
tweeted former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael
Oren. "I was disturbed to view the video in which Vice President
Kamala Harris appears to confirm the charge that Israel is committing
genocide in Gaza. This is the first time that the White House has been
linked to a libel which threatens Israel's legitimacy and security.
I call on the U.S. administration to issue an immediate and complete
denial."
Just goes to show that Israel's front-line hasbara warriors
realize that their arguments cannot withstand the admission of any
doubt or ambiguity.
Ben Lorber: [09-05]
The right is increasingly exploiting the horror of genocide:
"Right-wing operatives are channeling the genocide in Gaza into
mainstream antisemitism." This was bound to happen, although it's
been slow to emerge, as most right-wing antisemites are actually
big fans of Israel, and they're not especially sensitive to human
rights abuses of any sort. [PS: On closer examination, I may have
jumped to the wrong conclusion: that right-wingers were feigning
horror at genocide to whip up antisemitic sentiments. Turns out
this is mostly about a group called NatCon, where antisemitism
claims the mantle of "Judeo-Christian nationalism" and supports
genocide to the hilt.]
Bob Dreyfuss: [10-29]
Pennsylvania's undecideds: "The 2024 election will likely turn on
the Democrats' ground game."
John Feffer: [10-23]
Billionaires vs democracy: "The rich are trying to buy elections
all over the world and consign democracy to the trash bin of history."
Celinda Lake/Amanda Iovino: [10-30]
A Democratic and a Republican pollster agree: This is the fault line
that decides the election: Teases you with the "gender gap," the
chart showing Trump +8 with men, Harris +9 with women (gap of 17
points), then offers you the 29-point gap by education, which shows
Trump +10 for non-college, Harris +19 for college. Of course, both
factors compound with a 43-point gap between non-college men (Trump +16)
and college women (Harris +27), but non-college women still prefer
Trump (+4) while college men go with Harris (+7).
Nicole Narea: [10-27]
What if Jill Stein or RFK Jr. decides the election? That you
could even ask such a question shows that you understand nothing
about third-party candidates, or at least their voters. Anyone
who thinks that there is meaningful difference between the two
major party candidates will vote for one or the other. Those who
don't may register that opinion by voting for someone else, or
they may just skip the whole process -- third-party voters are
preferable, because at least they're showing respect for the
process, just not for the two parties and their candidates.
Stein and Kennedy decided to throw their names into the hat,
but that's about it. Perhaps they made that decision hoping
to spoil the election -- that's certainly the only message
popular media has any interest in examining. But the voters'
decisions are purely negative. Neither party has the right to
claim third-party votes as rightfully theirs, because those
votes were clear rejections of both parties.
I've made what I felt was a
pretty strong case that the two-party split really matters
this year, and that one should vote for Harris vs. Trump. But
the first commenter I got back disagreed and reiterated his
decision to vote for Stein. I respect that.
Go to the article for
the chart, but each node has an assigned probability, which of
course is just a wild guess, but this allows the possibility of
adding them up:
If the US were remotely normal, every entry on the left-hand edge
ought to be equal to 1. Harris should be a sure winner, Trump shouldn't
find any supporters for a coup, the MAGA Republicans in Congress should
be unelectable and the moderate program proposed by Harris should be
successful enough that Trumpism would be defeated forever.
But that's not the case. There are two end points in which US
democracy survives, with a total probability (excessively precise)
of 0.46, and one where it ends, with a probability of 0.54. By
replacing my probabilities at the decision nodes with your own,
you can come up with your own numbers. Or you may feel that I've
missed crucial pathways. . . .
Note: Any Thälmann-style comments (such as "After Trump, us"
or "Dems are social fascists anyway") will be blocked and deleted.
The key here is "remotely normal, so that's the part you still
have to puzzle out, and that's where the real problems and solutions
lie.
Catherine Rampell/Youyou Zhou: [10-22]
Voters prefer Harris's agenda to Trump's -- they just don't realize
it. Take our quiz." I hate these pieces, not least because they
deliberately try to screw you over with misleading questions, but
since I'm citing it, I figure I might as well score myself. The
verdict was: "you supported 1 of Trump's policies and 4 of Harris's
policies." The one "Trump proposal" I supported was: "Funding free
online classes with money taken from private university endowments
through taxes, fines, and lawsuits." I can see why Harris wouldn't
have proposed that. I'm not wild about the funding mechanism, but
private university endowments are a huge tax shelter that doesn't
offer much public interest value, so I could see taxing them down.
On the other hand, "free online classes" is a no-brainer. I think
that continuing adult education is drastically underserved in
America, and online classes would be a particularly cost-effective
way of helping out. (I also favor free in-person classes, and I
would fund it all from general funds, but I wasn't asked that.)
The only thing that distinguishes this as a "Trump proposal" is
that it's a bit harebrained. It's also a proposal that Trump will
never lift a finger to implement, nor could he pass through his
caucus.
Shaghayegh Chris Rostampour: [10-14]
Why aren't Harris and Trump talking about nuclear weapons?
"The threat is real and at times the call is coming from inside
our own house." This doesn't really belong under "election,"
because, as noted, it's not something being contested, or even
given much thought.
With Harris and Democrats, there is an opening for Americans to
organize, push, and pressure her administration to halt Israel's
genocide and pursue progressive healthcare and economic policies.
Democratic allies include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
labor organizations and communities of color who remain committed
to social justice, equity and peace. With the Republicans and Trump,
no such allies exist. There's simply a fascist and a white Christian
nationalist regime in waiting.
Matt Bai: [10-30]
George W Bush is running out of time: "He should take this
chance to get right with history, because history will certainly
be hard on him." I've long suspected that Bush had a streak of
plain human decency that he managed to suppress during his eight
years as president. He ended that streak in disgrace, which come
to think of it, is also how he started it, with many even worse
moments along the way. But at least he hasn't compounded that
disgrace, as most other ex-presidents have done. His withdrawal
and silence is really all the recognition we need (or can hope
for) that he is at least somewhat cognizant of his failures.
Doing anything else at this point would only compromise his
last shred of dignity.
By the way, it's easy enough to see Dick Cheney's endorsement
as nothing more than a favor to his daughter, who might still
hope to continue her political career -- not as a candidate but
in some other capacity -- by endearing herself to Harris. While
Cheney is the most certifiably evil character in recent American
politics, he's always had a soft spot for the women in his life.
Jackie Calmes: [10-20]
Top 10 reasons not to vote for Donald Trump: Plus: "Finally, the
bonus, a positive reason to vote Harris. She's not only among the
most experienced applicants for the job ever, but also: She's not
Trump."
William Lewis: [10-25]
On political endorsement: The Washington Post, presumably as
directed by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, declined to endorse any
presidential candidate this year, breaking with a practice that
they've followed since 1976, even after it's been reported that
they had a Harris endorsement ready to go. The publisher tries to
explain this decision here. I'm not terribly bothered by this,
probably because I deeply distrust the big money media anyway,
especially their pretensions of independence. The Post, like the
New York Times, goes out of their way to "balance" their proper
news reporting -- never free from their own deep seated biases --
with right-wing "opinion" writers. However, many readers recognize
Trump as not just a political opportunist but as such a perversely
malign presence that they think he merits more rigorous scrutiny:
that every mention that does not put his statements in historical
context runs the risk of sanitizing and legitimizing ideas that
most people upon reflection should find truly appalling. So this
particular non-endorsement has elicited an interesting set of
reactions, starting with economic sanctions:
Isaac Chotiner: [10-27]
Marty Baron on the Washington Post's "spineless" endorsement
decision: "The former executive editor discusses his relationship
with the newspaper's owner, Jeff Bezos, who was reportedly behind
the last-minute call to kill an editorial supporting Kamala Harris."
David Remnick: [10-30]
Standing up to Trump: "Jeff Bezos endorsed a Trump-era slogan --
'Democracy Dies in Darkness' for his newspaper, the Washington Post.
Why wouldn't he let it endorse a candidate?"
Isaac Stanley-Becker/Aaron C Davis/Josh Dawsey/Christian
Davenport: [10-30]
For Jeff Bezos and his businesses, Washington has become more important:
"Executives at companies founded by the billionaire Post owner have
sought contact with trump. He argues he didn't end presidential
endorsements out of self-interest."
The New Yorker:
Harris for President: "The Vice-President has displayed the basic
values and political skills that would enable her to help end, once
and for all, a poisonous era defined by Donald Trump."
Rick Perlstein: [10-23]
Science is political: "For only the second time in its 179-year
history, Scientific American has endorsed a candidate for
president: Kamala Harris.
Bret Stephens: [10-29]
A conservative case against Trump: This one gives me no comfort.
He's in the running for worst right-wing pundit in America, and
much of his rationale centers on his understanding that Trump is
less reliable than Harris when it comes to supporting war and
genocide: among other things, he worries that "allow Putin to
succeed in Ukraine, and Israel's threats from Russia's allies
in Iran, Syria and Yemen will multiply."
Wikipedia: I ran this last week, but the lists keep
growing:
Melissa Gira Grant: [10-29]
Trump wasn't kidding with that fascist rally. Just ask his ICE chief.
"While Stephen Miller and Tony Hinchcliffe were hurling racist tropes
at Madison Square Garden, former ICE acting Director Tom Homan was
on CBS explaining what the actual policies of mass deportation would
look like."
Alex Shephard: [10-28]
It's not just Trump we have to fear anymore: "Trump's rally at
Madison Square Garden was a parade of foot soldiers in a hateful
movement that has become even bigger than the man who founded it."
We don't know our true values until they're tested.
Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics.
Finally, trust is tribal.
Susan B Glasser: [10-18]
How Republican billionaires learned to love Trump again: "The
former President has been fighting to win back his wealthiest donors,
while actively courting new ones -- what do they expect to get in
return?"
Trump's effort to win back wealthy donors received its biggest boost
on the evening of May 30th, when he was convicted in Manhattan on
thirty-four criminal counts related to his efforts to conceal
hush-money payments to the former adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
After the verdict, Trump walked out to the cameras in the courthouse
and denounced the case brought against him as "rigged" and a "disgrace."
Then he departed in a motorcade of black Suburbans. He was headed
uptown for an exclusive fund-raising dinner, at the Fifth Avenue
apartment of the Florida sugar magnate José (Pepe) Fanjul. . . .
Trump was seated at the head table, between Fanjul -- a major
Republican donor going back to the early nineties -- and Stephen
Schwarzman, the C.E.O. of Blackstone, the world's largest private-equity
fund, who had endorsed Trump the previous Friday. Securing the support
of Schwarzman was a coup for the Trump campaign. . . .
Trump was fund-raising off his conviction with small-dollar donors
as well; his campaign, which portrayed him as the victim of a
politicized justice system, brought in nearly $53 million in the
twenty-four hours after the verdict. Several megadonors who had
held back from endorsing Trump announced that they were now
supporting him, including Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late
casino mogul Sheldon Adelson; the Silicon Valley investor David
Sacks, who said that the case against Trump was a sign of America
turning into a "Banana Republic"; and the venture capitalist Shaun
Maguire, who, less than an hour after the verdict, posted on X that
he was donating $300,000 to Trump, calling the prosecution a
"radicalizing experience." A day later, Timothy Mellon, the
banking-family scion, wrote a $50-million check to the Make
America Great Again super PAC.
Doug Henwood: [10-30]
Trumponomics: "What kind of economic policy could we expect
from a second Trump term?" A fairly obvious assignment for one of
our more available left-wing economists, but he comes up with
surprisingly little here, beyond income tax cuts and tariffs --
much-advertised themes that are unlikely to amount to very much.
I suspect this is mostly because, despite the obvious importance
of the economy, there isn't much of a partisan divide on how to
run it. Trump would be harder on workers (especially on unions),
and softer on polluters and all manner of frauds, but those are
just relative shifts of focus. He would also shift public spending
away from things that might be useful, like infrastructure, to
"defense," including his "beautiful wall."
Robert Kuttner: [10-30]
Why so much hate? "Trump has tapped into an undercurrent of crude
hatred and encouraged his supporters to express it. Where does all
this hate come from?"
Steven Levitsky/Daniel Ziblatt: []
There are four anti-Trump pathways we failed to take. There is a
fifth. Authors of two books that have many liberal fans --
How Democracies Die (2018), and Tyranny of the Minority:
Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023) --
but never struck me as worth investigating, partly because their
interest in democracy seems more concerned with formal elegance
than with making government serve the people. The fifth path,
when various legal schemes fail, is "societal mobilization" --
isn't that what we used to call "revolution"? The authors have
written several "guest essays" over the years, including:
Rick Perlstein: [10-30]
What will you do? "Life-changing choices we may be forced to make
if Donald Trump wins."
Molly Redden/Andy Kroll/Nick Surgey: [10-29]
Inside a key MAGA leader's plans for a new Trump agenda: "Key
Trump adviser says a Trump administration will seek to make civil
servants miserable in their jobs." Spotlight here on Russell Vought,
"former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget."
Also on Vought:
[10-22]
Americans need a closing argument against Trump: "Too many Americans
seem to be ignoring the risks that another Trump presidency would pose
to the US. This is a warning to them." Included here because the author
casually mentions: "Trump is a fascist who wants to overthrow the United
States' democratic system of government." That's under the first section
here, which is just one of several:
Threat to democracy
Imprison political opponents
Eliminate reproductive rights
Concentration camps and mass deportations for immigrants
Create a theocracy
Increase censorship and destroy the media
A puppet for Putin
Dictator for life
Actually, I don't see many of these things happening, even if
Republicans take Congress, and the last two are total canards.
No one aspires to be a puppet, but aside from that, the rest are
at least things Trump might think of and wish for. What separates
Trump from the classic fascists has less to do with thought and
desire than with checks and balances that make it hard for any
president to get much of anything done. Still, a bad president
can do a lot of damage, and any would-be fascist is certain to
be a very bad president. As Trump has already proven, so we
really shouldn't have to relitigate this.
Sean Wilentz:
Trump's plot against America: "A leading historian looks back
at Philip Roth's novel and how it perfectly predicts the rise of
Trump and his willing collaborators."
Did yesterday's rally seem like the work of an organized, dangerous
fascist party? Yes -- but the rally's rhetoric also seemed like
ordinary casual conversation among bigoted white men when they
think no one can hear them. Remember the cops who beat Rodney King
in 1991 and sent messages to one another describing Black citizens
involved in a domestic dispute as being "right out of 'Gorillas in
the Mist'"? Remember the police official responsible for investigating
workplace harassment in New York City being fired in 2021 after it
was revealed that he'd written racist posts in a police discussion
group called the Rant? . . .
This is how bigoted men talk. Among cops, it reinforces a sense
of grievance that often leads to brutality. It'll do the same thing
among Trumpers if they win -- and, to a lesser extent, if they lose.
This is a rising fascist movement, but it's built on ordinary
hatreds that aren't new and that predate Trump's political career.
I think young men find Trump's campaign-trail lapses relatable.
It's not just that they might really believe Haitians in America are
eating people's pets, or might enjoy Trump's smutty anecdotes. I think
they also might notice that Trump is being accused of campaign
incompetence or dementia -- and that endears him more to
them.
After all, many of them were diagnosed with ADHD because they
couldn't sit still in school or stop disrupting class. They might
not like Trump's taste in music, but they can relate to someone who
shows up and just doesn't feel like doing the work.
They appreciate the way Trump suggests that he not only can solve
all the world's problems, but can do it quickly and easily -- he
conveys a sense that he can succeed at many things without doing
any hard work. That's what they want to do!Why are young men attending college at lower rates than young
women? Aren't they attending the same schools as their sisters?
Being good in school has always been seen as weird and unmanly by
most Americans, and I think that mindset is having a greater and
greater impact on young men's choices. Boys with good grades are
seen as weird losers and not very masculine -- they're like girls,
who are allowed to be good in school. It's much cooler to be an
amusing fuckup.
When we express horror at Trump's latest baffling act on the
campaign trail, I think we sound, to these young men, like annoyingly
responsible scolds. Obviously, they like Trump's offensive humor
because they like offending people, but they also relate to Trump's
refusal to restrain his speech because trying to avoid giving offense
to people is hard work. It's almost like schoolwork, and the
same people are good at it, for the same reasons -- because they're
grade-grubbing goody-goodies who seem to like spoiling everyone
else's fun.
This is a reminder of one reason Donald Trump is winning over some
young men, apart from the bro-ishness and misogyny of his campaign:
Trump and his surrogates have young men convinced that a vote for
Harris is a vote for war. Trump regularly says that a Harris
presidency will lead to World War III, while he'll instantly,
magically, and single-handedly end all the major wars taking place
right now and prevent future wars by means of a slogan, "Peace
Through Strength." Harris, regrettably, has welcomed the support
not only of Liz Cheney (who has stood up for the rule of law in
recent years) but also of her father, whom nobody admires these
days and who was unquestionably a warmonger.
Trump is a repeat electoral loser. This time will be no different.
Money matters, and Harris has it in droves.
It's just a feeling.
His feeling?
For the past decade, Trump has infected American life with a
malignant political sickness, one that would have wiped out many
other global democracies. On Jan. 6, 2021, our democracy itself
nearly succumbed to it. But Trump has stated clearly that this
will be the last time he runs for president. That is exactly why
we should be exhilarated by what comes next: Trump is a loser;
he is going to lose again. And it is highly likely that there
will be no other who can carry the MAGA mantle in his wake --
certainly not his running mate.
Lydie Lake: [10-30]
Harris's final push before election day: "Kamala Harris delivered
her closing argument in a charged pre-election rally near the White
House."
Chris Megerian/Colleen Long/Steve Karnowski: [10-17]
Following death of Hamas leader, Harris says it's 'time for the
day after to begin' in Gaza. If by "day after" you mean the
day after the killing ends, that's been overdue since Oct. 8,
2023 (and really many years before), but the statement would
seem to reject the idea that the war has to go on until there
are no Palestiniains left to kill, which seems to be Netanyahu's
agenda.
One of the main mistakes Hillary Clinton made was making her central
message "Trump is bad" without offering a positive case for why she
would be a good president. The error is being repeated.
A quick search reveals more complaints about this as a strategy,
along with much consternation that Harris is blowing the campaign,
possibly letting Trump win. I get that the "Trump is a fascist" jab
is suddenly fashionable thanks to the Kelly quote, although it's
been commonplace for years among people who know much about the
history of fascism, and are willing to define it broadly enough
that a 78-year-old American might qualify. I'd say that Trump is
a bit more complicated and peculiar than simply being a generic
fascist, although sure, if you formulated a generic F-scale, he
would pass as a fascist, and it wouldn't be a close call. But I
have two worries here: one is that most Americans don't know or
care much about fascism -- other than that it's a generic slur,
which judging from his use of the word (e.g., to slam "radical
leftists") seems to be his understanding; the other is that there
are lots of other adjectives and epithets that get more surely
and much quicker to the point of why Trump is bad: even fancy
words like sociopath, narcissist, oligarch, and misanthrope work
better; as well as more common ones like racist, sexist, elitist,
demagogue; you could point out that he's both a blowhard and a
buffoon; or you could settle for something a bit more colorful,
like "flaming asshole." Or rather than just using labels/names,
you could expand on how he talks and acts, about his scams and
delusions -- sorry if I haven't mentioned lies before, but they
come in so many flavors and variations you could do a whole
taxonomy, like the
list of fallacies (many of which he exemplifies -- at least
the ones that don't demand much logic).
As for Robinson's complaint, I think that's typical of left
intellectuals, who've spent all their lives trying to win people
over on issues. Politicians have to be more practical, especially
because they have to win majorities, while all activists can hope
for are incremental gains. Harris has a lot of planks in her
platform, and if you're seriously interested in policy, there's
a lot to talk about there (and not all good, even if, like most
leftists, you're willing to settle for small increments). But to
win an election, she needs to focus on the elements that can get
her majority support.
And the one key thing that should put her over the top is that
he's Donald Trump, and she isn't: that the only chance we voters
have of getting rid of Trump is to vote for her. To do this, she
needs to focus relentlessly on his negatives. She doesn't need to
toot her own horn much, as every negative she exposes him for is
an implicit contrast: to say "Trump is a fascist" implies that "I
am not." That may not be saying much, but it's something, and it
should be enough. And Robinson, at least, should know better. I
find it hard -- I mean, he's just co-authored
a book with Noam Chomsky -- seriously expects any Democrat to
offer "a positive case for why she would be a good president."
All any voter can do is pick one item from a limited, pre-arranged
menu. Sometimes you do get a chance to vote for someone you really
like or at least respect, but quite often the best you can do is
to vote against the candidate you most despise.
That choice seems awfully clear to me this year. Unfortunately,
it appears that many people are still confused and/or misguided.
At this point, I don't see any value in second-guessing the Harris
campaign. I have no reason to think they don't want to win this as
badly as I want them to win. They have lots of money, lots of
research, and lots of organization. They think they're doing the
right things, and I hope and pray they're right. It's endgame now,
so let them run their last plays. And if they do lose, that will
be the time to be merciless in your criticism. (That'll be about
the only fun you'll have in the next four years. By the way, if
you want a head start, check out
this book.)
Susan B Glasser: [10-24]
Donald Trump and the F-word: "Kamala Harris embraces the 'fascist'
label for the ex-President, without any certainty that it will disquality
him."
Dylan Matthews: [10-23]
Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in. "Call him a kleptocrat,
an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he
doesn't quite fit the definition of a fascist." Had the head writer
read the article, they would have seen that it all depends on the
definition, and here 8 "experts" are all over the map, although they
all pretty much agree that Trump is an awful person and a dangerous
politician who is up to no good. Unless you're writing a comparative
historical analysis of right-wing political movements, that should
be understanding enough to vote against him.
Jonathan Weisman: [10-17]
Harris and Democrats lose their reluctance to call Trump a fascist:
"Since Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying Donald Trump is 'fascist
to the core,' a term avoided by top members of the Democratic Party is
suddenly everywhere." For me, the word "fascist" packs a lot of info in
a small package. For others, that info may be undecipherable, in which
case the charge rings hollow, or perhaps just scatalogical. But obviously
you don't get to be a general without studying a bit into WWII, which
is where Milley and Kelly are coming from.
Marc A Thiessen: [10-24]
Harris's closing argument is dishonest, desperate and hypocritical:
"Trump isn't a fascist, and he didn't say he would use the military
against his political opponents." But still not nearly as "dishonest,
desperate and hypocritical" as this (or pretty much any) Thiessen
column. Here's just one example:
Aaron Blake: [10-30]
Did Biden call Trump supporters 'garbage'? It comes down to an
apostrophe. "Republicans have long strained for a new Hillary
Clinton-"deplorables" moment, but Biden's defense is entirely
plausible." It mostly comes down to "who gives a fuck." I'm not
in favor of epithets applied to broad swathes of people, but
anyone offended by this is awfully thin-skinned.
Paige Oamek: [10-30]
Trump trashes Democrats after claiming what Biden said was mean:
"Donald Trump is back to his usual self, mere hours after complaining
about Joe Biden's 'garbage' comment." Of course, I could have filed
this in the Trump section, with so many other dumb and/or mean things
he's saying, but I wanted to stress what I meant by thin-skinned.
Adam Johnson: [07-12]
The best counter to Project 2025 is a Progressive Project 2025:
"If President Biden -- or any Democratic replacement -- wants to get
back in the race, they need a positive moral vision to run on, not
just dire warnings." Obviously, the subhed is dated, and even if
true (which it probably isn't), it's too late to affect the 2024
election. I'm not opposed to articulating "a positive moral vision" --
after Gaza, I'd even welcome a negative one, like "not that" -- but
naming it "2025" implies you're seeking to power to implement big
changes almost immediately, and that is neither realistic nor a
very conducive vibe.
[10-21]
The Biden-Harris job boom: "Donald Trump seems to have forgotten
what the economy was like when he left office. He talks as though it
was booming and then Biden sank it. In fact, the opposite is the
case."
Lydia Polgreen: [10-29]
We've just had a glimpse of the world to come. She's talking
about "a lavish global summit in the Russian city of Kazan," the
BRICS conference, where "Vladimir Putin looked like the cat who
ate the canary." US sanctions were supposed to isolate Russia,
to cripple its economy, and bring them back begging for peace and
mercy. How has that worked out?
Amelia Nierenberg: [10-21]
Understanding the BRICS summit: "The group, which seeks to rebalance
the global order away from the West, will meet on Tuesday." Here's a
primer.
Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:
Noam Hurowitz: [10-23]
Meet the world's least popular president: "With a 92 percent
disapproval rating, Peru's Dina Boluarte is testing the very limits
of disdain."
Ross Rosenfeld: [10-30]
How America's craven plutocrats busted the myth of the business
hero: "The members of the billionaire executive class have billed
themselves as great men of history beyond scrutiny and reproach. his
is the year that shattered that illusion." Sorry to break this, but
that illusion has been pretty thoroughly debunked at least since Ida
B. Wells. And while I appreciate the occasional Harris supporter in
their ranks, she isn't really that much of a reach: arguably she'll
do better by them than their culturally simpatico golf cheat buddy.
More than half of Trump's supporters don't believe he'll
actually do many of the things he claims he'll do (mass deportations,
siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals),
while more than half of Harris's supporters hope she'll implement
many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she
won't. And that pretty much sums up this election.
Barnett R. Rubin, former US diplomat: "Why do people keep saying
that US politics is polarized? Look at the big picture. Genocide
enjoys broad bipartisan support."
Fox News' Brian Kilmeade defended Trump's statement that
he wants the "kind of generals that Hitler had." Kilmeade: "I can
absolutely see him go, it'd be great to have German generals that
actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant
of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever."
Kilmeade and Trump may not be "cognizant" of the fact that several
"German generals" (von Stauffenberg, Friedrich Olbricht, and Ludwig
Beck) tried to blow Hitler to bits and Germany's most famous General,
Rommel, was forced to kill himself after being implicated in the
plot.
Hours after the Washington Post announced its decision not
to endorse [Kamala Harris, directed by Post owner Jeff Bezos], the
Associated Press reported that Donald Trump met with executives
from Blue Origin, the space company owned by Bezos that has a $3.4
billion NASA contract to build a spacecraft to take astronauts to
the moon and back.
Eugene Debs: "I'd rather vote for something I want and don't
get it, than vote for something I don't want and get it."
Trump: "I worked a shift at McDonalds yesterday." A McDonalds
shift is eight hours, not 18 minutes . . . Dukakis in a tank looked
less ridiculous.
Sounds familiar . . . [followed by a tweet which reads: "In
1938, Benito Mussolini closed off a wheat field & did a photo
shoot showing him harvesting hay in order to portray himself as a
common working man. He was surrounded by workers who had been
vetted as loyal to the party." Includes a picture of the shirtless
Fascist with cap and aviator goggles.]
Since 2001, forest fires have shifted north and grown more
intense. According to a new study in Science, global CO2 emissions
from forest fires have increased by 60% in the last two decades.
Christian nationalist pastor
Joel Webbon called for the public execution of women who falsely
claim to have been sexually assaulted: "MeToo would end real fast . . .
All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied."
Montana Senate candidate
Tim Sheehy, on why he wants to abolish the Dept. of Education:
"We formed that department so little Black girls could go to school
down South, and we could have integrated schooling. We don't need
that anymore."
Edward Luce, associate editor of the Financial Times: "Hard to
overstate what a sinister figure Elon Musk is. Never seen one oligarch
in a Western democracy intervene on anything like this scale with
unending Goebbels-grade lies." Musk is the most obnoxious kid in
middle school who is running the campaign of the school bully for
student council without even being asked because even the school
bully doesn't want to be around him . . .
Obituaries
Barbara Dane: She started as a folksinger,
and I heartily recommend her Anthology of American Folk Songs
(1959), better than her memorably titled 1973 album, I Hate the
Capitalist System, but she also recorded albums with Earl 'Fatha'
Hines, Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Chambers Brothers, and I liked
her 2016 jazz album Throw It Away enough for an A-.
Lewis Sorley, 90, who said the US won (but then lost) in Vietnam,
dies: [10-30] Military historian. I've always hated the very idea of his
book, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of
America's Last Years in Vietnam, where he claimed that America
could have and should have won the war in Vietnam, but was sabotaged
by the peace movement, a fickle media, and weak-willed politicians.
In Sorley's worldview, the war should have gone on forever.
Rick Lopez: [10-24]
Update.01 to The Sam Rivers Sessionography: A Work in Progress:
Fulfilling his subtitle, with a very substantial addition, on top of
a "magnificent" and "gorgeous" (to quote my own blurb) 764-page book
that already seemed definitive. By the way, those words were written
in advance of this "press release" quoted on page 3:
Michael Hull's Fifth Column Films has begun work on a feature-length
documentary about Sam Rivers through the lens of The Sam Rivers
Sessionography, a book by Rick Lopez. Rivers was a musical genius
who spent his life obsessed with creating intricate compositions that
pushed music to places no one else could conceive of. It's only fitting
that his biographer has invented an entirely new way to understand the
life of an artist through a minutely detailed portrait that could only
flower from the uniquely focused mind of Lopez. Rivers was a massive
talent who has been mostly forgotten by the American jazz scene and is
rarely included in the conversation about great masters of the art.
Lopez's book and this film aim to correct that oversight, and make the
case that Sam Rivers should take his place in the pantheon of the 20th
century.
Full disclosure: Michael Hull is my nephew. He started in Jason
Bailey's Wichita-based film crew (e.g.,
My Day in the
Barrel), produced a film
Smokers
no one has heard of, wrote a novel that hasn't been published and,
most relevant here, made the superb documentary
Betrayal at Attica. I've admired Lopez since I first
discovered him twenty-some years ago, so the idea of introducing
him and Mike was blindingly obvious. (I was also the person who
introduced Mike and Liz Fink, although the gestation period on
that project took much longer.) We have some money invested in
this project, which you can take as a caveat if you wish, but I
regard more as a vote of confidence. Still some ways to go, but
here's a preliminary
trailer and more information.
John McWhorter: [10-24]
It sounded like dancing, drinking and sex. It blew people's minds.
I only noticed this piece on "the long, syncopated journey from Scott
Joplin to Beyoncé" because Allen Lowe
complained about it: "his views of ragime are just bizarre and
beneath even the most minimal amount of knowledge, full of stereotypes
and really thirdhand historiography"; Phil Dyess-Nugent added: "Having
made his name writing about some things he seemed to understand, John
McWhorter has since demonstrated his cluelessness on a vast array of
subjects." That's my general impression of the few columns I've read,
especially since his ridiculous Woke Racism book. This I'm
less sure about, maybe because I don't know or chare that much about
ragtime (or, I might as well admit, Beyoncé), so I'm mostly just noting
a lot of name-dropping and connect-the-dots that favors obvious over
interesting.
QUESTION: Who is worse for Palestinians, Trump or Harris?
ANSWER: Harris is worse for Palestinians.
WHY?
Harris and Biden are already culpable for a year-long genocide.
Like Trump, Harris vows to keep giving Israel unconditional support.
Therefore, Trump can never match Harris's death toll.
Rewarding Harris's war crimes with a vote emboldens Netanyahu and
opens the floodgates for future tyrants.
If Trump wins and Democrats suddenly decide massacring children
is wrong, Trump will face much greater resistance to letting Israel
commit atrocities.
Bottom line: Voting third party is the only moral choice, but if
liberals insist on comparing Trump to Harris, Harris is worse for
Palestinians.
I found this immediately after posting my
preliminary draft on who to vote for president and why, so I've
already explained why I disagree with Daou's conclusion so strongly.
But perhaps I should stress one very important point, which is that
voting is not a moral choice; it is a political choice. I'm not going
to write a disquisition on the difference, but will insist that it is
a category error to vote based on morality. As for Daou's five points:
True, but the order is wrong, like saying "Speer and Hitler
are already culpable," where the clearest charge against Speer
(and Harris) is not breaking with their leader. By the way, Biden
is more like Speer than to Hitler -- in playing follow-the-leader,
but also given their critical position in the arms pipeline.
Not false, but Harris (unlike Trump and Graham) has never said
"finish the job," and she's not unaware of the human toll Israel's
"self-defense" is taking, so I'd say that continued "unconditional
support" is slightly less likely from her. Admittedly, that's a
thin reed she has often taken pains to cover up.
No way of predicting, but no reason to underestimate Trump's
capacity for getting people killed. His general contempt for most
of the world suggests quite the opposite.
Clearly, massively false. Netanyahu's preference for Trump is
widely known, not only through his own words and acts but through
mutual donors like Myriam Adelson.
Hard to know where to begin with this variation on "if the
fascists win, the revolution will hasten." Ever hear of "moral
hazard"? Sure, some Democrats may learn to blame the genocide on
Trump -- as some Democrats came to blame Nixon for Vietnam -- but
most will simply be shocked and search for scapegoats to blame,
especially "pro-Palestinians" like Daou.
Daou's conclusion that "Harris is worse for Palestinians" is
horribly wrong, even if "Harris is no good for Palestinians" may
well be true. But I wouldn't be much swayed if one could argue
that one candidate would be good or better, because I've never
looked at this conflict through that prism. I never quite bought
the argument that "Palestinians have dug their own graves," but
I did have sympathies for Israel at one point, which may be why
I still wish to emphasize that genocide is bad (and I mean really
bad) for Israel (and for America, which is implicated not just
due to recent arms support but via longstanding cultural and
political mores), and that in itself is reason enough to oppose
it. (And sure, it's even worse for the killed than the killers,
and that's another reason to oppose it, but it doesn't have to
be the only one.)
Some more comments on Daou's tweet:
Nathan J Robinson: Peter, this doesn't make sense. It
could absolutely get worse under Trump. Any pressure to provide
any aid whatsoever to Gaza will disappear. Greater pressure may
be brought on Egypt to let Israel fully ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Don't assume this is as bad as it can get.
Andrew Revkin: I sense @RudyGiuliani would disagree
with you, @peterdaou, on who's worse for Palestinians. Here's
how he explained the Trump plan at the #MSGRally tonight in
his own words.
Nathan J Robinson: [12-27] [comment attached to a clip of Tucker
Carlson's MSG rally rant]
The level of uncontrolled rage is terrifying, but I think if Trump
is elected you will see it get far worse. The amount of overt racism
will increase, the view of Democrats, leftists, migrants being scum
in need of elimination. JD Vance has made clear that Pinochet is the
model.
Mehdi Hasan: [10-30] Donald Trump is going around telling Michigan
Muslims he'll end the war, be the peace president, and how pro-Muslim
(!) he is.
Meanwhile, Dems sent Bill Clinton to lecture Michigan Muslims on
how it's all Hamas's fault that Israel is massacring kids and killing
civilians holding white flags.
Whether or not they end up losing Michigan, at this point the Dems
deserve to lose Michigan. Sheesh.
Aaron Rupar: [10-31] Trump on Liz Cheney: "Let's put her with
a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see
how she feels about it. You know, when the cuns are trained on her
face."
Local tags (these can be linked to directly):
music.
Original count: 228 links, 11718 words (15894 total)
Current count:
253 links, 12905 words (17532 total)
Note: This piece is also cross-posted at
Notes on Everyday Life. I originally posted it there first, in
hopes of generating some preliminary discussion. If keeping them in
sync proves difficult, this one should probably be authoritative.
Two questions need to be addressed before we get down to detailed
arguments. The first is why vote at all? I'd say first, because it
is your right as a citizen, but must be secured by your exercise of
it. People in America may have a very limited say in how the country
is organized and run, but you do have the vote, and using it shows
your willingness to engage in the responsibility for setting the
nation's direction.
The second question is whether you should limit your vote choice
to the two major political parties, or consider voting for a third
party should you prefer that candidate's platform? History shows us
that America gravitated into a two-party system almost immediately
after the Constitution was ratified, and quickly returned to a two
party system on the two instances where one major party disbanded
(replacing the Federalists with the Whigs, and replacing the Whigs
with the Republicans). No subsequent third party has been able to
sustain significant followings, with third-party votes often
dropping to under 5% in recent elections.
So from a practical standpoint, third parties are ineffective
and unpromising.One might nonetheless consider voting for a third
party candidate if: neither major party nominated a candidate you
can stand, and there is no significant difference between the two
candidates that can direct your choice. I can understand if you
feel that both Trump and Harris should be shunned for their rote
support of Israeli genocide, although I suspect that even there
the nature of their positions differs enough to favor a vote for
Harris.
One other possible consideration is whether one party offers a
better chance for future improvement, based on the composition of
the party, how open-minded its members are, and how democratic its
processes are. The current two-party system is quite possibly the
most polarized ever, which has led most people to select one party
or the other. Moreover, both major parties have primaries that are
open to all members, and as such are amenable to reform. If, like
me, you are primarily concerned with "left" issues of peace and
equal rights, you may have noticed that most of the people most
likely to agree with you are currently Democrats. If your goal is
to build a majority around your ideals, you need to establish a
bond of solidarity with the Democrats, which often means voting
for a candidate you don't totally agree with. You are, after all,
hoping that other Democrats, even ones that disagree with you,
will vote for your candidate should that person win a primary.
The last third party candidate I voted for was Ralph Nader in
2000. I don't feel bad about that vote, especially as I'm convinced
that the Gore-Lieberman ticket would have been as gung-ho starting
the "war on terror" after 9/11 as Bush-Cheney was. But I did learn
one lesson from that election, which is that even in Kansas, where
the Gore campaign was practically non-existent, 90% of the anti-Bush
votes cast went to the Democrat. Since then, I vowed to work within
the Democratic Party, such as it as, as best I could. (I did lapse
once since, to vote against a particular Democrat I've hated what
seems like all of my life, but there I went with the Republican, as
I really wanted that Democrat to lose.)
Having narrowed the choice down to Harris vs. Trump, arguments
that one candidate is better and/or one candidate is worse are
equally valid. This being American politics, "one candidate is
worse" arguments predominate. Lest you imagine there might be any
suspense here, Harris is the better option, while Trump is much
the worse.
And while the future is impossible to predict, the margins
overwhelm any imaginable uncertainty. Trump is especially known,
as we've actually experienced him as President. This doesn't
mean a second term will be just like his first: it could easily
be worse, for reasons we'll get into. Harris is harder to read.
Although she has much relevant experience, presidency offers
powers and temptations that she's never faced before, as well
as situations she's never had to deal with. This raises doubts,
which I will deal with in a separate list, following the "top
ten."
So, here are my top ten reasons to vote for Harris vs. Trump:
Donald Trump is a truly odious human being.
That's a personal, not a political judgment: sure, virtually all
of his political views stink, but most of the people who share
his political views have personal traits one can relate to,
respect, even appreciate. As far as I can tell -- and while
I only know what's been reported, I've been exposed to a lot
of that -- he has none. He seems totally miserable. If he's
ever laughed, it's been at someone else's expense. He lacks
even the slightest pretense of caring for anyone, even for
his wives or children (the prenups should have been a clue).
He's not unique in this regard, but most similar people are
easily ignored. The only way to free ourselves from Trump's
ever-present unpleasantness is to vote him off (like in the
"reality TV" shows he's a creature of).
Harris, on the other hand, can listen, and respond appropriately.
She has a generous and infectious laugh. And while I've never seen
her cry, she is at least cognizant of situations that call for a
show of concern and empathy. I don't particularly like the idea of
president as "handholder-in-chief," but it's better to have someone
who can feign that than someone who utterly cannot.
Such personal failings drive most people to
despair, which at least could be pitied, but Trump's inherited
wealth has provided him with an armor of callousness, which has
long elicited the warm glow of supplicants and sycophants. From
this, he has constructed his own mental universe where he is
adored and exalted. This has produced extraordinary hubris --
another of his distasteful traits -- but more importantly, his
narcissism has left him singularly unprepared to deal with reality
when it so rudely intrudes on his fantasy life (as happens all too
often when you're President).
I should note here that the collective embarrassment we so often
felt when witnessing Trump's failed attempts at addressing events
has dulled somewhat since he left office (need I remind you of
Hurricane Maria? -- just one of dozens of examples, ranging from
his staring into the eclipse to the pandemic). The only things that
have affected him that way since have been his indictments, but even
there he's been sheltered like no one else ever. There is no reason
to think that Harris wouldn't respond to events at least as well as
a normal politician, which is to say, by showing palpable concern
and deliberation. Trump's disconnect from reality is unprecedented.
(Good place to mention his election denialism.)
There is some debate as to whether Trump's wealth
is real, but even as it seems, that should be reason enough to disqualify
him. Only a few Presidents have come from the ranks of the rich, and
those who did -- like Washington, Kennedy, and the Roosevelts -- took
pains to distance themselves from their business interests. Back in
2016, Trump suggested he would give up his business ties, insisting
that his wealth made him more independent of corrupt influences, but
after he won, he backtracked completely, and ran an administration
that was outrageously corrupt -- especially at the top, where his
son-in-law's diplomacy netted him a billion-dollar private equity
fund, but his administration hired lobbyists to peddle influence
everywhere. One might argue that Trump's business was so large that
he couldn't possibly disentangle himself, but that's just part of
the reason why people like him shouldn't be allowed in politics.
Their inability to relate to ordinary Americans is another.
Aside from his abuse of executive power to staff
government with corporate agents, pack with courts with right-wing
cronies, and pardon numerous criminals in his circle, his record
for delivering on his 2016 campaign promises is remarkably thin: he
lost interest in things that might have been popular (like building
infrastructure, or "draining the swamp"). He also lucked out, when
a couple Republican defections saved the ACA, and then when Democrats
took Congress back in 2018. The only positive bill he signed was the
pandemic relief act, which he wanted desperately to save a flagging
stock market, but had to accept a mostly Democratic bill that helped
pretty much everyone.
Also, the full impact of many policies can take years before it
is felt. The repeal of Taft-Hartley in 1947 took decades before it
started to do serious damage to unions and workers (although it had
the immediate impact of ending a campaign to unionize in the South,
which would have been a big advance for civil rights). Deregulation
of savings & loans in the 1980s and larger banks in the 1990s
took most of a decade before triggering recessions. Much of what
Trump did during his term didn't blow up until after the 2020
election, including his killing of the Iran nuclear deal, his
agreement to give Afghanistan to the Taliban, and his Supreme
Court's overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Harris's ability to deliver on campaign promises will, as Biden's
has, depend much on the balance of power in Congress, but at least
Democrats have a track record of trying to pass laws to help most
Americans, and not just those favored by Republicans with their tax
and benefit cuts. Harris will be further hampered by the Republican
packing of the courts, but that's one reason why it matters not just
that Democrats win elections, but win big.
On the other hand, if Trump were more dedicated
in pursuit of the policy positions he espouses, or if he's just given
more power by a Republican Congress, he could (and probably would)
do much more harm in a second term, way beyond the still not fully
accounted for harm of his first. For starters, he has a much more
developed idea of what he wants to do -- not because he understands
policy any better, but because he has more specific goals in areas
that especially interest him -- and will hire more loyal operatives,
eager to carry out his wishes. This will be easier, because he's
already bent the party to his will, especially promoting its most
crazed cadres, while he himself has become further radicalized.
Moreover, he now has a long list of enemies to punish, while his
minions will be free to pursue their own grafts and obsessions.
We've already seen how he's turned the presidency into a cult of
personality. Give him more power -- not just in Congress but the
Supreme Court is ready to enshrine the "unitary executive theory" --
and he will only grow more monstrous.
Donald Trump is a shit stain on the face of America.
They say that wealth is power, and that power corrupts, absolute
power absolutely. America emerged from WWII with half of the world's
wealth, with troops spread to Europe and East Asia, and corporations
everywhere. America has been "breaking bad" ever since, starting in
the 1940s rigging elections in Italy, fighting communists in Greece
and Korea, overthrowing democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran,
replacing them with corporate-friendly autocrats. Still, even Reagan
expected good guys in white hats to win out, so he pretended to be
one, while the Bushes hid their conservatism behind fake compassion.
Trump is the first US president to give up all pretense. His fans
may mistake his contempt for candor, but the result is a much more
brutal world. He demands tribute from allies, lest they fall into
the ranks of enemies, who are expected to cower when faced with
overwhelming American might, and face escalating threats when they
refuse to fall in line. His is a recipe for neverending war, as
we've already seen with Russia and Iran, with Korea and China
waiting for the next break.
Nor are we only talking about foreign policy. The conservative
solution to domestic matters is also to rely on force, starting
with mass incarceration, eroding/stripping rights, smashing unions,
purging the civil service, quelling demonstrations, stifling free
speech, book bans, censoring the press, turning education into
indoctrination, rigging elections, even going so far as to incite
mobs and promise them immunity. While these impulses have long
been endemic to Republicans, Trump is unique in he wants you to
see and smell the feces, and that seems to be the basis for his
popularity among his hardcore constituency. This, with its embrace
of sheer power and rampant criminality, is what's so reminiscent
of the fascist movements of the 1930s.
Still, as bad as Trump is personally, the real
danger is that his election will bring a tidal wave of Republicans
into power all throughout the federal and local governments they
have pledged to debilitate and reduce, as Grover Norquist put it,
"to the size where I can drown it in the bathtub." (The less often
discussed ancillary idea is to hack off functions done by government
and give them away to the private sector. This almost never works.
When attempted, it almost always makes the functions more expensive
and/or less useful.) This is just one of
many deranged and dysfunctional ideas prevalent in the Republican
Party. Like most of their ideas, it's appealing as rhetoric, but
unworkable in practice. Republicans have repeatedly tried to reduce
government spending by cutting taxes on their donor class, but have
found little to actually cut -- even when they had the power to
write budgets -- so all they've produced is greater deficits, and
an inflated oligarchy.
They've had more luck at poisoning benefits, trying to make
government appear to be worthless. The idea is to convince voters
that voting is hopeless, because government will only take from
them, and never give back. The idea that the purpose of government
is to "provide for the general welfare" (that's in the Preamble to
the US Constitution) is inimical to them. The idea of "government
of, by, and for the people" (that's in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address)
is alien to those who hate most American people. Republicans created
a death spiral of democracy, which they hope will leave them in
permanent power, not to serve the public, but to prevent people
from using government for their own improvement.
Trump has added his own authoritarian quirks to the Republican
agenda, but the big risk to democracy has always come from money,
which Republicans have made sure selects candidates and drives
elections. Trump is less a cause of oligarchy than evidence of
how far it has progressed.
Two important concepts in economics are externality
(public costs that are not factored into product costs, such as
pollution) and opportunity costs (other things that we could spend
money on if we weren't preoccupied with given expenses). Republicans,
driven exclusively by their desire to help the rich get richer in the
here and now, and blind to the future, have no interest in these
concepts. Democrats are subject to the same donor pressures, but at
least recognize that such side effects are real and important. This
is because they try to recognize and balance everyone's welfare, and
not just that of their donors and voters.
Climate change is a good example of both: it is largely caused by
the waste products of fossil fuels, and can only be remedied by major
investment sooner rather than later. But people only see what gasoline
costs when they fill up, while the climate change they're contributing
to only manifests later, and mostly to other people. This gives them
little reason to spend now to avert future costs, so they don't.
Even as climate change has become a very tangible problem, Trump and
the Republicans have wrapped themselves ever deeper into a cocoon of
denial and ignorance, which ensures that as long as they're in power
we will never invest what we need to in sustainable infrastructure.
While a second Trump term could do a lot of immediate damage, its
long-term cost will largely be opportunity costs, as we belatedly
realize we didn't invest what we should have when it would have been
more effective.
It's impossible to overstate how completely Donald
Trump has taken over and perverted our culture, what philosophers
call our noosphere -- the mental universe, our ability to reason.
This may seem paradoxical given that few people on Earth are as
disengaged from and contemptuous of reason as Donald Trump, but
that may well be the source of his power. He has effectively given
his followers permission to disengage from other people, to eschew
reason and argument and indulge their own prejudices and fantasies,
because that's what he does, and he's so fabulously successful.
Moreover, it has the added benefit of driving crazy all those who
still worry about real problems (both their own and those of other
people), which they expect to deal with through science and reason.
(Such people often project their own mania back onto the Trumpers,
and reckon them to be saddled with problems, when they actually
seem to be quite blissfully serene in their obliviousness and/or
ignorance.)
Political scientists have a concept known as the Overton window,
which describes "the range of policies politically acceptable to
the mainstream population at a given time." Ideas outside the window
are dismissed as radical or even unthinkable, making it very hard to
get any sort of coverage, as the media limits itself to more widely
acceptable ideas. Events may push some ideas into the mainstream,
while discarding others. For instance, there was a time when eugenics
was all the rage, but no more. Climate change has become increasingly
mainstream, although there are still political interests out to kill
any such discussion. A big part of politics is fighting over what we
can and cannot talk about. What Trump has done has been to expand
the Overton window to the far right, legitimizing clusters of issues
that were previously regarded as baseless (like QAnon, antivax claims,
election denial). Perhaps the most disturbing of all has been Trump's
own criminal enterprises. These subjects, which at best distract from
real problems and often create more, would only grow under a second
Trump term.
I have no doubt that the bad policies advanced by Trump will blow
up and wind up discredited, but at a great waste of effort to stop
them, and a huge opportunity cost as we ignore constructive ideas
from the left. Even where Harris does not have good programs, which
certainly includes her continued fealty to Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden
(and Cheney?) foreign policy, her election would provide a much
healthier window for debate than what we'd be stuck with under
Trump.
It's time to turn the page on Trump and the era of
Fox Republicanism. Cloture on Trump is easy to imagine, as he's way
past his prime, increasingly doddering at 78, unlikely to ever run
again. Vote him out, and that's one problem America will never have
to deal with again. Not only would it give us a chance to heal, to
move on, to deal with our self-protracted problems, but it could be
the kindest result for Trump and even for his Party. Trump could cut
his plea deals and escape most of the legal jeopardy he's landed in.
The Party could finally recalculate, trying to find a way to compete
in the real world instead of trying to scam the rhetorical madness
that Fox created to profit from fear and rage. Moreover, by cutting
their losses, they'd escape much of the blame for the disasters their
preferred policies would inevitably lead to. Progress is inexorable,
so those who would resist it only have two choices: bend or break.
The Republicans' forty-year (1980-2020) era has done much damage to
the social and economic fabric of the nation. Some things have broken,
and many more are creaking. We might survive four more years of Trump,
but time is running out. And when things do break under Trump, beware
that no one will be more ill-prepared and incompetent at dealing with
them.
On the other hand, Harris, like most Democrats (even the nominally
left-wing of the party), doesn't represent visionary change, but she
is perceptive, analytical, and pragmatic, which suggests that she will
adapt to changing circumstances, and endeavor to make the best out of
them. She will be sorely tested by the influence of wealthy lobbyists,
by the superficial and sensationalist press, by the still powerful
remains of Republican power -- which while incapable of governing
competently let alone responsibly, is still a formidable machine for
amplifying grievances -- and by new challenges we haven't even been
able to think of yet (so mired are we in the ruins of bad Republican
politics, from Nixon and Reagan through the Bushes to their ultimate
self-parody in Trump, tempered ever so slightly by interim Democrats
who never got beyond patchwork repairs).
Of course, one can think of many more reasons, especially if you
tried to work from policies outward. I may do a separate document
where I read through Trump's "Agenda 47" and comment line-by-line.
Presumably there's a comparable Harris document somewhere, which
could also be scrutinized. From them, I might be able to come up
with a scorecard, but there's no chance of a different result. As
it is, I've concentrated less on issues and more on personalities
and political dynamics: Trump is at best muddled on issues, but
his shortcomings as noted are extremely clear.
Harris, as I noted, is harder to read, especially because for
tactical campaign purposes she has adopted a set of views that aim
to win over not just undecided/centrist voters but any Republicans
that Trump hasn't totally stripped of their decency yet. She's had
some success at that, although it remains to be seen how many actual
votes follow her celebrity endorsements. At this point, I don't see
any point in second-guessing her campaign strategy. Presumably she
has researched the electorate and knows much better than I do just
how to pitch them. If she loses, we'll have a field day dissecting
her mistakes -- which, for all the reasons mentioned above and many
more, may be the only fun we can have in the next four years.
But for now, let's assume she wins, and she runs her administration
along lines it is reasonable to expect. In that case, the left will
still have work to do and things to protest. So here are my:
Top 5 Reasons Electing Harris Won't Solve Our Problems
I ran across this synopsis recently: "There are converging
political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics
is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a
mythical past." Harris represents the party of "business as
usual," where "change" is acknowledged as inevitable, but is
guarded so as not to upset the status quo -- which may include
reforms to make it more tolerable, as not doing so would risk
more disruptive change.
While it didn't occur to me in listing the "top ten reasons"
above, one more strong reason is that Trump's "nostalgia for a
mythical past" -- the once-great America he aims to restore and
protect -- is not just incoherent but impossible, so much so that
his efforts to force the world back into his ideal alignment are
more likely to break it than to fix anything. Reducing America
to his chosen few would breed chaos and resentment, and collapse
the economy, destroying the wealth he meant to protect. Moreover,
his instinct to use force would only compound the damage.
It is ironic that while most of us on the left have grown wary
of revolution, many on the right, perhaps due to their embrace of
violence, have been seduced by the notion that might makes right.
If conservatism means wishing to keep things as they are, it is
the Democrats who are the true conservatives, while Republicans
have turned into flaming radicals, with Trump emerging as their
leader given his flamboyance and utter disregard for conventional
political thinking. As with the fascist movements of the 1930s,
many people are enthralled by this radicalism. Why such movements
have always failed, sometimes spectacularly, has yet to sink in --
although the connection does at long last seem to be entering the
mainstream media.
Democrats are still uncomfortable being the party of the status
quo. Many are nostalgic for the days when Republicans filled that
role, providing foils against which they could propose their modest
reforms -- which they've long needed to attract struggling voters.
The problem that Harris faces in 2024 is that the Trumpian romance
of reactionary revolution has become so attractive -- the backdrop
is the unprecedented extension of inequality over the last fifty
years, which has left most people feeling left behind -- and so
terrifying that she's fallen into the trap of defending the status
quo, making her seem insensitive to the real problems that we look
to candidates to help solve. Trump at least has answers to all the
problems -- wrong ones, but many people don't understand the details,
they're just attraction to his show of conviction, while they note
that Harris seems wary of pushing even the weak reforms popular in
her party.
She's banking on the status quo to save America from Trump and
the Republicans. If she wins her bet, she will win the election.
But then she'll have to face the more difficult task of governing,
where her limits could be her undoing. These five questions loom
large on the post-election agenda:
Perhaps most immediately, US foreign policy needs
a total rethink. US foreign policy took a radical turn shortly after
WWII, renouncing the "isolationist" past and assuming a militarily
as well as an economically interventionist stance. This was partly
a matter of filling the vacuum left by the war's global destruction,
and partly ambition. Beyond the battlefields, Europe's colonial
empires had become untenable, opening the door for businesses as
the hidden powers behind local rulers. As the alternatives were
communist-leaning national liberation movement, this soon turned
into the Cold War -- which was great news for the arms industry,
which along with oil and finance became a pillar of American
foreign policy. When the cold war receded, neocons came up with
more rationales for more conflicts, to keep their graft going.
Efforts at building international institutions (like the UN)
increasingly gave way to unilateral dictates: America First,
before Trump, who basically thinks of foreign policy as some
kind of protection racket, latched onto the term. There hadn't
been significant partisan differences in foreign policy since
the advent of the Cold War: all the Democrats who followed
Republican hawks (Reagan, the Bushes, even Trump in his own
peculiar way) did was to normalize their aggressiveness. Thus
Biden reaffirmed his support for Ukraine and Israel, as well as
his opposition to Russia, China, and the usual suspects in the
Middle East, which has (so far) blown up into two catastrophic
wars, while at the same time the US has made sure that world
organizations (like the UN) are powerless to intervene.
Harris seems to be fully on board with this: not only does
she support the current wars, she has gone out of her way to
ostracize so-called autocrats -- not the ones counted as allies
because they buy American arms but the others, the ones who make
their own (or buy from each other). This conventional thinking,
based on the notion that force projection (and sanctions) can
and will dictate terms for resolving conflicts, has a very poor
track record: it polarizes and militarizes conflicts, stokes
resentments, stimulates asymmetric responses (like terrorism),
while driving its targets into each others' clutches. Meanwhile,
the reputation the US once had for fairness is in tatters.
A new foreign policy needs first of all to prioritize peace,
cooperation, and equitable economic development. It should also,
where possible, favor social justice (albeit not through force,
which is more likely to make matters worse).
Restricting immigration is the one issue where
neo-fascist politicians seem to be gaining significant popular
support, in Europe as well as the US. Harris has chosen to lean
into the issue rather than oppose the Republicans, as had Biden
and Obama before her, not that any of their harsh enforcement
efforts have gotten any cooperation or compromise from Republicans,
who would rather milk this as a grievance issue than treat it as
a practical issue. Part of the problem here is that while many
voters will support Republicans just to vent rage, other voters
expect results from Democrats, and no matter what results they
hoped for, few are satisfied. The issue is complex and messy,
and Congress is unable or unwilling to pass any legislation to
help clear the mess. Which makes this an issue that will haunt
Harris indefinitely, no matter what she tries to do.
Personally, this is an issue I care little about either way.
What concerns me more is that the system be seen as fair and
just, that it is neither exploitative of immigrants nor that
it hurts the domestic labor market. I could see arguments for
limiting or for expanding immigration numbers. I do think that
the current backlog of non-documented immigrants needs to be
cleared up, which could involve clearing the path toward
naturalization and/or paying them to leave, but it needs to be
done in an orderly and humane manner, with clear rules and due
process. I've generally opposed "guest worker" programs (like
the one Bush tried to push through), but could see issuing green
cards as a stopgap measure. Harris will find it difficult to
navigate through this maze, but what would help is having some
clear principles about how citizenship should work -- as opposed
to just responding to Republican demagoguery.
I should also note that the biggest determinant of immigration
is foreign policy. Most people emigrate because they are dislodged
by war or ecological and/or economic distress, and those are things
that American foreign policy as presently practiced exacerbates.
Policies that resolve (or better still, prevent) conflicts, that
limit climate change, and/or that extend economic opportunities
would significantly reduce the pressures driving emigration.
Democrats under Biden made the first serious
legislative effort at addressing climate change ever, but the
structure of American politics makes it much easier to promote
the development of new technologies and products than it is to
do things like changing habits of fossil fuel use. Democrats
are so wedded to the idea of economic growth as the panacea
for all problems that they can't conceive of better lives lived
differently. How one can ever get to zero emissions isn't on
any agenda. Meanwhile, Republicans keep digging themselves ever
deeper into their tunnel of ignorance, so they have nothing to
offer but obstruction.
While prevention seems to be too much to ask of any Democratic
politician, they do still have a big advantage on disaster care.
Reagan's joke -- "The nine most terrifying words in the English
language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'" --
is easily disproven every hurricane season, yet remains as sacred
dogma. Given that climate change has already happened, and is
playing out in cycles of increasingly uninsurable "natural"
disasters, it becomes imperative to elect a government that
cares about such problems, and regards it as its duty to help
people out. Harris will be tested on this, repeatedly.
Meanwhile, if you want to try out nine really terrifying
words, try these: "I'm a Republican, and Donald Trump is my
President."
There is one political issue that close to 90%
of all Americans could agree on, but it has no leadership and
little support in either major party, and that is the thoroughly
corrupt influence of money on politics. The situation has always
been bad, but got much worse in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled
in favor of unlimited corporate spending in Citizens United v. FEC.
Obama spoke out against the ruling, but did nothing to overturn it.
Rather, he easily outraised his opponents in 2008 and 2012, winning
twice. Biden and Harris have also raised much more money than Trump,
so while Republicans are the most steadfast supporters of campaign
graft, top Democrats also benefit from the system -- especially
against their real competition, which is other Democrats, who
might be tempted to campaign on issues that appeal to voters, as
opposed to having to spend all their time catering to the whims
of rich donors. The 2024 presidential election is by far the most
ridiculously expensive in history, which also makes it the most
tainted by special interests and their peculiar obsessions (like
Israel, which has kept both candidates from expressing any concern
about ongoing genocide). Breaking this mold is a golden opportunity
for some aspiring politician. Harris can't do it while she's still
campaigning, but it's not only wasteful, it diminishes trust in
everyone involved, and as such discredits the whole system.
The worst offenders, of course, are the billionaires,
many of whom -- starting with Elon Musk, the kind of immigrant that
even Trump can love -- has been especially conspicuous this year.
They are the beneficiaries of a wide range of laws and breaks that
allow a tiny number of individuals to accumulate obscene amounts
of wealth. And they use that wealth to steer government away from
any notion of public interest, to do their own bidding, and to
indulge their own fantasies. This extraordinary inequality -- far
beyond the historic highs of the Gilded Age and the Roaring '20s
(both, you may recall, ill-fated bubbles) -- is the single biggest
problem facing the world today. It may seem hypothetical, but it
lies beneath so many other problems, starting with the dysfunction
of government and politics, which is largely influenced by the
distortions of wealth. It extends worldwide, with inequality of
nations mirroring the inequality of individuals.
The problem with inequality isn't that some people have a bit
more than others. It's that such wide variations corrupt and
pervert justice. It's often hard to say just what justice is,
but it's much easier to identify injustice when you see it. In
highly stratified societies, such as ours, you see injustice
everywhere. It eats at our ability to trust institutions and
people. It diminishes our expectation of fair treatment and
opportunity. It raises questions about cooperation and even
generosity. It makes us paranoid. And once lost, trust and
security is all that much harder to restore.
There is no simple answer here. It needs to be dealt with
piecemeal, one step at a time, each and every day. It helps
to reduce gross inequality (which can be done by taxation).
It helps to reduce sources of inequality (which can be done
by regulation of business, by limiting rents, by promoting
countervailing powers, like unions). It also helps to reduce
the impact of inequality (which can be done by raising basic
support levels, by removing prices from services, by ending
means testing, by providing universal insurance, and when no
better solution is possible, by rationing). I don't expect
any politician, especially one who has proven successful in
the current system of extraordinary inequality, to go far
along these lines, but most people are at least aware of the
problem, and many proposals for small improvements are in
common discourse. Even if Harris doesn't rise to the occasion,
we should work to make sure her successors do.
While I think that Harris comes up short on all five of these
really important points, they in no way argue for Donald Trump,
even as a "lesser evil." He personifies modern inequality, Back
in 2016, he tried arguing that his wealth would allow him to run
a truly independent campaign, but that was just another lie. No
one in recent memory has been more obvious about selling favors
for financing. He is a climate change denier, and has shown
nothing but contempt for the victims of natural disasters. His
signature issue is his hatred of immigrants (excepting, presumably,
two wives and his sugar daddy, Elon Musk), where he puts even more
emphasis on performative cruelty than on effectiveness.
His take on foreign policy is slightly more . . . well, "nuanced"
isn't exactly right, more like "befuddled." It's hard to make a
credible case that he's anti-war when he puts such emphasis on what
a tough guy he is, on how no opponent would dare challenge him.
He has shown remarkably poor judgment in defense staffing, which
is only likely to get worse now that two of his former generals
have called him a fascist. He has no dealmaking skills, nor would
he hire someone who could negotiate (any such person would be
dismissed as a wuss). His "America First" schemes are designed
to strain alliances, and are more likely to break than not. He
delayed his deal to get out of Afghanistan so Biden would get
the blame. His handling of Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Iran-Saudi
Arabia directly contributed to the outbreak of war and genocide.
As I said, foreign policy needs a complete rethink. He's already
failed on several counts, starting with the need to think.
Late Monday night, I'm posting this, without any real sense of
where I'm at, how much I've looked at, and how much more I should
have considered. I have no introduction, and at this point can't
even be troubled to think up excuses. (Perhaps I'll write something
about that in tomorrow's Music Week -- assuming there is one: my
problem there isn't lack of records but no time, given other demands
and priorities.) One thing I am confident of is that there is a lot
of material below. Maybe I'll add more on Tuesday, but don't count
on it.
Got up Tuesday morning and before I could eat breakfast, let
alone open next week's file, I added several entries below, including
a Zachary Carter piece I had open in a tab but didn't get back to in
time.
Top story threads:
Israel's year of infamy: Given the hasty
nature of last week's
Speaking of Which, it was inevitable that I'd need another
week (or more) for one-year anniversary pieces.
Spencer Ackerman: [10-03]
The year after October 7th was shaped by the 23 years after September
11th: "9/11 gave Israel and the US a template to follow -- one
that turned grief into rage into dehumanization into mass death.
What have we learned from the so-called 'war on terror'?" That it
feels better to make the same mistakes over and over again rather
than learn from them? Worth noting that the US response to 9/11
was modeled on Israel's by-then-long war against the Palestinians
(recently escalated in the Sharon's counter-intifada, effectively
a reconquista against Palestinian Authority, which saved Hamas
for future destruction).
Haidar Eid: 10-13]
A vision for freedom is more important than ever: "We must focus
on the present as conditions in Gaza worsen daily, but a clear strategy
and political vision are crucial to inspire people around the world
as to what is possible."
A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted
would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in
ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year
with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become
a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and
culture in Gaza and beyond.
While few took them seriously at the time, Israeli leaders spelled
out in explicit terms the savage goals of their war and the
unrestrained means they were going to use to prosecute it. This was
going to be a campaign of collective punishment where every
conceivable target -- school, hospital, mosque -- would be fair game.
Here was Israel unbound. The old rules of war and international law
were not only going to be ignored; they would be ridiculed and mocked
by the Israeli leadership, which, in the days after the October 7
attacks, announced their intention to immiserate, starve, and displace
more than 2 million Palestinians and kill anyone who stood in their
way -- man, woman or child.
For the last 17 years, the people of Gaza have been living a
marginal existence, laboring under the cruel constrictions of a
crushing Israeli embargo, where the daily allotments of food allowed
into the Strip were measured out down to the calorie. Now, the
blockade was about to become total. On October 9, Israeli Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant warned: "I have ordered a complete siege on the
Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, food, or fuel; everything is
closed." He wasn't kidding.
This goes on for 14 more paragraphs, all deserving your attention,
before he descends into his usual plethora of bullet points -- dozens
of them, his attention never straying to the more pedestrian atrocities
he often (and compared to most others exceptionally) reports on. He
ends with this:
The war of revenge has become a war of dispossession, conquest and
annexation, where war crime feeds on war crime. Not even the lives
of the Israeli hostages will stand in the way; they will become
Israeli martyrs in the cause of cleansing Gaza of Palestinians. . . .
It's equally apparent that nothing Israel does, including killing
American grandmothers, college students, and aid workers, will trigger
the US government, whether it's under the control of Biden, Harris, or
Trump, to intervene to stop them or even pull the plug on the arms
shipments that make this genocidal war possible.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: [04-24]
200 days of military attacks on Gaza: "A horrific death toll amid
intl. failure to stop Israel's genocide of Palestinians."
Oren Yiftachel: [10-15]
Is this Israel's first apartheid war? "Far from lacking a political
strategy, Israel is fighting to reinforce the supremacist project it
has built for decades between the river and the sea." The author thinks
so, while acknowledging the long history of war that preceded this
year's war:
While its eight previous wars attempted to create new geographical
and political orders or were limited to specific regions, the current
one seeks to reinforce the supremacist political project Israel has
built throughout the entire land, and which the October 7 assault
fundamentally challenged. Accordingly, there is also a steadfast
refusal to explore any path to reconciliation or even a ceasefire
with the Palestinians.
Israel's supremacist order, which was once termed "creeping" and
more recently "deepening apartheid," has long historical roots. It
has been concealed in recent decades by the so-called
peace process, promises of a
"temporary
occupation," and claims that Israel has "no partner" to negotiate
with. But the reality of the
apartheid project has become increasingly conspicuous in recent
years, especially under Netanyahu's leadership.
Today, Israel makes no effort to hide its supremacist aims. The
Jewish Nation-State Law of 2018 declared that "the right to
exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is
unique to the Jewish people," and that "the state views the
development of Jewish settlement as a national value." Taking
this a step further, the current Israeli government's manifesto
(known as its
"guiding
principles") proudly stated in 2022 that "the Jewish people
have an exclusive and inalienable right to all areas of the Land
of Israel" -- which, in the Hebrew lexicon, includes Gaza and the
West Bank -- and promises to "promote and develop settlement in
all parts of the Land of Israel."
My reservation here is that the "apartheid program" goes way
back, at least to 1948 when Israelis declared independence and
set up a separate judicial system for Palestinians in areas they
controlled, retaining it even after Palestinians became nominal
citizens of Israel. In effect, Israeli apartheid goes back to
the "Hebrew labor" concept adopted by Ben-Gurion's Histadrut
in the 1930s. (By the way, South Africa's
Apartheid laws were only formalized in 1950, although, as
with Israel, the roots of racist discrimination ran much deeper.
The ideas behind South Africa's legal thinking drew heavily on
America's Jim Crow laws, which were also notable sources for
Nazi Germany's race laws.) So what's new since October 7 isn't
apartheid, but the nature of the war, which has crossed over the
line from harsh enforcement to genocide: the purpose of which is
not just to punish Hamas for the insolence of rebellion, but to
purge Israel of all Palestinians:
Under the fog of this onslaught on Gaza, the colonial takeover of
the West Bank
has also accelerated over the past year. Israel has introduced
new measures of administrative annexation;
settler violence has further intensified with the backing of the
army;
dozens of new outposts have been established, contributing to the
expulsion of Palestinian communities; Palestinian cities have been
subjected to suffocating economic closures; and the Israeli army's violent
repression of armed resistance has reached levels not seen since the
Second Intifada -- especially in the refugee camps of Jenin, Nablus, and
Tulkarem. The previously tenuous distinction between Areas A, B, and C
has been completely erased: the Israeli army operates freely throughout
the entire territory.
At the same time, Israel has deepened the oppression of Palestinians
inside the Green Line and their status as
second-class citizens. It has intensified its severe restrictions
on their political activity through
increased surveillance,
arrests,
dismissals,
suspensions, and
harassment. Arab leaders are labeled "terror supporters," and the
authorities are carrying out an unprecedented wave of house demolitions --
especially in the Negev/Naqab, where the number of demolitions in 2023
(which
reached a record of 3,283) was higher than the number for Jews
across the entire state. At the same time, the police
all but gave up on tackling the serious problem of organized
crime in Arab communities. Hence, we can see a common strategy
across all the territories Israel controls to repress Palestinians
and cement Jewish supremacy.
Near the end of the article, the author points to
A Land for All: Two States One Homeland as an alternative,
and cites various pieces on
confederation. I'm not wild about these approaches, but
I'd welcome any changes that would reduce the drive of people
on both sides to kill one another.
[10-14]
Day 374: Israeli airstrike on Gaza hospital burns patients alive<:
"Israel bombed displacement shelters across Gaza and aid distribution
points in Jabalia, while Hezbollah intensified its fire on Haifa and
Tel Aviv amid Israel's continued bombardment of southern Lebanese
towns."
[10-21]
Day 381: Israel pummels northern Gaza amid intensifying extermination
campaign: "Israel's conditions for a ceasefire with Lebanon
include allowing the Israeli army to continue operating in Lebanese
territory. Meanwhile, Israel steps up its extermination campaign in
northern Gaza, targeting its last remaining hospitals."
David Dayen: [10-17]
In Israel, the war is also the goal: "Yahya Sinwar's death is
unlikely to change the situation in Gaza." This has long been
evident, but it's nice to see new people noticing:
That Netanyahu's personal and political goals vastly outweigh whatever
could resemble military goals in this war in Gaza by now has become a
cliché. Netanyahu wants to stay out of prison, and ending the war is
likely to place him there. So new missions and operations and objectives
sprout up for no reason.
Suddenly Bibi's party has mused about re-settling northern Gaza for
the first time in nearly 20 years, while transparently using
a policy of mass starvation as a way to implement it. . . .
The war has long passed any moment where Israel has any interest
in declaring victory, in the fight against terror or in the fight
for the security of its people. Even bringing up the fact of continued
Israeli hostages inside Gaza seems irrelevant at this point. The war
is actually the goal itself, a continuation of punishment to fulfill
the needs of the prime minister and his far-right political aims. The
annals of blowback indicate pretty clearly that incessant bombing of
hospitals and refugee camps will create many Yahya Sinwars, more than
who can be killed. That is not something that particularly burdens the
Israeli government. Another pretext would serve their continuing
interests.
Griffin Eckstein: [10-17]
Harris sees "opportunity to end" to Israel-Gaza war in Hamas leader
Sinwar's killing: Nice spin, especially after
Biden's me-too statement, but naive and/or disingenuous. Surely
she knows that the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't end with
regime change or the later deaths of Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar,
or Osama Bin Laden. Sure, those deaths seemed like good ideas at
the time, but by the time they happened many more people had been
killed, and more people rose from nowhere to fight back, and then
they too had to be killed, because once you -- by which I mean the
kind of people who lead countries and start wars -- start killing,
there's always more to do. Still, Harris deserves a nod for even
imagining that some other path is possible. Whether she deserves
it depends on whether she can follow through and act upon her
insight. Unfortunately, to do so would mean she has to develop
enough backbone to defy and put pressure on Netanyahu, which thus
far she hasn't risked.
Abdaljawad Omar: [10-21]
It was only their machines: on Yahya Sinwar's last stand:
"Yahya Sinwar's last stand laid bare Israel's weakness, exposing the
truth about its post-heroic army that only survives from a distance
and remains shielded by armor, unwilling to face its enemies head-on."
Steven Simon: [10-17]
The demise of Yahya Sinwar and his 'big project': "The Hamas
leader overestimated Israel's fractures and underestimated Netanyahu's
willingness to destroy Gaza." I'm not convinced that either of these
assertions are true. I tend to see his "big project" as an act of
desperation, aimed to expose Israel's brutality, as well as imposing
some measure of cost for an oppression that had become routinized
and uninteresting for most people not directly affected. It seems
highly unlikely that he underestimated Netanyahu's monstrosity,
although he might not unreasonably have expected that others, like
the US, would have sought to moderate Israel's response. But even
as events unfolded, Israel has done an immense amount of damage to
its international reputation, as has America. While it's fair to
say that Sinwar made a bad bet for the Palestinian people, the
final costs to Israel are still accumulating, and will continue
to do so as long as Netanyahu keeps killing.
Edo Konrad: [10-16]
The 'pact of silence' between Israelis and their media: "Israel's
long-subservient media has spent the past year imbuing the public
with a sense of righteousness over the Gaza war. Reversing this
indoctrination, says media observer Oren Persico, could take
decades." I've long been critical of US mainstream media sources
for their uncritical echoing of Israeli hasbara, but Israel --
where major media, 20-30 years ago, seemed to be far more open to
critically discussing the occupation than American outlets were --
has become far more cloistered. Consider this:
What Israeli journalists do not understand is that when the government
passes its
"Al Jazeera Law," it is ultimately about something much larger
than merely targeting the channel. The current law is about banning
news outlets that "endanger national security," but they also want
to give the Israeli communications minister the right to prevent any
foreign news network from operating in Israel that could "harm the
national morale." What the Israeli public doesn't understand is that
next in line is BBC Arabic, Sky News Arabic, and CNN. After that,
they're going to come for Haaretz, Channel 12, and Channel 13.
We are heading toward an autocratic, Orbán-esque regime and
everything that comes with that -- in the courts, in academia, and
in the media. Of course it is possible. It sounded unrealistic 10
years ago, then it sounded more realistic five years ago when
Netanyahu's media-related legal scandals blew up. Then it became
even more reasonable with the judicial overhaul, and even more so
today. We're not there yet, but we are certainly on the way.
[10-21]
Israel commits largest massacre yet in northern Gaza: "The siege
of north Gaza and Jabalia refugee camp enters its third week as Israel
has cut off aid to some 200,000 people. On Saturday, Israeli forces
bombed Beit Lahia, killing at least 80 Palestinians, in one of the
largest massacres in months."
Lebanon:
Dave DeCamp: [10-20]
Israel starts bombing banks in Lebanon: "The Israeli military is
targeting branches of al-Quard al-Hassan, which Israel accuses of
financing Hezbollah."
Adam Shatz: [10-11]
After Nasrallah. Long piece, lot of background on Nasrallah and
Hizbullah.
It's hard to see what strategy, if any, lies behind Israel's reckless
escalation of its war. But the line between tactics and strategy may
not mean much in the case of Israel, a state that has been at war
since its creation. The identity of the enemy changes -- the Arab
armies, Nasser, the PLO, Iraq, Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas -- but the war
never ends. Israel's leaders claim this war is existential, a matter
of Jewish survival, and there is a grain of truth in this claim,
because the state is incapable of imagining Israeli Jewish existence
except on the basis of domination over another people. Escalation,
therefore, may be precisely what Israel seeks, or is prepared to
risk, since it views war as its duty and destiny. Randolph Bourne
once said that 'war is the health of the state,' and Netanyahu and
Gallant would certainly agree.
[10-21]
Leaked documents show Israel's alleged plans for Iran attack:
"On October 18, two U.S. intelligence documents on a potential Israeli
attack on Iran were leaked, one describing shifting missile deployments,
and the other detailing possible Israeli rehearsals for a strike on
Iran."
Matt Duss: [10-17]
Yahya Sinwar's death can end this war: But it won't, because only
Netanyahu can end the war, and he doesn't want to, because there are
still Palestinians to dispossess and dispose of, and because Biden
isn't going to make it hard on him to continue. But sure, if one did
want to end the war, checking Sinwar off your "to do" list offers a
nice opportunity. On the other hand, negotiating a ceasefire with a
credible leader like Sinwar would have been even better. This piece
was cited by::
Mitchell Plitnick: [10-18]
No, the US is not 'putting pressure' in Israel to end its war:
"A letter from the Biden administration to Israel this week
threatening to possibly withhold weapons raised hopes among some,
but the delivery of a missile defense system and deployment of U.S.
soldiers sent the real message."
Sarah Leah Whitson: [09-27]
Shared zones of interest: "Harris and Trump's foreign-policy
aims in the Middle East proceed from the same incentive structures
and presuppositions about US supremacy." This is an important point,
which could be developed further.
There are two principal reasons for this. First, Harris and Trump's
worldviews are grounded in an article of faith that has undergirded
America's post-World War II foreign policy: maintaining U.S. hegemony
and supremacy. There is full agreement, as Kamala Harris recently
declared at the Democratic convention and reiterated in her debate
with former President Trump, that the U.S. must have the "most lethal"
military in the world, and that we must maintain our military bases
and personnel globally. While Trump may have a more openly mercenary
approach, demanding that the beneficiaries of U.S. protection in Europe
and Asia pay more for it, he is a unilateralist, not an isolationist.
At bottom, neither candidate is revisiting the presuppositions of U.S.
primacy.
Second, both Harris and Trump are subject to the overwhelming
incentive structure that rewards administrations for spending more
on the military and selling more weapons abroad than any other country
in the world. The sell-side defense industry has fully infiltrated the
U.S. government, with campaign donations and a revolving escalator to
keep Republicans and Democrats fully committed to promoting their
interests. The buy-side foreign regimes have gotten in on the pay-to-play,
ensuring handsome rewards to U.S. officials who ensure weapons sales
continue. And all sides play the reverse leverage card: If the U.S.
doesn't sell weapons, China and Russia (or even the U.K. and France)
will. There is no countervailing economic pressure, and little political
pressure, to force either Harris or Trump to consider the domestic and
global harms of this spending and selling.
In the Middle East, the incentive structure is at its most powerful,
combining the influence of the defense industry and the seemingly
bottomless disposable wealth of the Gulf States. And there are two
additional factors -- the unparalleled influence and control of the
pro-Israel lobby, which rewards government officials who comply with
its demands and eliminates those who don't; and Arab control over the
oil and gas spigots that determines the prices Americans pay for fuel.
As a result, continued flows of money, weapons, and petroleum will
ensue, regardless of who wins in November.
Whitson is executive director of Democracy for the Arab World
Now, after previously directing Human Rights Watch's Middle East
and North African Division from 2004 to 2020. Here are some older
articles:
Israel vs. world opinion: Although my
title is more generic, the keyword in my source file is "genocide,"
because that's what this is about, no matter how you try to style
or deny it.
Gabriel Debenedetti: Has a series of articles called
"The Inside Game":
[10-14]
David Plouffe on Harris vs. Trump: 'Too close for comfort':
"The veteran strategist on the state of play for his boss, Kamala
Harris, and what he thinks of the 'bed-wetters.'" He doesn't seem
to have much to say about anything, which may be what passes as
tradecraft in his world of high-stakes political consulting. It
does seem like an incredible amount of money is being spent on a
very thin slice of the electorate -- Plouffe is pretty explicit
on how he's only concerned with the narrow battleground states.
[09-15]
The WhatsApp Campaign: "Kamala Harris's team is looking for
hard-to-find voters just about everywhere, including one platform
favored by Latinos."
[10-02]
How Tim Walz saved himself: "At first, he looked overmatched by
JD Vance. Then came abortion, health care, and, above all, January 6."
John Morling: [10-21]
It is not too late for the Uncommitted Movement to hold Democrats
accountable for genocide: "The Uncommitted Movement voluntarily
gave up its leverage but it is not too late to hold Kamala Harris
accountable for supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza." Yes, it
is too late. The presidential election is about many things, but
one thing it is not about is Israeli genocide. To insist that it
is overlooks both that Trump has if anything been more supportive
of genocide, and that while he was president, he did things that
directly connect to the Oct. 7 Hamas revolt, and to Netanyahu's
sense that he could use that revolt as a pretext for genocide.[*]
On the other hand, punishing Harris suggest that none of the real
differences between her and Trump matter to you. Most Democrats
will not only disagree, they will blame you for any losses.
[*] Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, abandoning a major
tenet of international law. Trump ended the Iran nuclear deal. And
Trump's invention of the Abraham Accords was widely considered as
a major factor in Hamas's desperate attack.
Andrew Prokop: [10-21]
The big election shift that explains the 2024 election: "Progressives
felt they were gaining. Now they're on the defensive." A new installment
in a
Vox series the point of which seems to be to tell leftists to go
fuck themselves. As with the Levitz piece (also
hereabouts), this article is half false
and half bullshit. The false part starts with the "gaining" -- the
success of the Sanders campaigns had less to do with ideological
gains (although he made some, and continues to do so) than with his
presentation of a non-corrupt alternative to a very corrupt system),
and the adoption of some progressive thinking by Biden had more to
do with the proven failures of much neoliberal thinking under Obama
and Clinton -- and continues with the "defensive": Sanders' decision
not to challenge Biden and (later) Harris was largely a concession
to age, as well as a gesture of party unity against Trump and the
increasingly deranged Republicans, but also a sense that Harris
would be at least as willing to work toward progressive ends as
Biden had been. That Harris, having secured the nomination with no
real opposition from progressives or any other faction or interest
group, should deliberately tack toward political orthodoxy may be
disappointing to a few of us -- and in the especially urgent matters,
like Israel's wars and genocide, we still feel the need to speak
out[*] -- but the "assignment" (to use Chait's wretched phrase) is
to win the election, and that involves reaching and convincing a
majority of voters, way more than just self-conscious progressives,
in an environment and culture that are severely warped by moneyed
interests and mass media doublespeak. I'm inclined to trust that
what she's saying is based on sound research and shrewd analysis
with that one goal in mind. She's the politician, and I'm just a
critic. If she loses, I'll take what little joy I can in dissecting
her many failings, but if she wins, I can only be thankful for her
political skills, at least for a few days, until her statements
move from vote-grubbing to policy-making, in which case we critics
will have a lot of expertise to offer.
As for the left, I'm more bullish than ever. Capitalism creates
a lot of benefits, but it is also a prodigious generator of crises
and chronic maladies, and it fuels political ideologies that seek
to concentrate power but only compound and exacerbate them. Anyone
who wants to understand and solve (or at least ameliorate) thsee
systemic problems needs to look to the left, because that's where
the answers are. Granted, the left's first-generation solutions --
proletarian revolution and communism -- were a bit extreme, but over
many years, we've refined them into more modest reforms, which can
preserve capitalism's advances while making them safer, sustainable,
and ultimately much more satisfying. Post-Obama Democrats haven't
moved left but at least have opened up to the possibility that the
left has realistic proposals, and have adopted some after realizing
that politics isn't just about winning elections, it's also about
delivering tangible benefits to your voters. (Obama and Clinton no
doubt delivered tangible benefits to their donors, but neglect of
their base is a big part of the reason Trump was able to con his
way into his disastrous 2016 win.)
No problems are going to be solved on November 5. What will be
decided is who (which team) gets stuck with the problems we already
have. Republicans will not only not solve any of those problems,
they -- both judging from their track record and from their fantasy
documents like
Project 2025 (or Trump's somewhat more sanitized
Agenda47 -- they will make them much worse for most people,
and will try to lock down control so they can retain power even as
popular opinion turns against them. Democrats will be hard-pressed
to solve them too, especially if they revert to the failed neoliberal
ideologies of the Clinton-Obama years. But when decent folk do look
for meaningful change, the left will be there, with understanding
and care and clear thinking and practical proposals. Left isn't an
ideology. It's simply a direction, as we move away from hierarchy
and oppression toward liberation and equality. It only goes away
when we get there.
[*] It's not like Communists did themselves any favors when in 1939,
when after Stalin negotiated his "pact" with Hitler, they stuck to the
party line and dropped their guard against Nazi Germany. Ben-Gurion
did much better with his 1939 slogan: "We shall fight in the war
against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, but we shall fight
the White Paper as if there were no war." He ultimately succeeded
on both counts.
David Weigel: [10-15]
No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right: Prokop
cites this piece, which argues that the rightward shift of 1980-2005
had been countered by a leftward drift from 2005-20, but since 2000
the tide has shifted back to the right. His evidence is superficial,
mostly polling on language that correlates weakly with left/right.
Biden may have talked more left in 2020 because he literally stole
the nomination from Sanders, and desperately needed to shore up
left support (which he managed to do). Harris got the nomination
handed to her on a platter, with virtually no dissent from the
left, so she's been free to wheel and deal on the right, for
whatever short-term margin it might bring. But nobody on either
side thinks she's more conservative or orthodox than Biden. That's
why Republicans are in such a panic, so unmoored from reality.
Stephen Rohde: [10-07]
Why the Uncommitted and Undecided should vote for Kamala Harris:
"In sharp contrast to the lawless dictatorship Trump promises in his
second term, I urge Undecided voters to examine how Harris would
preserve democracy and continue to strengthen the United States."
He also explains that "since Uncommitted voters care about the
humanity and self-determination of the Palestinian people, Harris
is their best choice."
[10-16]
Critiquing Trump's economics -- from the right: "What one of the
right's greatest thinkers would make of Trumponomics." On Friedrich
Hayek, who saw himself as a classical liberal, and who saw everyone
else even slightly to his left as marching on "the road to serfdom."
But nothing here convinces me he would have a problem with Trump --
he was, like most of his cohort, a big Pinochet fan -- let alone that
his opinion (having been wrong on nearly everything else) should matter
to me.
Philip Bump: [10-18]
Trump's age finally catches up with him: "The man who would (once
again) be the oldest president in history has reportedly scaled back
his campaign due to fatigue. So who would run his White House?"
Zachary D Carter: [10-16]
The original angry populist: "Tom Watson was a heroic scion of the
Boston Tea Party -- and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump's violent
fantasies." Link title was: "They say there's never been a man like
Donald Trump in American politics. But there was -- and we should
learn from him." If you're familiar with Watson, who started out as a
Populist firebrand and wound up as a racist demagogue, it's probably
thanks to C Vann Woodward, if not his 1938 biography,
Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, then (as in my case) his 1955 book,
The Strange Career of Jim Crow. But this, of course, is mostly
about Trump.
Something important happened at the end of Trump's presidency and the
beginning of Joe Biden's. Nobody wants to talk about it -- not even
conservatives bring up masks and school closures anymore, and much of
the discourse surrounding inflation studiously avoids reference to the
massive economic disruption of COVID-19. But one of the most important
cultural artifacts of the period is the sudden spread of vaccine
skepticism to the cultural mainstream. The anti-vaxxer delusion that
vaccines cause autism has lingered at the fringes of the autism
community in no small part because it provides narrative meaning to a
difficult and random experience. There is tremendous joy in the life
of a special needs parent, but there is also a great deal of fear and
pain. Fear, because you do not know how the world will respond to your
child, and pain, because you must watch your child struggle for no
fault of their own. For many, it is more comforting to believe that
their child's hardships are not a random act of fate but a product of
deliberate malfeasance. The idea that bad things happen for bad
reasons is more palatable than the belief that they happen for no
reason at all.
It is not only anti-vaxxers who seek such comfort. Americans on
both the left and the right avert their eyes from the story of Tom
Watson not only because the story is ugly and violent but because we
insist on being able to control our own destiny. From Huck Finn to
Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to write its heroes as
variations on the story of David and Goliath -- tales of underdogs who
secure unlikely triumphs against an overbearing order. Even when that
order is part of America itself, individual heroism soothes the
audience with the promise that the world's wrongs can be righted with
enough derring-do. Horatio Alger's novels of children born into
poverty could be read as an indictment of the Gilded Age social order,
but the romance of these stories always lies in a boy taking fate by
the horns. Watson disturbs us not only because he turns to evil but
because an extraordinary leader's earnest, Herculean attempt to right
the world's wrongs comes up short. To win, he assents to the dominion
of dark forces beyond his control.
Chas Danner: [10-15]
Trump turned his town hall into a dance party after fans got sick.
This was much ridiculed by late night comics, so I've seen much of
Trump and Kristi Noem on stage, but very little of the crowd, which
is usually the definition of a "dance party." How did the crowd react
after his bumbling responses to five setup questions? It's hard to
imagine them thrilling to multiple versions of "Ava Maria," but it's
also hard to imagine them showing up for the information. I wonder
if Trump rallies aren't like "be-ins" in the 1960s, where crowds
assemble to associate with similar people and complain about the
others. Trump defines who shows up, but after that, does it really
matter what he says or does? This was a test case, but if you start
thinking everything Trump does or says is stupid, your confirmation
bias kicked in instantly, without raising the obvious next question,
why do crowds flock to such inanity? Or are they as stupid as Trump?
[10-18]
"Thirst for the spectacle of Trump's cruelty": Exploring MAGA's
unbreakable bond. Some time ago, I noted that there are two
basic types of Christians in America: those whose understanding
of their religion is to love their neighbors and seek to help them,
and those who hate their neighbors, and see religion as a way to
punish them for eternity -- it's no wonder that the latter group
have come to define Christian Republicans.
DaVega includes a long quote from Peter McLaren, then adds:
McLaren notes "Trump is speaking to an audience that since 2016
has come to share Trump's worldview, his political intuition, his
apprehension of the world, what the Germans call Weltanschauung
and has created a visceral, almost savage bond with the aspiring
dictator."
As the next step in Trump's dictator and authoritarian-fascist
plans, he is now embracing scientific racism and eugenics by telling
his followers that nonwhite migrants, refugees and "illegal aliens"
have bad genes, i.e. "a murder gene." Last Monday, Trump told
right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt that, "You know now, a murderer --
I believe this -- it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes
in our country right now." Take Trump's obsessions with good genes
and bad genes and couple them with his remarks about "purifying the
blood" of the nation by removing the human poison and other human
vermin. Historically, both in American society and other parts of
the world, people with the "bad genes" that Trump is so obsessed
with have been removed from normal society through imprisonment and
other means. Such targeted populations have also been subjected to
eliminationist violence and forced sterilization.
Sometimes I wonder if Trump's team doesn't just plant this obvious
Nazi shit to provoke recognition and reaction. They know that it
just sails past their own people, while it turns their opponents
into whiny hysterics droning on about stuff no one else understands.
Dan Froomkin: [10-20]
If Trump wins, blame the New York Times: "America's paper of
record refuses to sound the alarm about the threat Trump poses to
democracy." Sure, the Times endorsed Harris -- see [09-30]
The only patriotic choice for president -- but in such jingoistic
terms you have to wonder. Their opinion columnists are, as always,
artfully divided, but in day-to-day reporting, they do seem awfully
dedicated to keeping the race competitive (presumably the ticket to
selling more papers) and keeping their options open (as is so often
the way of such self-conscious, power-sucking elites). I've never
understood how many people actually take "the paper of record" all
that seriously. At least I've never been one.
Though braggadocio is a familiar Trump quality, much like his reluctance
to stick to his prepared remarks, he is arguably getting weirder -- and
more disturbing -- over time. Trump's speeches are so outlandish, so
false, that they often pass without much comment, as the New York
Times
reported earlier this month in a story about his age. Yet a change
is noticeable. "He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought
to thought -- some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished,
some of them factually fantastical," the Times noted, adding
that his speeches have become much longer on average, and contain
more negative words and examples of profanity than they previously
did.
Hassan Ali Kanu: [10-16]
Conservatives use Trump assassination to target women in anti-diversity
war: "It's a move to enshrine values into law, but it's not beyond
the realm of possibility." What? "The claim is one of reverse discrimination:
that the historically and presently male-dominated Secret Service
discriminates against men." Say whaaat?
[10-18]
Campaign official admits Trump "refusing interviews because he's
'exhausted'": "Trump has cancelled at least 11 campaign events
since August even as he accuses Kamala Harris of dodging media."
On the other hand, as best I recall, Trump surged in the polls in
2016 after his staff took away his Twitter handle, reducing
his exposure. So it's not clear to me that Trump gains much (other
than merch sales) from his appearances. Still, "exhausted" may not
be the message they want to convey.
Carlos Lozada: [10-13]
When Trump rants, this is what I hear: The author came to the
US when he was three, so technically he's an immigrant, a person
Trump makes rather gross generalizations about.
[10-11]
Donald Trump's campaign stops give away the game: "California and
New York are not battleground states so why is the campaign spending
time there in the final weeks?" I don't see an answer here, but I also
don't like the idea that one should only campaign in "battleground"
states. (Not that I mind that both sides take Kansas for granted: this
has been a remarkably quiet election here in Wichita, with only two
political signs out as I walk the dog around the block -- both, fwiw,
Harris/Walz.)
Chas Danner: [10-17]
Who won Kamala Harris's Fox News interview with Bret Baier?
What does "winning" even mean here? The more salient question is
who survived with their reputation intact? This is really just a
catalog of reactions, the final of which was "both sides got what
they wanted." Which is to say, if you missed it, you didn't miss
much.
David Dayen/Luke Goldstein:
Google's guardians donate to the Harris campaign: "Multiple
Harris donors at an upcoming fundraiser are representing Google
in its case against the Justice Department over monopolizing
digital advertising." I have to ask, is digital advertising
something we even want to exist? Competition makes most goods
more plentiful, more innovative, and more affordable, but if
the "good" in question is essentially bad, maybe that shouldn't
be the goal. I'm not saying we should protect Google's monopoly.
A better solution would be to deflate its profitability. For
instance, and this is just off the top of my head, you could
levy a substantial tax on digital advertising, collect most of
it from Google, and then redistribute much of the income to
support websites that won't have to depend on advertising.
Elie Honig: [11-18]
Kamala Harris has finally embraced being a cop: "The label hurt
her in 2019. Today she wears it like a badge." Reminds me a bit of
when Kerry embraced being a Vietnam War soldier. He didn't get very
far with that.
Robert Kuttner: [10-09]
Notes for Harris: "It's good that Kamala Harris is doing more
one-on-one interviews, because she's getting a lot better at it.
Still, she occasionally misses an opportunity." E.g., "Harris could
point out that the administration has made a difference by challenging
collusion and price-gouging, in everything from prescription drugs
to food wholesalers."
Matthew Stevenson: [10-18]
Harris: Speed dating Howard Stern: I was surprised last week
to find the "shock jock and satellite-radio wit" endorsing Harris
last week, probably because I have zero interest or curiosity in
him, and may know even less.
Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:
Avishay Artsy/Sean Rameswaram: [10-21]
Why Wisconsin Democrats are campaigning in places where they can't
win: "To win statewide, the party wants to "lose by less" in
rural areas." That's good advice everywhere. Especially as Democrats
actually have a better proposition for rural voters than Republicans
have.
Ed Kilgore: [10-19]
Four good reasons Democrats are terrified about the 2024 election:
I wasn't sure where to fire this, but the reasons turn out to mostly
reside in Democrats' heads. Nothing here suggests that Democrats are
more likely to lose. It's just that if they lose, the consequences
will be far worse than whatever setbacks Republicans might suffer in
another Trump loss:
Democrats remember 2016 and 2020
Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris
Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results
If Harris wins, she'll oversee a divided government; if Trump
wins, he'll have a shot at total power
Eric Levitz: [10-17]
The Democrats' pro-union strategy has been a bust: "Despite
Joe Biden's historically pro-union policies, the Democrats' share
of the union vote is falling." First question is: is this true?
(Actually, either "this": the falling vote share, or the "pro-union"
policies.) Second question is would be anti-union (like Republicans)
win or lose votes? Most of the people who are locked into Republican
positions (e.g., guns, abortion) are so distrustful of Democrats no
amount of pandering can move them, but giving up positions that are
popular among Democrats can lose face and faith, and that can hurt
you more than you can possibly gain, even if there is no meaningful
alternative. Third point is who cares? If standing up for unions is
the right thing to do, why equivocate with polling? We live in a
country where the rich have exorbitant power, where unions are one
of the few possible countervailing options. Extreme inequality is
corroding everything, from democracy to the fabric of everyday life.
More/stronger unions won't fix that, but they'll help, and that's
good in itself, as well as something that resonates with other
promising strategies. Fourth, if you're just polling union members,
you're missing out on workers who would like to join a union if
only they could. Are your "pro-union" policies losing them? Or
are they offering hope, and a practical path to a better life?
On some level, Democrats and Republicans are fated to be polarized
opposites, each defined by the other and stuck in its identity. A
couple more pieces on labor and politics this year:
Sharon Block/Benjamin Sachs: [10-16]
The truth about the parties and labor: "You need only look at
the state level to understand who supports workers and who doesn't."
Steven Greenhouse: [10-15]
Sean O'Brien's tantrum against the Democrats: "He appears to be
hoping for a Trump victory, which would be a disaster for the
Teamsters, but just maybe good for him."
Erik Loomis: [09-26]
Preserving public lands: "Deb Haaland has been a remarkable
secretary of the interior. But the future is about funding in
Congress."
Hassan Ali Kanu: [10-15]
America's judicial divisions: "Every major policy issue is now
also a courtroom battle, decided in increasingly partisan settings.
And there's no end in sight." This is a good overview of an effect
Millhiser has been writing about case-by-case for years: right-wing
plaintiffs and Red State attorneys general shopping for favorable
judges willing to impose horrific rulings on the rest of the nation.
Kacsmaryk's mifepristone ruling is just one glaring case example.
Ian Millhiser:
[10-16]
The nightmare facing Democrats, even if Harris wins: "If Harris wins,
the Republican Party will almost certainly be able to veto anything she
does, thanks to our broken Constitution." She'll also have to contend
with thousands of lobbyists, including many with hooks deep into her
own party -- and given her billion dollar campaign warchest, most likely
into her as well -- as the Constitution isn't the only thing broken in
American politics.
Alex Abad-Santos: [10-11]
For some evacuation defiers, Hurricane Milton is a social media
goldmine: "They didn't listen to Hurricane Milton evacuation
orders. Then they posted through it." This reminds me of the hype
that "shock and awe" would win the war against Iraq, because all
it would take is one awesome demonstration of force to get Iraqis
to drop their arms and surrender. Problem was: the people who were
truly shocked were dead, and the rest survived not just the bombs
but the hype, making them think they were invincible.
Robert Kuttner: [10-15]
How hurricanes are a profit center for insurers: "To compensate
for exaggerated expectations of claims, they jack up rates and hollow
our coverage, giving themselves more profit than before." As long
as the market will bear it, and up to the point when they really do
go bankrupt. This is, of course, the kind of profiteering business
schools teach their students to be shameless about.
Business, labor, and Economists:
Dean Baker: Quite a bit to catch up with here, as
he always has good points to make. In trying to figure out how
far I needed to go back, I ran across this tweet I had noted:
"Part of the job of a progressive government is to shift the
public narrative towards the idea that the state can improve
people's lives." I'll add that the point here is not to convince
you that government is good or benign, but that it belongs to
you and everyone else, and can be used to serve your interests,
as far as they align with most other people (or, as the US
Constitution put it, to "promote the general welfare, and secure
the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"). While
progressives initially do this by advancing reasoned argument,
they also need to put it into practice whenever possible, and
actually do things to "promote the general welfare and secure
the blessings of liberty." You hear much about "democracy" these
days, but knows this: democracy makes good government possible,
but only works if/when people realize they have the power to
direct it. Also, make sure to check out Baker's free book,
Rigged.
The New York Times picks an atypical worker to tell a story
about a divided economy.
It's hard for recent college grads to find jobs even when
their unemployment rate is near a twenty-year low.
The two-full time job measure of economic hardship
The retirement crisis
The collapsing saving rate
Young people will never be able to afford a home
He adds:
Those are my six favorites, but I could come up with endless more
pieces, like the CNN story on the family that drank massive amounts
of milk who suffered horribly when milk prices rose, or the New York
Times piece on a guy who used an incredible amount of gas and was
being bankrupted by the record gas prices following the economy's
reopening.
There are also the stories that the media chose to ignore, like
the record pace of new business starts, the people getting big pay
increases in low-paying jobs, the record level of job satisfaction,
the enormous savings in commuting costs and travel time for the
additional 19 million people working from home (almost one eight
of the workforce).
The media decided that they wanted to tell a bad economy story,
and they were not going to let reality get in the way.
[09-26]
The economy after the GDP revisions: "Basically, they tell us
a story of an economy that has performed substantially better since
the pandemic than we had previously believed."
The highlights are:
An economy that grew substantially more rapidly than previously
believed and far faster than other wealthy countries
Substantially more rapid productivity growth, suggesting more
rapid gains in wages and living standards and a smaller burden of
the national debt;
Higher income growth than previously reported, with both more
wages and more profits;
A higher saving rate, meaning that the stories about people
having to spend down their savings were nonsense.
There were also a couple of not-so-good items:
A higher profit share that is still near a post-pandemic peak;
A lower implicit corporate tax rate, although still well above
the 2019 level.
[10-05]
Automation is called "productivity growth". As he points out,
productivity growth was long regarded as a universal good thing,
until the 1980s, when businesses found they could keep all of the
profits, instead of sharing with workers.
Anyhow, this is a big topic (see Rigged, it's free), but the
idea that productivity growth would ever be the enemy is a bizarre
one. Automation and other technologies with labor displacing potential
are hardly new and there is zero reason for workers as a group to fear
them, even though they may put specific jobs at risk.
The key issue is to structure the market to ensure that the benefits
are broadly shared. We never have to worry about running out of jobs.
We can always have people work shorter hours or just have the government
send out checks to increase demand. It is unfortunate that many have
sought to cultivate this phony fear.
I will say that by any historical standard the labor market is doing
pretty damn good. It could be better, but a low unemployment rate and
rapidly rising real wages is a better story than any incumbent
administration could tell since -- 2000, oh well.
I would put more stress here on "it could be better" than on the
seemingly self-satisfied "pretty damn good." I'd also stress the
options: that Republicans and business lobbyists have obstructed
reforms that would help more (and in some cases virtually all) people,
and that the key to better results is electing more Democrats -- who
may still be too generous to the rich, but at least consider everyone
else.
[10-14]
CNN tells Harris not to talk about the economy. CNN is not
the only "neutral news outlet" to have persistently trashed the
economic success of the Biden-Harris administration, but they
have been particularly egregious. It's almost as if they have
their own agenda.
The goal for Democrats in pushing their many economic successes
(rapid job creation, extraordinarily low unemployment, real wage
growth, especially at the lower end of the wage distribution, a
record boom in factory construction) is to convince a small
percentage of the electorate that this is a record to build on.
By contrast, Donald Trump seems to push out a new whacked out
proposal every day, with the only constants being a massive tax
on imports and deporting a large portion of the workforce in
agriculture and construction.
Given the track record of the Biden-Harris administration
compared with the craziness being pushed by Donald Trump, it is
understandable that backers of Donald Trump would not want Harris
to talk about the economy. But why would a neutral news outlet
hold that view?
Sarah Jones: [Fall 2024]
In the shadow of King Coal: "While the coal industry is in terminal
decline, it still shapes the culture of central Appalachia."
Robert Kuttner: [10-18]
Redeeming the Nobel in economics: "This year's prize went to three
institutionalist critics of neoliberalism. The award is overdue."
Daren Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A Robinson. The latter two
were co-authors with Acemoglu of books like Why Nations Fail: The
Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), and Power and
Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
(2023). Johnson was also co-author, with James Kwak, of one of the
first notable books to come out of the 2008 financial meltdown: 13
Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
(2010).
Van Jackson: I just ran across him today, but he has
several books I should have noticed by now, and a Substack newsletter
that I'll cite below. He describes himself as "a one-time 'defense
intellectual' and a longtime creature of the national security state,"
but also "on the left," albeit only in a "vague cosmopolitanism and
an antiwar sensibility, yet reflexively in support of the going
concerns of the Democratic Partly, including (paradoxically) military
primacy."
Whizy Kim: [10-16]
Is every car dealer trying to rip me off? "Why buying a car is
the worst kind of shopping." Cited here because after 18 years I'm
in the market for a new car, and because I've been for 2-3 years
without ever managing to put the time and effort into it. I've only
bought one used and four new cars in my life, and the new car I
spent the least time shopping for was by far the worst -- the
others were pretty good deals on pretty good cars. But I've seen
a lot of crap like this, and it pays to beware.
Fred Kaplan: [10-15]
Bob Woodward's latest book tells the story of America's declining
leverage in the world. Link title was "Bob Woodward's new book
is about Biden, but the most urgent takeaways are about Trump."
This is just more proof of the truly ridiculous extent to which
Trump has dominated our minds since 2015. Nearly four years out
of office, it still feels like he's the incumbent, to no small
extent because most of our regrets and great fears of the moment
are directly traceable back to him, but because of his amazing
(and I'll use the word "ridiculous" again here) domination of
the noosphere (apologies for using a word almost everyone will
have to look up, so I can at least save you that trouble: per
Merriam-Webster: "the sphere of human consciousness and mental
activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere
and in relation to evolution"). In short, he's in our heads, as
intractable as an earworm, and several orders of magnitude more
disturbing. I've been struggling with trying to narrow down "the
top ten reasons for voting for Harris against Trump," but number
one has to be: MAKE IT STOP!
Returning to the book, Kaplan writes a bit about Biden:
Woodward's style of storytelling is more episodic than structural.
Chapters tend to run for just a few pages. His mantra tends to be
"And then . . . and then . . . and then . . . " as opposed to "And
so . . . and so . . . and so . . ." Still, the stories here hang
together, more than they usually do, because of their underlying
thread -- as the title suggests, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and
how Biden and his team dealt with them.
For the most part, Woodward is impressed, concluding that they
engaged in "genuine good faith efforts" to "wield the levers of
executive power responsibly and in the national interest," adding,
"I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in
history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership."
Needless to say at this point, I disagree with nearly everything
that Biden has done in the foreign policy arena, but Woodward's
wording here -- "good faith efforts," "steady and purposeful
leadership" -- betrays the subtext, where the baseline for praise
is "at least he's not Trump." So I can get the point, without
having to agree with the particulars. Kaplan continues:
This is an uncharacteristically bold assertion for any author, much
less Woodward, who, throughout his 50-year career, has been the less
judgmental half of the Woodward and Bernstein team that broke the
Watergate scandal and brought down Richard Nixon. In a
Playboy interview back in 1989, he admitted that analysis wasn't
his strong point; it still isn't. But heading into his ninth decade,
with nearly two dozen books under his belt, it seems he feels entitled --
properly so -- to render some verdicts from journalism's high bench.
He dangled his new assertiveness in 2020, on the eve of that year's
election, when he wrote, as the last line in Rage, "Donald Trump is the
wrong man for the job." The next year, after Trump's defeat, he ended
Peril by musing, "What is your country? What has it become under
Trump?"
And even in War, where Trump plays a cameo role as he mulls
making another run for the White House, Woodward declares, just before
touting Biden's legacy, "Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the
presidency, he is unfit to lead the country."
Meme quote from Michelle Wolf: "You know in High School if you
didn't believe in Science or History, it was just called failing."
I got this from a Facebook
thread, with several interesting comments, including this one from
Clifford Ocheltree:
I shall only point to an earlier remark, the failure of our educational
system to teach critical thinking. To be skeptical in the absence of
that learned skill is pure ignorance. I would add that perception plays
a critical role in how an uneducated populace becomes 'skeptical,'
'credulous' and 'easily duped.' We are, we have become, the product of
a failed educational system. One in which the vast majority of the
population cannot read directions on a bottle of aspirin or name the
three branches of the Federal Government. These failures allow both
parties to play fast and loose with history and science knowing full
well the audience isn't likely to 'get it.'
Ocheltree also addressed history: "History is the interpretation
of fact by 'experts' who bring their own bias." Someone else picked
this up, noting "I can't help laugh at the notion of your feigning
disdain for history" then asking "why do you lap up so many history
books?" Ocheltree replied:
Fact and history are not the same thing. Most 'experts' (historians)
have a bias and view 'facts' through that lens. Nearly 50 years ago
I read an excellent book by Frances Fitzgerald, "America Revised:
History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century" (1979). A discussion
and analysis of how history teaching and texts had changed over the
years. At times the result of new information coming to light and
at others the outgrowth of changing social standards or political
leanings. Some 20 years ago I discovered some 'facts' while researching.
Trial testimony with supporting documentation (original records) in
a Virginia court house basement. At a conference I had some time to
speak with the author of the leading text(s) being used on the topic
by any number of colleges. I shared my findings, privately, as they
disproved a good chunk of his work. His response in short? Nobody
will give a shit that I was wrong, my text is the accepted standard
and will always be paramount because it makes my point.
I would add, history and record reviews are much the same. The
author collects 'facts,' the critic listens. Each applies his/her
own bias. The idea that anyone would accept an authors' work(s) as
'unbiased' strikes me as a failure of our education system. Steven
Pinker's recent work has focused on the utter lack of training
students in the basics of critical thinking. I 'lap up' history
books with a jaundiced eye. I love the topic but learned many
years ago, just because a book has been issued isn't 'proof' that
it is accurate.
Hardin Smith, who started this thread, added:
Who said fact and history are the same thing? I sure didn't. But
that doesn't mean it's not worth studying and it doesn't mean that
it doesn't behoove people to have a working knowledge of it. And
certainly you'd agree that there are certain things that we can
all agree on, or at least on the general outlines. Here's a question:
if so much of what you read is biased, whose work are you using to
make that judgment? Is there a higher unbiased source you go to?
And, are there certain historical events that we can all agree to?
The Holocaust, the Moon Landing, Trump's loss in '20? Or is everything
in your world subjective opinion? Also, history is not like record
reviews, sorry. Record reviews are totally based on opinion, but
though there may be bias, history at least concerns itself with
actual facts. It's a subjective interpretation of actual facts.
There's never completely removing bias in anything produced by
humans, but I'd submit to you that some are more biased than others.
Some are relatively free of bias. None of it means that history
isn't worth knowing.
It's tempting to go all philosophical here, and argue that it's
all biased, all subjective, at best assertions that are subject to
independent verification -- same for record reviews, although the
odds of being rejected by other subjectives there are much elevated
compared to science, which has a longer history of refinement and
consensus building (not that similar processes don't apply to record
reviewing). Still, not much disagreement here. Smith seems to find
it important to maintain a conceptual division between opinion and
fact, between subjective and objective, which I find untenable and
not even necessary (although it's easy to fall into when arguing
with idiots -- which is why Wolf's joke is so cutting).
This leads us back to the importance of critical thinking,
which is ultimately a process of understanding one's own biases --
starting, of course, with exposing the biases of others. (Much
like crazy people developed psychoanalysis to understand, and
ultimately to master, their own neuroses.)
Ali Abunimah: [10-21]
In April, under pressure from "Israel," @amazon banned the sale of
The Thorn and the Carnation, the novel by Palestinian resistance
leader Yahya Sinwar.
You can still buy copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf from Amazon,
in multiple languages.
I had the thought of writing up a "top ten reasons for voting for
Kamala Harris and the Democrats this year," but haven't gotten much
further than considering the possibility of adding a second list of
"top five reasons why voting for Kamala Harris and the Democrats
won't be enough." The former is obviously dominated by how bad the
Republican offerings are, although you still have to establish that
at least in some significant respects, Democrats are preferable. If
you can't show that, you can't reject the "third party" option. The
second list might even help there, in that most of my reservations
are about programs that don't go far enough. The exceptions there
are Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine, where Harris doesn't go
anywhere at all.
So while I have zero doubt that I will vote for Harris/Walz, and
most likely for every other Democrat who bothers to run here in Kansas,
I've spent most of my time here dealing with the pressing issues of
war, which the election will have little obvious impact on. The best
hope I can offer is a mere hunch that Harris has locked herself into
a Netanyahu dittohead position out of the calculated fear that any
sign of wavering might precipitate a sudden pro-Israel shift toward
Trump, and scuttle her campaign, but that once she wins, she'll have
more room to maneuver behind the scenes, and ease back toward the
more viable ground of decency. In any case, decency isn't even an
incidental prospect with Trump.
Monday night, I ended this arbitrarily, with little sense of how
much more I didn't get to.
Israel's media have acted this way for years. They conceal the
occupation and whitewash its crimes. No one orders them to do this; it
is done willingly, out of the understanding that this is what their
consumers want to hear. For the commercial media, that is the top and
foremost consideration. In this way Israel's media have become the
most important agent for dehumanization of the Palestinians, without
the need for censorship or a government directing it to do so. The
media take on this role in the knowledge that this is what their
customers want and expect of it. They don't want to know anything
about what their state and army are carrying out, because the best way
to be at peace with the reality of occupation, apartheid and war is
with denial, suppression and dehumanization.
There is no more effective and tried means to keep alive an
occupation so brutal and cruel as dehumanization via the
media. Colonialist powers have always known this. Without the
systematic concealment, over dozens of years, and the dehumanization,
it may well be that public opinion would have reflected greater
opposition to the situation among Israelis. But, if you don't say
anything, don't show anything, don't know anything and have no desire
to know anything, either, if the Palestinians are not truly human --
not like us, the Israelis -- then the crime being committed against
them goes down easier, can be tolerated.
The October 7 war brought all of this to new heights. Israel's media
showed almost nothing of what was happening in Gaza, and Israelis saw
only their own suffering, over and over, as if it was the only
suffering taking place. When Gazans counted 25,000 fatalities in less
than four months, most of them innocent noncombatants, in Israel there
was no shock. In fact, shock was not permitted, because it was seen as
a type of disloyalty. While in Gaza 10,000 children were killed,
Israelis continued to occupy themselves exclusively with their
captives and their own dead. Israelis told themselves that all Gazans
were Hamas, children included, even the infants, and that after
October 7, everyone was getting just what they deserved, and there was
no need to report on it. Israelis sank into their own disaster, just
theirs.
The absence of reporting on what was happening in Gaza constituted
the Israeli media's first sin. The second was only slightly less
egregious: the tendency to bring only one voice into the TV studios
and the pages of the printed press. This was a voice that supported,
justified and refused to question the war. Any identification with the
suffering in Gaza, or worse, any call to end the war because of its
accumulating crimes, was not viewed as legitimate in the press, and
certainly not by public opinion. This passed quietly, even calmly, in
Israel.
In Israel, people were fine with not having to see Gaza. The Jewish
left only declined in size, great numbers of people said they had the
scales removed from their eyes -- that is, October 7 led to their
awakening from the illusion, the lies, the preconceptions they had
previously held. It was sufficient for a single cruel attack for many
on the left to have their entire value system overturned. A single
cruel attack was sufficient to unite Israelis around a desire for
revenge and a hatred not only of those who had carried out that
attack, but of everyone around them. No one considered what might be
taking place in the hearts and minds of the millions of Palestinians
who have been living with the occupation's horrors for all these
dozens of years.
What kind of hatred must exist there, if here in Israel such hatred
and mistrust could sprout up after a single attack, horrific as it may
have been. This "waking up" among the left has to raise serious
questions about its seriousness and resilience. This wasn't the first
time that the left crumbled in the face of the first challenge it
encountered.
I've long been struck by the fickleness of the "peace camp" in
Israel: in particular, by how quickly people who should know better
rally behind Israeli arms at the slightest provocation. Amos Oz
and David Grossman are notorious repeat-offenders here, but the
effect is so common that it can only be explained by some kind of
mass psychology so deep-seated that it can be triggered any time
some faction sees an opportunity for war.
Top story threads:
Israel's year of infamy:
Mondoweiss: A
website founded by Philip Weiss which has moved beyond its origins
as a vehicle for progressive Jews to express their misgivings about
Israel by providing an outlet for a wide range of Palestinian voices,
this has long been my first stop for news about Israel/Palestine, and
has been extraordinarily invaluable over the past year. Here's their:
Palestinians reflect: One year of genocide:
Michael Arria: [10-10]
A year of genocide, a year of protest: "Despite the horror we
are watching unfold in Palestine, the movement challenging Israel
has seen unprecedented growth and accomplishments in the past
year." A reminder that every action produces a reaction -- perhaps
not "opposite and equal," but things have a way of settling out
over time.
It has exposed the enduring colonial nature of international law
This is a U.S. genocide of Palestinians
Universities are an extension of the state's coercive apparatus
Zionism has no moral legs to stand on
Racism and power -- the invisibility and power of Palestinians
Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-07]
After October 7, my home became a bag I carry with me: "I have
lived through my own Nakba and understand why thousands of Palestinians
fled their homes in 1948. I made the most difficult decision of my life
and left Gaza, not knowing that what I carried might be all I will ever
possess of my homeland."
Reem A Hamadaqa: [10-07]
My martyrs live on: "Out from under the rubble, I see my martyrs
waving for me. They all stand again. They smile. They live. They go
back home."
Hebh Jamal: [10-10]
The Gaza I knew is gone with our martyrs: "We do not fight for
Palestine for our family. I am no longer clinging to the hope of
reunification and survival. We fight for Palestine because the
liberation of its people means the liberation of us all."
Ghada Karmi: [10-08]
The true lesson of October 7 is that Israel cannot be reformed:
"The year since October 7 has shown us that Israel can neither
be accommodated nor reformed. It must be dismantled, and Zionism
must be brought to an end. Only this will finally alleviate the
Palestinians' terrible ordeal over the past 76 years." This is
an argument that I instinctively dislike and recoil from, but I
do take the point that it is incumbent on Israelis to show that
they are open to reform, the first step to which would be the
recognition that they have done wrong, and the resolve to stop
doing so, and to start making amends. Whether they can salvage
some sense of Zionist legacy is an open question. The strands of
thought and culture that drove Israel to genocide are woven deep
in their history, and won't be easy to dispose of, but I wouldn't
exclude all hope that Israel might recover.
Qassam Muaddi: [10-09]
After a year of extermination, Palestine is still alive:
"Palestinians have endured 76 years of the Nakba and now the 2024
genocide. Despite Israel and the West's desire to erase our existence,
we continue to declare, 'We won't leave.'"
Salman Abu Sitta: [10-07]
From ethnic cleansing to genocide: "I am a survivor of the 1948
Nakba who lived to witness the 2024 genocide. I may not live to see
justice be made, but I am certain our long struggle will be rewarded.
Our grandchildren will live at home once again."
Alice Austin: [10-07]
A year after the Nova massacre, survivors are still paralyzed with
grief: "The Nova festival was the site of October 7's largest
massacre. Now, survivors and the families of those murdered are
suing the state for negligence." One section head here is in quotes:
"It's impossible to heal, because it's never-ending." But the
massacre itself ended almost as quickly as it started. What has
never ended has been the political use and psychological abuse
of that massacre as a pretext for genocide. End that, and everyone
can start healing.
Ramzy Baroud: [10-11]
A year of genocide. "No one had expected that one year would be
enough to recenter the Palestinian cause as the world's most pressing
issue, and that millions of people across the globe, would, once
again, rally for Palestinian freedom." In some limited sense that
may be true, but I don't see how it works out. Not for lack of
trying, but those "millions of people" haven't been very effective,
nor is their fortune likely to change.
Since October 7, organizations of the American Jewish establishment,
like the Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League, have
weaponized our grief, decontextualized it, promoted falsehoods about
what happened that day, and deployed Israeli propaganda talking
points to justify a genocidal onslaught against the Gaza Strip.
Within days of October 7, Israeli political and military leaders
publicly declared their intention to exact vengeance by destroying
Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. Leading with a campaign of
mass bombing in densely populated areas that could only result in
massive civilian deaths, they have done so. Israel's conduct of the
war does not conform to any reasonable definition of self-defense.
The second half of the piece is devoted to relatively old history,
especially an event in 1971, which leads into the final paragraph:
The January 2, 1971 attack on the Aroyo family and Israel's brutal
response to it prefigure, albeit on a much smaller scale, the events
of October 7, 2023 and their aftermath. Shlomo Gazit was correct.
Israeli security cannot be achieved by committing war crimes and
ethnic cleansing. Palestinian liberation cannot be achieved by
murdering civilians.
Helen Benedict: [10-03]
Ending the cycle of revenge: "Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians
use their grief to advocate for reconciliation and peace together."
Robert Grenier: [10-05]
How Israel's brutal war strategy has remade the Middle East:
"Israel set out to reestablish military superiority. It succeeded --
at catastrophic human cost." Article misses the obvious question,
which is why "military superiority" matters to anyone other than
the military budget makers, as well as why the Hamas attack on
October 7 made them think they had something to prove. As for
"remaking the Middle East," it really looks much like it did just
over a year ago, except for the humanitarian crisis which Israel
itself is solely responsible for. (Sure, blame America for aiding,
but had Israel not wanted to launch its multi-front war, Americans
would have bowed and scraped just the same.)
Anis Shivani: [10-11]
Israel won: I considered pairing this piece with Baroud (above)
as a sobering counterpoint, but it has its own problems. While
Palestinians have lost much, it's hard to say what (if anything)
Israel has won. Also, he seems to be stuck on the notion that
the US is the architect of Israel's foreign policy, whereas the
opposite seems much closer to the truth.
Last year,
images and
video of the survivor of the October 7, 2023, strike in Abasan
Al-Kabira, 11-year-old Tala Abu Daqqa, circulated online. In a short
video, the young girl -- her face peppered with tiny cuts -- appears
glassy-eyed, broken, shattered. That day, the first of the war, she
became one of the now 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza who have
witnessed or directly experienced conflict trauma and one of the
1 million children in need of mental health and psychosocial support.
Since the attack, at least 138,000 fellow Gazans have been killed or
wounded.
Numbers can't tell the full story of the suffering of children
and adults living under a year of Israeli bombardment. No matter
how accurate, figures can't capture the scope of their sorrow or
the depth of their distress. An estimate of how many million tons
of rubble Israeli attacks have produced can offer a sense of the
scale of destruction, but not the impact of each strike on the
lives of those who survived, and the effect on the future of Gaza
given how many didn't.
Numbers are wholly insufficient to explain Tala Abu Daqqa's
anguish. Statistics can't tell us much about how living through
such a catastrophe affects an 11-year-old child. Heartache defies
calculation. Psychological distress can't be reduced to the score
on a trauma questionnaire. There is no meaningful way to quantify
her loss except, perhaps, by offering up two basic, final numbers
that will stay with her forever: two parents and three sisters
killed.
Israel:
Mondoweiss:
[10-07]
Day 367: Israel orders new evacuations in Gaza, expands bombing in
Lebanon: "The Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon
continues to face stiff resistance along the border one week on,
while the Israeli army has renewed its assault on northern Gaza,
laying siege to Jabalia refugee camp for the sixth time since
October 7."
Jonathan Adler:
Israel's paradoxical crusade against UNRWA: "Israeli officials
are relying on UNRWA to prevent a polio epidemic -- while the
Knesset advances laws to expel the agency." Paradox?
Israeli defense officials
told Haaretz on Sunday that the Israeli government is not
seeking to revive ceasefire talks with Hamas and is now pushing for
the gradual annexation of large portions of the Gaza Strip. . . .
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth has
reported that Israeli forces in Jabalia are carrying out a
"scaled-down" version of the "general's plan," an outline for the
complete ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza and the killing of any
Palestinians who choose to stay, whether by military action or
starvation. The UN's World Food Program said Saturday that no
food aid has entered northern Gaza since October 1. . . .
If Israel is successful in cleansing northern Gaza of its Palestinian
population, it would pave the way for the establishment of Jewish-only
settlements in the area, an idea openly supported by many Israeli
ministers and Knesset members. The general's plan calls for the
tactics to be used in other parts of the Strip once the north is
cleansed.
Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-09]
Inside Israel's ongoing invasion of Jabalia in northern Gaza:
"Israel laid siege to Jabalia in northern Gaza on the anniversary
of October 7. Residents tell Mondoweiss that the Israeli army is
forcibly conscripting civilians as human shields and shooting
residents who attempt to evacuate."
Mairav Zonszein: [10-07]
On Israeli apathy. I resisted the word "apathy" here. It's a
commonplace that many (most?) Israelis have lost the ability to
recognize Palestinians as human beings -- a loss of empathy that
makes them indifferent to horrendous violence. But it's easier to
understand that as hatred than as apathy. And no doubt much Israeli
propaganda is devoted to stoking hate, but that goes hand-in-hand
with efforts to desensitize Israelis to the effects of violence
directed at others, and ultimately to keep Israelis from realizing
that their own violence is doing to themselves.
The lawlessness and state violence directed at Palestinians for so
long have started to seep into Jewish Israeli society. Mr. Netanyahu's
refusal to assume responsibility for the security failures of Oct. 7,
his grip on power despite corruption trials, his emboldening of some
of the most radical and messianic elements in Israel are a testament
to that. The nearly carte blanche support Israel has received from
the Biden administration throughout much of this war has further
empowered the most hard-line elements of the nation's politics. And
yet many Israelis are still not making the connection between their
inability to get the government to prioritize Israeli life and how
expendable that government treats Palestinian life.
Without this realization, it is hard to see how Israelis can pave
a different path forward that does not rely on the same dehumanization
and lawlessness. This, for me, has made what is already a dire,
desperate reality seemingly irredeemable. For Israelis to start
carving a way out of this mess, they will have to feel outraged
not only by what is being done to them, but also what is being done
to others in their name, and demand that it stop. Without that, I'm
not sure that I, like other Israelis with the privilege to consider
it, see a future here.
Any state that allows such abuse will ultimately turn its anger
and callousness on its own people.
Lebanon:
Elia Ayoub: [10-04]
Killing Hezbollah leaders failed 30 years ago. It won't work now:
"Instead of debilitating Hezbollah, Israel's assassination of Hassan
Nasrallah may prove to be a major PR boost for the embattled
organization." Useful mostly for background, especially Israel's
1992 assassination of Hezbollah co-founder Abbas al-Musawi, which
only intensified the struggle against Israel's occupation of south
Lebanon, as new leaders like Nasrallah took over.
[10-09]
Israel invaded Lebanon because the United States let it: "The
leveling of Lebanese border towns is the continuation of Israel's
Gaza policy: total destruction and ill-defined objectives." I also
found an earlier article I had meant to mention:
Sunjeev Bery: [10-10]
US foreign policy has created a genocidal Israel: "Without
massive, unconditional US military subsidies, Israel would have
had to practice diplomacy with their neighbors years ago." One
could just as easily argue that Israel has steered the US toward
increasing embrace, if not (yet) of full-blown genocide, then at
least to the leading policies of "extraordinary rendition," "black
sites," and "targeted assassination," as Israel became first the
model, then the laboratory for the "war on terror" -- really just
a cult that believes that sheer force can overcome all obstacles.
Or one can argue that genocide is encoded in the DNA of our shared
settler-colonial origins, a latent tendency which flowers whenever
and wherever conditions allow.
There can be no doubt that the American "blank check" has
contributed significantly to those conditions. And on the surface,
it would seem that the rare occasions when American presidents
attempted to restrain Israel were successful: in 1956, Eisenhower
forced Israel to retreat from Egypt; in 1967 and 1973 the US and
Russia brokered UN ceasefire resolutions; in 1978, Carter halted
Israel's intervention in Lebanon, and in 1979 Carter brokered a
peace agreement with Egypt; in 1990-91, Bush restrained Israel
from retaliating against Iraq, and pressed for peace talks, which
ultimately led to Israelis replacing the recalcitrant Shamir with
Rabin, leading to the ill-fated Oslo Accords. But in fact, every
apparent accommodation Israeli leaders made to US pressure was
systematically subverted, with most of the offenses repeated as
soon as allowed: the war against Egypt that Eisenhower ended was
relaunched with Johnson; the invasion of Lebanon that Carter held
back returned with Reagan; the sham "peace process" under Clinton
was demolished -- well, actually repackaged in caricature -- with
GW Bush. But under Trump and Biden, American subservience -- which
is part pure corruption, but also imbued in war-on-terror culture --
has become so complete that Netanyahu no longer bothers to pretend.
Actually, Israel's die was set in two previous events where a
realistically alternative path was possible and rejected -- in both
cases, by David Ben-Gurion. The first was in 1936, when British
authorities realized what a mess of their mandate in Palestine,
and proposed, through the Peel Commission, to solve their problem
with a program of partition and mandatory transfer: divide the
land into two pieces, and force all the Jews to one side, and all
the Arabs to the other. The division, of course, was unfair, not
just in the ratio of people to land but especially in that nearly
all of people forcibly uprooted and "transferred" would be Arabs.
But Ben-Gurion, whose power base at the time was the Hebrew-only
union Histadrut, saw in the proposal the prospect of an ethnically
pure Jewish state, which could with independence and time build up
a military that could seize any additional lands they thought they
needed.
The British proposal was not only rejected by the Palestinians,
but precipitated a revolt which took the British (and the Israeli
militias they encouraged) three years to suppress, and then only
when the British to the main Palestinian demand, which was to
severely limit Jewish immigration. But Ben-Gurion kept the drive
for partition alive, eventually persuading the UN to approve it
in diluted form -- the "transfer" was sotto voce, but when the
British withdrew in 1948, Israel's militias merged into the IDF,
significantly expanded beyond the resolution's borders, and drove
more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes into exile. The
resulting Israel wasn't as large or as pure as Ben-Gurion had
hoped, but it soon became as powerful, as became clear in its
wars against Egypt in 1956 and 1967 (and its defense in 1973).
One can argue that Ben-Gurion did what needed to be done in
order to found and secure Israel. But once Israel was free and
secure, it had options, one of which was to treat its new minority
fairly, earn its respect and loyalty, and disarm its neighbors by
normalizing relations. Ben-Gurion didn't do that, but he did give
way to his lieutenant, Moshe Sharrett, who was much more inclined
to moderation. Ben-Gurion's second fateful decision was to return
to politics, deposing Sharrett, and returning Israel to the path
of militarism, ethnocracy and empire building. This led straight
to the 1956 war, and its 1967 reprisal. Ben-Gurion had retired
again before the latter, but he had left successors who would
carry on his maximalist objectives (notably, Moshe Dayan, Golda
Meir, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon; meanwhile,
he had rehabilitated his old enemies from the Jabotinsky wing,
from Menachem Begin to Benjamin Netanyahu, and integrated into
the political system the followers of the ultra-orthodox and
ultra-nationalist Kook rabbis -- pretty much the entire spectrum
of current Israeli politics).
I like to think of Ben-Gurion's return to power as similar to
Mao's Cultural Revolution: the last desperate attempt of an aging
revolutionary to recreate his glory days rather than simply resting
on his laurels. It is interesting that Ben-Gurion advised against
the 1967 war, arguing that Palestinians wouldn't flee from Israel's
advancing armies like they did in 1948, so any land gained would
reduce the Jewish demographic majority he had fought for, and be
burdened with a heavy-handed occupation. But once the war ended so
decisively, he was delighted, and his followers were confident they
could handle the occupation -- the bigger threat was that Egypt and
Syria would fight to get their land back, as they did in 1973.
While Ben-Gurion has had extraordinary influence on Israel's
entire history, he has at least in one respect been eclipsed of
late: he always understood that occupation was a burden, one that
can and should be lightened by some manner of decency, and he also
understood that Israel needs friends and alliances in the world,
which again demands that Israel show some decency and respect.
Shlomo Avineri ends his The Making of Modern Zionism with
chapters on Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, and Kook. Ben-Gurion at least
understood the rudiments of social solidarity, and saw practical
value in it, even if his socialism was radically circumscribed by
his nationalism. Most Israelis today no longer feel the need:
like Jabotinsky, they believe that power conquers all, and that
the powerful should be accountable to none; while some, like
Kook, see their power as divinely ordained, as is their mission
to redeem greater Eretz Yisrael, and purge it of its intruders.
To them, America is just a tool they can use for their own ends.
Indeed, it's hard to explain why Biden and his predecessors have
indulged Israel so readily. Which, I suppose, is why Bery's
thesis, that American power has always been rotten, cannot be
easily dismissed. His conclusion is not wrong, except inasmuch
as he implies conscious intent:
The simple reality is that U.S. foreign policy remains just as
bloody and horrific as it has always been. In earlier decades,
"acceptable" losses included the 1 to 2 million civilians killed
in Vietnam, another million dead in Indonesia, the carnage of
U.S.-backed dictators across Latin America, and the hundreds of
thousands killed during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today's U.S. military and diplomatic interventions in the Middle
East are no different.
To end Israel's horrific actions in the Middle East, we must
change the politics of America itself. This is no easy task, given
the robust power and influence of pro-Israel -- and pro-war --
networks, donors, and lobbying groups inside the U.S. But it is
the task at hand, and it should be the focus of every person of
conscience, both within and outside the borders of the United
States. As has been true in other regions of the world, U.S.
foreign policy is the fundamental obstacle to justice, democracy,
and peace in the Middle East.
Page also included a link to a year-old article which adds
background depth here:
Khader Jabbar: [10-06]
Israel and Iran: Unpacking Western media bias with Assal Rad:
"Assal Rad joins The Mondoweiss Podcast to discuss media coverage
of recent events in Palestine and Lebanon and the persistent
pro-Israel bias in Western media."
Jake Johnson: [10-13]
Alarm as Pentagon confirms deployment of US troops to Israel:
"Netanyahu is as close as he has ever been to his ultimate wish:
making the US fight Iran on Israel's behalf." The deployment is
pretty limited -- "an advanced antimissile system and around 100
US troops" -- but it encourages Israel to provoke further armed
responses from Iran, while making American troops handy targets
for all sorts of terrorist mischief. Washington, conditioned to
see Iran as a potential aggressor, probably sees this as purely
defensive, urgent given Iran's threats (and occasional but mostly
symbolic practice) of retaliation, and practical in that trained
troops can get the system operative much faster than just handing
the weapons over to Israel. Netanyahu, on the other hand, will see
this as confirmation that the Americans are on the hook for war
with Iran. They also understand that if/when Iran wants to hit
back in ways that actually hurt, the US has many easier targets
to hit than the patch of Israel this weapon system is meant to
protect.
The first thing we have to do is to disabuse ourselves of the notion
that the United States has any reservations about what Israel is doing.
Israel is doing what it is doing in careful and close coordination with
Washington, and with its full approval. The United States does not just
arm and diplomatically protect what Israel does; it shares Israel's
goals and approves of Israel's methods.
The tut-tutting, the pooh-poohing, and the crocodile tears about
humanitarian issues and civilian casualties are pure hypocrisy. The
United States has signed on to Israel's approach to Lebanon -- it
wants Israel to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. It does not have any
reservations about the basic approach of Israel, which is to attack
the civilian population in order to force change in Lebanon and
obviously in Gaza. . . .
The United States helps Israel in targeting Hezbollah and Hamas
leaders -- that is a fact. Anybody who ignores that and pretends
that there's any daylight between what Israel does and what the
United States wants it to do is lying to themselves or is lying to us.
I don't have any evidence to contradict this, but this doesn't
fit the model I have of American interests and motivations. The
most likely part of this story is the low-level sharing of signals
intelligence and targeting information, because that doesn't have
to go through diplomatic levels where questions might be asked
about what it's being used for. That sort of thing is pre-approved,
not because Israel is doing America's dirty work but because US
officials have, as a matter of political convenience, given up
any pretense of independent thought where Israel is concerned.
Ben Samuels: [10-02]
In US election, Israel might be the ultimate October surprise:
"For the first time, there's a real chance that Israel may help sway
the race. Election Day is 34 days away. Undoubtedly, many more surprises
are in store, and none of them are likely to be pleasant."
Dahlia Scheindlin: [10-01]
Hamas and Hezbollah trapped Israel on October 7. Now Israel is trapping
Iran and America: "Tehran and Washington are facing tremendous
dilemmas, trapped between two highly fraught options. Their choices
will determine the fate of the Middle East for both the short term
and for years to come." But the only real choice here is Israel's,
as they can keep doing this until they get their desired result,
which is America and Iran at war.
Ishaan Tharoor: [10-09]
How Netanyhahu shattered Biden's Middle East hopes: "The Israeli
prime minister tested and bested President Joe Biden's diplomatic
strategy around the growing conflict in the Middle East." The logical
fallacy here is in thinking that Biden ever had his own plans for
anything involving Israel.
"Reading the health experts, I am starting to think with horror that
if it's not stopped, Israel's assault could end up exterminating almost
the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years," Francesca
Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine,
wrote on Friday on social media.
Albanese cited
a recent report from University of Edinburgh global public health
chair Devi Sridhar finding that the true death toll from Israel's
genocide could be estimated at 335,500 as of September.
Sridhar based this rough calculation
off of an estimate by public health researchers published in
The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts
from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard
in the field. At that time, the researchers estimated that the true
death toll could be roughly 186,000, stemming from direct killings
like bombings as well as Israel's destruction of the health, food
and sanitation systems in Gaza.
The death toll, then, could be between 15 and 20 percent of the
population by the end of this year, Albanese said, in just over a
year of Israel's genocide. And, as Sridhar writes in her Guardian
report, the calculation that she borrows from The Lancet
editorial is highly conservative -- meaning the death toll could be
even higher than her 335,500 estimate.
There is a good bit of evidence that suggests Israel is unraveling
from within. It now appears that Zionism, like communism, is a
self-defeating project. In June of this year, renown Jewish historian,
Ilan Pappé, suggested [link follows] that the collapse of Zionism
may be imminent. According to Pappé, "We are witnessing a historical
process -- or, more accurately, the beginnings of one -- that is
likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism."
In a manner eerily reminiscent of ancient Israel, modern Israel is
quickly dividing into two separate states: the State of Israel and the
State of Judea. The former identifies as a secular liberal democracy
while the latter consists of far right religious zealots who want to
establish a theocracy, and believe that God has promised them all the
land between the Nile and the Euphrates.
Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich is a leading figure of
this latter group. In a new documentary produced by Arte, Smotrich
claimed that "the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus."
Not surprisingly, Smotrich's vision for the State of Judea includes
annexing territories presently belonging to Egypt, Jordan, Syria,
Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The members of this group, including,
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, believe that the events
which transpired on October 7 provide the perfect pretext for them to
realize their vision of Greater Israel.
It should be noted here that Smotrich's party only holds seven seats
(out of 120) in the Knesset, although they seem able to use their
limited leverage to dominate the coalition government agenda.
Adam Johnson/Othman Ali: [10-14]
A study reveals CNN and MSNBC's glaring Gaza double standard:
"Palestinians received far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage
than either Israelis or Ukrainians, a Nation analysis has
found." Nice to have the charts and all the rigor, but the
conclusion has been obvious for many years. It's been engineered
by "hasbara" architects, and reinforced by the whispers of money
in editors' ears.
By scapegoating Netanyahu, who has dominated the Israeli political
system for most of the past fifteen years, liberal Zionists have
been able to preserve in their imaginations the idealized Israel
many of them fell in love with decades ago -- the Israel that was
founded by secular socialists from Eastern Europe and that branded
itself as a paragon of enlightened governance, even as it engaged
from the beginning in colonization, land theft, murder, and expulsion
on a scale that Netanyahu's coalition can only envy. By denying the
essential nature of the Zionist project and its incompatibility with
progressive values, liberal Zionists have also been in denial at
every stage about the war to which they have pledged at least
conditional support. They have insisted that the situation is
"complicated," which is the framing Ta-Nehisi Coates absorbed
during his tenure at the predominantly liberal Zionist Atlantic,
and which he denounced as "horseshit" following a trip to the occupied
West Bank in the summer of 2023. "It's complicated," Coates
toldNew York magazine last month, deriding that common
talking point, "when you want to take something from somebody."
A year after October 7, no one seriously believes there will be
peace between Israel and the Palestinians in our lifetime. The bombed
and starved children of Gaza will never forget what they've been
subjected to, nor the world's general indifference; while it's not
on the same scale, their counterparts in Israel will never forget
the national trauma of the attacks. The "two-state solution" that
liberal Zionists have verbally supported for years as the only
possible just outcome is an obvious fantasy. Other, far more
disturbing outcomes seem likelier; at present, it is hard to see
what consequences Israel will face from continuing to kill and
displace Palestinians on all fronts while seizing and occupying
more and more of their land. If there is one lesson to be taken
from the past dismal year, it's this: the liberal Zionist
interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical
weight, and no moral rigor. It is a failed dream of the previous
century, and it is unlikely to survive this one.
The loss of humanity in public discourse is a contagious and sometimes
fatal disease. Recovery is very difficult. Israel has lost all interest
in what it is doing to the Palestinian people, arguing that they "deserve
it" - everyone, including women, children, the elderly, the sick, the
hungry and the dead.
The Israeli media, which has been more disgraceful over the past
year than ever before, voluntarily carries the flag of incitement,
inflaming passions and the loss of humanity, just to gratify its
consumers.
The domestic media has shown Israelis almost nothing of the
suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while whitewashing manifestations
of hatred, racism, ultra-nationalism, and sometimes barbarism,
directed at the enclave and its population.
Said Zeedani: [10-08]
Gaza's governance must remain in Palestinian hands: "Amid plans
for external interventions, it is vital to build a consensus around
an interim body to manage Gaza's urgent needs and pave the way for
unity." I have no idea who's saying what about "external interventions,"
but nothing serious can happen until Israel implements a ceasefire
(with or without any Hamas consent -- even if the hostages are not
repatriated immediately, they will be much safer with a ceasefire),
agrees to withdraw its forces, and renounces any claim to the land
of Gaza and/or its people. If we've learned anything from the last
year, it's that Israel is not fit to occupy land without citizens.
That shouldn't be a hard sell to Israel, as they have no settlers
in Gaza to contest claims, and they've more than made their point
about what they will do to people who attack them.
Once Israel is out of the picture, other people can get involved,
immediately to rescue the people -- for the most part de-housed,
with many diseased and/or starving -- and eventually to repair and
rebuild. Gazans have great needs and no resources or leverage, so
reconstruction will depend on the generosity of donors -- which may
quite reasonably come with strings attached (especially to respect
Israel's security, to avoid future repeats of its brutality). The
one point which must be respected is that in due course Gaza must be
self-governing, its sovereignty vested in the people who live there
and are free to choose their own leaders. Any "interim authority"
must lead without prejudice to such a democracy. Among other things,
this means that it should not ensconce previous political parties
(like Fatah or Hamas), nor should it exclude former members. Gaza
should rebuild on a clean slate.
B'Tselem:
The pogroms are working - the transfer is already happening:
I've cited this report
before, but it popped up again in Mazin Qumsiyeh's newsletter,
and is worth repeating, as it helps put the post-Oct. 7 genocide
into its much deeper historical context, as a continuation of a
process which Israelis were diligently working on before they could
accelerate it under the "fog of war." (You may recall that the Nazi
extermination program only began after they invaded Russia, although
the Nazis were rabidly antisemitic from the start, and committed
many heinous crimes against Jews well before they crossed the line
we now know as genocide.)
This is mostly a report on events in the West Bank prior to the
Oct. 7 Gaza revolt, after which settler violence in the West Bank --
"in the past two yeras, at least six West Bank communities have
been displaced" -- only increased.
For decades, Israel has employed a slew of measures designed to
make life in dozens of Palestinian communities throughout the West
Bank miserable. This is part of an attempt to force residents of
these communities to uproot themselves, seemingly of their own
accord. Once that is achieved, the state can realize its goal of
taking over the land. To advance this objective, Israel forbids
members of these communities from building homes, agricultural
structures or public buildings. It does not allow them to connect
to the water and power grids or build roads, and when they do, as
they have no other choice, Israel threatens demolition, often
delivering on these threats.
Settler violence is another tool Israel employs to further
torment Palestinians living in these communities. Such attacks
have grown significantly worse under the current government,
turning life in some places into an unending nightmare and
denying residents any possibility of living with even minimal
dignity. The violence has robbed Palestinian residents of their
ability to continue earning a living. It has terrorized them to
the point of fearing for their lives and made them internalize
the understanding that there is no one to protect them.
This reality has left these communities with no other choice,
and several of them have uprooted themselves, leaving hearth and
home for safer places. Dozens of communities scattered throughout
the West Bank live in similar conditions. If Israel continues this
policy, their residents may also be displaced, freeing Israel to
achieve its goal and take over their land.
Election notes:
Gail Collins/Bret Stephens: [10-07]
How could the election be this close? Good question, to which the
article only offers the oblique of answer of demonstrating how clueless
two New York Times opinion columnists can be. Stephens, at least, wears
his ignorance on his sleeve, going out of his way to quote arbitrary
Blacks and Hispanics who think Harris is "too liberal," "overall
untrustworthy," and "unsure how prepared she is to be president."
(And see those traits as worrisome compared to Trump?) Stephens also
wants Harris to "name some widely respected policy heavyweights as
members of her brain trust -- people like Robert Rubin and David
Petraeus. And announce that Liz Cheney will be her secretary of
state." Collins keeps her cluelessness hidden better. She has a
reputation for humor, but here it's mostly just egging Stephens on
to say stupid things.
PS: Speaking of stupid Stephens things, this piece came to my
attention:
Despite what those afflicted with sociopathy at the top want us to
believe, we are hardwired to help each other. We've heard how the
military has to work so hard to train killers, to erase that
hesitation to kill, and how so many shots taken in war are purposely
missed ones. When we see such wanton glee at killing we can bet that
an immeasurable number of hours have been spent in the indoctrination
of hatred, to erase the inclination for community and mutual aid. . . .
But we all know how kids often turn out after living in violent
and hate-filled homes and that's basically what all of us have been
toiling under our whole lives. We all know we've been propagandized,
it's a constant task that we need to be aware of this fact and we
need to recognize things like "passive voice" so popular in newspapers
like the New York Times. All these people dying, not being killed!
Children being called adult terms to take away our natural gut reaction
to their deaths . . . I think many have been able to break out of the
arrogant decrees that are brought down by religious institutions but
still are enamored with the liberal intelligentsia media. If they say
it, it must be true and there is no slant to the way it's delivered.
Well, it will take some time and critical thinking for those "esteemed"
edifices to be brought down. But for now, New York Times, you can go
fuck yourself and your call to war, there's real work to be done and
we don't have time for your shit.
Author's ellipses in last paragraph (originally six dots, no
idea why). I considered dropping the second half of that paragraph,
but decided the author deserved to make the point, even if crudely.
Stanley B Greenberg: [10-09]
Trump is laser-focused on the final duel. Harris is not. "That
will put Trump and Vance in the White House." One problem with reporting
based on polls is that polls most often ask stupid questions of people
who are far short of well-informed, so they can chastise politicians
for failing to cater to their nonsensical results.
Chris Lehman: [09-25]
In 2024, the pundits are wronger than ever: "Most of the predictions,
advice, and scolding emanating from the glow of TV news this year have
proved flat-out wrong. Democrats should stop listening once and for
all." Well, yes and no. It helps to start from the assumption that
you're being lied to and being given faulty and often disingenuous
advice, then try to work out what you can learn from that. On the
other hand, there actually is a lot of pretty good, solid reporting
and analysis available, if only you can figure out which is which.
Rick Perlstein:
[09-25]
The polling imperilment: "Presidential polls are no more reliable
than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political
lives?" Catching up with other Perlstein columns:
[10-02]
Who are the 'undecided'? "It may not be about issues, but whether
voters surrender to Trump's invitation to return to the womb." Here
he draws on an article Chris Hayes wrote on undecided voters in 2004,
and which hardly anyone seems to have understood or rediscovered in
the last two decades of intense 24/7 political "coverage": basically,
undecided voters are unable to think about political issues in terms
of political choices. That's my simplification. Here's Perlstein
quoting Hayes:
Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that,
"such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked
undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made
up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them
to name their favorite prime number . . . the very concept of the
'issue' seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided
voters I spoke to." . . .
Hayes: "I tried other ways of asking the same question: 'Anything
of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything?
Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last
four years?'"
But those questions harvested "bewilderment" too. "As far as I could
tell, the problem wasn't the word 'issue' . . . The undecideds I spoke
to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances
qualify as political grievances."
That's the part that stuck with me word for word, almost two decades
on. Some mentioned they were vexed by rising health care costs. "When
I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums,
they would respond in disbelief . . . as if you were telling them that
Kerry was promising to extend summer into December."
Of course, you don't have to be "undecided" to have no clue as to
the policy domain that politics determines. Many uninformed or less
than competently comprehending voters pick their allegiances on other
seemingly arbitrary and often nonsensical grounds. These factors are
rooted in psychology, and are expertly exploited, mostly by Republican
operatives, perhaps realizing that their actual policy preferences
have little rational appeal. Perlstein, after noting Trump's promise
to be "your protector," reflects back on fascism:
Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the
psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact
that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where
nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an
all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you
first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and
transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people
formerly committed to liberal politics. I've
written before in this column about the extraordinary film
The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko
describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the
influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News -- and also how,
after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter
campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share
similar stories about their own family members.
I've learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from
the
X feed of a psychologist named
Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger
infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these
scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump's
gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut.
Trump's appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely
this way. When he
addresses women voters, for instance: "I am your protector.
I want to be your protector . . . You will no longer be abandoned,
lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger . . ."
Or when he grunts the other side of the infantilizing
promise: that he will be your vengeance. His promise to destroy
anything placing you in danger. Like when he recently pledged to
respond to "one really violent day" by meeting criminals with "one
rough hour -- and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it
will end immediately."
Or when he
posted the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel ("O Prince of the
heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the
evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls")
illustrated by a 17th-century painting of said saint curb-stomping a
defeated devil, about to run a sword through his head.
Even on the liberal-left, many interpret the way Trump seems
even more to be going off the rails these last weeks as a
self-defeating lack of control, or as a symptom of cognitive
impairment. They almost seem to celebrate it. The New Republic's
email newsletter, which I cannot stand, is full of such therapeutic
clickbaity headlines canvassing the same examples I talk about here:
"Trump Proposes Stunningly Stupid Idea for Public Safety"; "Ex-Aide
Says Trump's 'Creepy' Message to Women Shows He's Out of Touch";
"Trump Appears to Have Lost a Total Grasp on Things."
I certainly don't disagree that Trump is becoming more cognitively
impaired and out of touch with reality. But might not these impairments
render him a better fascist seducer, as his invitations to infantile
regression become ever more primal, ever more basic, ever more pure?
[10-09]
Our cults, ourselves: "Is the best way to understand the MAGA movement
to binge-watch docuseries about charismatic leaders sending their acolytes
to ruin? Tune in and find out."
[02-14]
A cultural artifact that meets the moment: "Stephen King's Under
the Dome nails how Trumpism functions at the most elemental of
levels." This is the piece Perlstein cited in the "undecided" piece
above, but worth breaking out here. I remember watching, and enjoying,
the
miniseries (2013-15), but had forgotten whatever political import
it might have held, but I welcome the refresher course. The section on
The Brainwashing of My Dad is kind of a coda. I should look
into it further, although I can already think of several examples
from my own family. (I had a pair of cousins, who shared the same
cultural legacy -- small towns, church, hunting -- and could be
socioeconomic twins, but one got her news from the BBC, the other
from Fox.) This essay also refers to a "Part 1":
[01-31]
A hole in the culture: "Why is there so little art depicting
the moment we're in?" Starts with a letter, which includes this:
My husband and I are old and sitting right slap dab in the middle
of red Arkansas with MAGA friends and family all around. They try to
pull us into their discussions but we change the subject. I stopped
going to church because the churches no longer teach Christ's
message, but Trump's message.
The Nation: [09-23]
The Nation endorses Kamala Harris: "In her own right, and
because we oppose Donald Trump's reactionary agenda." I imagine
Joan Walsh is responsible for the first clause, although in the
fine print, they admit "on foreign policy, however, the positive
case is harder to make" -- in what Billmon liked to call a
"Hirohito moment" (which I recalled as severe understatement,
expressed as innocuously as possible; his
definition: "a political statement so painfully cautious and/or
ridiculously understated that it's hard not to laugh at it").
After Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of
senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of
old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the
boot?
At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest,
healthiest, and/or luckiest of us, who manage to hang around the
longest. Donald Trump is, of course, in this same group, although
much of America seems to be in selective denial about his diminishing
capabilities. He was crushed recently in The Great Debate yet is
generally given something of a mulligan for hubris, craziness, and
unwillingness to prepare. But face it, unlike Joe B, he was simply
too old to cut the mustard.
It's time to get real about old age as a condition that, yes,
desperately needs and deserves better resources and reverence, but
also careful monitoring and culling. Such thinking is not a bias
crime. It's not even an alert for ancient drivers on the roads. It's
an alarm for tolerating dangerous old politicians who spread lies
and send youngsters to war, while we continue to willfully waste
the useful experience and energy of all ages.
He also mentions Rupert Murdoch (93) and Warren Buffett (94):
Those old boys are anything but role models for me and my friends.
After all, they've been practicing all their lives how to be rich
old pigs, their philanthropy mirroring their interests, not the
needs of the rest of us. In my pay grade, we're expected to
concentrate on tips from AARP newsletters on how to avoid telephone
scams and falls, the bane of the geezer class. And that's important,
but it's also a way of keeping us anxious and impotent.
But he does mention some other ancients, like Casey Stengel and
Jules Feiffer, who he finds more inspiration in. And the
Gray Panthers, founded by Maggie Kuhn -- a personal blast from
the past, as I knew of them through
Sylvia Fink Kleinman (who excused her own fine tastes, explaining
"nothing's too good for the working class").
New York Times: [09-26]
The dangers of Donald Trump, from those who know him: A big chart
of sound bites from "administration insiders, the Trumps & Trump
Inc., Republican politicians, conservative leaders, world leaders" --
including some who remain as steadfast supporters, like Lindsey Graham
and Ted Cruz. Oddly enough, the wittiest is Kim Jong-un's "a frightened
dog barks louder."
There are lists of Donald Trump's lies and lists of his alleged
crimes. But the catalog of all the good things that have happened
to the former president is equally unnerving. Every dog has its
day, but Trump -- no fan of dogs, BTW -- has had far more good
luck than the average mutt.
Of course, the man was born lucky -- into a life of wealth and
privilege and with looks that some women apparently find attractive.
Like many indulged heirs, he quickly dispensed with those gifts,
wasting away his fortune like a 20th-century tristate re-creation
of "A Rake's Progress." It could have easily curdled into squalor
from there.
But one fateful day, along came "The Apprentice," visiting the
sulky developer in his moldering office. As my colleagues Russ
Buettner and Susanne Craig document in their new book, aptly titled
Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and
Created the Illusion of Success, it was this improbable TV
show that offered Trump a golden ticket out of bankruptcy and
irrelevance, transforming him into a successful billionaire by
pretending he actually was one.
Also:
Eight years ago Trump, who has been convicted of 34 felony charges
in Manhattan and has been indicted in three other cases, told a rally
full of acolytes, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and
shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." It is fortunate for
him, then, that he was able to appoint three justices to the Supreme
Court who created the possibility for him to be granted immunity in
the three remaining cases against him.
It's impossible to attribute all of this to strategy or intelligence
or even mere cunning. In the same way the mask-averse Trump contracted
what we now know was a serious case of Covid, at age 74 and seriously
overweight, miraculously bounced back with the benefit of cutting-edge
treatment that did not include injecting disinfectant, these things
happened independent of Trump's own actions and inclinations.
Now here we are, with Trump crediting the outcome of two failed
assassination attempts to divine intervention.
James Risen: [10-03]
The reason Netanyahu and Putin both want a Trump victory: "so
they can prolong and intensify their brutal wars." Actually, there's
not much stopping them now, and any policy shift under Harris is
purely speculative -- it's sure not something she's campaigning
on. I don't doubt that Trump is preferred by both -- as a fellow
right-winger, Trump is unbothered by human rights abuses, and
he's notoriously open to bribery and flattery. Also, both have
history of poking their noses into American domestic politics,
although in that Putin is a piker compared to Netanyahu.
Tony Schwartz: [10-11]
I was Trump's ghostwriter. A new biopic gets the most important thing
right. The movie is
The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel
Sherman, based on "Trump's career as a real estate businessman in New
York in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as his relationship with lawyer
Roy Cohn." (Sebastian Stan plays Trump, Jeremy Strong plays Cohn, and
Martin Donovan plays Fred Trump Sr.)
Watching The Apprentice crystallized two big lessons that I
learned from Mr. Trump 30 years ago and that I've seen play out in
his life ever since with more and more extreme consequences. The
first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage
when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society
where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second
lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world
can ever adequately substitute for what we're missing on the inside.
Lawrence Ware: [10-11]
Republicans are not evil . . . well, not all of them: When I
saw this, my first thought was that it might take off from a New
York Times opinion piece I had noticed but didn't mention at the
time. Author is based in Oklahoma, so no suprise that he regularly
encounters Republican voters who seem decent enough even when they
are wrong. As a writer, I am often tempted to use "evil," as few
words make a point so succinctly. But almost always, the real
target is some act or belief, not the person implicated in the
moment. Aiming at the person loses that distinction, and makes
it that much harder to ever recover.
Nicholas Kristof: [08-31]
Here's why we shouldn't demean Trump voters. It's not just
that some Trump voters have decent (even if misguided) motivations,
and that grouping them all together is a logical fallacy, but that
the habit and practice is bad for you too -- it makes you more like
the person you are demeaning. That said, in this particular case,
"misguided" is a really huge understatement.
Branden Adams: [10-13]
Jim Justice tied West Virginia coal to global financial capital:
"While running his coal company Bluestone, Governor Jim Justice
ushered the mines of West Virginia deep into the grasp of global
financial capital -- at the expense of West Virginians. Why should
Swiss bankers get paid before West Virginia teachers?"
Gaby Del Valle: [09-25]
How immigration became a lightning rod in American politics:
"Anti-immigrant think tanks and advocacy groups operated on the
margins until Trump became president. Now they have molded not
only the GOP but also Democrats in their image."
[10-08]
The race is close because Harris is running a brilliant campaign:
"Stop complaining; the centrism is working." Or so says Chait, who
only views every disappointed/disaffected leftist as a strategic
gain, even though he can't begin to count the votes. No doubt that
if Harris does manage to "pull a Hillary" and lose the election,
Chait will be the first to blame it on the left.
[10-10]
The election choice is divided government or unrestrained Trumpism:
"Harris won't be able to implement her plans. Trump will." As a devout
centrist, Chait may regard divided government as the best of all worlds,
with each party making sure the other doesn't accomplish anything, or
rock any boats. Indeed, no Democratic president has had a Democratic
Congress for a full terms since Carter, and even the initial two-year
stretches Clinton, Obama, and Biden inherited were hobbled by lobbyists
and the filibuster.
Ed Kilgore: [10-09]
Can Nikki Haley voters win it for Kamala Harris? I can believe
that most of the people who voted for Harris in Republican primaries
this year won't vote for Trump. But calling them "Nikki Haley voters"
seems gratuitous, especially given that Haley is on board for Trump,
so isn't one of them.
Branko Marcetic: [10-12]
Is Kamala 2024 Clinton 2016?: "Republican endorsements, running
to the right on foreign policy, an unambitious agenda of incremental
change less important than how bad the other guy is. Where have we
seen this before?"
Andrew Prokop:
The rise -- and fall? -- of the New Progressive Economics:
"Progressives conquered economic policy under Biden. Would they lose
it under Harris?" How should I know? And not just because the article
is a "member exclusive" I can't even get a glimpse of. (I did feel
kind of bad about never giving what used to be my favorite news site
any money, but less and less so every time I hit a paywall, especially
on an article that is obvious bullshit.) In the first place, the premise
that "NPE conquered Biden" is somewhere between greatly exaggerated and
plain false. Biden moved somewhat out of the Obama-Clinton neocon rut
because both the economics and the politics failed. Unlike Republicans,
Democrats are expected to address and at least ameliorate real problems,
and the old neoliberalism just wasn't working. Some new stuff got tried,
and mostly worked. Other ideas got stymied, for which there was lots
of obvious blame, as well as Biden's own lukewarm interest. But where
is the evidence that Harris is going to abandon policies and proposals
that are popular with Democrats just to help the rich get richer? The
only thing I'm aware of is that she's had to cozy up to a lot of rich
donors to raise her billion dollar campaign war chest, and they're
going to want something in return. But by then, she'll be president,
and in a better position to call her own shots.
Bill Scher: [10-10]
No "deplorables," "you ain't black," "cling to guns": Harris's
gaffe-free campaign: I suppose that's good news, but Scher is
the most unflappable of Democratic Party apologists, so one doubts
his ability to detect gaffes, let alone strategic missteps. The one
I'm most worried about is her continuing political calculation to
amp up vitriol against Russia and Iran. My guess is that as president
she will pivot to a more moderate stance, because I don't see her as
a neocon ideologue, but I do see her as politically cunning, so her
stance tells me that she thinks it's the smart play viz. voters and
the media. That's pretty depressing.
Robert Kuttner: [10-04]
Biden's amazing win settling the dock strike: "The terms are a
total victory for dockworkers and for smooth supply chain operation,
as the White House faced down exorbitant shipper profits. What would
Trump have done?"
Paul Starr: [09-20]
What should Democrats say to young men? "Young men appear to be
drifting right. Ignoring them means trouble." As an asymptomatic
observer, I have trouble caring about this -- much like the "stolen
pride" in the Arlie Russell Hochschild book (below): been there, got
over that. Still, I do, as a matter of principle, believe that every
voter counts, and that all pain (even the phantom variety) merits
some kind of treatment. Cites:
Astra Taylor: [09]
Divided and conquered: "In search of a democratic majority."
"You've reached your free article limit," so sayonara. "The essay
was partially adapted with permission from Solidarity: The Past,
Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea, which I did buy
a copy of, so I can probably reference it when I want a critique
of Kevin Phillips (The Emerging Republican Majority, which
is often counted as prescient, even if only with regret) and/or Ruy
Teixeira/John Judis (The Emerging Democratic Majority, which
isn't, so they recently rewrote it as Where Have All the Democrats
Gone?), not that I couldn't write those myself.
Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:
David Dayen: [09-30]
How Congress gets its groove back: "The Supreme Court's recent
rulings will change how Congress writes laws. It may even force the
legislative branch to take a hard look at its own dysfunctions."
This is about the Court's recent dismantling of what's called the
"Chevron defense," which while possibly disastrous for the normal
functioning of the federal government, can (at least in theory) be
rectified by Congress writing and passing more precise laws that
leave less discretionary power in the hands of an increasingly
politicized executive. But for that to happen, you first need a
Congress that is willing and able to do the necessary work to
deal with real problems. That obviously involves getting rid of
a lot of Republicans, and tools like the filibuster, but it also
suggests the need for much better Democrats. Otherwise, problems
just multiply, while the courts further hamstring any efforts at
remedy by executive order.
Sarah Jones: [10-10]
The misogyny plot: A new report on the Kavanaugh hearings reveals
a deeper conspiracy."
Ian Millhiser:
[10-05]
We should call the Republican justices "Republicans" and not
"conservatives": "Supreme Court journalist should tell the
truth about what's going on at the Court." While I agree that
"the arguments against treating the justices as partisan actors
are unpersuasive," I worry that reducing them to partisan hacks
will set expectations both for and against, reinforcing their
stereotypical behavior. It is still the case that on occasion
Republican justices can rule against their party's most craven
arguments -- indeed, the legitimacy of the Court depends on at
least some air of independence. Same for Democratic justices
(which as far as I've noticed happens more often).
Intelligencer: [10-10]
Florida assessing damage from Hurricane Milton: Live updates,
at least through 10-10. My impression is that it was not as bad
as predicted: it was down to category 3 when it made landfall,
which was significantly south of the feared direct Tampa Bay hit,
and it moved across Florida and out into the Atlantic rather
quickly. Still a lot of rain and wind in a fairly narrow band,
and a lot of local damage.
Dan Stillman: [10-04]
Helene has become one of the deadliest hurricanes of the modern era:
"the deadliest hurricane to make landfall on the US mainland since
Katrina" (1392 deaths in 2005; many more since 1954 are listed, as
is Maria's 2975 deaths in 2017, but evidently Puerto Rico doesn't
count).
[10-09]
Just how doomed is home insurance? "Hurricanes like Milton and
Helene are making it harder than ever to insure your home." Aside
from the big storms, he spends a lot of time on other factors that
are driving insurance into an unaffordable spiral. Then he asks
the big question: "is the future insurable?" He throws cold water
on the idea of government reinsurance ("would only entrench the
current flaws of the insurance market," which sounds to me like
a call for better design than a blanket rejection).
Maureen Tkacik/Luke Goldstein: [10-02]
A toxic explosion in private equity payouts: "Private equity
barons just pocketed as much as $850 million from the company
behind this week's massive chemical blast in Georgia."
Ukraine and Russia: No "Diplomacy Watch"
this week?
Ted Snider: [10-08]
How Blinken turned the diplomatic corps into a wing of the
military: "In 2021 the administration said it would pursue
'relentless diplomacy.' They call it something else today in
Ukraine." Starts with a Henry Kissinger saying (not a direct
quote) that is even dumber than I'd expect ("little can be won
at the negotiating table that isn't earned on the battlefield")
before he quotes Blinken saying the same thing ("all that we can
to strengthen Ukraine's position on the battlefield so it has
the strongest possible position at the negotiating table").
Also cites a paywalled FT article claiming "it is the diplomats
who have pushed for escalation, and the Pentagon and intelligence
community who have argued for caution."
Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:
Matt Breunig/Zephyr Teachout: [09-27]
Should the government break up big corporations or buy them?
"Matt Bruenig writes that governments should nationalize more
companies while Zephyr Teachout argues that freedom requires
decentralized power." Ça dépend. Each case should be
evaluated on its own merits. One could write a book on this.
Stephen F Eisenman: [10-11]
What does fascism look like? A brief introduction: Most of this
piece focuses on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with an eye toward
architecture and aesthetics, but that leads to a section "what does
fascism look like today?" that opens with a photo of the Pentagon.
Conclusion:
Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928-32, himself often called
a fascist, said: "American Fascism would never emerge as Fascist,
but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the
German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right
President and Cabinet." Fascism, as I said at the beginning of this
brief survey, is easy to see in retrospect, but not in prospect.
However, when it appears right in front of you, identification becomes
simple -- signs and symbols appear everywhere. As we approach the U.S.
election, we can clearly witness one political party's tight embrace
of fascism -- but seeing it doesn't mean we can easily stop it.
Those of us on the left, especially with any real sense of history,
are quick to brand certain right-wingers as fascists -- the dividing
line is where disagreement turns to hatred and a desire to kill us.
To us, at least, it's not just a derisive label, but a full paradigm,
which informs not just by analogy but by internal logic. However, the
label "fascist" doesn't appear to have much utility in communicating
with people who are not on our specific bandwidth. One thing I will
point out is that throughout history, fascists have not only done
bad things, they have repeatedly failed, often bringing to ruin the
nations and folk they claim to love. By the way, Eisenman has a
forthcoming book,
The Young Person's Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,
with illustrations by Sue Coe.
Obituaries
Donald L Bartlett
Glenn Rifkin: [10-09]
Donald L Bartlett, 88 dies: prizewinning reporter bared corruption:
"Over four decades, he and his colleague James B Steele gained renown
for resourceful, often explosive investigative journalism at The
Philadelphia Inquirer. I've read several of their books.
Robert Coover:
John Williams: [10-06]
Robert Coover, inventive novelist in iconoclastic era, dies at 92:
"Once called 'probably the funniest and most malicious' of the
postmodernists, his books reflected a career-long interest in
reimagining folk stories, fairy tales and political myths."
Branko Marcetic: [10-09]
Ta-Nehisi Coates is bucking the media's Palestine consensus:
"The problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent grilling on Palestine
by CBS News's Tony Dokoupil isn't that it was rude. It's that
Dokoupil's questioning betrays a fundamental lack of concern for
Palestinians' basic humanity, shared across mainstream media."
Allen Lowe: [10-11]
The new Archeophone King Oliver: Just a Facebook note, but longer
and much deeper than most reviews. Remind me that I got some press
(but no CD) from Archeophone -- first I've heard from them in many
years.
Lara Friedman: [09-28]
Observations on the current the moment - a thread.
Israel used 10/7 to manufacture US consent/collaboration to undo
what Bibi & his Greater Israel/neocon fellow travelers (incl in
US) have long viewed as historic errors forced on Israel by weak
leaders & intl appeasers of terror.
These are: Gaza disengagement (viewed as capitulation to Hamas),
the Oslo Agreement (viewed as capitulation to the PLO), and withdrawal
from southern Lebanon (viewed as capitulation to Hezbollah).
Along the way the Biden Admin & Congress acquiesced to new
Israeli-authored rules of war that, among other things, define every
human being as a legitimate military target - a terrorist, a terrorist
supporter or sympathizer, or a "human shield" -
- & allowing the annihilation of huge numbers of civilians &
destruction of entire cities; allowing entire populations to be displaced,
terrorized, starved, & deprived of medical care; & normalizing
killing of journalists, medical workers, & UN staff - all
with impunity.
The costs of these new rules of war will be paid with the blood of
civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the US responsibility
for enabling, defending, & normalizing these new rules - and their
horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.
In the countdown to the US November elections, continued Israeli
impunity means that Netanyahu and his government have every incentive
to continue to pursue their revanchist and genocidal goals in Gaza,
the West Ban, and Lebanon.
Absent some new US & intl seriousness to impose concrete
consequences that change Israeli calculations, the only real question
now is whether Bibi & friends will seize this moment to pursue the
other long-held dream of neocons in both Israel and the US: regime
change in Iran.
If they do so - and following a year of genocide-with-impunity
capped by Nasrallah's assassination, the likelihood is today higher
than ever before - the decision will be in large part based on the
certainty that the Biden Admin, more than any Admin before it, will
back them.
This backing - which they have every reason to assume is assured -
includes money, military aid, & even US military action. & it is
assumed, regardless of whether the Biden Admin wants such a war &
regardless of Israel's tactics/the scope of the destruction and
casualties.
Likewise, such a decision will reflect an equal certainty that the
Harris & Trump campaigns not only will support Israel in waging
war on Iran, but will actively compete over who, as president, will
stand more firmly with Israel in its push to remake the entire
region.
And to be clear: Bibi & friends have - in actions & words -
been telling the world since 10/7 their intent. Anyone surprised
things have reached this point was either not paying attention, was in
denial, or was happily playing along.
For anyone who thinks my analysis re "next up, Iran" is wrong, see:
[followed by tweet from Jared Kushner, then video of Netanyahu]
Local tags (these can be linked to directly):
music.
Current count:
214 links, 15280 words (19367 total)
Draft file opened 2024-10-02 12:17 PM. I expected to have very
little time to work on this, and that's proved accurate. Now trying
to wrap this up Monday afternoon, while I have a bit of a breather.
But I already got distracted, and spent the last hour posting a
dinner plate to
Facebook, and writing further notes in the notebook. Nero wasn't
the only one ever to fiddle while their country burns.
Wound up after 2AM, arbitrarily deciding I've done enough. Maybe
I'll add more while working on Music Week, but I should get back to
working on house. Good news, though, is that working on blog is less
painful than the house work has been.
When I got up this morning, I started reading the third chapter in
Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, it occurred to me
that the following bit, while written about Champlain in the early
1600s, is most relevant today (pp. 81-82):
While violence was an essential institution of colonialism, it was
never enough to achieve permanent goals of empire. As political
theorists have long maintained, violence fails to create stability. It
destroys relationships -- between individuals, communities, and
nations -- and does so unpredictably. Once it is initiated, none can
predict its ultimate course. While threats upon a population do over
time result in compliance, more enduring stability requires shared
understandings of power and of the legitimate use of violence. . . .
Nor could violence ever be completely monopolized. As in New Spain,
Native peoples across North America quickly adopted the advantages
that Europeans brought. Raiders took weapons as spoils of war and
plundered Indians who were allied with Europeans or had traded with
them. They stole their metals, cloths and, if possible,
guns. Increasingly, they took captives to trade in colonial slave
markets.
Apologists and propagandists for Israel really hate it when you
describe Israel as a settler-colonial movement/nation. They resent
the implicit moral derision -- every such society has been founded
on racist violence, which we increasingly view as unjust -- but
they also must suspect that it implies eventual failure: the cases
where settler-colonialism was most successful are far in the past
(especially in America, where the Indian wars ended by 1890, and
full citizenship was accorded to Indians in 1924). But perhaps most
troubling of all is the recognition that many others have started
down this same road, and found that only a few approaches can work
(or at least have worked), and only in limited circumstances.
Top story threads:
Israel: One year ago today, some Palestinians
from Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- street gangs left free to operate in
Gaza because Israel and the US refused to allow any form of political
freedom and democratic self-governance in a narrow strip of desert with
more than 2 million people, isolated from all norms of human discourse --
staged a jail break, breaching Israel's walls, and, as brutalized
prisoners tend to do, celebrating their temporary freedom with a
heinous crime spree.[*]
Most of the people in Gaza were refugees from
Israel's "war of independence," known to Palestinians as "Nakba"
for the mass expulsions of Palestinians. From 1948-67, Egypt had
occupied Gaza. In 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, and occupied Gaza,
placing it under military rule. The situation there became even
more desperate after 2006, when Israel dismantled its settlements
in the territory, locked down the borders, left local control to
Hamas, and begun a series of increasingly devastating punitive
sieges they rationalized as "mowing the grass."
As the situation in Gaza grew more desperate, Israeli politics
drifted ever more intensely to the right, to the point where some
parties advanced genocidal responses to the Gaza revolt, while
even large segments of the nominal opposition concurred. Meanwhile,
especially under Trump, the US has become a mere rubber stamp for
whatever Israel wants. And what "Israel wants" is not just to
extirpate Hamas and punish Gaza but to take out their fury on
Palestinians in the West Bank, to complete the annexation of
Palestinian land, and to export war all the way to Iran.
[*] Per Wikipedia, the
2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel lasted two days (October 7-8),
during which 1180 Israelis (379 security forces, 797 civilians)
were killed, and 251 Israelis were taken captive, while Israeli
forces killed 1609 "militants" and captured 200 more. At the end
of those two days, Israel had secured its border with Gaza, and
had gone on the offense against the people and infrastructure of
Gaza. Israel's subsequent slaughter and destruction has been so
indiscriminate, and so systematically destructive of resources
necessary for sustaining life, that it is fairly characterized
as genocide -- a judgment that is consistent with the clearly
stated intentions of many Israeli political leaders. Moreover,
the genocide in Gaza, has provided cover allowing Israelis --
including vigilante settler-mobs protected by IDF forces -- to
attack Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli aggression has
now has spilled over into Lebanon.
[10-07]
Day 367: Israel orders new evacuations in Gaza, expands bombing in
Lebanon: "The Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon
continues to face stiff resistance along the border one week on,
while the Israeli army has renewed its assault on northern Gaza,
laying siege to Jabalia refugee camp for the sixth time since
October 7."
The ongoing violence has created a cycle of anxiety and trauma in
the besieged Strip, leaving young people particularly devastated.
Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health,
spoke to Anadolu about the mental health crisis in Gaza.
The amount of anxiety and the exposure to trauma, as well as the
level of anticipation of violence, is very abnormal
Mofokeng said, emphasizing the persistent threat of violence
as a major contributor to the psychological distress.
She highlighted that 50 per cent of Gazans were already suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before the relentless
violence they experienced since 7 October, 2023. "We have to talk
about it as a deliberate infliction of mental trauma," she added.
The psychological impacts, manifesting as anxiety, nightmares,
depression and memory loss, are compounded by the absence of
adequate mental health resources.
Yet, some scars remain invisible, Mofokeng pointed out, as many
suffer in silence, with distress escalating into PTSD, eventually
leading to complex mental health issues. These only intensify for
children who have lost their entire family. She further noted that
the lack of proper mourning and dignified funerals is "very
detrimental," robbing families and communities of the chance to
heal and opening wounds that may take a lifetime to mend.
The absence of healthcare and therapy has exacerbated the
situation. "The situation is much worse," she stressed.
Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-07]
After October 7, my home became a bag I carry with me: "I have
lived through my own Nakba and understand why thousands of Palestinians
fled their homes in 1948. I made the most difficult decision of my
life and left Gaza, not knowing that what I carried might be all I
will ever possess of my homeland."
[10-07]
Israel's year of war on the West Bank: "While Israel has been
carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, its
military and settlers have been waging another campaign of ethnic
cleansing in the West Bank, moving ever closer towards Israel's
goals of annexation." This is an often neglected but increasingly
important part of the story. This makes it clear that the root
problem is not Hamas or Palestinian "national ambitions" but the
fundamental, all-pervasive injustice of the apartheid regime. I
was hoping in early days that the powers could separate Gaza and
the West Bank, deal with the former by cutting it loose, and save
the more entangled West Bank occupation to later, at which point
cooler heads might prevail. But hotter heads made sure peace was
never given a chance, because they saw the cover of war as useful
for promoting their real goals.
Abdaljawad Omar: [10-03]
Israel's forever war and what comes next: "In Gaza and Lebanon,
Israel is projecting its force while burrowing itself deeper into a
quagmire. While it may achieve brief operational successes, it fails
to extinguish the spirit of the resistance or coerce it into
submission."
America's Israel (and Israel's America):
Spencer Ackerman: [10-03]
The year after October 7th was shaped by the 23 years after
September 11th (director's cut): "9/11 gave Israel and the US
a template to follow -- one that turned grief into rage into
dehumanization into mass death. What have we learned from the
War on Terror?" Unfortunately, "this post is for paying subscribers
only," so I don't know how he relates the US reaction to 9/11 to
the previous year's demolition of the Oslo Accords and the breakout
of the Shaul Moffaz Intifada (more commonly called "Al-Aqsa," but
Moffaz was the instigator).
[10-03]
The Shift: US preemptively backs Israel after Iran attack:
"Joe Biden said he opposes Netanyahu hitting Iran's nuclear sites,
but why should anyone trust him? The administration backed Israel's
invasion of Lebanon while he was publicly calling for a ceasefire.
Will we see a similar contradiction on Iran?"
Matthew Duss: [10-07]
Joe Biden chose this catastrophic path every step of the way:
"What's happening in the Middle East was enabled by a president with
ideological priors, aides who failed to push back, and a cheerleading
media establishment."
There's a 23-year-old quote from Benjamin Netanyahu
in The New York Times that I've been thinking a lot about
lately. Reached on the evening of September 11, 2001, the then-former
prime minister was asked what the terrorist attacks that brought down
the Twin Towers and killed almost 3,000 people meant for relations
between the United States and Israel. "It's very good," he said. Then
he quickly edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate
immediate sympathy."
He may have been rude and insensitive, but he was also being
uncharacteristically honest. Like any demagogue, Netanyahu knew
instinctively that enormous pain could be easily transformed into
permission.
In addition to providing Israel's then-Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon a freer hand in crushing the second intifada, Netanyahu
also saw America's trauma as an opportunity to achieve a wider
set of regional security goals. As Congress was considering the
Iraq invasion, he came to the United States to lend his support.
"If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that
it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region," he
assured a congressional committee in September 2002.
James Robins: [10-07]
Israel is trapped by its own war machine: link title, actual,
with sub: "The missed moral lesson of October 7: Hamas's attack
should have triggered not military retaliation but the immediate
resumption of negotiations for a just peace." Of course, it didn't,
because Israel has never considered justice a consideration in its
very rare and never serious efforts at negotiation -- they look
for leverage, and play for time. But I do recall making the same
point on 9/11: I thought it should be viewed as a wake-up call,
as a time when the first thing you ask yourself, have I failed?
Netanyahu (and Bush) couldn't ask that question, much less answer
it. But if you just give it a few minutes of thought, you'll
realize that every war is consequential to a series of mistakes.
The least you can do is to learn from such mistakes, but the
people who yearn to fight wars never take the effort to learn.
Yousef Munayyer: [10-07]
A year that has brought us to the breaking point: "Alongside
the mass graves and beneath the tons of rubble, there may lie
another victim: the very possibility of a jointly imagined
coexistence."
Trita Parsi: [10-01]
Iran bombs Israel, but buck stops with Biden: "If Israel's response
sucks us into war, it will be on the administration's hands. Here's
why." People really need to get a better idea of motivations, costs,
and imagined rewards.
Biden's strategy has been to put enormous effort into deterring Iran
and its partners from retaliating against Israel, while doing virtually
nothing to discourage Israel from escalating in the first place. This
lopsided approach has in fact been a recipe for escalation, repeatedly
proving to Netanyahu that Washington has no intention of bringing
pressure to bear on Israel, no matter its actions.
The situation is actually worse than this, because Israel sees
nothing but positives from provoking a war that pits Iran and the
US. For starters, it keeps the US preoccupied with external threats
when the real enemy of peace is Israel itself. And if Americans get
hurt in the fracas, Netanyahu understands that will only make the
Americans more determined to fight Iran, just as he knows that his
periodic attacks on Iran and its friends only make them more determined
to strike back, even if just ineffectively, at Israel.
Mitchell Plitnick: [10-05]
The United States and Israel set out to remake the Middle East,
again: "The mood in Washington today is similar to 2003 when the
neocons of the Bush administration sought to remake the Middle East.
This time, a joint vision shared by Israel and the Biden administration
seeks to remake the region in the West's vision."
The images coming out of Lebanon and Gaza are horrifying. As I write
this, well over a million Lebanese civilians are displaced as the
Israeli military carries out punishing bombing raids across nearly
the entire country, and over 2,000 have been killed. We've watched
them drop so-called "bunker buster" bombs on residential blocks in
Lebanon's capital, Beirut, in an attempt to kill the leadership of
Hezbollah, never mind the civilians who may be in the way. Like in
Gaza, Israel is targeting hospitals and schools, border crossings,
and infrastructure. That the international community is allowing
this to go on is nothing short of a calamity.
Responsible Statecraft: [10-03]
Symposium: Will US-Israel relations survive the last year? "We
asked if the post-Oct. 7 war has permanently altered Washington's
80-year commitment to the Jewish state." Collects statements from:
Geoff Aronson, Andrew Bacevich, Daniel Bessner, Dan DePetris, Robert
Hunter, Shireen Hunter, Daniel Levy, Rajan Menon, Paul Pillar, Annelle
Sheline, Steve Simon, Barbara Slavin, Hadar Suskind, Stephen Walt,
Sarah Leah Whitson, James Zogby. While several are critics, it is
pretty obvious that the "special relationship" has held fast, with
the Biden administration providing unstinting support despite
reservations that they are unable or unwilling to act on, with most
of Congress even more emphatically in thrall.
Jonathan Guyer: [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." Welcome to hell, Samantha Power.
Jeffrey D Sachs: [09-30]
Israel's ideology of genocide must be confronted and stopped:
"Israel's violent extremists now in control of its government
believe that Israel has a Biblical license, indeed a religious
mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people."
VP Debate
Zack Beauchamp: [10-01]
The only moment from the VP debate that mattered: "Vance's
'damning non-answer' on the 2020 election exposed the true stakes
for democracy in 2024." I'm a bit chagrined that the one Vance lie
that Walz chose to push back hard on was the "fate of democracy."
It's not that I don't appreciate the threat, but to understand it,
you need some context. To borrow Grover Norquist's metaphor, the
program of the right since the 1970s -- cite Potter Stewart if you
like -- has been to shrink democracy "down to the size where we
can drown it in the bathtub." We've barely noticed the shrinkage,
but only started to panic now that we can identify Trump as the
one threatening to finish the job. So right, it matters, a lot
even, but it's a bit like waiting until a hurricane or flood or
fire to discover that something is screwy with the climate --
another comparable oops!
Gabriel Debenedetti: [10-02]
How Tim Walz saved himself: "At first, he looked overmatched by
JD Vance. Then came abortion, health care, and above all, January 6.
In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents
said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said
that of Harris.
The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China,
Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin,
Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the
candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with
four clips of Kamala dancing -- a lot better than Trump does --
and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer
and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: "America doesn't need
another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect
us."
Even though Trump lives in a miasma of self-pity and his businesses
often ended up in bankruptcy, somehow his fans mistake his swagger and
sneers for machismo. What a joke. Trump is the one who caves, a foreign
policy weakling and stooge of Putin. . . .
In a Trumpworld that thrives on mendacity, demonizing and dividing,
sympathy is weakness.
Debate watchers said, 48% to 35%, that Walz is more in touch than Vance
with the needs and problems of people like them, and by a similar margin,
48% to 39%, that Walz, rather than Vance, more closely shares their
vision for America.
M Gessen: [10-03]
The real loser of the VP debate: "It's our politics." And: "In
this audio essay, Gessen argues that when we put Trump and his acolytes
on the same platform as regular politicians and treat them equally,
'that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our
understanding of politics.'"
Andrew Prokop/Dylan Scott/Abdullah Fayyad/Christian Paz: [10-02]
3 winners and 2 losers from the Walz-Vance debate:
W: JD Vance's code switching abilities;
L: The narrative that Tim Walz is a media phenomenon;
W: Obamacare;
L: The moderators;
W: A surprising amount of decency. The bottom line is that Vance lied
outrageously (but smoothly) in his attempt to make Trump out as a
reasoned, skillful public servant, while Walz somewhat awkwardly
dialed his own criticism back. From point two:
It was not exactly a masterful showing, though. Walz seemed uncomfortable
in the format compared to the smooth-talking Vance, he didn't really seem
to have one overarching message that he kept returning to, and he often
missed opportunities to call out Vance's lies and misrepresentations.
On the moderators:
From the start, Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan, the CBS news
moderators, made it clear they did not think it was their job to
keep the candidates grounded in reality. . . . The questions
themselves were either not probing enough or poorly framed.
Jeffrey St Clair: [10-04]
Notes from a phony campaign: the great un-debate: "This week's
vice-presidential debate, one of the most tedious and dull in US
history, was praised by the punditocracy for its civility. Is civility
in politics what we need when the current government is arming a
genocide and the rival campaign wants to arrest 15 million people
and deport them?" Also: "Why did Walz try to humanize a jerk who
claims Haitians are BBQing pets?"
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [10-01]
VP debate: preemptive strike on Iran now? "This was the only
foreign question of the night, which made it easier for everyone,
apparently." The question was horrible, even to suggest such a
thing. The obvious answer was: no, never, wars should be ended,
not started when there is any chance of avoiding one. The answers --
unlike John McCain's "bomb bomb bomb Iran" refrain -- at least were
evasive, but in failing to address the question, allowed it to hang
in the air, as if the idea is something a sane person might consider.
It wasn't, and should have been flagged as such.
Election notes:
Ed Kilgore: [10-07]
Harris and Trump are deploying party defectors very differently:
They may be calculating differently, but the dominant issue is the
same. Trump is using Gabbard and Kennedy as testimony that he's the
lesser world war threat, without him having to soften his tough guy
image. Harris, on the other hand, is attracting some Republicans
with extreme neocon credentials, like the Cheneys -- not primarily
to show that she's the hawk in the contest, but their support does
reassure the neocons that she's likely to stick with the conventional
wisdom on foreign policy (which is decidedly neocon, despite their
disastrous track record).
Kevin T Dugan: [10-04]
Trump Media has major new problems: "A whistleblower alleges that
CEO Devin Nunes is running the struggling Donald Trump-owned company
into the ground."
[10-05]
Vance says Trump shooting inevitable: "Speaking in the town where
Trump was nearly assassinated, Vance laid blame for the shooting on
Democrats."
David Daley: [10-04]
Two men have re-engineered the US electoral system in favor of
Republicans: "If the right strews constitutional chaos over
the certification of this presidential election, two people will
have cleared the path." Leonard Leo (who packed the Supreme Court)
and Chris Jankowski (who refined the art of gerrymandering).
I don't mean to pick on Margaret Sullivan. I think the fact that even
she can't find the words to explain what's so horrifying about this
suggests that maybe there aren't any words -- or to be more precise,
maybe there aren't words that can convey what's so horrifying about
this to people who've watched Trump for the past nine years and still
aren't horrified.
Calling a political opponent "mentally impaired" and "mentally
disabled" ought to be a very bad look for any candidate, and it should
be self-evidently bad for reasons Joe Scarborough noted this morning:
"If [Harris] were so quote stupid, if she were so quote mentally
impaired, if she were quote so mentally disabled, why did she destroy
him in a debate for 90 minutes, humiliate him, and beat him so badly
that he refuses to even debate her on Fox News?"
"That's question number one," he continued. "And if she's had this
mental condition from birth, then why did he give her thousands of
dollars in 2014 for her political campaign when she was running for
the United States Senate?"
But it's unsuitable language for any candidate to use -- except it
isn't anymore, because talk radio and Fox News coarsened the political
culture, in lockstep with Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich on,
and now there's a large percentage of the voting population for whom
there's nothing a Republican can say that will lead to a
withdrawal of support, except perhaps a kind word about a Democrat. . . .
Trump can't be discredited any more than he already has been. Our
only recourse is a large turnout by people who are neither impressed
by his rhetoric nor numbed by it.
If you're Vance, the only reason you agree to take Trump on as a client
is the hope that he will pay your seven-figure fees before you, yourself,
end up in jail.
Alas, as the history of broken dreams isn't one of the subjects
taught at Yale Law School, Vance seems to be missing the point that
most of his predecessors -- Michael Cohen, Sidney Powell, Kenneth
Cheseboro, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliana, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark,
and Alina Habba (to list only a few Trump attorneys who are drifting
up the river) -- never got paid and will probably end up in jail long
before Trump himself is fitted with an oversized orange necktie.
Nicholas Wu/Madison Fernandez: [10-04]
House Democrats' new bogeyman: Project 2025: "The party is making
a concerted effort to go on the attack using the controversial set of
conservative policy proposals." It's about time. Similar plots have
been circulating for decades, but this year's edition exposes the
threats exceptionally tangible form. Moreover, it's never been easier
to imagine Republican apparatchiki blindly following whatever master
plan they're given. Project 2025 makes clear and comprehensible how
pervasive rotten ideas are throughout the Republican Party.
Jonathan Chait: [10-03]
Kamala Harris is right to get endorsements from bad Republicans:
Like Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales. Of course, Chait loves this
because it gives him another excuse to take digs at Sanders and AOC,
who also, like Chait, support Harris. Different people have different
reasons for who they vote for, and these particulars aren't totally
deluded in thinking a public announcement might help, and probably
won't hurt. What bothers me is the suggestion that they see Harris
as more in tune with their neocon warmongering legacy, and that
their endorsements can be taken as evidence that Harris is more
war-prone than Trump.
Michael Kruse: [10-04]
The woman who made Kamala Harris -- and modern America: "Shyamala
Gopalan's immigrant story explains the roots of a multiethnic society
that has defined the country in the 21st century -- and also become a
political flashpoint."
Elie Honig: [10-03]
Jack Smith's October Surprise: That's the title on the index
page. The title on the page itself is "Jack Smith's October cheap
shot." Honig's complaining that Smith's "proactive filing" was too
long, disclosing many more details of his case than was necessary,
and that filing it ahead of the election was "prejudicial." Honig
goes to great lengths here to parade his disapproval. In charging
Smith with playing politics to get at Trump, he never considers
the possibility that politics is what has kept this case from
going to trial, and that the only way to break that logjam might
be to do what Smith has done, and remind the public what evidence
says, and why it is all the more relevant before the election.
The way the court system is rigged, it's unlikely that Trump will
ever "face justice," at least on federal charges, but the people
deserve to know what he did, before they risk giving him the
chance to do it again.
Li Zhou: [09-26]
The Eric Adams indictment, explained: "Fancy plane tickets, donations,
and political favors: what to know about the charges." I hadn't noted
the New York City mayor, which seems like the sort of run-of-the-mill
corruption that occasionally traps unwary Democrats, yet Republicans --
despite being ideologically committed to furthering corruption -- are
rarely held accountable for. That plus it's a local issue, but in a
locale that generates a lot of political media, so we're getting
a cluster of stories.
Jeffery C Mays/Stefanos Chen: [10-05]
Big business saw an ally in Eric Adams, and overlooked his issues:
"New York's business community threw its support behind Adams, and
continued backing him even as his legal problems began to threaten
the governance of the city."
Intelligencer Staff: [10-07]
Hurricane Milton intensifies to category 5, Florida prepares: live
updates. The storm formed in a hot spot in the Gulf of Mexico,
heading northeast. Projection is that it will hit Tampa, with 175
mph winds and a 15-foot storm surge, on Wednesday, cross Florida,
and continue heading east into the Atlantic. More Milton:
Li Zhou: [10-03]
Get used to more absurdly hot Octobers: "This year's unrelenting
heat, explained." Last few days here in Wichita have been in the
mid-90s, which is what I expect for first two weeks of September,
but hard to remember anything this hot this late in the year.
Dylan Scott: [10-02]
Why is US health care like this? "America unintentionally built
a health care system that is hard to fix." Short article, but covers
the basics. It's not a system. It wasn't designed. It was created
as opportunities to profit were relentlessly exploited, resulting
in various gaps and inequities, which have been partly compensated
for with a patchwork of fixes designed mostly to preserve previous
profit centers. And each of those profit centers has its own lobby,
which is to say clout within the American political "system."
Mark Mazzetti/Adam Entous: [10-05]
Behind Trump's views on Ukraine: Putin's gambit and a political
grudge: "The roots of Donald Trump's animus toward Ukraine --
an issue with profound consequences should he be elected again --
can be found in a yearlong series of events spanning 2016 and
2017."
Constant Méheut: [10-05]
Ukraine's Donbas strategy: Retreat slowly and maximize Russia's
losses: "The idea is to use rope-a-dope tactics, letting Russian
forces pound away until they have exhausted themselves. It's far
from clear if the Ukrainian strategy will succeed." Maybe that's
because "rope-a-dope" is a strategy that favors the one with the
greater reserves of strength, which isn't Ukraine.
Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:
Richard Slotkin: [10-05]
To understand Trump vs. Harris, you must know these American myths:
The author has mapped out the entire history of American mythmaking
in his book
A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Struggle for America,
so applying his methodology to one more election is pretty easy.
I've read his book, and previously cited various reviews. I've
long placed great importance on the notion of myth -- paradigmatic
stories that are widely believed, transcending fact and fiction --
so I'm very used to this form of critique. Still, there is a risk
that his categories have become too pat, and forcing new facts to
fit them tends to lose your grip on anything new. For instance, it's
easy enough to see Trump playing off the "lost cause playbook," but
those of us who grew up in what was still the Jim Crow era should
be struck by how much weirder it seems this time around. On the
other hand, when Democrats (like Obama/Clinton) embrace "American
exceptionalism," they look naive and foolish, and easily loose
track of the reforms they understand we need.
Jennifer Szalai: [09-29]
Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to the political fray, calling out
injustice:
"The
Message marks his re-entry as a public intellectual determined
to wield his moral authority, especially regarding Israel and the
occupied territories." More on the book below, but first a good
introduction is a bit of
CBS Mornings interview with Coates. A quick sampling of reviews.
(I have a copy of the book, but haven't cracked it open yet.)
Jay Caspian Kang: [10-04]
Why Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: "In The Message, Coates urges
young writers to aspire to 'nothing less than doing their part to
save the world,' but his latest work reveals the limits of his own
advice."
Peter Beinart: [10-01]
this first question: would you support a preemptive strike on Iran
rather than how would you stop this regional war pretty much encapsulates
what is wrong with US media coverage of this conflict
Local tags (these can be linked to directly):
music.
Original count: 131 links, 7251 words (9735) total).
As expected, I've had very little time to work on this all week.
The idea of starting each week's post with an evolving executive
summary will have to wait until next week, at the earliest.
Trying to wrap this up Monday afternoon, but I soon have to take
a break to buy some lumber and tools, and I should spend most of
the day working on the upstairs room (having wasted my weekend on
what should have been a simple wiring job, and, well, much of the
bulk below. I probably won't post this until late, so I'll likely
find more, but in lieu of trying to summarize my main points, let
me just emphasize two:
I've tried very hard for very long to be as understanding as
possible to Israelis, even though I never embraced the nationalist
movement that founded and led the "Jewish State" (never mind the
crypto-religious settler cult that currently holds sway over it).
Nor have I been reluctant to criticize when I've sensed similar
(correlative?) movements among Palestinians, even when I saw in
them reflections of the dominant Israeli trends. I believe that
people of all sides deserve human rights, and I'm sympathetic to
those who are denied them, regardless of whose fault that might
be (even when the fault is one's own). However, at this point
Israel alone -- by which I mean the current governing coalition
and all those who support them (not all Israelis, but most; not
most Americans, but some) -- bear exclusive responsibility for
all pain and suffering in the region, even their own. One thing
that follows from this is that every violence from any side is
properly viewed as a consequence of Netanyahu's incitement and
perpetuation of this genocidal war. Just for the record, I don't
approve of Hamas or Hezbollah violence any more than I approve
of Israeli violence, but I understand that when Israel acts as
it has been doing, human nature will respond in kind. Israel
alone has the power to end this conflict. That they refuse to
pay even the minimal rights of according Palestinians a right
to live in peace and dignity puts this all on them.
I have very little new to say about the US elections.
Trump, Vance, and virtually every other Republican have proven
to be even more boorish and benighted than previously imagined.
Honest and decent American voters have to stop them, which means
electing Democrats, regardless of their flaws. I will continue
to note some of these flaws, but none of them can possibly alter
the prime directive, which is to stop the Republicans. To that
end, I will continue to note pieces that expose their failures
and that heap derision on them, but I don't see that doing so
here makes much difference. I, and probably you, know enough
already. Aside from voting, which is the least one can and
should do, I wouldn't mind tuning out until November, when we
can wake up and assess the damages.
I could write much more about each of these two points, but
not now.
Top story threads:
Israel: Israel dramatically expanded its
genocidal war into Lebanon this week, which warrants yet another
section, below
Mondoweiss:
[09-23]
Day 353: Israel launches bombing campaign on Lebanon as Hezbollah
retaliates: "Israel's intensifying bombardment of Lebanon has
killed at least 274 people so far, while Hezbollah retaliates with
rockets across Israel. The Israeli army also raided and forcibly
shut down the Ramallah office of Al Jazeera."
[09-26]
Israel's Genocide Day 356: Netanyahu denies accepting US-French
ceasefire proposal with Lebanon: "As Israel expands bombing
in Lebanon, Hezbollah rockets have reached reached Akka, Haifa,
Tiberias, and the lower Galilee. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel
returned a truckload of decomposing bodies without identification
that it had abducted from Gaza." First thing to note here is that
they've changed the headline here: all previous entry titles
started with 'Operation al-Aqsa Flood' (their quotes)
before "Day." I've always dropped that part, as I found it both
unnecessary and unhelpful: "Operation al-Aqsa Flood" lasted at
most four days; everything since then, as well as most of those
first four days, has been Israel's doing -- and I wasn't about
to impose Israel's own declaration ("Operation Swords of Iron,"
which in itself says much about Israeli mentality). I'm not going
to repeat the new title either (beyond this one instance), but
I do consider it truthful, and have since about one week into
the operation, by which time it was clear what Netanyahu had in
mind (look back for quotes about Amalek; e.g.: Noah Lanard:
[2023-11-03]
The dangerous history behind Netanyahu's Amalek rhetoric: "His
recent biblical reference has long been used by the Israeli far right
to justify killing Palestinians").
Ahmed Abu Abdu: [09-25]
Waste is piling up in Gaza. The public health implications are
disastrous. "I am in charge of waste management in Gaza City.
The Israeli occupation has launched a war on our sanitation
facilities and waste management systems, creating an environmental
and health crisis that will take years to recover from."
B'Tselem:
The pogroms are working - the transfer is already happening:
This is mostly a report on events in the West Bank prior to the
Oct. 7 Gaza revolt, after which settler violence in the West Bank --
"in the past two yeras, at least six West Bank communities have
been displaced" -- only increased.
For decades, Israel has employed a slew of measures designed to
make life in dozens of Palestinian communities throughout the West
Bank miserable. This is part of an attempt to force residents of
these communities to uproot themselves, seemingly of their own
accord. Once that is achieved, the state can realize its goal of
taking over the land. To advance this objective, Israel forbids
members of these communities from building homes, agricultural
structures or public buildings. It does not allow them to connect
to the water and power grids or build roads, and when they do, as
they have no other choice, Israel threatens demolition, often
delivering on these threats.
Settler violence is another tool Israel employs to further
torment Palestinians living in these communities. Such attacks
have grown significantly worse under the current government,
turning life in some places into an unending nightmare and
denying residents any possibility of living with even minimal
dignity. The violence has robbed Palestinian residents of their
ability to continue earning a living. It has terrorized them to
the point of fearing for their lives and made them internalize
the understanding that there is no one to protect them.
This reality has left these communities with no other choice,
and several of them have uprooted themselves, leaving hearth and
home for safer places. Dozens of communities scattered throughout
the West Bank live in similar conditions. If Israel continues this
policy, their residents may also be displaced, freeing Israel to
achieve its goal and take over their land.
Tareq S Hajjaj: [09-26]
In Gaza, all eyes are on Lebanon: "People in Gaza hoped that
an expansion of the Lebanese front would ease pressure on Gaza.
Instead, Israel has escalated its massacres while global attention
is elsewhere. They still hope the resistance in Lebanon will make
Israel pay."
Erika Solomon/Lauren Leatherby/Aric Toler: [09-25]
Israeli bulldozers flatten mile after mile in the West Bank:
"Videos from Tulkarm and Jenin show bulldozers destroying
infrastructure and businesses, as well as soldiers impeding
local emergency responders."
Israel targets Lebanon:
Following last
week's stochastic terrorist exercise -- detonating thousands of
booby-trapped pages and walkie-talkies -- Israel escalated its
bombing of Lebanon, Israel targeting and killed senior Hezbollah
leadership, including long-time leader Hasan Nasrallah. In many
quarters, this will be touted as a huge success for Netanyahu in
his campaign to exterminate all of Israel's enemies, but right
now the longer-term consequences of fallout and blowback are
incalculable and probably even unimaginable. We should be clear
that Hezbollah did not provoke these attacks, even in response
to Israel's genocide in Gaza.
(In 2006, Hezbollah, which had
been formed in opposition to Israel's 1982-2000 occupation of
southern Lebanon, did act against Israel, as a diversion after
Israel launched its first punitive siege of Gaza. Israel shifted
attention to Lebanon, and conducted a horrific bombing campaign,
as well as an unsuccessful ground incursion.)
Rather, Israel has
repeatedly provoked Hezbollah -- which has tried to deter further
attacks by demonstrating their ability to fire rockets deep into
Israel, a strategy I regard as foolish ("deterrence" only deters
people who weren't going to attack you in the first place; it
works for Israel against its hapless neighbors, but when others
try it, it just provokes greater arrogance and aggression by
Israel). As I've stressed all along, Israel's expansion of the
war into Lebanon serves two purposes: to provide "fog of war"
cover for continuing the genocide in Gaza, and expanding it into
the West Bank; and to lock reflexive US support in place, which
is tied to the supposedly greater regional threat of Iran. The US
could short-circuit this war by denouncing Israel's aggression, by
demanding an immediate cease-fire, and by negotiating a separate
peace and normalization with Iran (which Iran has long signalled
a desire for). Instead, the Biden administration continues to let
Netanyahu pull its strings.
Note that I haven't tried to subdivide these links, but events
unfolded quickly, so dates may be significant.
I may be exaggerating at some level, but those are the contours
of how Israel viewed October 7. Not because it was really an
existential risk. We already saw that in only two or four days,
Israel was able to regain the Gaza envelope and the settlements
surrounding Gaza. But on the level of the psyche, that's how it
felt for most Israelis. So they want to regain the initiative.
They saw October 7 as an opportunity to exact a price from
everybody in the region who supports resistance. They want to
destroy societies that are challenging them, whether in Gaza,
Lebanon, or other places.
The real desire is for an ultimate form of victory, this kind
of awe-inspiring victory that will give them an answer to their
existential questions.
I think that on some level, the Israelis won the war, they won
the victory. They want to create these awe-inspiring moments, like
we saw with the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, which they have
severely missed in contrast to how they were caught with their
pants down on October 7.
October 7 was a moment that not only stuck in the Israeli psyche,
but the Palestinian psyche as well. Israel's genocide in Gaza inspired
shock and horror, but didn't inspire a lot of awe. It didn't give
Israelis the taste of power that Israeli identity was built on. But
with Hezbollah, we've seen this awe factor come back, like the
penetration of the communication devices and blowing them all up at
once. This includes some of the operations that Israel has conducted
in Gaza, like the extraction of some Israeli prisoners held by the
Palestinian resistance.
That's on a level of, if you want, psychological and aesthetic
analysis. But on a political level, Israel finds this as an opportunity.
It's already way deep into a war for 11 months, a war that is costing it
a lot economically, socially, politically, and diplomatically. It sees
that only more war will bring about better results in those domains.
It will be able to establish what it calls deterrence. It will be
able to put a line in the sand and say, if you ever challenge us again,
this is what will happen to you. It will burn into the consciousness of
the people of the region that Israel shouldn't be played with. All of
these motivations coexist all at once in Israel's conduct -- and of
course, for the settlers specifically.
The only ones who have a real solution for this whole Palestinian
question, instead of managing the conflict or shrinking the conflict
or destroying the possibilities for two states or one state, are
the settlers who say that we should change the paradigm with the
Palestinians. They say, we should destroy Palestinian existence in
the land of Palestine.
So for the settlers, the "ultimate victory" is to get rid of as
many Palestinians as possible from the river to the sea, including
Palestinian citizens of Israel, and establish the kind of pure
religious Jewish state that they have always dreamed of. For them,
war is desirable. It maintains the possibility for ethnic cleansing,
it maintains the possibility for genocide. It means it still keeps
the possibility of total victory open. Of course, even in their
wildest dreams, even if they clear out all of the Palestinians
from Palestine, I think the Palestinian question will not go away.
I don't have time to ruminate on this right now, but there is
a lot to unpack here.
Ken Klippenstein: [09-23]
Beep, beep! "Israel's pager caper is a Wile E. Coyote vs. Road
Runner exercise in futility."
This is the less cinematic but no less depressing reality of the
pager attack: it is just another version of the latest weapon in
the never changing battlefield, one typified by these kinds of
tit-for-tat attacks that never bring about a decisive ending or
a new beginning.
Before long, other countries and terrorist groups will buy or
develop their own Acme Exploding Pagers, as Panetta hinted. The
media's uncritically declaring Israel's latest caper a success
creates an incentive for countries to do just that. Absent an
honest assessment, hands will again be wrung, chins scratched,
ominous warnings issued, and beep, beep! -- perpetual war will
zip right on by.
And of course when Hezbollah or some other group attacks our
devices, the national security state will happily label it terrorism.
[09-28]
Hezbollah confirms the death of Hasan Nasrallah in Israeli
carpet-bombing: "Considered an icon of resistance against Israel
and one of the most influential political figures in the Arab world,
Hasan Nasrallah was killed by a massive Israeli airstrike that
leveled an entire residential block in Beirut's Dahiya district."
Liz Sly: [09-29]
Nasrallah's assassination shreds illusion of Hezbollah's military
might. What military might? In 2006, Hezbollah was effective at
repelling an Israeli ground incursion, which wasn't all that serious
in the first place. But Hezbollah has no air force, no effective
anti-aircraft defense, no tanks, few if any drones, a few small
missiles that while more sophisticated than anything Hamas had in
Gaza have never been able to inflict any serious damage. Sure, they
talk a foolish game of deterrence, but no one in Israel takes their
threat seriously.
David E Sanger: [09-23]
Biden works against the clock as violence escalates in the Middle
East: "President Biden is beginning to acknowledge that he is
simply running out of time to help forge a cease-fire and hostage
deal with Hamas, his aides say. And the risk of a wider war has
never looked greater." It's hard to make things happen when you
don't have the will to exercise your power. Still, it's pretty
pathetic to think that a sitting US president needs more than four
months to demand something as simple and straightforward as a
cease-fire. (The hostage exchange is an unnecessary complication.)
While I'm sure there are limits to presidential power, the problem
here appears to be that Biden and his administration don't have
the faintest understanding of what needs to be done. Nor do they
seem to care.
[Netanyahu] has a vested interest in prolonging the war for his
political survival and in making it an election issue that could
potentially harm Vice President Kamala Harris. It seems that the
US finally and very belatedly realized it last week, which is why,
however unfortunate, there is little the US will do until the
election, unless it's forced to act in the case of a major escalation.
[09-27]
Netanyahu defends Gaza and Lebanon attacks in UN speech:
"Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations on Friday, vowing
to continue waging war on Gaza and Lebanon. Israeli media reports
the Israeli Prime Minister ordered massive strikes on Beirut just
before giving the speech."
Tara Copp: [09-23]
US sends more troops to Middle East as violence rises between Israel
and Hezbollah: I've been saying all along that Israel's attacks
on Lebanon (aka Hezbollah) are designed to trap the US into a role
of shielding Israel from Iran. The thinking is that if the US and
Iran go to war, the US will become more dependent on Israel, and
more indulgent in their main focus, which is making Gaza and the
West Bank uninhabitable for Palestinians. US troop movement prove
that the strategy is working, even though it's pretty obviously
cynical and deranged.
Fawaz A Gerges: [09-30]
The rising risk of a new forever war: Title from jump page: "The
United States has not been a true friend of Israel." This is the
relevant paragraph:
Nevertheless, it is the only way forward. Israel's hubris in its
attacks on Lebanon has been enabled by America's "ironclad" military
support and diplomatic cover for its ally. In this regard, the United
States has not been a true friend to Israel. Israel will not know
lasting peace until it recognizes that its long-term security depends
on reconciliation with the millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West
Bank and East Jerusalem. Its leaders must find a political compromise
that will finally allow Israel to be fully integrated into the region.
Top-down normalization with Arab autocrats is not enough.
[09-20]
A broader Israel-Lebanon war now seems inevitable: "This week's
pager explosions in Lebanon represent a tactical victory for Israel.
They also appear to lock the region into an escalatory spiral." I
thought that tactics were meant to facilitate strategy, but it's
hard to discern either in such massive, indiscriminate mayhem.
Unless the strategy is to convince the world that Israelis are
insane as well as evil, in which case, sure, they're making their
point.
[09-23]
World leaders gather at a UN desperate to save itself: "Ongoing
crises in Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine have underscores the inefficacy
of the world's foremost decision-making body. Great power competition
may be to blame." You think? The UN has no power to enforce judgments,
so the only way it can function is as a forum for negotiation, and
that only works if all parties are amenable. There is nothing the UN
can do about a nation like Israel that is flagrantly in contempt of
international law. In many ways, the US is even more of a rogue force
on the international scene. America's disregard for other nations has
pushed other countries into defensive stances, further disabling the
UN. Now it's just a big gripe session, as the speeches by Netanyahu
and Biden made abundantly clear.
[09-27]
At the UN, overwhelming anger at Israel: "At the United Nations,
world leaders cast Israel's heavy-handed campaigns in Gaza and the
inability of the UN system to rein it as a danger to the institution
itself."
Kyle Anzalone: [09-27]
Israel is fighting a war on seven fronts: "The Israeli leader
called the UN General Assembly a 'swamp of antisemitic bile'.
The UN published a
statement summary of Netanyahu's speech. Two fairly obvious
points here: (1) most leaders would seek to divide and diminish
their enemies, but Netanyahu conflates and aggrandizes them, to
make them look more ominous to Israel's patrons in America, to
keep them in line; (2) relentlessly conflating any criticism of
Israel's apartheid and genocide with anti-semitism is a sure-fire
way to promote generic Judeophobia.
Craig Mokhiber: [09-28]
How Israel attempts to justify indiscriminate attacks on civilians
(and why it's failing): "Israel's mass terror attack in Lebanon that
led to the death and maiming of hundreds of civilians also served as
a playbook for how Israel seeks to justify its war crimes. But as
the attack's aftermath showed, these tricks are beginning to fail."
This is a big and important subject, including "collateral damage
defense," "magic-word defense," all sorts of canards, many of which
inadvertently expose underlying prejudices.
But calling someone a "terrorist" or saying that they are affiliated
with a group that you dislike or consider to be terrorist, is not a
legal argument. At the very heart of international humanitarian law
is the distinction between combatants and non-combatants.
Superimposing another label on top of a civilian population that
you do not like does not make them legitimate targets.
Indeed, even attempting to re-label combatants in this way does
not relieve Israel of its obligations under international humanitarian
and human rights law. Unlawful weapons and tactics remain unlawful,
regardless of the labels the attackers apply to their targets.
James North: [09-25]
CNN's dishonest duo, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, strike again:
"The latest dishonesty from CNN's Biased Duo, Jake Tapper and Dana
Bash, about Rashida Tlaib prompted an intense critical reaction.
The solution? CNN should ban them from reporting on Palestine."
[09-27]
Biden would rather defend Israeli impunity than stop a regional
war: "As Israel intensified its deadly attacks on Lebanon, the
US moved more troops to the Middle East. The move shows Joe Biden's
priority is not to avoid escalation but to ensure that Israel has
full impunity."
Derek Seidman: [09-29]
Using research to uncover campus complicity in genocide: "Across
the US, students organizing against Israel's assault on Gaza have made
essential use of power research, uncovering financial ties between the
Pentagon and campus labs and mapping out connections between university
trustees and the war machine."
Saad Shahriar: [09-28]
The German Left's complicity in the Palestinian genocide:
"While the German left passionately supports many international
causes but remains conspicuously silent on the ongoing genocide
of Palestinians, conveniently overlooking its own complicity in
Germany's military-industrial ties to Israel."
Kate Wagner: [07-09]
The awful plan to turn Gaza into the next Dubai: "The Netanyahu
administration seems to have learned from neighboring petrostates
that spectacle can distract from ethnic cleansing." I missed this
when it came out -- not long, just a few months ago -- but it's all
smoke and mirrors, so hardly matters. Reminds me, though, that it
wasn't all that long ago with Hamas (although I'm hard pressed to
find a suitable link).
On Truth Social, Donald Trump recently posted a special message to
American women. "WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE!"
he announced. "YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE
IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES." The first
sentence sounds like an Always commercial; the second is a bit more
pernicious. It is difficult to be "happy, healthy, confident and
free" as women
die from abortion bans in states such as Georgia. Nevertheless,
Trump is fond of his new pitch. At a
campaign event in Pennsylvania on Monday, he called himself a
"protector" of women, adding that ladies will no longer be "abandoned,
lonely, or scared." How wonderful. . . .
The rhetoric is characteristically authoritarian in the sense
that Trump admires strongmen and wishes to become one. He will thus
deliver further subjugation, not liberation. Not even his female
supporters will be safe from the anti-feminist backlash heralded
by his party. If it's dangerous to be pregnant in America, then
it's dangerous for anyone who can conceive; a doctor won't check
a patient's political views when he refuses to perform a D&C
under the threat of prosecution. That is the world that Trump's
supporters have signed up for; it is a world that social
conservatives have labored to create. . . .
We can review the facts, and
polling suggests that most of us are inclined to reject Trump
as our improbable protector. Trump is not capable of protecting
anyone, let alone women, from himself or from anyone else. He is
the wolf in the pasture, the threat in the dark. We can run, or
we can fight.
Not that long ago, endorsements like these would have been rebuffed]
by Democrats as valentines from warmongers.
I can't recall any such time, certainly not since Clinton picked
Gore as his VP in 1992 because both were Gulf War hawks, then Gore
picked the even more hawkish Lieberman as his VP in 2000. Obama kept
much of Bush's war cabinet on board after 2008, especially Gates, who
he later replaced with another Republican before finding an even worse
Democrat in Ash Carter. Hillary Clinton didn't shy away from Kagan
endorsements -- see Ben Norton: [2016-06-10]
Another neocon endorses Clinton, calling her "2016's real conservative"
and "the candidate of the status quo". Before Nixon and Reagan,
the party with the reputation for fighting wars was the Democrats
(Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson).
Brett Wilkins: [09-25]
Trump condemned for 'genocidal' threat to destroy Iran: "Trump's
threat to blow Iran's largest cities and the country itself 'to
smithereens' is an outrageous threat that should be widely condemned,"
said the National Iranian American Council."
Chas Danner: [09-23]
Mark Robinson's campaign is imploding: Republican lieutenant
governor, campaigning for governor, and much in the news of late.
Also:
Political advocacy and charitable groups controlled by Leo now have
far more assets than the combined total cash on hand of the Republican
and Democratic National, Congressional and Senatorial committees:
$440.9 million.
Leo is a 58-year-old graduate of Cornell Law School, a Catholic
with ties to Opus Dei -- the most conservative "personal prelature"
in the church hierarchy -- chief strategist of the Federalist Society
for more than a quarter century and a crucial force behind the
confirmations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett
Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He has emerged over the past five
years as the dominant fund-raiser on the right.
As Leo has risen to this pinnacle of influence, he has become
rich, profiting from the organizations he has created and from the
consulting fees paid by the conservative advocacy and lobbying
groups he funds.
James Carden: [09-25]
When odious foreign policy elites rally around Harris: "We
should take seriously those responsible for some of the bloodiest,
stupidest national security decisions in recent memory." Cheneys,
of course, and a few more mentioned, as well as reference to this:
Adam Jentleson: [09-28]
Kamala Harris said she owns a gun for a very strategic reason:
"She has been doing an effective job of vice signaling from the
left." First I've heard of "vice signaling," and this definition
doesn't help: "Vice signaling means courting healthy controversy
with the enforcers of orthodoxy -- the members of interest groups
who on many critical issues have let themselves off the hook for
accurately representing the views and interests of those they claim
to speak for." I have run across "virtue signaling" before, which
is a term used to deride views from the left as mere ploys to make
one seem more virtuous -- an implicit put-down of anyone who doesn't
agree. "Vice signaling" has the same intent, but opposes virtue by
embracing its opposite vice. Why these terms should exclusively be
directed against the left is counterintuitive -- throughout history,
"enforcers of orthodoxy" have nearly always come from the right,
where "holier than thou" is a common attitude, and snobbery not
just accepted but cultivated.
The actual examples given, like embracing fracking and threatening
to shoot a home invader, may help Harris break away from cartoon left
caricatures, and that cognitive dissonance may help her get a fresh
hearing. That may be part of her craft as a politician -- as a non-
or even anti-politician, I'm in no position to tell her how to do her
job. Nor do I particularly care about these specific cases. But I am
irritated when leftists who've merely thought problems through enough
to arrive at sound answers are dismissed as "enforcers of orthodoxy."
Padma Lakshmi: [09-21]
As a cook, here's what I see in Kamala Harris. There's a lot in
this piece I can relate to, put my own spin on, and imagine her spin
as not being all that different.
Talking about food is a way to relate to more Americans, even those
uninterested in her politics. We've all been eating since we were
babies, and we're experts on our own tastes. Talking about food paves
the way to harder conversations. Food removes barriers and unites us.
Ms. Harris evinces clear delight in cooking and in talking about
almost any type of food -- a passion that is core to who she is, like
basketball for Barack Obama or golf for Donald Trump.
She is omnivorous and a versatile cook.
That Obama and Trump would go for sports is in itself telling
(as is that Trump went for the solo sport, vs. a team sport for
Obama, one that requires awareness of other people and the ability
to make changes on the fly). I've only watched one of the videos
(so far, making dosa masala with Mindy Kaling, which was chatty
with less technique than I would have preferred -- I understand
the decision to use the premix batter, after at least one stab
at making it from scratch).
John Nichols: [09-20]
Kamala Harris is winning the Teamsters endorsements that really
matter: "The national leadership may have snubbed her -- but
Teamsters in the swing states that will decide the election are
backing her all the way." They all matter. Not clear whether the
non-endorsement was reaction to the DNC snub, which I never quite
understood. Still, the choice for labor is so overwhelming this
time the national leadership appears pretty out of touch.
Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:
Ethan Eblaghie: [09-26]
The Uncommitted Movement failed because it refused to punish
Democrats: "The Uncommitted movement failed to move the
Biden-Harris administration policy on Gaza because unaccountable
movement leaders were unwilling to punish Democrats for supporting
genocide." They failed, if that's the word you want to use, because
they didn't get the votes. I doubt this was due to lack of sympathy
for their issue: most rank-and-file Democrats (as opposed to party
politicians, who of necessity are preoccupied with fundraising)
support a cease-fire, and many are willing to back that up with
limits on military aid[*]; but they also see party unity as essential
to defeating Trump and the Republicans, and they see that as more
critical/urgent than mobilizing public opinion against genocide.
I can see both sides of this, but at this point the ticket and the
contest are set, so all you can do is to pick one. While I have
little positive to say about Harris on Israel, it's completely
clear to me that Trump would be even worse, and I can't think of
any respect in which he would be preferable to Harris. As for
punishing the Democrats -- even with third-party and not-voting
options -- don't be surprised if they never forgive you. So ask
yourself, do you really want to burn the bridge to the people
you're most likely to appeal to?
[*] Michael Arria, in a piece cited
above, has some polling:
Recent polls show vast support for an arms embargo on Israel among
Democratic voters.
A March 2024 Center for Economic and Policy Research
survey found that 52% of Americans wanted the U.S. to stop
weapons shipments. That included 62% of Democratic voters.
A June
survey then from CBS News/YouGov found that more than 60% of
voters should not send weapons or supplies to Israel. Almost 80%
of Democrats said the the U.S. shouldn't send weapons.
Jeffrey St Clair: [09-27]
The judicial murder of Marcellus Williams: "The State of Missouri
executed Marcellus 'Khalifah' Williams on Tuesday night despite knowing
he was
most likely innocent of the crime he was condemned for." Also:
"The State of Missouri plans to execute another innocent man,
Robert Roberson, on October 17."
Nia Prater: [09-30]
Videos show Helene's catastrophic toll in Southeast: "Multiple
states are contending with widespread damage and significant loss
of life following the landfall of Hurricane Helene, a Category 4
storm."
Sam Bull: [09-24]
Poll: Americans want Ukraine talks, conditions on aid to Israel:
"Yet they are split along party lines on a host of issues ahead of
the elections." Still, the numbers are very scattered, and it's
especially hard to credit the party trust figures.
Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:
Other stories:
Obituaries:
Benny Golson:
Richard Williams: [09-25]
Benny Golson obituary: "Tenor saxophonist whose compositions
were valued for their harmonic challenge and melodic grace."
Fredric Jameson: A critic and philosopher,
I remember him fondly from my early Marxist period, which certainly
meant his books Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical
Theories of Literature (1971), and possibly The Prison-House
of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism
(1972), but I haven't followed him since. Turns out he's written much
more than I was aware of, especially many titles published by
Verso Books.
Terry Eagleton:
Fredric Jameson, 1934-2024: "reflects here on Jameson's humility,
generosity, and unrivalled erudition."
Jameson's work was both utopian and depressive, expansive in the
field of its analysis and trained almost entirely on culture rather
than politics. And he was rare among Marxist intellectuals in the
neoliberal era to have managed to speak firmly to the present day.
That is why his work affected so many. An entire strand of mainstream
political thought is unimaginable without the influence of Jameson's
fusion of hard cultural criticism, immense knowledge, refusal of
low/high cultural boundaries, and his endlessly ruminative, open-minded
dialectical curiosity, put in the service of a refusal ever to forgive
or downplay the horrors that capitalism has inflicted upon the world.
Jameson's Marxism was particularly tailored for our fallen era, a low
ebb of class struggle, an apparent triumph of a new and ever more
ruthless capitalism: "late", as he optimistically put it, borrowing
a phrase from the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel.
Also:
"The dialectic," wrote Jameson, "is not moral." In the sprawling
Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Jameson proposed "a new
institutional candidate for the function of Utopian allegory, and
that is the phenomenon called Wal-Mart". While conceding that the
actually existing Wal-Mart was "dystopian in the extreme", Jameson
was fascinated by its unsentimental destruction of small businesses,
its monopolistic mockery of the concept of a "free market", and its
immense, largely automated and computerised network of distribution
of cheap, abundant goods. Perhaps it was a step too far to extrapolate
from this -- as did Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski in their
2019 The People's Republic of Wal-Mart -- and portray the
megacorp as a prefiguring of communist distribution networks. But
what Jameson was up to, following Gramsci's and Lenin's fascination
with Fordism and Taylorism, was an attempt to uncover what the new
horrors of capitalism made possible. In the case of Wal-Mart, he
argued, the answer was: a computerised planned economy. Jameson was
a strict, 20th-century Marxist in remaining a firmly modernist thinker,
refusing to find any solace in imagined communal or pre-capitalist
pasts. But his unsentimental modernism did not preclude an outrage
at the ravages inflicted by colonialism and imperialism in the name
of "progress", an often overlooked thread in his work.
[PS: From this, my first and evidently only free article, I clicked
on Richard Seymour: [07-22]
The rise of disaster nationalism: "The modern far-right is not
a return to fascism, but a new and original threat." I could see
this as a reasonable argument, as evidence of the "thought-provoking
journalism" the publication touts, but I was stopped cold at the
paywall ("as little as $12.00 a month").
Kate Wagner: [09-26]
The gifts of Fredric Jameson (1934-2024): "The intellectual titan
bestowed on us so many things, chief among them a reminder to Always
Be Historicizing."
Verso Books: [09-23]
Jameson at 90: A Verso Blog series: "Our series honoring Fredric
Jameson's oeuvre in celebration of his 90th birthday."
Patrick Iber: [09-24]
Eric Hobsbawm's lament for the twentieth century: "Where some
celebrated the triumph of liberal capitalism in the 1990s, Hobsbawn
saw a failed dream." Re-reviewing the British historian's 1994 book,
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991,
which I started at the time, and have long meant to return to --
although after re-reading the first of what turned into his
tetraology, The Age of Revolution (1789-1948), I found
myself wanting to work through the intermediate volumes --
The Age of Capital (1848-1875) and The Age of Empire
(1875-1914) first. Iber teases us with his conclusion:
But if a classic is a work that remains worth reading both for
what it is and for what it tells us about the time it was created,
Hobsbawm's text deserves that status. It rewards the reader not
because a historian would write the same book today but precisely
because they would not.
Hobsbawm's previous books are dazzling for the breadth of his
knowledge, and his skill at weaving so many seemingly disparate
strands into a sensible whole. This one, however, is coterminous
with his life (into his 70s; his dates were 1917-2012), which
gives him the advantages (and limits) of having experienced as
well as researched the history, and having had a personal stake
in how it unfolded.
Ryu Spaeth: [09-23]
The return of Ta-Nehisi Coates: "A decade after The Case for
Reparations, he is ready to take on Israel, Palestine, and the
American media." Coates has a new book,
The Message, coming out Oct. 1. I expect we'll be hearing
much more about this in coming weeks. To underscore the esteem
with which Coates is held, this pointed to a 2015 article:
Here's are several fairly long quotes from Spaeth's article:
In Coates's eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the
territories. In the soldiers who "stand there and steal our time,
the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs." In the
water sequestered for Israeli use -- evidence that the state had
"advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the
pools and fountains but the water itself." In monuments on sites
of displacement and informal shrines to mass murder, such as the
tomb of Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Muslims in a mosque
in 1994, which recall "monuments to the enslavers" in South Carolina.
And in the baleful glare of the omnipresent authority. "The point
is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly," he
writes. And later: "The message was: 'You'd really be better off
somewhere else.'" . . .
His affinity for conquered peoples very much extends to the Jews,
and he begins the book's essay on Palestine at Yad Vashem, Israel's
memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. "In a place like this," he
writes, "your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms,
and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it
does not, what hope is there for any of us?" But what Coates is
concerned with foremost is what happened when Jewish people went
from being the conquered to the conquerors, when "the Jewish people
had taken its place among The Strong," and he believes Yad Vashem
itself has been used as a tool for justifying the occupation. "We
have a hard time wrapping our heads around people who are obvious
historical victims being part and parcel of another crime," he told
me. In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his
Israeli companions: "They were raised under the story that the
Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had
been confronted with an incredible truth -- that there was no
ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever
flowing." . . .
The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no
mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set
on the state's annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas
and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders
going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates
was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did
not want to report on a place he hadn't seen for himself. ("People
were like, 'Gaza is so much worse,'" he told me. "'So much worse.'")
What there is, instead, is a picture of the intolerable cruelty and
utter desperation that could lead to an October 7.
"If this was the 1830s and I was enslaved and Nat Turner's rebellion
had happened," Coates told me that day in Gramercy, "I would've been
one of those people that would've been like, 'I'm not cool with this.'
But Nat Turner happens in a context. So the other part of me is like,
What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in
an open-air prison, and I had a little sister who had leukemia and
needed treatment but couldn't get it because my dad or my mom couldn't
get the right pass out? You know what I mean? What would I do if my
brother had been shot for getting too close to the barrier? What would
I do if my uncle had been shot because he's a fisherman and he went
too far out? And if that wall went down and I came through that wall,
who would I be? Can I say I'd be the person that says, 'Hey, guys,
hold up. We shouldn't be doing this'? Would that have been me?"
Ta-Nehisi Coates: [08-21]
A Palestinian American's place under the Democrats' big tent?:
"Though the Uncommitted movement is lobbying to get a Palestinian
American on the main stage, the Harris campaign has not yet approved
one. Will there be a change before Thursday -- and does the Democratic
Party want that?" In the end, the DNC didn't allow a Palestinian
speaker, calling into question their "big tent" commitment, and
exposing how invisible and unfelt Palestinians have become even
among people who profess to believe in democracy, equal rights,
human rights, peace and social justice.
Zack Beauchamp: [09-24]
The Israel-Palestine conflict is in fact complicated and difficult to
resolve fairly.
Invariably, posts like these attract the absolute stupidest people
who prove why it needs saying in the first place.
PS: I replied: Reminds me of a joke: how many psychiatrists does
it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb really has
to want to change. Palestinians have tried everything; nothing worked,
so it looks difficult. But Israel has offered nothing. If they did,
it would be easy.
Many comments, preëmptively dismissed by Beauchamp, make similar
points, some harshly, others more diplomatically. One took the
opposite tack, blaming it all on Palestinian rejection of Israel's
good intentions -- basically a variation on the argument that when
one is being raped, one should relax and enjoy it. The key thing
is that Israelis have always viewed the situation as a contest of
will and power, where both sides seek to dominate the other, which
is never acceptable to the other. When dominance proves impossible,
the sane alternative is to find some sort of accommodation, which
allows both sides most of the freedoms they desire. That hasn't
happened with Israel, because they've always felt they were if
not quite on the verge of winning, at least in such a dominant
position they could continue the conflict indefinitely. Given
that presumption, everything else is rationalization.
One comment cites Ta-Nehisi Coates:
For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and
immediate: Here, he writes, was a "world where separate and unequal
was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet
for others was policy." And this world was made possible by his own
country: "The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the
specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means
it had my imprimatur."
That it was complicated, he now understood, was "horseshit."
"Complicated" was how people had described slavery and then segregation.
"It's complicated," he said, "when you want to take something from
somebody."
Zachary D Carter: [09-25]
Biden's Middle East policy straightforwardly violates domestic and
international law.
In just about every other respect Biden's foreign policy operation
has been admirable, but the damage he has done to international
conceptions of the U.S. with his Middle East program is on par
with George W. Bush.
PS: I replied: Funny, I can't think of any aspect of Biden
foreign policy as admirable, even in intent, much less in effect.
Same hubris, hollow principles, huge discounts for shameless
favorites (arms, oil, $$). Even climate is seen as just rents.
Israel is the worst, but the whole is rotten.]
I saw this in a Facebook image, and felt like jotting it down
(at some point I should find the source):
Banksy on Advertising
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your
life, ttakle a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you
from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant
comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the
fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend
feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated
technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They
are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual
property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they
like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no chance
whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and
re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is
like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially
don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the
world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your
permission, don't . . .
Quite some time ago, I started writing a series of little notes
on terms of interest -- an idea, perhaps inspired by Raymond Williams'
book
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, that I've
kept on a cool back burner ever since. One of the first entries
was on advertising, and as I recall -- I have no idea where this
writing exists, if indeed it does -- it started with: "Advertising
is not free speech. It is very expensive . . ." Williams would
usually start with the history of the word, including etymology,
then expand on its current usage. I was more focused on the latter,
especially how words combine complex and often nuanced meanings,
and how I've come to think through those words. Advertising for
me is not just a subject I have a lot of personal experience in --
both as consumer or object and on the concept and production side --
but is a prism which reveals much about our ethics and politics.
In particular, it testifies to our willingness to deceive and to
manipulate one another, and our tolerance at seeing that done,
both to others and to oneself.
In looking this up, I found a few more useful links on
Raymond Williams (1981-88) and Keywords:
The Raymond Williams Society:
Contemporary Keywords. "Every year our journal Key Words
includes a new "keyword," usually linked to the general 'theme' of
the issue, in the tradition of Williams's historical analysis."
These were written by Tony Crowley: class, commitment, crisis,
post-truth, privilege, scouse, the Raymond Williams Society also
publishes a
journal and a
blog.
File opened: 2024-09-17 2:05 PM. Wrapping it up, rather arbitrarily,
on Monday afternoon. I feared I would have little time to work on my
weekly posts this week (and next, and the week after, when we expect
visitors), so I limited my hopes to picking up a few links for future
reference, collected in my spare time. This has grown larger than I
expected, especially as I opened up and wrote several lengthy comments.
Such informal writing comes easy, and feels substantive, where my more
ambitious concepts so often flounder. So I count this as therapeutic,
regardless of whether it's of value to anyone else.
My one ambitious concept this week was to write up an outline of
an introduction, which would provide some kind of "executive summary"
of current events. As events change little from week to week -- for
some time now I've been starting each week with a skeletal template,
which I refine and reuse -- it occurred to me that I could come up
with a boilerplate introduction, which I could then copy and edit
from week to week, but would cover the main points I keep returning
to in scattered comments.
I came up with that idea back on Thursday, but here it is Monday
and I still haven't started on it. So maybe next week? I'll start
with a blanket endorsement of Harris and all Democrats, not because
I especially like them but because they're the only practical defense
against Republicans, who are set on a program to do you great harm,
and in some cases get you killed. Then we'll talk about inequality
and war, which top my list of the world's problems -- not that we
can ignore the latter, but fixing them is really hard without ending
war and reducing inequality. And when it comes to war and inequality,
no example is more horrific than Israel, which as you'll read below,
took a sudden, bizarre turn for the worse last week. Back in October,
I explained my plan for ending the Gaza war. My thinking has evolved
a bit since then, and it would be good to update it and keep it
current.
I woke up early (way too early for me) Tuesday morning, and found
this in my mailbox from Mazin Qumsiyeh (I've replaced URLs with
linked article titles):
A regional war has just been officially declared and will likely
soon become a global war. This accelerated with Netanyahu's refusal
to do a prisoner swap and ceasefire deal for Gaza for 11 months
(even against the wishes of his military commanders) with no prospect
of that changing which meant continuation of the genocide and
conflict with Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq (yes supportive resistance
forces to Israeli imperial hegemony). The Israeli regime escalated
with a series of terrorist attacks on Lebanon including rigging
pagers and walkie-talkies to explode killing and injuring scores
of civilians. Then attacked Beirut apoartment buildings, then in
the past 24 hours attacked homes throughout Lebanon killing 500
Lebanese civilians (most women and children like in Gaza)
Israel escalates its military attacks in Lebanon, targeting
residential areas and civilians with intense raids.
And yes the resistance from Lebanon and Gaza continues to target
Israeli military forces. And attacks on the West Bank continue so
that they can depopulate us
Inside the brutal siege of Jenin.
An Interfaith Dispatch From the West Bank: Rabbis for Ceasefire
and Hindus for Human Rights make a peace pilgrimage (mentions us):
An interfaith dispatch from the West Bank.
[09-16]
Day 345: Israel threatens Lebanon again: "Israeli settler
violence continues to terrorize Palestinians in the Jordan Valley
as the U.S. envoy arrives in the region to deescalate tensions
along Lebanon's southern border."
[10-19]
Day 349: Nasrallah says 'we wish' Israel invades Lebanon: "Following
the Lebanon pager explosion attacks, Nasrallah said an Israeli invasion
would be a 'historic opportunity' to target Israeli forces. Earlier in
the week, Israel razed an entire residential block in central Gaza,
killing at least 40 people."
[09-23]
Day 353: Israel launches bombing campaign on Lebanon as Hezbollah
retaliates: "Israel's intensifying bombardment of Lebanon has
killed at least 274 people so far, while Hezbollah retaliates with
rockets across Israel. The Israeli army also raided and forcibly
shut down the Ramallah office of Al Jazeera."
Prior to the current war, Gaza had 150 small-scale desalination
plants to produce potable water. By mid-October 2023, Israeli
missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants;
and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water
treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them. Gaza's
drinking water production capacity dropped to just
5 percent of typical levels.
With no power to run Gaza's five wastewater treatment plants,
sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record
increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By December 2023, cases
of diarrhea among children under 5 in Gaza jumped 2000%, because
of which children under five are over
20 times more likely to die than from Israeli military violence.
Ibrahim Mohammad: [09-18]
The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday: "For
thousands of Palestinian parents, the joy of giving birth rapidly
turned to grief when their newborn babies were killed by Israel's
bombardment."
The increase in settler violence against Palestinians in the West
Bank over the past year has been unprecedented. Since Hamas' Oct. 7,
2023, attack and the start of the war, there have been more than
1,000 attacks, according to
a new report from the International Crisis Group.
The spike, which has
raised international alarm, is often blamed on the permissive
policies of Israel's right-wing government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to a
U.N. investigation, nearly half of all settler attacks documented
in October 2023 were conducted in collaboration with, or in the
presence of, Israeli military forces.
Tala Ramadan: [09-11]
Gaza faces a massive reconstruction challenge. Here are key facts
and figures: "Billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild
Gaza when the war between Israel and the Palestinian militant
group Hamas ends, according to assessments from the United Nations.
Here is a breakdown of the destruction in Gaza."
Meron Rapoport: [09-17]
A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam: "As Israeli
ministers, generals, and academics bay for a decisive new phase in
the war, this is what Operation Starvation and Extermination would
look like."
America's Israel (and Israel's America):
Michael Arria:
[09-19]
Jill Stein leads Kamala Harris among Muslim voters in swing states
as Palestine supporters weigh choices amid Gaza genocide: "A
recent poll shows Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein
beating Kamala Harris among Muslim voters in multiple swing states
as pro-Palestinian voters weigh the upcoming U.S. presidential race."
I'm skeptical of any such polling, and not just because third-party
support tends to evaporate in the closing days of the season. The
article doesn't go into much detail about either the poll details
or the question of how many voters are we really talking about here.
CAIR estimates that there are over 2.5 million Muslim voters in
the US (75% born in the US, 20-25% African-American), so about 1.5%
of all registered voters. Contrary to the headline, the
CAIR poll shows Harris slightly ahead of Stein, 29.4%% to 29.1%,
trailed by Trump (11.2%), Cornel West (4.2%), and Chase Oliver (the
Libertarian, 0.8%), with 16.5% undecided and 8.8% not voting.
[09-19]
The Shift: Uncommitted Movement says it won't back Harris in election.
If you read the fine print, you'll see that while they refuse to endorse
Harris, they "oppose" Trump, and are "not recommending a third-party
vote in the Presidential election, especially as third party votes in
key states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given
our country's broken electoral college system." They don't talk about
not voting, but if you're leaning that way, please read the parts
about Trump again.
Akela Lacy:
Kamala Harris refused to meet with Uncommitted about Gaza -- and
Uncommitted refused to endorse her: "The movement counts among
its ranks many disillusioned Arab and Muslim voters in the key
swing state of Michigan." A pretty clear indication that Harris
calculated that an endorsement would expose her to more risk than
not. On the other hand, Harris has embraced (and presumably sought)
the endorsements of neocon hawks like the Cheneys, so factor that
into your risk assessment.
[09-17]
The Shift: Nearly 60% of Israelis say they'd vote for Trump:
"Former President and GOP nominee Donald Trump remains a popular
figure in Israel. A recent poll found that 58% of Israelis would
vote for Trump, while just 25% would vote for Harris."
This week Trump will give two speeches to pro-Israel audiences.
First, he'll speak to a group of Jewish supporters in DC about
countering antisemitism.
Jewish Insider's Matt Kassel reports that Orthodox
businessman Yehuda Kaploun and his business partner Ed Russo
will host the event.
A source told Kassel that the event will allow Trump to speak
with Jewish leaders "about his plans to combat the wave of antisemitism
and antisemitic behavior and enforce the laws for religious liberty
to all."
Miriam Adelson is expected to attend. The GOP megadonor is
reportedly set to spend more than $100 million to elect Trump
in November.
In DC Trump will also address the Israeli American Council's
(IAC) national convention. The IAC is led by lan Carr, who served
as the envoy to combat antisemitism under Trump. Its largest donor
is Adelson.
I understand why people are disturbed the level of reflexive
support for Israel that Harris has consistently shown, and how
tempting it is to punish her at the ballot box, but the candidate
who is most under Israel's thumb is clearly Trump. Harris at least
has the presence of mind and decency to decry and bemoan the war,
and offer that it must stop. Trump's allegiance is not just for
sale here. It's done been sold.
Nicole Narea: [09-18]
What we know about the pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon
and Syria: Unfortunately, Vox doesn't seem to know very much about
this wave of exploding tech devices -- hundreds of pagers on Tuesday,
followed by thousands of walkie-talkies on Wednesday, each packed with
remotely-detonated explosives, and allegedly distributed by Hezbollah
in Lebanon and Syria -- and more importantly, isn't able or willing to
set the context and draw meaningful conclusions. Their subhed: "It's a
dangerous escalation in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel as
the war in Gaza rages on."
The first thing that needs to be noted is that the "conflict" is
extremely asymmetrical. The background is that Israel invaded Lebanon
in 1982, intervening in a civil war to bolster a Phalangist (fascist)
party thought to be favorable to Israel, which backed out of Beirut
but continued to occupy southern Lebanon, up to its withdrawal in
2000 (except for a small sliver of territory[*], which remains as
a sore point, which seems to be the point). Hezbollah developed as
the most effective resistance organization to Israeli occupation.
Once Israel withdrew (except for that sliver, see what I mean?),
Hezbollah's mission was complete, but since Israel never signed
any peace treaty with Lebanon, they continued to organize as a
deterrent against another Israeli attack (as happened in 2006).
Since then, except for that sliver, the only times Hezbollah
has fired (mostly missiles) at Israel has been in response to
Israel's periodic attacks on Lebanon. I'm convinced that Israel
does this simply to provoke responses that they can spin into
their cover story on Iran: Americans still bear a grudge against
Iran over 1979, a feud they've relentlessly stoked since the
1990s, as it gives Israel a threat which is beyond its means,
thus binding an American alliance that provides cover for their
real agenda, which is to erase the Palestinian presence in all
of Israel.
The US could end this farce immediately by making a separate
peace with Iran (and for good measure, with its alleged proxies
in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen). Obama took one step in that direction
with the JCPOA "nuclear deal," which was the only realistic
solution to "the Iranian nuclear threat" -- which Israelis had
played up since the early 1990s[**]. But Netanyahu denounced the
deal, and used the full power of the Israel lobby to undermine it,
leading to Trump's withdrawal, and Biden's failure to reinstate.
Had Israel been serious about the "nuclear threat," they would
have celebrated JCPOA. Had the US understood Israel's objectives,
they would have extended their "deal" with Iran to resolve other
disputes and normalize relations.
I had several other points in mind when I started writing this,
but they're more obvious from the reporting, which I'll continue
to collect below. Chief among them is that this is a patently
Israeli operation, combining as it does a fascination with high
tech and completely oblivious disregard for its impact on others,
or even for the damage it will do to the future reputation of
all Israelis. This is indiscriminate terrorism, on a huge scale.
Exactly who in Israel is immediately responsible for this isn't
yet clear, but whoever it is should be held responsible, first
and foremost by the Israeli people, but until that happens, it
is not unreasonable to sanction the state. Any nation, like the
US, which claims to be opposed to terrorism would be remiss in
not doing so.
The most similar event I can recall was the
Chicago Tylenol murders of 1982, which was probably the work
of a single rogue individual (although it was followed by several
copycat crimes, and was never definitively solved). The maker of
Tylenol (Johnson & Johnson) took extraordinary measures to
restore consumer trust (see
How the Tylenol murders of 1982 changed the way we consume
medication). While similar in terms of sowing mistrust, this
case is orders of magnitude larger, and is likely to prove much
more difficult for Israel to manage. No one ever thought for a
moment that Johnson & Johnson wanted to poison customers,
but Netanyahu's hands are not just tainted but dripping blood.
Even if he is not personally responsible for this, the war and
genocide are clearly his work, in conception and commission,
and in his consistent refusal to end or even limit it. Moreover,
there is no reason to trust Israel to investigate itself -- as
it has claimed many times in the past to do, covering up and/or
excusing many serious crimes along the way.
[*] This sliver is called Shebaa Farms. When Israel withdrew from
Lebanon, they continued to occupy this bit of land, arguing that it
was originally part of the Syrian Heights, which Israel has occupied
since 1967 (and later annexed, contrary to international law; it is
now better known as Golan Heights). See
Why is there a disputed border between Lebanon and Israel?.
[**] What changed for Israel in 1990 was that after Saddam Hussein
was defeated in Kuwait and bottled up and disarmed, they needed a new
"existential threat" to replace Iraq and maintain American support.
While the Ayatollahs weren't as chummy with Israel as the Shah had
been, they maintained cordial relations all through the 1980s -- by
far the most anti-American period of Iran's revolution. Israel helped
arm Iran as a counterweight to Iraq's ambitions (including their role
in Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, which gave them insight into America's
schizoid reaction to overthrowing the CIA-installed Shah). Trita Parsi
explains all of this in Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings
of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007).
Mitchell Plitnick: [09-18] I scraped this off Facebook.
A friend asked me how I come to say that Israel targeted civilians
with their attack on pagers purchased by Hezbollah.
Here is my response:
So let's start with this: being a Hezbollah "operative" does not
make one a legitimate target nor does it mean you're not a civilian.
Hezbollah operatives include clerks, messengers, secretaries, even
medical workers. Bear in mind, Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese
government. Its activities cover a lot more than military actions.
Therefore, targeting Lebanese people for their connection to Hezbollah
is no different from targeting the janitor in the IDF's Tel Aviv
headquarters. It's targeting civilians.
Second, I am told by people I know and have seen it confirmed by
at least two Lebanese journalists that many recipients of these pagers
are not military. Israel certainly knows that.
Third, Israel detonated these pagers en masse. They certainly knew
they were sure to be in populated areas, with women and children nearby,
but they certainly did NOT know who actually had each pager. That's not
collateral damage. That's intentionally targeting civilians.
Any ambiguity in any of this is negated by the fact that this is a
blatant violation of international law, specifically the
Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons which explicitly bars
booby-trapping ordinary items. Israel is a High Contracting Party to
Article II, where this prohibition is seen:
4. "Booby-trap" means any device or material which
is designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which
functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an
apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act.
3. It is prohibited in all circumstances to use any mine,
booby-trap or other device which is designed or of a nature to
cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.
4. Weapons to which this Article applies shall strictly comply
with the standards and limitations specified in the Technical Annex
with respect to each particular category.
5. It is prohibited to use mines, booby-traps or other devices
which employ a mechanism or device specifically designed to detonate
the munition by the presence of commonly available mine detectors as
a result of their magnetic or other non-contact influence during
normal use in detection operations.
I'm very comfortable calling this the deliberate targeting of
civilians.
Mohammed Mourtaja: [09-20]
The Israeli war on Lebanon's hidden goal: Gaza's full erasure:
"While the world's attention shifts to Lebanon, Israel may pursue
another darker goal -- completing its ethnic cleansing of Gaza."
I don't see where this "may" comes from. There's little chance that
Israel is going to lose its focus on Palestinians by kicking off a
war with Lebanon -- unless they've underestimated the consequences
(as happened in 2006). For Israel, Hezbollah is a diversion, one
meant to keep the Americans engaged as allies (because, you know,
we all fear and hate Iran). Israelis know better than anyone that
the easiest way to get away with genocide is to bury it in a bigger
war (like, you may recall, Hitler did).
[09-18]
Israel's true objectives in Gaza and why it will fail: "Never in
its history of war and military occupation has Israel been so incapable
of developing a coherent plan for its future and the future of its
victims." But when have they ever had a coherent post-war plan? On
various occasions, they've made concessions to American opinion, but
they've never been held to anything more than a temporary compromise.
And the Biden administration is so confused and spineless they hardly
have to go through the motions anymore. But the core problem, which
is one that Americans find impossible to relate to, is how Israelis
expect to always be at war with people who can never stop wanting
to kill them. If your wars are forever, you don't need any sort of
postwar vision.
Mazin Qumsiyeh: Links from his latest newsletters,
one new, most old, but his writings rarely lose their relevance,
as new events more often than not just confirm his insights.
[01-01]
2024: Year-end report, personal achievements (research papers,
etc.), plans for the coming year.
[2023-11-12]
Are we being duped to focus only on Gaza suffering? This is an
even bigger question today, as coverage of Gaza has settled into a
mind-numbing tedium while Israelis have escalated attacks on the
West Bank, and working hard to provoke a war with Hezbollah which
will only further cloud their operations against Palestinians. The
first two paragraphs here (my bold) are so accurate one has to
wonder about all the pundits back then who were (and in many cases
still are) clueless.
Israel's genocide of Gaza is intentional, planned and ongoing with
no sign of slowing down. The contrary, with no water, food and
medicine it is accelerating. Israel leaders boast openly that they
do not care about what the UN, ICC, or ICJ say. Israeli fascist
leaders say they do not care what statements are issued by governments.
Nor do they care if public pressure causes some western leaders to
moderate their "language" stating there is a "humanitarian catastrophe"
unfolding in Gaza (without naming the perpetrator and continuing to
support physically the genocide). Israel actually can use the
humanitarian catastrophe (as if it is an act of God not their agency)
as bargaining chips. The focus on "ceasefire negotiations" is actually
a very clever strategy to continue the genocidal occupation and for
impunity from facing tribunals for war crimes and crimes against
humanity.
Israeli leaders are crystal clear about their crimes and they get
their way by genocide and total state terrorism against populations.
If you have any doubt, listen to them (see below). They even say
openly that if Hizbollah continues its resistance in South Lebanon,
then all of Lebanon will pay a devastating price and Beirut will be
like Gaza (i.e. totally devastated). Israeli military spokesmen
gave the same threats to cities in the West Bank like Jenin and
Tulkarem and even Ramallah. These are not idle threats. Many were
complicit with Israeli apartheid regime by suppressing the truth
and giving weapons to commit genocide. According to Israeli leaders
global public opinion and "diplomatic" pressure will not end its
carnage done to promote colonialism and greed. Many human rights
advocates are at a loss as to how to end the carnage. While people
focus on the carnage, few address its underlying cause. It is like
focusing on suffering in concentration camps without identifying
the source of that suffering (or even worse blaming the victims).
Next line is a bit inflammatory ("Extreme nationalism leads to
genocide: Nazis and Zionists"), but the error there is assuming
causality from consequences. Extreme nationalism may be a necessary
precondition, but something more is also required: the hubris of
unchecked, unaccountable power. Plenty of kneejerk nationalists
all around the world, but in Israel they've achieved a sense of
invincibility unmatched since Hitler's Germany. That one exemplar
claims to be for Jews and the other against just how unimportant
the category is.
[2023-07-03]
Hope: present and future: Starts with an Israeli atrocity which,
needless to say, predates the Oct. 7 Hamas revolt, and the even
greater Israeli atrocities since then.
[2023-06-29]
Changing ourselves: "As a zoologist and geneticist I am always
puzzled about human (optimistically named Homo sapiens) behavior."
[09-22]
End of empire? His grasp of US politics is less assured here.
While his critique of Trump is sound enough, his points against
the Democrats are harsh where I would be more generous. To pick
out two of five:
Harris courting of the lobby and supporting genocide
undermines any remnant of illusion progressives,
the Democrat party is corrupt and worked hand in
glove with republicans against allowing other parties.
The American political system is such that it is impossible for
anyone to win without picking up a whiff of corruption. While some
Democrats play that game as adeptly as Republicans, and when they
can, shower their donors with favors as readily, most also see and
feel some obligation to serve their constituents, or more generally
"all the people." One thing nearly all Democrats have in common is
their loathing for Trump and his shock troops, and this is almost
always due to how repulsive they find the effect of his programs
on ordinary people. The Israel lobby has done a masterful job of
disappearing Palestinian humanity, but most Democrats can still
see through that veil -- and, unlike most Republicans, once they
see they will care and act. It's not unreasonable to hope that
eventually their leaders, including Harris, will follow their
rank and file [there's a good Gandhi quote I could look up and
insert here]. This may seem like faint hope, but Qumsiyah has
written eloquently about his hopes. I'm not going to deny that
Harris, following Biden, has been complicit in and supportive
of genocide and other hideous crimes against human rights, but
I still believe that their support is squishy and conflicted,
far from the hardened determination of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and
now Netanyahu, who would rather join Hitler in the bunker than
give up their life's work.
Mona Shtaya: [09-16]
Israel is joining the first global AI convention, here's why that's
dangerous: "Over the last year Israel has weaponized AI in its
genocide in Gaza, deploying AI-driven surveillance and automated
targeting systems which has killed tens of thousands. Israel's
participation in the first global AI treaty raises serious
questions."
Andrew Prokop: [09-17]
What happened to Nate Silver: I'm not sure he was ever all that
"beloved by progressives." In his 538 days, his focus was on getting
it right, which meant anticipating contests Republicans would win,
and calling them emphatically enough to claim the win. He started
out as a useful corrective to a lot of polling bullshit, but after
he blew the 2016 election, he overcompensated and turned into just
another annoying pundit.
Trump:
Sasha Abramsky:
[09-20]
There's no low Trump won't go: "The Republican presidential
nominee is peddling lies about Haitian migrants and blaming the
Democrats after a thwarted assassination attempt."
Zack Beauchamp: [09-18]
Why Trump's lies about Haitians are different: "Trump says nasty
things about immigrants all the time. But these ones have disturbingly
specific Nazi parallels."
Eric Levitz: [09-18]
Trump's healthcare plan exposes the truth about his "populism":
Following up on Trump's "concepts of a plan," we find they support
"populism of the privileged," using the magic of deregulation to
make more affordable for the healthy and more expensive (and prone
to fraud) for everyone else. Really just a special case of Trump's
concepts about tax policy and business.
Zak Cheney-Rice: [09-20]
Mark Robinson has been hiding in plain sight. He's the current
Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, and the Republican candidate
for Governor this year. He's, well, . . .
Eduardo Medina: [09-22]
Top aides resign from embattled North Carolina candidate's campaign:
"Most of the senior staff members on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson's campaign
for North Carolina governor resigned on Sunday after reports that he
had made a series of disturbing online comments."
Chris Lehmann: [09-04]
The never-ending grift of DC influence peddling: "Right-wing
fraudsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman got caught lying about their
lobbying firm, but K Street has long been a breeding ground for
bottom-feeding grifters." This is a truly bipartisan problem, and
some Democrats pursue grift as avidly as many Republicans -- Bob
Menendez and Krysten Sinema leap to mind -- but Republicans have
raised it to a cultural ideal. Links here to a couple of old "more
on grifter politics" articles (and underscore the Republican link):
Mike Konczal: [2017-11-02]
Trump is creating a grifter economy: "The White House economic
plans help the scheming and powerful swindle ordinary Americans."
Elie Mystal: [2022-09-16]
Trump's "big lie" was also a big grift: "The January 6 committee's
revelations that the Trump campaign raised money for a bogus 'Official
Election Defense Fund' point to criminal fraud."
Doug Henwood: [09-16]
Kamala's capitalist class: "Both parties have little trouble
attracting support from the superrich. But a closer look reveals
fissures within the ruling class."
Rebecca Picciotto: [09-21]
Harris raised 4 times more than Trump in donations for final election
sprint: Harris raised $189 million in August, compared to $44
million for Trump. Harris ended the month with $404 million in cash
on hand, "dwarfing Trump's $295 million war chest." Converting that
advantage in money into votes isn't straightforward, but Democrats
have a lot to work with here. The article doesn't break this down,
but I figure the fundraising advantage must come from two sources:
from the usual rich donors, who in substantial numbers are sick and
disgusted with Trump, and want to see him gone; and from small donors,
whose enthusiasm is unprecedented. People who put their money on the
line will also press their friends and acquaintances into voting,
and that's likely to determine how the election breaks. And while
most of the money will be spent on advertising, one thing I've
been noticing is how much more "ground game" focus there is among
Democrats this year -- living in Kansas, the norm is zero, so what
I'm seeing is not just unprecedented, but orders of magnitude.
And the good news in bad polls is that no one's counting chickens
before they're hatched. The race is on.
Sara Swann: [09-11]
Why Harris' debate remarks about US military in combat zones is
misleading: I noted her comment in passing, and linked to an
article on it (Joshua Keating:
Biden and Harris say America's no longer at war. Is that true?),
but didn't attempt to discern whether there was any technical
plausibility behind the gross misrepresentation. This popped up
again when Heather Cox Richardson tweeted:
Harris is shifting the
Afghanistan question to point out that the US has no troops in
combat zones in the world right now.
To which Greg Grandin replied:
Because it is as much a lie as Haitians eating cats.
So I did a bit of digging here. This turns on the term "combat
zone," which has some effect on soldiers' pay and benefits, but
not everyone's clear on this. PolitiFact says the assertion is
"mostly false." Here are a couple more references:
Rick Perlstein: [08-26]
Say it to my face: "How Democrats learned to tell the plain
truth and like it." Perlstein's columns have been terrific ever
since he started writing for American Prospect, but somehow I
missed this one, which came out of the DNC without being explicit
about it (well, until the end). He gives examples from Clinton,
Gore, Kerry ("the worst of them all"), and Obama. I don't think
Harris is totally past running from her own shadow, but she's
much better at at defending what's right, and attacking what's
wrong.
Elie Mystal: [09-17]
How John Roberts went full MAGA: "A revealing article in The
New York Times details how the chief justice put his thumb on
the scale for Trump to keep him on the ballot and out of jail."
The article:
Jodi Kantor/Adam Liptak: [09-15]
How Roberts shaped Trump's Supreme Court winning streak: "Behind
the scenes, the chief justice molded three momentous Jan. 6 and
election cases that helped determine the former president's fate."
John Cassidy: [09-18]
How inflation fooled almost everybody: "With the Fed poised to
cut rates for the first time in years, what have we learned about
the economic disruptions of the pandemic era?"
Ryan Cooper: [08-05]
The case for pragmatic socialism: "The times are right for a
socialist agenda that America can accept. We even have examples of
it in practice." I held this piece back for later perusal, but I
rather doubt I'm ever going to finish reading it, much less argue
with it. In my philosophy days, I was fairly simpatico both with
Marxism and with Pragmatism, and never saw much of a problem there.
(I certainly knew a lot more of Marxism, but I read a fair amount
of Charles Peirce, and also of Kant and various neo-Kantians like
Robert Paul Wolff -- although I gather he spent more time critiquing
pragmatists than swimming with them.) At least the focus on praxis
was shared, along with the suspicion of metaphysics. The thing is,
I have very little interest in salvaging "socialism" as a slogan,
even though I admire both the theory and the legacy, and I'm willing
to do my bit in defense of both. I just think that at this point a
fresh start might work better. There's something pragmatist in that,
isn't there?
Jeffrey St Clair: [09-20]
Roaming Charges: Cat scratch political fever: Starts with
"Miss Sassy started the biggest political fire since Mrs. O'Leary's
cow kicked over a lamp and burned down Chicago." So, with Trump
and Vance. Then includes a picture captioned "When sleazy immigrants
[Don Jr. and Eric Trump] sneak into your country and kill your cats."
Obituaries
Books
Wendy Brown: [09-09]
The enduring influence of Marx's masterpiece: "No book has done
more than Capital to explain the way the world works." Essay
"adapted from the foreword to the first English translation of
Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 in 50 years."
Somehow, I don't recall this "famous turn of phrase" that Brown cites:
"Capital is dead labor that acts like a vampire: It comes to life when
it drinks more living labor, and the more living labor it drinks, the
more it comes to life." Brown continues:
Capital's requirements of increased labor exploitation over time --
exploiting more workers and exploiting them more intensively -- and
in space -- ever expanding markets for its commodities -- constitute
the life and death drives of capitalism, drives that are as insatiable
as they are unsustainable. They reduce the masses to impoverishment,
concentrate wealth among the few, and pile up crises that spell the
system's eventual collapse, overthrow, or, as we have later learned,
reinventions through the social state, the debt state, neoliberalism,
financialization, and the asset-enhancing and de-risking state. Since
growth is essential for what Marx called the "realization of surplus-value"
or profit, capitalist development becomes an almighty shredder of all
life forms and practices, including its own recent ones. From small
shops, family farms, and cities to gigantic industries, rain forests,
and even states, everything capital makes or needs it will eventually
also destroy. In Marx's summary, "Capitalist production thus advances . . .
only by damaging the very founts of all wealth: the earth and the
worker."
I'm reminded here of how easy it is to explain all of the world's
ills with one word: "capitalism." That's the lesson drawn by every
person who ever fell under Marx's spell, but reading this now I'm
most struck by the insatiability of the process, which dialectically
impels us to limit and regulate growth. Even now, when we've seen
much of the harm capitalism can do, and as we've clearly benefited
from many efforts to limit its rapacity, that's still a tough sell
to many otherwise well-meaning people (e.g., "progressives," who
still hope to grow our way out of all earthly hardships).
James Miller: [09-19]
Karl Marx, weirder than ever: "What good is one of the communist
thinker's most important texts to 21st-century readers?"
The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood
ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic
plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the
audience ("I don't get it -- when did he say he was coming back?"),
are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between
the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place.
That ending -- the Book of Revelation -- has every element that
Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned
land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands
of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for
Megan Fox. ("And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and'
she repented not.")
I have this mental image of a certain type of 19th century Midwest
farmer-intellectual who thinks that all of the world's knowledge --
past, present, and future -- is locked in the pages of the Bible,
waiting to be explored and conquered by obsessive scholars like
themselves. I even have a specific name in mind: Abraham Lincoln
Hull, my great-grandfather, born on an arid west Kansas homestead
in 1870, shortly after his father (plain Abraham Hull) moved out
from Pennsylvania, after the Civil War. He was a sheep rancher,
but I've heard him described as "the laziest human being ever." I
suspect he was just lost in his thoughts, which fed into sideline
jobs of teaching and preaching. I never knew him, but I did know,
until I approached 15 and he died at 70, thereby confirming his
own biblically-derived prophecy. He also farmed, taught school,
dressed up for church, and pondered Revelations. One of the few
times when he asked me a question was when he was trying to figure
out whether the founding of Israel was proof that the second coming
was imminent. I lacked the presence of mind to figure out whether
he was a premillennial or postmillennial dispensationalist, but I
was struck by the crackpot nature of the question, and I've recalled
the moment every time I've seen or heard of Christian Zionists wax
on the subject -- going back at least as far as David Lloyd George
in approving the Balfour Declaration.
As it turned out, my father had his own very different take on
Revelation, but I never made the slightest effort to understand
his, just noting that it was opposed to my grandfather's, and
suspecting that, as with most of his theories of everything, it
erred on the side of the whimsical. Eventually, I realized that
I too was fated to have a theory of Revelation, even without
having read more than the occasional isolated verse (which is
the only way I ever approached the Bible -- the idea that one
could just read it as literature, like The Gilgamesh or
Moby Dick, only occurred to me when I saw it listed in
the Great Books curriculum). My theory is that the book was
tacked onto the end of the Bible as a reveal, one of those joke
endings that exposes everything that had come before it as an
elaborate hoax. That suggests more intention than I can imagine
early Christian clerics as being capable of. Still, some of the
most dedicated scholars have easily wandered into reductio
ad absurdum, especially when the subject is religion.
While my "theory" was never more than a joke, it was pretty
clearly derived from insights I gleaned while reading a book
about Judaism:
Douglas Rushkoff: Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.
Rushkoff's thesis is that the internal logic of Judaism functions
as an aid in helping you get through and past and over religion.
The book isn't fresh enough in my mind to do justice to here (not
that I have the time, anyway), but I will note that I had spent a
lot of time on the history and evolution of puritanism, and found
a similar dynamic at play there (e.g., the unitarians are direct
descendants yet perhaps the most secular and tolerant sect in all
of Christendom; but far more significant is the liberation puritan
theology allowed to turn into "the protestant ethic and the spirit
of capitalism").
Ed Park:
Nuance and nuisance: on the Village Voice: Review of
Tricia Romano's oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The
Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That
Changed American Culture.
My overarching argument is continuous with the one I developed in
Family Values [2017, subtitle: Between Neoliberalism and
the New Social Conservatism]. I question the idea that the neoliberal
counterrevolution of the early 1980s was a backlash against Keynesianism
as such. Instead, I see it as a backlash against the leftist social
movements of the late 1960s and '70s, which were already engaged in a
kind of immanent critique of actually existing Keynesianism. . . .
My basic argument is that neoliberals of different stripes managed
to create a regime of extreme public spending austerity for those
primarily dependent on wage income, while at the same time ushering
in a regime of radical spending and monetary extravagance for financial
asset owners. We tend to see only the austerity side of the equation --
hence the illusion that this is all about the retreat of the state.
But it's hard to explain the extreme wealth concentration that has
occurred in recent decades if we don't also understand the multiple
ways in which financial wealth is actively subsidized by the state.
There's quite a bit here on how capital gains taxation (or lack
thereof) subsidizes asset inflation -- my term, not a very popular
one as it suggests assets aren't really worth as much as they seem,
and also that inflation, like money, is "good for the rich but bad
for the poor" (as Lewis Lapham liked to put it). Also more details
on how the "Virginia school neoliberals" (like James Buchanan)
"dovetailed" with the "supply siders" - despite different concepts,
both sought to make the rich richer, at the expense of everyone
else. Then back to politics:
Having said this, I don't think economic liberalism as such ever
works alone; it always works in alliance with some species of
conservatism. This may be the communitarian/neoliberal alliance
of a Third Way Democrat like Bill Clinton, or the neoconservative
neoliberalism of George W. Bush.
In today's Republican Party, we have something that looks like
a neoliberal/paleoconservative alliance, and this brings complexities
of its own. Paleoconservatism has clear connections to the white
supremacist and theocratic far right; as a movement, it defines
itself in opposition to neoconservatism, which it sees as too
secular, too liberal, too internationalist, and too Jewish.
However, the kinds of economic alliances made by paleoconservatives
have been quite diverse. [Mentions Koch-favorite Murray Rothbard,
drawing on Ludwig von Mises; "Ayn Rand devotee" Alan Greenspan;
Pat Buchanan.] . . .
I would say the contemporary Republican Party draws on all of
these influences, Trump more haphazardly than others. In his first
election campaign, Trump seemed to embody the kind of paleoconservative
national protectionist policies espoused by Pat Buchanan or Steve
Bannon -- and certainly on the issue of trade with China, he followed
through on this.
JD Vance sounds like he espouses an anti-neoliberal national
protectionist position too, but then again he is one of several
Republican right operators who are funded by the ultra-libertarian
Peter Thiel. What unites these people is their affiliation to
far-right paleoconservatism and their immersion in the world of
private investment. This underwrites a deeply patrimonial,
autarchic, and atavistic outlook that is sometimes dressed up
in the garb of a more progressive anti-corporate agenda.
Means testing is divisive, wasteful and punitive: [09-19]
Israel has shown itself as a metastasizing threat to the whole
world. Are you going to be comfortable getting on a plane with
people carrying Israeli-made products?
Jeff Sharlet: [09-23]
49% of the class of '23 at Dartmouth, where I [t]each, went into
finance or consulting. Even were [I] the most ardent capitalist --
I am really not that -- this would be a crushing statistic. So
much energy, education, & intellect hoovered up by one sector.
[I might have added: which produces nothing of value, being mostly
parasitic, and often just predatory.]
Tony Karon: [09-24]
Israel -- a Jewish supremacist state created by violently displacing
the indigenous Palestinian majority -- was built on racist contempt
for Arab life, limb and property. It is maintained today by the same
people -- for Israel and its US backers, Arab lives don't matter.
[image of headline: Israeli air strikes kill 492 people in
Lebanon]
Local tags (these can be linked to directly):
music.
Original count: 135 links, 8611 words (11055 total).
Current count:
144 links, 9060 words (11622 total)
Opened this file on September 11, 1:27 PM, with the big debate
looming that evening. As I'm writing this Sunday evening, that
start seems like ages ago. Little chance I'll make my rounds
before nodding off tonight. I could see posting or of not, where
the main reason for posting is to move earlier into doing endlessly
delayed non-blog work.
Indeed, late Sunday night I decided to pack it in without posting.
I don't expect I'll need to add much on Monday. And in general,
I won't be circling back to publications I checked on Sunday, or
reporting news that only broke on Monday.
Finally posted this late Monday night. I ran into a lot of pieces
on Monday that added a lot of extra writing, in many cases including
regrets that I didn't have time to write even more. Even with the
extra day, I didn't make all the usual rounds. I also found myself
needing to search for further articles on specific topics, which
may wind up being a better way to go about doing this. I also hit
a bunch of paywalls. That's a horrible way to run a democracy, but
that's a rant for another day.
For what it's worth, this week, on initial post, has the most
words (15635) and the third most links (288, behind
317 and
290) of
any week since I embedded the counting software.
Rome's first emperor, Caesar Augustus, was seventy-two years old and
near the end of his rule when the legions suffered their catastrophic
defeat on the edge of the Great Bog. Germania's population was rural,
made up of farmer-warriors and their families living in small
settlements at the time of the battle. There were no real towns, and
private ownership of land had been unknown among the eastern
barbarians fifty years earlier when Caesar conquered Gaul. In general,
where colonial- and imperial-minded aggressors make their moves into
new territories and encounter indigenous people, often very numerous
and "complex, multi-lingual, culturally diverse," as the two groups
gradually mix and confront each other, tribal identities begin to take
shape and individual "tribal leaders" are named. For the aggressor,
this bundling is the opening process of controlling the indigenous
people who, up to that time, may not have seen themselves as
distinct tribes. Suddenly, they are corralled by identity to a
specific area.
The Roman system of conquest was to grant conquered people Roman
citizenship and involve them in Roman customs and culture. What Rome
got from its aggressive takeovers encircling the Mediterranean Sea
was an increase of manpower to serve in the army, slaves and money
from taxation of its new colonies.
The Roman legions were augmented by auxiliaries of men from
conquered lands. Yet many of the vanquished hated the Romans, their
martial ways, their enslavements, their self-proclaimed superiority,
their heavy taxes and their strutting presence as overseers and
governors in seized territories. At the same time the conquered
population wanted to be joined to the powerful, to visit glittering
Rome whence all roads led.
The next couple pages go into specifics about the battle, where
over 13,000 Roman troops were slaughtered at a loss of 500 Germans.
I had long been under the impression that the Roman Empire expanded
steadily up to its maximum under Hadrian (117-138 CE;
Wikipedia has maps from 117 and 125), but I've since learned
that history is messier. I first heard about the German bog debacle
after the Bush invasion of Iraq, when I
noted:
Of course, this will take a while to play out, but the logic of
self-destruction is clear. A while back Martin van Creveld compared
the Bush invasion of Iraq to the disastrous Roman invasion of Germany
in 9 BCE when Augustus marched his legions into a swamp, losing them
all.
By the time I wrote that, I had already
noted a comparable Roman military disaster, when in 53 BCE
Crassus led "across the Euphrates" into Iraq, where the desert
proved as debilitating as the German bog -- although in both cases
the real culprit was the Roman ego. Back then I was thinking more
about the hubris of the invaders, but one could just well focus on
the inevitability and resilience of resistance.
What Curtis knew of Indians was informed, in large part, by depictions
of dead natives he had seen in a book as a child. More than a thousand
Eastern Sioux had been rounded up following an 1862 raid on settlers
in Minnesota. The carnage was widespread in villages and farms in the
southwest part of the state; by one estimate, eight hundred whites
were killed in what became known as the Sioux Uprising. The Sioux had
been roused to violence by repeated violations of their treaty, and by
the mendacity of corrupt government agents who refused to make the
required payments from the pact. In defeat, after the uprising, the
Indians were sentenced to death. At the same time, many in Congress
demanded that all Indians be wiped from the map, echoing the view of
their constituents after the Sioux had caused so many casualties.
President Lincoln commuted the sentences of most of the insurgents.
But the death penalty remained for more than three dozen of them. On
December 16, 1862, they were all hanged, the largest mass execution
in American history. Curtis had studied an engraving of the lifeless
Sioux in Mankato, Minnesota. Necks snapped, faces cold -- it haunted
him. "All through life I have carried a vivid picture of that great
scaffold with thirty-nine Indians hanging at the end of a rope," he
wrote.
[09-09]
Day 339: Israel winds down West Bank operation, continues
blockade: "Palestinians in Nablus held a funeral procession
for a Turkish-American activist killed by Israeli forces in Beita.
Meanwhile, Israel continued to close its borders with Jordan for
the second day in a row following a shooting at Allenby bridge."
[09-16]
Day 345: Israel threatens Lebanon again: "Israeli settler
violence continues to terrorize Palestinians in the Jordan Valley
as the U.S. envoy arrives in the region to deescalate tensions
along Lebanon's southern border."
[09-12]
The Shift: Debate shows both candidates are in full agreement when
it comes to Palestine: "Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's first,
and possibly only, presidential debate showed there is no distance
between the two when it comes to Palestine." The author isn't looking
very closely, and he isn't considering what to him are side issues,
but which reveal major differences, so profound they should have
bearing on how each candidate will deal with events. But the debate
does provide a view of what each candidate thinks they can safely
say, and of whom they feel the need to confirm and appease. The
movement to oppose Israel's genocide has made many people aware
and uneasy, but that has yet to move the Democrats who depend on
donors for their livelihood.
Rachel Chason/Jennifer Hassan/Alon Rom/Niha Masih/Kareen
Fahim: [09-15]
Houthis fire missile from Yemen into central Israel, warn of more
strikes: "Israeli forces said the missile Sunday did not cause
any direct injuries, but Netanyahu threatens, 'we exact a heavy
price for any attempt to harm us.'"
Fred Kaplan: [09-11]
The key reason why we're not close to a cease-fire: That's an
easy one -- "Netanyahu refuses" -- but one should note that Biden
doesn't dare make his refusal the least bit awkward, even though
that simply reinforces the ideas that he is helpless as a leader
and/or he actually endorses as well as facilitates genocide.
Previous American presidents have generally been able to prevail
on Israeli leaders to make some gestures toward accommodating
American needs, even if they really didn't want to (withdrawing
from Sinai in 1957) and/or doublecrossed the Americans later
(basically, every time since). Also, what the hell is this?
Both sides' positions are reasonable, given their interests. Hamas
fears that without a permanent cease-fire and total withdrawal,
Israel will inflict utter devastation on all of its positions (and
suspected positions) after the last hostage is released. And Israel
fears that Hamas will attempt another Oct. 7 if the group isn't
first destroyed as a political and military power.
I mean, the Hamas position sounds reasonable, because that's
exactly what Israel is doing, and without a permanent ceasefire
has vowed to continue doing until the last Hamas fighter is dead,
even if they have to kill every other Palestinian to get to him.
But Israel has no grounds for any such "reasonable fear." Another
"Oct. 7," if indeed any such thing is possible, will only happen
if Israel recreates the same (or worse) conditions. There are
many ways to prevent further eruptions from Hamas. Killing every
Palestinian is the worst possible option.
Josephine Riesman/SI Rosenbaum: [09-10]
Kamala is sending a subtle message on Israel. Is anyone listening?
What she said in the debate was almost literally what she said in
her DNC acceptance speech. "Subtle" is one word for it, if you assume
that she's being completely honest, and has every intention of filling
out every little detail. Or, less generously, you could say she's being
cynical and deceptive. As I pointed out a while back, her "subtle"
message would be more effective if she reversed the order of terms,
and first bemoaned the massive destruction and loss of life before
touting her deep commitment to a secure Israel. At this point, when
most people hear "Israel's right to defend itself" they automatically
translate it to a license to commit mass murder, because that is
exactly what Israel has done every time they've uttered those magic
words.
The authors make their case at great length. I'm not completely
dismissive, but I'm far from convinced. I do have some feeling for
the pressure she is under, and of the stakes should she fail. I'm
personally willing to let this play out through November, after
which she will either have much more leverage, or will be totally
irrelevant. Partly for that reason, I've moved this discussion
away from the sections on Debate and Harris. But another part of
that reason is that I feel her critics for failing to come out
more clearly in favor of ceasefire and conflict resolution have
every cause to speak their piece. And even to vote against her
if they feel the need, although I think that would be a mistake,
especially as an attempt to move your fellow Americans to be
more critical and independent of Israel.
Here's part of the piece:
If you're trying to determine Harris' position on Israel from the
mainstream news media coverage of it, you're likely confused.
But taken together, Harris' statements and movements around Israeli
policy -- throughout her career but especially in recent months, after
the candidacy was bestowed on her -- do add up to something.
Norman Solomon: [09-11]
Undebatable: what Harris and Trump could not say about Israel and
Gaza: Starts with "Kamala Harris won the debate. People being
bombed in Gaza did not." Ends with: "Silence is a blanket that
smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral
voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the
functioning of the warfare state."
Ben Lorber: [09-05]
The right is increasingly exploiting the horror of genocide:
"Right-wing operatives are channeling the genocide in Gaza into
mainstream antisemitism." A report from the fifth annual National
Conservatism (NatCon) conference ("the cutting edge of the Trumpian
Right"). I'm not making a lot of sense out of this. Traditional
right-wing antisemites, including some NatCon grandees, have more
often been staunch supporters of Israel: Zionism both flatters
their prejudices and offers them hope for their own societies
becoming Judenrein. However, we're not dealing with especially
clear-headed thinkers here, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise
when they start confusing their complaints. Anyone who sees the
atrocities Israel is committing and conflates them with all Jews
(or even all Israeli Jews) is a fool -- and note that the most
flagrant offenders here are the propagandists who try to equate
any criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It's inevitable that
people who don't know any better will take this hint and run
with it, which seems to be Lorber's subject here.
[2023-11-21]
The ADL is making it less safe to be a progressive Jew: "In
our topsy-turvy reality, the organization most associated with
fighting antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League, has cast its
lot with antisemites." I found a couple more pieces from 2016,
which may still be useful as background, but also found this,
where the old date just adds to its current value:
Craig Mokhiber: [09-10]
No, Israel does not have a right to defend itself in Gaza. But
the Palestinians do. "Basic morality and simple logic dictate
that the right of self-defense belongs to the Palestinian people,
not to their oppressor. And international law agrees." True that
international law does recognize some right to self-defense, but
it is not a moral principle, and I am suspicious of whatever logic
you might think supports it. Although law often reinforces what we
take to be moral, it has to deal not just with what people should
do, but with real people in complex situations who do things that
do not always conform with morality. One thing that people often
do, whether by nature or culture, regardless of law, is attempt to
defend themselves. Self-defense is used to describe a wide range
of acts, from shielding your face from blows to throwing punches
of your own. Modern weapons magnify and accelerate both threats
and damage. Some are so powerful that they can harm bystanders,
who never were threats, so never needed to be defended against.
What law has to do is to decide whether self-defense
is understandable and/or excusable, or should be condemned and
possibly punished. To say self-defense is a right is to assert
that acts which otherwise would be considered criminal should
be not just tolerated but taken as exemplary, as precedents to
encourage others to even greater violence.
But in this specific case, to the extent that one allows such
a right, why shouldn't Palestinians enjoy it same as Israelis?
If you only allow Israel a right to self-defense, and allow it
so broadly, you're really just saying that you think Palestinians
are sub-human, that they don't count or matter, and might as well
be slaughtered indiscriminately. As the last year has proven,
that's no hypothetical. That's what Israel is doing, and anyone
who thinks they have a "right" to do so is simply aiding and
abetting genocide.
James Ray: [09-13]
Electoral politics are not the way forward for the Palestine
movement: "The question of how Palestine activists should
engage in electoral politics has split the movement, but the
2024 election season should clarify why they are not an effective
strategy for building power." I'll endorse the title, but the
article itself leans way to heavy on "the Palestine movement,"
which I have some sympathy for but little faith or interest in.
Electoral politics are set for the year, with nothing but the
voting left to do. While there are important issues and major
differences in candidates yet to be decided, lots of issues
aren't on the ballot, including America's support for Israel's
genocide against Palestinians -- which is how I prefer framing
the issue, as it seems much broader (of interest to many more
people) and deeper (of greater importance) than the question
of where and when one can fly Palestinian flags.
The movement, of course, can and must continue, using any
tactics that seem likely to move public and/or elite opinion --
anything that would put pressure on those in power to act to
halt these atrocities and start the long process of healing.
I can argue that those of you who are intensely concerned with
this issue should spend your vote on Harris and the rest of
the Democrats -- it's not much, but it's yours, and if you
don't vote, even out of righteous spite, you're wasting your
right to participate in even our bare minimum of democracy.
Also, by spoiling your vote, you're not just being negligent
but showing contempt for people who need your help on issues
that really matter to them -- the same people you need most
urgently for your issue.
I could also argue that Harris is more cognizant of and
amenable to further pressure on this issue. I'm not going to
plead this case here: it's just a feeling, not supported by
clear statements on her part, or by a track record which shows
any great will on her part to withstand the enormous pressures
the entire political systems puts on politicians like her to
pledge allegiance to Israel. My own inclination is to not just
vote for her but to give her a free pass through November, as
I don't see any constructive value in further embarrassing her
on this issue (or in encouraging her to embarrass herself by
reiterating her blanket support for Israel). But I'm not saying
that anyone active on this issue should stop talking about it,
and I'm not going to be holding any grudges against others who
can't help but include her among the many American political
figures who are complicit in this genocide. For pretty much
the same reason, I may think that people who self-identify as
"pro-Palestinian" have a dubious grasp of political tactics, I
bear them no ill-feeling, because they at least are committed
to opposing Israel's hideous and shameful reign of terror.
Until the atrocities are stopped, whatever thoughts they may
have about Palestinian statehood are mere curiosities.
By the way, don't give Trump the same free pass until the
election. Feel free to point out how his presidency contributed
to the conditions that elected Israel's ultra-right government,
that cornered and prodded Hamas into their desperate Oct. 7
revolt, and that revealed so many Republicans as genocide's
biggest cheerleaders. This is not just a matter of setting the
historical record straight, but it directly counters the ridiculous
notion that Trump is some kind of antiwar candidate.
Stephen Semler: [09-12]
Is Israel intentionally attacking aid workers? "We've compiled
14 incidents where humanitarians were attacked despite giving the
IDF their coordinates and being clearly identified as civilians."
The Harris-Trump debate:
Vox [Andrew Prokop/Nicole Narea/Christian Paz]: [09-10]
3 winners and 2 losers from the Harris-Trump debate: The winners
were: Kamala Harris, ABC News's debate moderators (David Muri and
Linsey Davis), and Swifties for Kamala; the losers: Donald Trump,
and Immigration. Once again, the Vox writer were out in force:
Joshua Keating: [09-11]
Biden and Harris say America's no longer at war. Is that true?
"Harris says US troops aren't fighting in any 'war zones.' What
about Iraq, Syria, and the Red Sea?" Within the context of the
debate, Harris had a point, which was useful in countering Trump's
lie:
Beyond the legal hair-splitting, Harris made the comment in the
context of a defense of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan,
and it is true that under Biden, the US military posture overseas
has significantly shrunk from what it was under the Bush, Obama,
and Trump administrations.
(Trump has falsely claimed in the past that his presidency was
the first in 72 years that "didn't have any wars," despite the fact
that he oversaw four years of combat in Afghanistan as well as major
military escalations in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. At least 65 US
troops died in hostile action under Trump's presidency.)
That number under Trump was significantly less than under Obama,
which in turn was less than under Bush. A comparable Biden number
is probably less than Trump's, but not much less.
Eric Levitz: [09-11]
Donald Trump lost the debate because he's too online: "The GOP
nominee spoke to swing voters as though they were his Truth Social
followers." Also note the section head: "For swing voters, many of
Trump's ravings sounded like a summary of the sixth season of a
show they'd never watched."
[09-12]
Is the entire world conspiring to make it look like Trump lost the
debate? "An intriguing theory by Matt Taibbi." Taibbi's piece
is here --
DNC talking points become instant post-debate headlines -- not
that you can read it without a paid subscription, which the excerpt
and report doesn't inspire. By the way, I still remember Taibbi's
Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season (2005)
as one of the best campaign journals ever. He was especially good
at showing how working journalists played into conventional tropes
fed them by campaign flacks, willingly due to the vacuousness of
their own jobs. It's likely that something like that is still in
the cards here, but if your blind spot is big enough to exclude
critical scrutiny of Trump, you're not going to be able to see
very much.
Ed Kilgore: [09-10]
Debate shows Trump losing his war with reality: "But he reached
new vistas of delusion during his debate with Kamala Harris, to the
point where it was unclear whether he was debating the vice-president
or debating reality."
Margaret Carlson: [09-11]
Harris shows how to dismantle a would-be dictator: "Humor,
ridicule, gut punches, and that look of puzzlement and contempt
were just some of the tools the vice president used to take down
Trump."
John Ganz: [09-11]
Cats and dogs: "I can't believe I watched the whole thing!"
Trump still has considerable powers of self-expression, which are
often underrated by liberals, but they should not be overrated
either. He has a very limited vocabulary and it constrains the
extent to which he can articulate responses on any issue. So, he
falls back into hyperbole -- everything is the worst, the best,
the greatest. This can be effective, but often last night it
sounded repetitive and, yes, kind of dull. If the American simply
people tire of his antics, it will really be over for him. Harris's
message of "let's turn the page" is a good one because it presents
Trump as tiresome as much as fearsome.
Shane Goldmacher/Katie Rogers: [09-11]
Harris dominates as Trump gets defensive: 6 takeaways from the
debate: "Layout out bait that Donald Trump eagerly snatched,
the vice president owned much of the night, keeping him on the
back foot and avoiding sustained attention on her own
vulnerabilities." As
Rick Perlstein tweeted: "In a strictly intellectual sense, I'm
very excited to see how the New York Times solves the linguistic
puzzle of making that sound like a tie. It will require a Fermat's
Last Theorum-level of ingenuity." Perlstein later linked to a NYT
app article headline ("Fierce Exchanges Over Country's Future
Dominate Debate") that satisfied his expectations, but when I
searched for that headline, I found this article instead. Perhaps
sensing that such precise (albeit vague) balance wouldn't stand
up to scrutiny, they conceded the debate to Harris, while playing
up whatever they could for Trump. The six takeaways:
Thom Hartmann: [09-13]
Inside Trump's 'peace candidate' debate scam. This is an important
subject -- one I wish he did a better job of handling. Trump should
have zero credibility as a "peace candidate," well below Biden/Harris,
even though they've set the bar pretty low. They at least have a
modicum of empathy for the costs of war. As such, they can see some
reason to stay clear of war, or to clean up the wars they've been
given (e.g., Afghanistan). What Hartmann is pretty good at is pointing
out "our media failures":
Thus, Trump and the entire GOP are now furiously trying to rewrite
their party's history of using unnecessary wars to get re-elected.
And, according to opinion polls, it's working because America's
corporate media pretty much refuses to point out Republican perfidy
in any regard.
Consider these indictments of our media failures. Polls show:
52% trust Trump more compared to 37% for Harris on inflation
(even though America has the lowest inflation rate in the developed
world because of Biden's policies)
51% trust Trump vs. 43% for Harris on handling the economy (even
though Biden's economy beats Trump's by every metric, even pre-Covid)
54% trust Trump more on border security compared to 36% for Harris
(even though border crossings are at historically low levels now,
lower than any time during Trump's non-Covid presidency)
53% trust Trump vs. 40% for Harris on immigration (even though
Trump wants to build concentration camps, go door-to-door arresting
Hispanics, and again tear children from their mother's arms)
51% trust Trump vs. 41% for Harris to stand up to China, even
though Trump got millions in bribes from them for his daughter
And on crime and public safety, 48% trust Trump versus 42% for
Harris, even though crime levels today are lower than any time during
Trump's presidency
None of these numbers would be where they are if our news
organizations had accurately reported the facts.
Fred Kaplan: [09-11]
Harris exposed how easy Trump is to manipulate. Dictators have known
this for a long time. Easy to manipulate, for sure, but when it
comes to manipulation, you need proximity, which only his staff really
has, and they've generally been able to cancel out any idea foreign
dictators may have planted. While Trump threatens to break the mold
on US foreign policy, in his first term, he was hamstrung by orthodox
blob operatives, leaving him with nothing but a few ridiculous photo
ops. A second term could be better or worse, but given how consistent
(and wrong-headed) US foreign policy has been across both partisan
administrations, he'll probably just make the same mistakes over and
over again. It's not like he actually knows any better.
Ezra Klein: [09-11]
Harris had a theory of Trump, and it was right: "The vice president
successfully baited Trump's angry, conspiratorial, free-associating
side. But what wasn't said was just as telling."
Robert Kuttner: [09-11]
Notes for next time: "Kamala Harris did well in the debate but
missed some opportunities to remind voters of Trump's sheer
craziness."
[09-10]
God, these people have no shame: That's the title in the index.
After the jump, the page title is: "Yes, they're really claiming
immigrants eat cats and geese now. You can guess why: A racist
GOP scare tactic has taken over the internet."
Bill Scher: [09-11]
Kamala Harris is good at this: "The vice president laid out her
plans for the future while Donald Trump was caught in a tangle of
grievances about the past."
Adam Serwer: [09-14]
The real 'DEI' candidates: Kamala Harris's evisceration of Donald
Trump at the debate revealed who in this race is actually unqualified
for power."
Charles Sykes: [09-11]
Trump blames everybody but himself: Talk about infinitely
recyclable headlines! "He can't face the truth about his performance
at the debate."
Steve M: [09-11]
How the right-wing mediasphere -- and Trump's fragile ego -- set him
up for failure last night. This elaborates on a theme that I've
been noticing for years, which is that Trump is merely a receptacle
for right-wing propaganda. Right-wingers have cynically formulated
their propaganda to trigger incoherent emotions in their listeners --
a technique often dubbed "dog-whistling." To carry the analogy a bit
farther, Trump isn't a whistler; Trump's just one of the dogs. What
makes him the MAGA leader is his money, his ego, his ability to
capture the media's attention. But as a thinker, as a speaker, as
an organizer, he's strictly derivative, a second-rate hack picking
up and repeating whatever he's been told. M explains:
Trump has always been cultural conservative -- a racist, a fan
of "law and order," an admirer of strongmen and authoritarians --
but years of binge-watching Fox News have made his opinions and
prejudices worse. Now he has a set of opinions -- on renewable
energy vs. fossil fuels, on immigration, and so on -- that are
made up of talking points from the right-wing informationsphere.
When he says that windmill noise causes cancer, he's repeating
an idea spread by pseudo-scientists funded by the fossil fuel
industry.
But that's how his mind works -- his ego is so fragile that he can't
bear to be wrong, so he clings desperately to any assertion that
reinforces his notion that he's right. Windmills kill birds! Solar
energy is useless when it's cloudy! Of course, the right-wing
infosphere is a machine designed to reassure all of its consumers
that their prejudices and resentments are right. . . .
But in recent years, as Fox News has begun losing its primacy
on the right while the Internet has increasingly been the main
source for what rank-and-file right-wingers believe, fringe ideas
have become more mainstream: Barack Obama birtherism, the allegedly
stolen election in 2020, QAnon's notion of a vast elitist pedophile
ring that somehow excludes all Republicans.
And now we have the cats.
When even J.D. Vance was spreading scurrilous stories about
Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, I was surprised --
not because right-wingers are spreading hateful and dangerous blood
libels about immigrants (that happens all the time), but because
Republicans weren't confining the spread of this preposterous and
easily disproved story to the fringier parts of their infosphere.
They were going mainstream with this.
But of course they were. In 2024, it's hard to restrict a story
like this to the fringe. Naturally, Elon Musk promoted it, as did
many online influencers and Trumpist members of Congress.
Trump hates immigrants, so of course he seized on this story
and talked about in the debate. Trump's confirmation bias is tied
to his delicate ego, which always needs to say, See? I was right.
A few years ago, he might not have even noticed this story. But
the tiers in the right-wing mediasphere have collapsed, so the
confirming messages Trump is exposed to are stupider. And he
believes them. . . .
Trump simply can't take in information that challenges his
beliefs. His ego can't handle it. The right-wing infosphere
flatters Trump the way dictators flatter Trump: by telling him
what he wants to hear. That's the person Kamala Harris showed
us last night, and that's why we can't allow him to win the
presidency again.
Taylor Swift endorses Harris:
I wouldn't be surprised to find that her lawyers drafted the
statement (released on Instagram) weeks ago, but its timing
does two useful things: it shows due diligence, as she waited
for a moment when it would appear she considered both options
fair and square, and it provided a singuarly conspicuous
verdict on the debate, thereby underscoring its importance.
Alex Galbraith: [09-15]
"I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT": Trump goes on Truth Social tirade against
Harris supporters: "In a series of Sunday morning posts to
Truth Social, Donald Trump rallied [sic] against Kamala Harris'
rich supporters." Apologies for the Latin, but I think whoever
titled this meant "railed." Trump's identity as a billionaire
is so narcissistic that he takes any billionaire who doesn't
bow to his class leadership an act of treason. This sense of
entitlement is most common among those who inherited fortunes
(like Trump, and certain Kochs and Mellons come quick to mind),
as opposed to billionaires who can remember or imagine what
life is like for the non-rich.
Donald Trump told his supporters how he really feels about Kamala
Harris' most-famous booster in a Sunday morning flurry of angry
posts to his Truth Social platform.
"I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT," the former president wrote, as one part
of a tirade against rich supporters of Harris' candidacy.
"All rich, job creating people, that support Comrade Kamala
Harris, you are STUPID," he wrote. "She is seeking an UNREALIZED
TAX ON CAPITAL GAINS. If this tax actually gets enacted, it
guarantees that we will have a 1929 style Depression. Perhaps
even the thought of it would lead to calamity - But at least
appraisers and accountants would do well!"
Trump also said: "She's a very liberal person. She seems to
always endorse a Democrat. And she'll probably pay a price for
it in the marketplace."
David Atkins: [09-12]
Trump doesn't understand tariffs, but he knows enough to be menacing.
Trump's fascination with tariffs seems to be based on the notion
that he can impose them arbitrarily and with impunity, so they
function as a massive ego stroke. On the other hand, his opponents
are nearly as simple-minded and dogmatic as he is. As I've said
before, tariffs only make sense as part of a strategy to build up
domestic industries (i.e., if you are doing economic planning,
which is something most American politicians have long denounced).
It now occurs to me that there may be better ways to do that than
tariffs.
Facts cannot penetrate Trump's narrow, incurious, egotistical
worldview. He believes that as the leader of the world's dominant
economy, he can bully the rest of the world into submission. And
like Hoover -- not coincidentally, the only other president to
preside over a net loss of jobs in the United States -- he will
make an easily avoidable mistake that costs everyone.
John Cassidy: [09-09]
Donald Trump's new "voodoo economics": "The former president's
tax plan would cost the government trillions of dollars. Tariffs
and Elon Musk will pay for everything, he says."
Eugene R Fidell/Dennis Aftergut: [09-13]
Trump's plan to undermine foreign policy: The authors argue
that Trump promised to violate the Logan Act, a law which "makes
it a felony for private citizens, including presidents-elect, to
interfere in foreign policy." I doubt that anyone, least of all
Trump himself, is going to take his statements that literally,
but the sloppy thinking is typical. The innuendo, that he's just
a Putin stooge, is more barbed, but its plausibility is also
based on his sloppy thinking.
[09-13]
Trump's new big lie: "The goal is not to earnestly correct the
record on crime but to spread an atmosphere of fear and paranoia."
[09-13]
The cases against Trump: a guide: "Thirty-four felony convictions.
Charges of fraud, election subversion, and obstruction. One place to
keep track of the presidential candidate's legal troubles."