Notes on Everyday Life

As of November 12, 2025

I wonder if I've fallen into the trap of thinking I need to write something monumental — like how international law should be applied to free Gaza from Israel (Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond) or the late, great jazz singer Sheila Jordan — every time out. Actually, I write stuff every day, starting with something like a diary in my online notebook, as well as draft tidbits for Music Week and Loose Tabs. That's a big part of my everyday life, so perhaps I can share some tidbits here?

And wasn't that the idea behind choosing "Notes on Everyday Life" as my title? (Aside from nostalgia from when I was 22, discovering that Henri Lefebvre's Critique de la vie quotidienne offered a prism through which everything made sense. Although I should note that the actual samizdat title was suggested by someone else — probably Elias Vlanton, who recruited me, or maybe Kevin Dougherty.) So wasn't it inevitable that I would slip some mere notes in amidst the more focused pieces?

I started thinking along these lines after the Nov. 4 elections, figuring that some quick thoughts were in order. But I've been very distracted with other matters these last couple weeks, like a leaky roof, so my accumulation of Loose Tabs has been thin and haphazard. It would take me a couple weeks to round up the usual links, and by then something else will have happened. I don't see how full-time analysts can keep up with news these days. I sure can't. So what follows are just some semi-random comments, short on documentation, but by now I figure I have some feel for what I'm talking about.

Before the election, there were the No Kings demonstrations, which suggest strongly that the Tea Party has flipped their partisan leanings, and possibly the Silent Majority as well. I'm always short on graphics, so let's slip in one I snapped in Wichita:

The Election

Democrats won the big prizes, which were governorships in New Jersey and Virginia — two nominally blue states, but Virginia is a flip, and Chris Christie isn't distant past yet. Both were won by margins much better than Harris posted in 2024. And notably, Democrats won consistently down ballot, especially in Virginia, where they swept state offices and won a big majority in the legislature. This suggests to me not only that centrist dread of Democrats (and support for Trump) is weakening, but also that Democrats are feeling the need to stick together. I think the clearest evidence of this is the California referendum. Normally you'd expect lots of Democrats to react against any change in the rules, but Republican gerrymandering (and abuse of power in all areas) has gone so over the top that masses of voters feel the need to fight back.

The New York City mayoral exception might look like a break in Democratic solidarity, but only because party elites conspired to reverse a left primary win (as they successfully did in Buffalo in 2021, and in Minneapolis this year). That they failed this time is notable, as is the fact that Republican Curtis Sliwa dropped to 7% (down from Trump's 17%: the share of Republicans who broke party ranks is nearly as large as the share of Democrats who backed Cuomo.

I'm impressed and pleased with the Mamdani win there, but I wouldn't say I'm excited by it, nor am I inclined to read much into it. [PS: My wife, who's followed the Mamdani campaign much closer than I have, objected at this point. I'll have more to say about this later, after I've done more research, but for now, Thomas B Edsall raises some issues.] He ran a remarkable campaign, first of all in clearing out all the other left-leaning contenders (notably Brad Lander, who he turned into a major ally). Arguably, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams were severely tarnished candidates, but Cuomo still had a lot of support among New York's power brokers, even if much of it was driven by desperation to kill off the possibility of the sort of alternative Mamdani represented.

Two characteristics I've long noted in "blue" states and cities:

1. Powerful insider business interests operate as easily with Democratic administrations as with Republican ones, especially where Democrats make few if any demands on the rich. Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel are prime examples of nominal Democrats who have always been deep in bed with business interests.

2. Rank-and-file voters are reluctant to rock the Democratic party boat, even when leaders are clearly much more devoted to chasing donors than voters. (Thus, for instance, Hillary Clinton handily beat Sanders in 2016 primaries in such long-established blue states as Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and California, while Sanders won most non-Southern states with weaker Democratic elites.)

Mamdani appears to break this pattern. Whether he offers a model that can be replicated elsewhere isn't clear. I doubt most people care that much about policy, but his combination of integrity, focus, and personability are an exceptional combination. More complicated is the question of whether red scare panic tactics still work: in New York, they've lost a lot of credibility. But Mamdani has also garnered a lot of publicity elsewhere, thanks largely to the belief of Republicans and elite Democrats that he makes a good bogeyman. That should work fine for Republicans, who mostly talk to themselves to reaffirm their own prejudices, but like almost everything they attack, will incite resistance. This will be trickier for Democrats, always torn between donors and voters, increasingly desperate for results, and conscious of the need for solidarity.

At times like this, I reflect back on Ronald Reagan's "eleventh commandment," which was to never speak ill of a fellow Republican. That didn't stop him from driving the GOP far to the right, but it did reflect a realization that he needed liberal Republican senators to make his margins. The only real criticism I have of Spanberger's Virginia campaign was that she felt some need to attack Mamdani. To have a future, mainstream Democrats have to figure out how to use the left, and to build on it. They need the left for votes and for energy and analysis to resist the right. And they need the left for solutions, because that's where most real solutions lie. We live in an increasingly complex and fragile world. We need trust, expertise, and cooperation to navigate it. And to build that critical trust, we need more people to accept justice based on equality. Left is the direction to greater equality, fairness, trust, cooperation, peace, and broad-based prosperity.

But it probably won't be the left that sells itself on the basis of idealistic arguments. That needs to be done by practical politicians, by Democrats, who can find ways to make those benefits tangible for large blocks of voters. That's what Franklin Roosevelt did, even if he ultimately came up short and only saved capitalism from itself. You can argue that Clinton and Obama tried to do the same thing, but the capitalism they tried to save didn't want their help, and public reaction to their compromises ranged from unimpressed to resentful, leaving them with little credibility once they cashed in.

Mamdani, or any leftist with serious political aspirations, needs to do three things: avoid the appearance of impropriety (don't sell out, and don't betray your voters); always speak from principles, even when you choose to compromise for tactical reasons; and make shrewd compromises, which move in the right direction, and position you to make more moves (not least by not claiming you've accomplished more than you have).

The Shutdown

This always seemed like a losing proposition, but lacking any real power base, Democrats haven't been in much position to pick their fights. I think there were one or two previous occasions when Democrats forced a government shutdown, but this has almost always been a Republican thing, consistent with the party position of wanting to shrink the government and "drown it in a bath tub," with characteristically no concern for who might suffer along the way. On the other hand, public sector workers have become a major segment of the Democratic coalition, so Democrats naturally want to keep their paychecks coming. So I was surprised to see this turn into a real fight. The Senate filibuster rule offered a chokepoint, and it took eight defectors to give them the "win." By then, most voters blamed Republicans for the shutdown, which served to highlight Republican overreach, especially where they are plotting major increases in health insurance cost. While Democrats lack the power to stop Republican cuts, they can make it clear who is responsible for what, and remind people who fought against them.

I didn't follow the shutdown closely, but Dean Baker's Roadmap to the Shutdown provides a useful analysis of the core issue, which is that Trump has claimed a right to spend or not spend Congressionally allocated money according to his whim. Not only does this violate the Constitution, this exposes as foolish any efforts to negotiate with Trump, as he cannot be trusted to negotiate anything in good faith. ACA is just one example, albeit one that has a huge effect on whether one can afford health insurance.

Baker, by the way, has a couple of important posts on health care costs:

• Health care cost growth slowed sharply after Obamacare: This is a key story that is easily overlooked, largely because Republicans have carped endlessly about "Obamacare," and because doing so has obscured the trends before passage.

  In the decade before Obamacare passed, healthcare costs increased 4.0 percentage points as a share of GDP — the equivalent of more than $1.2 trillion in today's economy. By contrast, in the 15 years since its passage, health care costs have increased by just 1.4 percentage points.

• Why is healthcare expensive? While the ACA slowed down increases in health care expenses, it didn't eliminate the really big problem, which is monopoly rents ("the costly trinity: drugs, insurance, and doctors").

At first glance, Baker's articles on ACA savings seem to run counter to Dylan Scott's Why are my health insurance premiums going up so much? Scott suggests that "the ACA was designed to expand coverage, not to control costs." While that is true, the ACA made initial compromises in both directions, and those compromises have been picked apart by Republican states and courts. The cost side was compromised by trying to get support from all of the business interests, mostly by making concessions to their usual business tactics (perhaps most notoriously, by prohibiting the government from trying to negotiate drug prices). Meanwhile, the coverage side has been sabotaged by states refusing to expand Medicaid, by eliminating tax penalties for non-coverage, and more. Another reason for rising premiums is that the companies have learned how to game the system. Scott asks the question, "is it worth defending?"

I'd say yes and no: yes because Democrats need to be seen as fighting back against Republican cuts; no because the system was designed as a barely satisfactory solution for two problems: adverse selection (the exclusion of benefits for "pre-existing conditions"), and the unaffordability of health insurance for most people. The latter required subsidies well beyond the Medicaid limits. The former also required subsidies. Yet the ACA approach came up way short both on coverage and cost. But if somehow the ACA gets wiped out, the solution isn't to aim to restore it. It's to advance a much better system: one that really would provide universal coverage, and that would have the leverage to manage costs. We know such systems are possible, because nearly every other country has one that beats the US system on coverage, cost, and outcomes.

As for the shutdown, like the No Kings demonstration and the after-election parties, it was fun while it lasted, because it's always fun to make autocrats squirm. And I appreciate the anger directed toward the "surrender caucus," but that too will pass. What won't go away is the talking points, which will move on to the next Trump/Republican outrage, and hopefully will keep tying them together into an indelible impression of how wrong-headed the 2024 election was.

Dick Cheney

I'm showing my age here, but for sheer political evil, no one will ever replace Richard Nixon in my mind. I'm not alone in that view. I've loathed Bob Dole ever since his execrable 1972 campaign — not that I didn't dislike his 1966 campaign, or his tenure in the House — but I had to concede that he had some wit, especially for his quip on seeing a "presidents club" picture of Carter, Ford, and Nixon: "see no evil, hear no evil, and evil." But if you're 20-30 years younger than me, Dick Cheney could have left you with the same impression. I'll spare you the details, which like Nixon were foretold decades before his ascent to real power, other than to remind you that the great blogger Billmon regularly referred to the Bush years as "the Cheney administration." If you're 20 years younger still, you probably have Trump in that slot — he's the only one who exercises power on that level, although the cunning behind it is harder to credit as sheer evil (but maybe that's just proof of the great dumbing down).

I expect to collect some links that give Cheney his due, but so far I haven't found many. Jeffrey's St. Clair's Roaming Charges: The Evil Dead is a good place to start, especially for notes on the pathetic tributes offered by discredited Democrats — this reminds me of when Nixon died and Bill Clinton didn't just say something innocuously credulous but rushed to give Nixon's eulogy. The Clintons had famously campaigned for McGovern in 1972, so they must have felt something like I did then, but somehow their lust for power corrupted them. I remember having hopes for them in 1992, and a series of letdowns in 1993-94, but heaping praise on Nixon was a complete and utterly unforgivable betrayal of any principles he could possibly have had.

No doubt I'll have more to say on this in Loose Tabs, but one point that sticks in my mind (amid everything else from the Nixon pardon to "taking the gloves off" to shooting his "friend" in the face to sinking the Harris campaign) is a quote I should look up from right after the Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to Bush. When asked whether the lack of mandate shouldn't moderate the Bush administration, he explained that he won and would use every bit of power he could muster to impose his agenda. That is exactly what Trump has done since taking office in January, reflecting a perversely moral worship and abuse of power that in America has been baked into the Republican Party since Nixon in 1969 — although I suppose the gold standard for seizing more power than anyone thought they were giving was Hitler in 1933.

One more point: I think respect is very important, and I don't generally mind the etiquette of "don't speak ill of the dead," but one should be careful when flattering your enemies, especially for what one might inadvertently reveal about oneself. The expressed admiration of Clinton for Nixon, of Obama for Reagan, and of Harris for Cheney, not only helps legitimize the terrible deeds of those Republicans, it also exposes the Democrats on nearly every level. It shows them to be ignorant and/or deceitful, to lack principles and determination, to be unfit for leadership — traits which once exposed turn out to be pretty easy to corroborate.

Jack DeJohnette

One of the all-time great jazz drummers, recognized as such by pretty much everyone, dead at 83. Hank Shteamer wrote the New York Times obituary and a second piece, The infinity of Jack DeJohnette. Also see Ethan Iverson, who notes "for many, Elvin-Tony-Jack was and is the holy trinity." (That's Jones and Williams, a syllogism that dates you without losing profundity.) I haven't searched through my own writings, but I'm sure I'll find at least a dozen instances of praise for his drum work. The juxtaposition with Cheney reminds me of my notebook entry after Ronald Reagan died in 2004. Worth remembering here:

A great man died yesterday: Steve Lacy pioneered and exemplified the avant-garde in jazz — in particular, the notion that the new music doesn't evolve from the leading edge so much as it transcends all of the music that came before it. He was the first postmodernist in jazz, and he explored the music (Monk above all) and developed it in novel ways over 45 years of superb records. Ronald Reagan also died yesterday: he was a sack of shit who in his "what, me worry?" way destroyed far more than Lacy built. To describe Reagan as the intellectual forefather of George W. Bush is just sarcasm; for both ideas were nothing more than excuses for wielding power not just to vanquish the weak or to favor the strong but to bask in its own glory. Ideas, of course, did flower up around Reagan, as they do around Bush — really bad ideas.

At the time my take on the Reagan administration was that under them fraud became the biggest growth industry in the U.S. By the end of Reagan's second term almost every department of the U.S. government was awash in corruption scandals: despite all of the talk, the administration's most evident real program was to steal everything in sight. But ultimately the talk did matter. At the time there was much talk about a "Reagan Revolution" — oblivious to the fact that the only right-wing revolutions in memory led to the triumph of the Fascists and Nazis, to WWII and the Holocaust. Those are big boots to goosestep in, and it's taken a while to fill them. That the U.S. does not yet exude the stink of Nazi Germany is due more to tactical success and luck than its moral claims to a legacy of freedom and democracy — claims that are easily exploited as propaganda even as they are cynically subverted.

I made one minor edit there, straightening out a malformed sentence. The coda, twenty years later, is so self-evident I shouldn't need to write it. Serendipitously, the next two paragraphs discuss a book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, written by the father of New York mayor-elect, Mahmoud Mamdani. Lots of interesting bits buried in old notebooks. Further down I sum up Reagan:

Reagan himself seemed harmless enough, but he was never more or less than a front for forces behind the scenes. They gave us the marriage of the Christian Right and the ultra-rich; they sought to dismantle any shred of a welfare state, by bankruptcy if not by law; they preached military might and sought to extend America's military advantage and project hegemonic power all over the world, and they recruited and trained the scum of the world to do their bidding. Bush is a front for the same forces, but he's not as disarming an actor as Reagan, and he's got a lot more shit to cover up.

Trump, of course, is another actor-front, with a somewhat different shtick for a somewhat different time, one where there's too much shit to cover up, so all you need is someone who can insist that his is great and problem is everyone else's.

Recent Reading

David A Graham: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America (2025, Random House): Trump's break with political norms is so extreme that it's easy to overlook how utterly derivative his policy ideas are. Most of them come from the cesspool of Fox News, where "evil geniuses" craft dog-whistles for the masses. Trump is just the alpha dog. But behind Fox are serious right-wing idea factories, like the Heritage Foundation, the authors of 2024's massive Project 2025 blueprint, a document so odious that Trump disclaimed and denied it during his campaign, even though it differed little from his own campaign position papers, and was taken as a bible by many of his key people — indeed, a big part of the Project was to qualify personnel who could be counted on to implement the program while professing complete loyalty to their feckless leader. Graham provides a useful service in his brief summary, and shows how the post-inauguration blitzkrieg had been meticulously mapped out well in advance.

The one thing I was most surprised by in the book was the lack of any substantive discussion of Israel. I asked Graham about this, and he speculated that it derives from differences between various right-wing thinkers: while the neocons were very explicit about their Israel envy, that's not something Trump's America Firsters want to go around bragging about. On the other hand, Israel's harsh oppression of Palestinians is still very much a model for the Trump administration's war against immigrants and leftists in America, and the barrage of attacks on boats and so forth is something Israel pioneered. Still interesting that, given all the horrible things they aspired to do in Project 2025, there are still some outrages where mum's the word.

Christopher Bonneuil/Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (2016, Verso): I read a review of Fressoz's recent book, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, but when I looked him up, I was more intrigued by this earlier book. One reason is that I've long been interested in geology, so I know a fair amount about the earth's geochronology, including the various discontinuities that divide strata. I know about the decision to divide the holocene from the pleistocene, even though the former is an exceptionally thin sliver of geological time: the holocene, after all, is little different from four other interglacial episodes back in the pleistocene, but stands out simply because it is recent, and as yet uncluttered by further glaciation. On the other hand, I'm also quite aware of the enormous impact human beings have had in very recent historical times on the thin layers of atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, and that such impacts are registered in the rocks. I spend a good deal of time thinking about how much our world has changed within my own lifetime, and even more since my grandfathers and their grandfathers were born. And one thing I've come to realize is that we have very little appreciation of how much change has transpired.

The word "anthropocene" isn't universally accepted by geologists, but it is being debated. The authors aren't especially interested in this debate, but they take the word as a gateway to opening up a big picture history of the nearly 250 years since Watt's steam engine, the industrial revolution it ushered in, and the capitalism that organized and propelled it. The authors coin more similar words to explore other aspects of the period. Few are memorable, but I found many of the same names John Cassidy uncovered in his recent book, Capitalism and Its Critics, as well as many more I know from left critics of capitalism. One thing the authors stress is that every stage in the domination of nature was met by doubts and resistance.

One phrase that doesn't occur in their book is enshittocene, which Cory Doctorow coined in his latest book on how the internet tech giants have turned predatory. I read a similar book he wrote in 2023, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. The new one is Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. I don't have that book, but I've noted several reviews and interviews, which I recommend. Doctorow has long been involved with EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which may be why his subtitles usually offer practical solutions for improvement. They are good, but I can think of some more he hasn't gotten to yet.

Marcel Dirsus: How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive (2025, John Murray): I picked this up from the library, and doubt I'll get through it before due date, but the title intrigued me, and not just because we have a tyrant who needs to fall. I've long been suspicious of power, noticing how it can be fragile, that its effectiveness is limited (even below the level of generating active resistance), and that it often fails, and rarely thrives. The case that opened my eyes was probably the sacking of Nikita Krushchev in 1964. The Soviet Union had been presented as this totalitarian dictatorship, which Stalin exemplified, but Krushchev was turned out as easily as a scandal-besotted CEO, showing that the levers of power in the Soviet Union were more complex and sensitive than we were led to believe. Many more examples followed, with a wide range of variations — some fell, some were pushed, some by external forces, more due to internal fractures, where as with building materials, rigidity may forestall the inevitable but at the critical juncture will speed it up.

Dirsus ranges very widely here, jumping from example to example at a dizzying pace: first up is a story about Muammar Gaddafi, but then he goes into an attempted coup in the Congo, and before long he winds up with Catherine and Peter III in Russia, then Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhistan. I would have appreciated a bit more order, but I haven't gotten to the general themes yet. One chapter to look forward to is "You Shoot, You Lose."

Some Music

Listening to new music is a big part of my everyday life, so I thought I'd offer an advance taste of that here. Just a couple highlights. Not the complete log, which comes out weekly in Music Week, and is archived monthly. Links (where available) to Bandcamp.

Rodrigo Amado/The Bridge: Further Beyond (2023 [2025], Trost): Consistently outstanding tenor saxophonist, from Portugal, second album with this stellar international quartet, where bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, drummer Gerry Hemingway, and especially pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach provide much more than backup. Their 2023 album, Beyond the Margins, won El Intruso's poll as the year's best. This is only a shade less consistent. A- [bc]

Joy Crookes: Juniper (2025, Insanity): British (parents Bangladeshi and Irish) neo-soul singer-songwriter, started with YouTube covers at 13, moved on to an EP in 2017 and an album in 2021, a Mercury Prize nominee. Second album, catches my ear, gets better on multiple replays. A-

Brennen Leigh: Don't You Ever Give Up on Love (2025, Signature Sounds): Country singer-songwriter, from Texas, steady stream of albums since 2002, which started good and just keep getting better. She is quick to take the gloss off the title song, following it with many more break up songs like "Dumpster Diving," "A Reason to Drink," "Thank God You're Gone," and "How's the Getting Over Me Going," emerging at the end with "I'm Easy to Love After All." Indeed. A- [bc]

Thomas Morgan: Around You Is a Forest (2024 [2025], Loveland Music): Bassist, many credits since 2000 but this is his first album with his name up front. His main "instrument" here is WOODS, a program written in SuperCollider with a recursive acronym (for WOODS Often Oscillates Droning Strings). Nine pieces here, each with a guest feeding music into his program, folding back into the music — not exactly duets, nor remixes either. Guests are varied and notable, starting with his own bass piece, and ending with poet Gary Snyder. [PS: While I generally feel that music should be evaluated independently from its conception, Morgan's story, including a lot of programming history I can relate to, helped me to focus on the results.] A-

Mavis Staples: Sad and Beautiful World (2025, Anti-): Started in her father's gospel group, the Staple Singers, breaking out as a solo artist in 1969, up to 86 now. Widely scattered covers, only two I recognized instantly, and they are standouts. A- [bc]

I held Music Week back a couple days to get this done and out first, but by the time you read this, it should be available here (41 albums, 7 A-list, so the 5 above + 2 more). I did do the cutoff before Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide came out. Included there are reviews of several albums I've recently weighed in on (his grades in brackets, then mine, which this time are fairly close): Big Thief: Double Infinity [A, A-]; Wednesday: Bleeds [A-, A-]; Alick Nkhata: Radio Lusaka [A-, ***]; Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl [B+, A-]; JID: God Does Like Ugly [***, ***]; Todd Snider: First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder [***, A-]; Michael Hurley: Broken Homes & Gardens [**; ***]; Doja Cat: Vie [**, **]. The Snider was a 2021 release he had previously graded B+. I wasn't aware of the new Snider album, or of the Gurf Morlix (whose April-released A Taste of Ashes was ** for both of us).

While my reviews for this Music Week are set, I still have to write some sort of intro, which gives me a chance to reflect further.