Monday, November 4, 2024

Speaking of Which

Draft file opened 2024-11-01 5:10 PM.

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:

Top story threads:

Israel:

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

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Juan Cole: [11-02] As UN warns entire population of Gaza is at risk of death, Bill Clinton says he's not keeping score. Here's a report on Clinton's campaign for Harris:

  • 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):

  • Chris Hedges: [10-31] Israel's war on journalism.

    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.

  • Jonathan Ofir: [10-30] New UN Special Rapporteur report warns Israel's genocide in Gaza could be expanding to the West Bank: "A new report by Francesca Albanese."

  • 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.

  • Saleema Gul: [10-31] A community divided: With Gaza on their minds, Muslim and Arab Americans weigh their options ahead of election day: Such as they are, which isn't much.

  • 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.)

  • Ben Kamisar: [11-03] Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week. Most of this money, staggering amounts, is being spent on down-ballot races, including state referenda.

  • 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.

  • Parker Molloy: [11-04] We already know one big loser in this election: the mainstream media: "When your most loyal supporters start questioning your integrity, that's not just a red flag -- it's a siren blaring in the newsroom."

  • 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.

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [11-01] Notes on a phony campaign: strange days.

  • 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.

  • Zoe Williams: [10-31] An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics -- just as academics predicted: "Politicians have always courted the wealthy, but Elon Musk and co represent a new kind of donor, and an unprecedented danger to democracy."

  • Endorsements:

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.

  • Zack Beauchamp: [11-02] It's not alarmist: A second Trump term really is an extinction-level threat to democracy: "Why a second Trump term is a mortal threat to democracy -- though perhaps not the way you think." Having written a recent book -- The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (I bought a copy, but haven't gotten into it yet -- on this broad theme, he predictably offers us a rehash with a minor update. It's nice to see him dialing back the alarmism, enough to see the real longer-term erosion:

    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).

    PS: Here's a video of Beauchamp talking about his book: The realignment: The rise of reactionary politics.

  • 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.

  • Michelle Goldberg: [11-01] What I truly expect if an unconstrained Trump retakes power.

  • 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).

  • Arun Gupta: [11-01] Triumph of the swill: A night at the Garden with Trump and MAGA. About as good a blow-by-blow account as I've seen so far. Ends on this note:

    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.

  • Margaret Hartmann: [11-01] Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein: Everything we've learned: "Michael Wolff claims he has Epstein tapes about Trump, and saw compromising Trump photos."

  • Antonia Hitchens:

    • [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."

  • Marina Hyde: [11-01] Trump may become president again -- but he's already a useful idiot to the mega rich: "They make nice with him when it suits, ridicule him when he's not listening. Their lives are money and gossip -- with him they get both."

  • Ben Jacobs: [11-04] The evolving phenomenon of the Trump rally: "Rarely boring, always changing, and essential to his appeal."

  • Hannah Knowles/Marianne LeVine/Isaac Arnsdorf: [11-01] Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Liz Cheney should have guns 'trained on her face': "The GOP nominee often describes graphic and gruesome scenes of crimes and violence, real and imagined."

  • Eric Levitz: [11-01] Elon Musk assures voters that Trump's victory would deliver "temporary hardship"; "And he's half right." Meaning the hardship, but not necessarily "temporarily":

    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."

  • Nicholas Liu: [10-31] Trump nearly slips attempting to enter a garbage truck for a campaign stunt.

  • 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."

  • Clarence Lusane: [10-31] The black case against Donald Trump: "Hold Trump accountable for a lifetime of anti-black racism."

  • 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.

  • Amanda Marcotte:

  • Peter McLaren: [11-03] Donald Trump versus a microphone: a head bobbing performance.

  • 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.

  • Nicholas Nehamas/Erica L Green: [10-31] Trump says he'll protect women, 'like it or not,' evoking his history of misogyny.

  • Jonathan O'Connell/Leigh Ann Caldwell/Lisa Rein: [11-02] Conservative group's 'watch list' targets federal employees for firing.

  • 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.

  • Aaron Regunberg: [11-01] Why is the Anti-Defamation League running cover for Trump? "Yes, it's fair to compare Trump's Madison Square Guarden spectacle to the Nazi rally of 1939."

  • Aja Romano/Anna North: [11-05] The new Jeffrey Epstein tapes and his friendship with Trump, explained.

  • 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.

  • Marc Steiner: [10-30] The failures of liberals and the left have helped Trump's rise: "Feckless Democrats and a disorganized Left have fed fuel to the MAGA movement's fire." Interview with Bill Fletcher Jr. and Rick Perlstein.

  • Kirk Swearingen: [11-02] Donald Trump was never qualified to be president -- or anything else: "After a lifetime of lying, failure and incompetence, this conman stands at the gates of power once again."

  • 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."

Vance, and other Republicans:

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:

Climate and environment:

Business, labor, and Economists:

Ukraine and Russia:

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

Other stories:

  • Victoria Chamberlin: [11-02] How Americans came to hate each other: "And how we can make it stop." Interview between Noel King and Lilliana Mason, author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018), and Radical American Partisanship (2022, with Nathan P Kalmoe). She seems to have a fair amount of data, but not much depth. There is very little hint here that the polarization is asymmetrical. While both sides see the other as treats to their well-being, the nature of those threats are wildly different, as are the remedies (not that the promise of is in any way delivered).

  • 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.

  • Elizabeth Kolbert: [2017-02-19] Why facts don't change our minds: An old piece, seemingly relevant again."

Obituaries

Books

  • 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.

Music (and other arts?)

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]

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