#There might be re-elections in March???

[siren-of-agony]

Tried to stay away from the news today to not constantly be faced with the US tragedy just for my mom to just inform me that the German government just broke today 🙃

[lord-of-hollows]

The morality of the vote:

Ive had enough of people telling me I care more about my own perfectionist sense of morality than using my vote to reduce harm as if that's an argument. As if that's not exactly what I'm going for.

Look, I watched Vaush cover the election, this is the guy who said it's a moral good to vote blue no matter who. Did you see how many people in his chat were going full doomer, considering suicide? Over the fact that Kamala lost when at best it was going to be 4 years of Trump but with abortions?

Yes, I do care more about my sense of morals than the infinitesimally small chance that my vote may lead to harm reduction, but the fact of the matter is, even if I knew for a fact that my vote would be the tiebreaker that solved the whole election. Even in that scenario, I still do not believe my vote would reduce harm and be a force of good in the world.

Its a simple fact that if your vote would ever change things, you wouldn't be allowed to do it. If the reality for you is that it's easy as just registering to vote and showing up on election day, no further thought? Then you can do that but I hope you don't believe your vote will make a difference.

Democracy functions at its most stable when elections are predictable, the final form of democracy is when approval rates couldn't be lower and re-election rates couldn't be higher.

So the vote is as useless as it could be, but why do I have a problem with it on moral levels?

Im not a utilitarian, my morals are not flexible based on consequence. I believe consequence based morality would be brilliant if you could perfectly predict the outcome of your actions when you're making them, however I doubt the predictive abilities of basically every human being. As such I believe in a more Kantian system of ethics where minimum standards of justice are applied. Murder is wrong not because of the consequences it brings but because each human being has an intrinsic worth and when you commit murder you disregard that intrinsic worth as a means to your own end. If you could lay out the perfect argument as to why killing someone would be a benefit for literally every other human being, it would still be immoral because a murder is a wrong in and of itself.

So let's talk about why voting might not be the most moral of actions:

Lets assume that voting does anything. I don't believe it does, but I'll entertain the hypothetical that it does.

Lets first assume I vote out of self interest, without regard for others. Well, then I'm disregarding the intrinsic value of others and the harm that may be caused by my vote to manufacture a preferred outcome for myself. I don't believe actions motivated by self interest need any further explanation as to why they're a moral wrong.

Now, let's assume I don't go with self interest and simply "Vote blue no matter who." That's a lack of rational consideration, simply following an axiom without thinking about it, even if you're technically doing a moral good, can never be a moral action. Not considering the wider implications for society wholly, ignoring things like the fact that no matter who I vote for the nation is on a long slow march toward fascism and neither party is doing anything to course correct is a moral wrong. Even if I do follow through with this, viewing it as the lesser of two evils, the problem with that is the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.

Third, let's consider the universalism of the vote. For an action to be a moral good it needs to be universally applied to all moral actors. This is why I dislike the idea of the lesser of two evils. Being slightly less bad doesn't suddenly manufacture a good outcome. So if I were to call my vote a moral good, I would have to ignore and/or be okay with the fact that no law will be made that prevents Amazon's work conditions, no attempt will be made to pull out of Gaza (not falling for that one again, at least) and police will continue to be allowed to execute civilians with no due process and get away with it. I cannot bring myself to cast a vote without believing it will bring universal good instead of a religious adherence to this status quo. And if you would vote for a party that will continue to maintain this status quo, then don't call yourself antifascist. You're fascist-neutral if not an enthusiastic fascist.

Participation in the vote is consenting to the outcome of that vote. This is the one thing Utilitarians and I agree on, even if they don't think they do. (Hey, if you believe in consequence based morals, it should make sense that your bad consequences are a moral outcome.) And my moral beliefs do not allow me to participate and consent to a system that routinely violates human agency and dignity, endorse actions that cannot be universalized as morally positive, and be complicit in immoral outcomes.

So don't come to me with "you care about your own personal beliefs more than I do" bullshit. Yes, that's the point. Hey, maybe you should try having strong moral beliefs before you try to argue with mine.

And know what? I'd love to be wrong. I'd love it if there were a candidate I could cast my vote for, free of all moral doubt. Voting my conscience is not a freedom I am granted because my conscience has a habit of noticing shit like the fact that nothing will be different except a few minor things that don't actually change shit in the long run.

[gveret-fic]

Re: prev ask

something that I’ve noticed that western leftists like to do is pretend to be more radical in order to have the “moral high ground”, to be more woke and be a better leftist than other people. in doing so they both succumb to right wing framing, center themselves on issues that really don’t affect them in the bigger picture, and cause unnecessary infighting.

the reality is that in order to cause positive change we need to unify by not fighting on the minutiae of ideological issues/hypotheticals and instead focusing on pushing for policy that will mitigate the current problems at hand. ie: the majority of Americans including a spectrum of people with different views on I/p currently want a ceasefire and a hostage deal.

do not let politicians forget that what we are really discussing is the very real issue of dying babies in Palestine.

also nazis are bad. do not let nazis pretend to be allies of brown people when their main contention with Jews is the fact that they aren’t “white enough”

It may surprise you to learn that a majority of Israelis also support a hostage deal, which de facto means a ceasefire. In fact, thousands of people have been marching in the street every single week (and several dozen, every single day) for months now demanding a hostage deal.

And do you know what happens when a fundamentalist, extremist, criminal, anti-democratic government is elected, and there are mass protests in the streets? Nothing. Because they don't care, because this isn't a democracy, because public opinion can't sway a government that isn't serving the public.

That's what Amricans are courting with Trump.

As to the effectiveness of mitigation strategies in general, there's plenty of debate over that, so I wouldn't accept it as fact. But there's no doubt that nothing short of overwhelming unified majority can stop an actual war. Even that might not be enough. This is absolutely the time to be pragmatic and solution-oriented and stop daydreaming of decolonial revolution.

I agree that Nazis are bad, but your phrasing here is incorrect and misleading. There's no "main contention" with Jews, it's pure irrational genocidal antisemitism. And the reason behind it certainly isn't that Jews aren't "white enough". Nazis considered Jews our own separate, inferior race, completely disctinct from other races, distinct enough that we aren't even considered human and should be exterminated about it. Like there's a whole Nazi racial theory you can easily google and I encourage you to do so.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Josh Kovensky at TPM:

Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes. In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.

This dark vision of the future draws on deeply pessimistic theorizing, on lectures about Marxist anti-government ideology seemingly ripped from the Cold War, on memories of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and on claims that Democrats and the left will be unable to accept a Trump victory. It all comes against the backdrop of senior officials around Trump and Trump himself reportedly having been eager to invoke the Insurrection Act while he was in office, and mulling its actual use if he’s re-elected. In this situation, a second Trump administration would invoke the law to deploy the military to enforce immigration laws as part of a broader mission at the southern border — a proposal Trump has often spoken about publicly. But it would also make that invocation to do something far more extreme and at odds with American history: use the military against protestors.

[...] In the minds of Trump’s supporters, this planning is justified — in line with Trump’s promise of “retribution.” In their telling, he’s already borne those same slings and arrows that he envisions for his opponents: years of attempts by the “deep state” to thwart his administration, followed by supposedly unjust political prosecutions. He is punching back. It sets the stage, for Trump and those around him, to claim they are simply engaged in a tit for tat: using the machinery of the state to suppress his political opponents. And, in a stunning coincidence, those same opponents will happen to be violently rioting just as Trump takes office — at least in the fantasies of these hardcore supporters. Peter Feaver, a scholar of civil-military relations at Duke University, told TPM that the powers of the executive had “evolved” over the years, and that their responsible use had it come to “depend on electing a principled President.” Feaver served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He added that the judiciary has long given the executive branch the power to use the Insurrection Act to override state law enforcement, in part out of deference to national security decision-making. Federal troops have been deployed domestically in dozens of situations; to quell the 1992 Los Angeles riots, to ensure desegregation efforts, to break up railroad strikes.

[...]

Higher stakes

For many right-wingers, the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests serve as a benchmark, often invoked when forecasting the kind of developments that they see as inevitable over the coming months, and requiring a tough response following a potential Trump victory. On the right, those protests are regarded as the high-water mark of recent left-wing violence.

As MAGA influencers tell it, the media and local, Democratic-controlled city governments ignored wanton lawlessness and violence, leaving shop owners and police squads to fend for themselves among violent mobs. The sense of grievance that’s emerged ignores the reality that many of the 2020 marches against police brutality were peaceful and managed to avoid burning down any police stations or looting stores. But the memory of that moment of activist mobilization remains powerful, among this set, and continues to inspire fear. Howell and others said that in their view, the November election would lead to a far greater level of chaos across the country than what was seen in summer 2020.

“Much more is at stake,” Douglas Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho pastor who has become influential in conservative circles, told TPM. “With the killing of George Floyd, it was simply an opportunity to vent, but no actual power was at stake. And with the presidential election, it would be actual power.”

Setting aside the crimped definition of “power” here, Wilson envisions left-wing self-preservation as further inflaming the imagined post-election violence. “If Trump wins, a lot of high powered, highly placed people are going to go to jail,” Wilson added. “They don’t want to go to jail.” Wilson has become increasingly influential among self-described Christian Nationalists, who see Trump as a vehicle to punch through an agenda that would try to reshape American society, bringing it closer to their hardline interpretation of Christianity. Wilson appeared last September at an event held on Capitol Hill called “Theology of American Statecraft.” He spoke immediately after a talk given by Russ Vought, a former Trump Office of Management and Budget director who has taken a leading role in developing policies for a second administration, including through Project 2025.

[...] A review of the paper that Vought referenced, authored by former DHS acting secretary Ken Cuccinelli and another staffer, shows that it answers an undisputed question: Does the Posse Comitatus Act, which blocks executive branch officials from deploying troops domestically, allow the president to use the military to defend the border? That part of the paper answers a question that’s long been settled: The Pentagon regularly deploys troops in support of protecting the U.S.-Mexico border, though not in a law enforcement capacity. But as the New York Times first reported, the document makes extensive legal arguments for using troops to arrest people as part of a domestic deployment.

[...] “This is actually the longest the United States has ever gone without an invocation of the Insurrection Act since the first version of the law was enacted in 1792,” Nunn, a fellow at the Brennan Center, told TPM. (The last time the Act was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when state and local law enforcement briefly lost control of sections of the city.) He noted that the Act is intended for situations in which civilian law enforcement cannot cope; thanks to heavy investment in state and federal law enforcement, Nunn said, those kinds of emergencies have become exceedingly rare.

Using the military against peaceful demonstrators would cut against a foundational element of American public life: the right to freely and peacefully make your views about the government known, absent government retribution. “To the extent that any candidate or person in the orbit of a candidate is suggesting a preemptive plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, that’s inappropriate,” Nunn said. “The purpose of this law is to respond to sudden emergencies. If you are planning it months in advance, that’s by definition anticipating an abuse of the law.” Neither of the two missions that the Trump team is envisioning — immigration enforcement or putting down protests — falls remotely within the ambit of why people join the military, Nunn added. “People who join the military don’t do so because they look to be deployed against their fellow Americans,” he said. Domestic law enforcement, among other things, is not seen within the military as its job. “It’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be focused outward, on defense.”

MAGA influencers are seeking to justify use of military force on domestic soil for law enforcement purposes if Trump wins to be used against anti-Trump protests.

[mariacallous]

Earlier this month, a German court ruled that the country’s nationalist far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), was potentially “extremist” and could warrant surveillance by the country’s intelligence apparatus.

Campaign ads placed by AfD have been allowed to appear on Facebook and Instagram anyway, according to a new report from the nonprofit advocacy organization Ekō, shared exclusively with WIRED. Researchers found 23 ads from the party that accrued 472,000 views on Facebook and Instagram and appear to violate Meta’s own policies around hate speech.

The ads push the narrative that immigrants are dangerous and a burden on the German state, ahead of the European Union’s elections in June.

One ad placed by AfD politician Gereon Bollmann asserts that Germany has seen “an explosion of sexual violence” since 2015, specifically blaming immigrants from Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The ad was seen by between 10,000 and 15,000 people in just four days, between March 16 and 20. Another ad, which had more than 60,000 views, features a man of color lying in a hammock. Overlaid text reads, “AfD reveals: 686,000 illegal foreigners live at our expense!”

Ekō was also able to identify at least three ads that appear to have used generative AI to manipulate images, though only one was run after Meta put its manipulated media policy into place. One shows a white woman with visible injuries, with accompanying text saying “the connection between migration and crime has been denied for years.”

“Meta, and indeed other companies, have very limited ability to detect third-party tools that generate AI imagery,” says Vicky Wyatt, senior campaign director at Ekō. “When extremist parties use those tools with their ads, they can create incredibly emotive imagery that can really move people. So it's incredibly worrying.”

In its submission to the European Commission's consultation on election guidelines, obtained by a freedom of information request made by Ekō, Meta says “it is not yet possible for providers to identify all AI-generated content, particularly when actors take steps to seek to avoid detection, including by removing invisible markers.”

Meta’s own policies prohibit ads that “claim people are threats to the safety, health, or survival of others based on their personal characteristics” and ads that “include generalizations that state inferiority, other statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, expressions of dismissal, expressions of disgust, or cursing based on immigration status.”

“We do not allow hate speech on our platforms and have Community Standards that apply to all content—including ads,” says Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts. “Our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live, and this system is one of many we have in place to protect European elections.” Roberts told WIRED the company plans to review the ads flagged by Ekō but didn’t respond to questions about whether the German court’s designation of the AfD as potentially extremist would invite further scrutiny from Meta.

Targeted ads, says Wyatt, can be powerful because extremist groups can more effectively target people that might sympathize with their views and “use Meta’s ads library to reach them.” Wyatt also says this allows the group to test which messages are more likely to resonate with voters.

The AfD has a long history of portraying immigrants as a threat to the Germany. In January, German media reported that the AfD had secretly met with members of neo-Nazi groups to discuss expelling immigrants from the country, or what they dubbed “re-migration.” Ekō found that some of the ads placed by the AfD included the hashtag #remigration.

Experts say that social platforms, particularly Facebook, have been integral to the AfD’s growth. “Facebook was their main platform from the beginning,” says Juan Carlos Medina Serrano, a former researcher at the Bavarian School of Public Policy, who studied the rise of the AfD’s presence online. “It's hard to get into German politics. There have been other right-wing parties before the 2010s, and the AfD is the only one that made it to being one of the main parties in recent elections.”

Because they were not platformed by traditional media, the AfD invested heavily in social media, says Serrano. “They have been very adept at designing polarizing content that goes viral.”

In a 2021 interview with DW, the party’s own press officer said that Facebook had been integral to the party’s success: “Without Facebook, I don't believe that the AfD could have become successful so quickly.” The party has also seen recent success on TikTok, where Medina says its message has resonated with younger voters.

In February, Meta published a blog post outlining its plans for the EU elections. But last month, the EU announced that it was investigating Meta for potentially violating the Digital Services Act and not doing enough to combat election-related disinformation.

“Companies cannot be trusted and are completely unreliable in enforcing their own self-governance rules,” says Aurel Eschmann, campaigner at LobbyControl, a German civil society organization that promotes transparency in elections. “Particularly if there's a conflict of interest with the content that generates the most activity, they will be unwilling to ban that sort of content.”

Experts worry that allowing entities like the AfD to push divisive ads and organic content on social media is helping to accelerate the rise of the antidemocratic far right across the EU.

“I definitely think that the platforms have failed to understand their impact on society, on how this content is transforming the whole European electorate,” says Serrano. But, he says, now that the AfD is an established part of the German government, it makes it difficult for any platform to ban it, despite its use of hate speech or anti-immigration rhetoric. “They cannot completely ban a political party, but they should be able to moderate it.”

[fatehbaz]

Hannah and Chris: [...] For Ruth Wilson Gilmore, for example, “Life in rehearsal” is one way to describe abolition. To her, this means “building life-affirming institutions” whilst refusing to reproduce rules or remain with regret. Instead of signifying absence, it is both a present and about presence. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay makes the case for “rehearsals with others”, to question sovereignty and its operative mechanisms. For her, this entails imagining camaraderie and alliances and reversing the temporality of opposing sovereign violence “to imagine its demise not as a promise to come but as that which others have already experienced and made possible”. Moten and Harney use the term “rehearsal” to explain their idea of “study” as an always unfinished and improvisatory collaboration: “And since we’re rehearsing, you might as well pick up an instrument too.” [...]

Robyn: Every day I wake up and rehearse the person I would like to be. [...] To use the words of the late, great, C.L.R. James, “every cook can govern.” Organizing, whether formal or informal, whether geared toward a short term goal or a massive, transformative shift: this is what happens when people consciously decide to come together and “shape change,” to think with Octavia Butler. And to move through the world with the intention of making it a better place for living creatures to inhabit. [...] And most importantly, it’s an invitation to join in. And it is a reminder that liberation is not a destination but an ongoing process, a praxis. Every day, groups of parents, librarians, nurses, temp workers, ordinary people, tired of the horrors of the present, come together to decide what kind of world they want to inhabit. [...]

---

Robyn: [...] [T]here were 21 hunger strikes in Canadian jails, prisons and detention centers between March 2020 and March 2021 [...]. "[W]ithin this architecture of oppression, we are a vibrant community [...] who eat together, [...] play together, and protect each other from a system that has exploited us.” [...]

[Robyn:] I’m thinking here of Claude McKay’s words from “If We Must Die”: “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Now of course fighting back looks like many things [...]. But it’s also much more: for so many people, whether abandoned by the state in a [public health crisis] [...] or abandoned by society in a carceral site, fighting back, by virtue of necessity as well as of ethics, is building, always building. This is the freedom work, and the love work, and the care work, of rehearsal. [...]

Robyn: [...] [I]t’s crucial, I think, that we remember that regimes of private property - and, crucially, the carceral state that entrenches them - are continually being contested, have never been written in stone, and are far from inevitable or permanent fixtures of planetary and earthly life. […] Elected officials chose, and choose every day, to spend millions of public dollars on criminalizing homelessness rather than address its root causes: the unaffordability of a city caused by the unchecked powers of developers and the mass abandonment of Black, Indigenous, disabled peoples, and people living with mental health issues. [...] But new visions for living are forwarded every day [...]. Mutual aid [...] support projects [...] in Toronto and Hamilton, [...] [in] Edmonton [and] [...] in Halifax are supporting [homeless people] [...] against city evictions, ensuring food, water, and medical services where their city has failed to do so. [...] Here I’d like to bring in the words of [G.I.] [...], describing [...] the longer-term [homeless] support organizing that came out of it: That is one of the most revolutionary things: to build community with people who our government and our society tells us not to: Black, Brown and houseless people standing side by side, to re-imagine what the world could look like.

---

All text above by: Robyn Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Hannah Voegele, and Christopher Griffin. “Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World: An Interview with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.” Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics. 19 November 2021. At: doi dot org slash 10.17613/9w3e-n182 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[sigridstumb]

Tank, DPS, Support

It's February 2024 as I type this, and there will be a federal election here in the U.S. that could decide the fate of the planet. Right? Right.

I look at what TFG says he will do if he wins, and I start pondering - How can I help people who will be fiat-declared to be illegal? How do I support and aid people who will honest-to-fuck need to go on the run? I'm disabled, I am ill, there's a lot I cannot do. But I can Support Class and I can limited-Tank.

See, in RPGs there are three basic types of character. Characters that do a lot of damage - DPS. Those that can take a lot of damage, that can hold the attention of attacks - Tanks. And Support class, people who heal, or repair, or build, etc.

In reality, DPS are folks who write scathing essays, who lead marches with protest chants, DPS are attorney who take cases to the courts, DPS are folks who write great speeches, who organize strikes and walk-outs.

In reality, Tanks are people who stand in the front at a protest or direct action, they are folks who hold the umbrellas and throw the tear-gas cannisters back. Tanks also get in between an attacker and their victim, Tanks distract and engage with the opposing DPS and hold their attention so others can get away.

In reality, Support are the folks who bring food and coffee to the picket line, Street Medics, people who offer jail support, folks who donate money to the non-profits that go out and do the work.

I can limited Tank and I can support. I can be a big-ol' obvious dyke and perhaps get the attention of some fucker who might otherwise go after someone more vulnerable than I am. I can donate. I can send coffee to the picket line.

Sometimes, we have to take care of ourselves and our family first. And that is GOOD, that is right and proper and good. Take care of you and yours first. But if you have a moment to spare, see what kind of MMORPG character you can be, and go be that character.

Because if TFG gets re-elected, it's going to take every single one of us to get out the other side.

[aceofcupsbiggestfan]

Pompe

Taking place during City Dionysia, pompe was the walk to the temple all took part in.

The planning of the festival came down to the Archons of Athens, political leaders. Once elected and planned the festival kicked off.

With the help of two chairs and ten curators the festival began with pompe. All statutes of Dionysus were removed from temples as the polis, metics and representatives marched to the Theatre of Dionysus at Acropolis. This pompe was to re-enact the arrival of Dionysus at Athens.

Along with the statues, this was the time where phalloi were carried, along with water and wine.

Metics and foreigners wore purple robes and carried trays of offerings while citizens wore everyday clothes and carried the water and wine. This is thought to be associated to Dionysus's fashion of reversal of roles. Along with libations, oboloi, long bread, was offered.

Bulls made the procession as well to be sacrificed at the temple. Choregoi, sponsors, wore ornate clothes during the procession.

These sponsors partook in dithyrambic competetions, hymn singing to Dionysus after the pompe. Flute playing and lyrical poetry also took place. After, the bulls were sarcificed and Athenians took part of a feast.

Modern Hellenes can incorporate pompe into practice by taking a walk around local cities or town. One might like to travel to a theatre, as Dionysus is the god of theatre.

[batboyblog]

trans people are allowed to be frustrated with the state of the world what the fuck are you on. how are trans policies in michigan supposed to help trans kids in florida. do you see what im saying here. and bidens words arwnt worth shit if he doesnt actually do anything

Of course they should be frustrated I'm frustrated, who wouldn't be frustrated?

this is not about that, it's fine to say "the world really sucks right now" "this is shit" yes I totally fucking agree

it's when it goes off into "and there's nothing to be done" "no one else cares" "we are without friends and allies" "no one is doing anything" LIES! LIES! from the mouth of hell! lies that give aid and comfort to the enemy! PLAGUE! WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A PLAGUE AND YOU BEHAVE LIKE THIS!

this ask is full of so much horseshit that needs to get unpacked I almost didn't but fuck it someone might read what I say.

First off I brought up Michigan because it was claimed no straight allies were useful or doing "fuck all" clearly untrue if we look at Michigan (and else where but lets stay focused) and as Harvey Milk taught us, hopelessness is the ally of oppression, if people don't believe it can get better they stop fighting, gotta give 'em hope. So clearly right now at a time when trans rights are under attack, in some places they're also making gains and that can happen in your state too.

You see Michigan had a Republican governor till 2019, but in 2018 after years of organizing and working (and voting) progressive forces managed to elect Gretchen Whitmer. In 2022 She was up for re-election against a woman named Tudor Dixon who made attacking LGBT people, trans kids in sports, and drag show central parts of her platform, she was defeated. But what's more till the 2022 election Republicans had a majority in both the MI Senate and State House. Hard work lead to Democrats flipping a handful of seats to get a majority in both and now they can pass things like expanding trans civil rights.

My point is Michigan could EASILY be passing its own "Don't Say Gay" bill, could easily be banning trans health care for minors, easily EASILY, those are the policies Michigan Republicans ran on last year, and they were the majority before the election. Hard work, organizing, showing up, beat them and we get the reverse of all that hate.

flipping a whole state government is a lot, and in some Red States that might not be doable. But take Nebraska, where state Senator Machaela Cavanaugh's heroic filibuster looks like it's gonna derail anti-trans legislation, she's only able to do that filibuster because the Republican majority is one seat shy of a super majority. They need 33 votes to end her filibuster, there are 32 Republicans. Because all the Democrats have her back the Republicans can't shut her down and the bill will die because the Democrats can filibuster it to death.

In Kansas the Democratic governor has vetoed an anti-trans law, in Kentucky the Democratic governor is expected to veto their anti-trans laws. In Utah in March 2022 the Republican Governor Spencer Cox vetoed an anti-trans sports bill (he's since supported an anti-trans bill this year) Now I bring these up because in each state Republicans have a super majority that can override the veto, they over turned Cox's 2022 veto, and are expected to in Kentucky. So if you live in a red state and you think "oh we can't flip the whole state!" you can flip one or two or 3 state house seats and make ALL the difference.

Finally on trans kids in Florida right now not after some future election. Four organizations are suing the state of Florida to block its hateful anti-trans health care rule, Southern Legal Counsel, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Human Rights Campaign. Again the charge was "trans allies fucking suck at their job" well one of these orgs isn't even an LGBT organization at all (Southern Legal Counsel) the others are LGBT groups supported by thousands (millions in the case of HRC) of dollars from allies across the country. These are the groups leading the fight in Florida right now to block this shit in court right now, trans allies.

FINALLY FINALLY on Biden, you can't say "basically the only people who has gotten upset over this are trans people" and claim that no one else said anything when the President of the United States of America did a WHITE HOUSE interview and called transphobia evil and transphobic laws "close to a sin". Either you want people talking about this problem or talking about it is meaningless which is it?

besides which Joe Biden is the most aggressively pro-trans President America has ever ever had and is most likely the most pro-trans head of state on earth right now, he's head and shoulders ahead of most European left wing parties on this issue rn. Don't take my word for it, let's see what America's largest LGBTQ rights org has to say and they're careful to point out more can be done, always more can be done. But people telling you Biden does nothing or only does bad things are not your friend they are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Did you know Joe Biden is the first President to EVER appoint a trans person to a senate confirmed position? That he was an early endorser and supporter of the first openly trans person elected to state government Danica Roem? that the first trans state Senator, Sarah McBride got her start in politics working in the White House for Vice-President Biden? Biden is a historic friend and ally of trans people he's boosted trans people into office and supported trans polices. Change is possible progress is possible don't give in to defeatism and cynical both sides bullshit.

[wooodyguthrie]

Rubin vs. Ochs

Perhaps not Untypical

On March 31, 1968, in a move that surprised most, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run for re-election in 1968. In the aftermath of Lyndon B. Johnson's sudden shocker a heated dialogue between Phil Ochs, folksinger, and Jerry Rubin, Yippie organizer, took place on the subject of America, Johnson, Kennedy and the movement.

Full dialogue under the cut

RUBIN: The six-gun has surrendered; the machine will now move back into control of America’s banks. Rationality will replace the sloppy hand. Kennedy, the mechanical consumer product, will replace Johnson, the existential gambler. And things won’t be as interesting up there.

OCHS: The machine has never relinquished control; the six-gun is now fully automated. The yippie is a political child reacting emotionally, like an artist, armed with intuition and numbers, and therefore effective in the current madness. Perhaps the politics of acid. The yippie is the child and creation of the insane technological society.

RUBIN: Only an emotional child could react properly to this world. What can a grown-up Harvard professor say about napalmed babies? What can a rich man know about black poverty? I try to react to America like an emotional child. I am also angry. I am angry with the machine that does not ask why, that smiles, that shakes your hand, that feels no emotion. The battle in America is not between Johnson and Kennedy, or Democrats and Republicans, but between children and the machine. Kennedy represents the basic evil of America, not Johnson. Johnson was just doing all he could in his own way to live up to J. Kennedy’s memory. I hate all rich bastards.

OCHS: You radicals are all alike, lashing out at the approaching armed tractor with yo-yo s. I agree with an essential part of what you’re saying, but I also sense the machine is developing a rather apparent emotion, that of survival. The system is in a state of crisis and I feel there may be a surprising number of radicalized establishment figures (“rich bastards”) who are responding to the lunacy of the times as deeply as we are. Many people are very mad, many are in a drugged stupor, and being a semi-yippie I’m hysterical.

RUBIN: OK, that draws the issue clearly. I do not want this system to survive. You do. I want to help destroy America’s military domination of the world, and her cultural imperialism. To me the essence of America is viewing man as a material, not a spiritual, object. In other words, the Death society. America at her essence is irrational to man’s freedom. Kennedy would rationally protect this irrationality. Kennedy is the enemy of the South American peasant and the Detroit black, and the dropped – out Long Island white teenager.

OCHS: Once again I essentially agree with you but I see a different pattern for the change. America must change the direction of its foreign policy and the character of its soul if it is to survive. The world at its essence has been historically irrational to man’s freedom and we’re just the new generation of actor-comedian-revolutionaries who get to face the impossible, but only worthwhile battle. I’m just as unpatriotic as the next guy, but I realize the revolution requires timing as well as militancy. Look before you leap and consider who else might be dominating.

RUBIN: Fuck your timing. Johnson quit because like you, he understands that the counter-revolution also requires timing as well as militancy.

OCHS: Johnson pulling back is either the noblest or the craftiest move he ever made. The advancing armies, panting on the verge of a major kill, pause and lift their visors to discover to their outrage that their helpless enemy has disappeared and joined their ranks through the night. Come back Lyndon, we need you.

RUBIN: Johnson hates Kennedy more than he hates Ho Chi Minh. He has robbed Kennedy of a Kennedy crusade. Johnson can now sit on the sidelines, amused. Both men have so confused their images with their heads that all they see is their images colliding in the media. And the whole charade is a technicolor movie distracting us, the yippies, from doing our thing.

OCHS: Yes, but it’s a great movie, and I suspect we’re all part of it, without our choice. In fact, we are probably creations of it. We’re trying to kill daddy by our underground films, forgetting that Warner Bros. can still come up with Bonnie and Clyde. Yes, that Warner Bros. can still come up with Bonnie and Clyde. Yes, one hand on the creation of the new society, but perhaps another trying to keep horseshoes away from the cossacks.

RUBIN: The change in the faces of royalty have no effect on Yippie. Chicago will still be a theatrical stage, and we actors. The Democratic Convention still smells of Death. Yippie and black power are the only ideas left to believe in in America.

OCHS: The change in the faces of the party will in fact diminish some of the natural organizing power of yippie. Johnson is the great theatrical enemy to have; it is much easier to get people to freak out over him than the memory of John Kennedy.

RUBIN: But in four months Bobby as the establishment candidate will reveal his fanged teeth; he will oppose revolution in South Vietnam; he will salute the flag; he will attack crime in the streets; he will embrace Lyndon B. Johnson; he will condemn extremism; he will court the South; he will have you arrested for pot; he will joke on camera. Bobby is the polar opposite to our alternative consciousness, alternative culture. In Chicago the freaky, emotional, communal underculture will expose itself to Bobby’s refrigerated mind.

OCHS: All presidential candidates are required to recite the defensive slogans of the corporation cold war; the question is what they actually do when in office. John Kennedy followed the natural political course, which was middle; Robert Kennedy will follow today’s natural political course, which is moderate left. I’m not proposing to blindly follow the man. I’m leaving open the possibility that he is hip enough, and charismatic enough, and powerful enough to make a major attempt to reform an unworkable system. If he really has no intention of making a change, he will fall like any nearsighted bureaucrat.

RUBIN: Phil, please take your thumb out of your mouth! Don’t swoon so soon! Bobby Kennedy believes in the corporate cold war with all his sawed-off soul. Bobby Kennedy has won your heart and stolen your head. Kennedy stands for the maintenance of property; we stand for the destruction of property and the establishment of community—never the two shall meet. The youth are building a real thing, and Kennedy is irrelevant to it. I suggest a five-month ban on the mention of Kennedy’s name.

OCHS: Jerry, take the joint away from your thumb. The day community stops meeting property is the day Kennedy loses his ambition. I believe the youth movement should define its separation from Establishment leaders so as not to have anything approaching the Stevenson disillusionment. But while we’re hacking our way out of the jungle, let’s not forget that we’re not the only tribe and we must carve our future out of our past, however corrupt. Kennedy doesn’t own me; I visualize him arm-wrestling in the wings with Che Guevara, and morally I lean toward Che’s side. I admit I’m confused about the current situation. I am blinded by movie star reform, and movie star revolution. But I can see reform on the way to youthopia.

RUBIN: Kennedy? Who is that?

OCHS: He doesn’t exist; neither do the yippies.

RUBIN: The yippies are a social movement, a dynamic youth energy force. International. Young people too alienated to become spare parts in somebody’s junk car. Young people ecstatic with the “now!” Demonstrations are becoming a way of life, a life style—a celebration of the future—without specific political demands—our politics exist in the very way we live our lives. We cannot be co-opted because we want everything. We do not accept the assumptions of America. Electoral politics is a trick-bag which has little to do with the way America works; America’s power lies in her cultural and economic institutions; and we are at war with them. The Vietnam war has taught us how to stand on our two feet. Once standing, we shall never kneel again. See you in Chicago.

OCHS: The energy of the youth social movement is there without the yippies, and the yippies are becoming the natural embodiment of that force. I’m a part of that force; I celebrate life; I also have specific demands, like the legalization of marijuana, the curtailing of the police, the end of an imperialist foreign policy. I am not kneeling, but my feet aren’t completely off the ground either. America is the beautiful shipwreck; we are the orphans of technology, and “now” is an illusion just as sure as my name is Eugene McCarthy. Keep flippy for yippee; see you in Chicago!

[panicinthestudio]

Best Of: A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe, March 31,2023

In last November's midterm elections, voters placed the Republican Party in charge of the House of Representatives. In 2024, it’s very possible that Republicans will take over the Senate as well and voters will elect Donald Trump — or someone like him — as president.  But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots; a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament; Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide; Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections; and Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil. Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems? Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/... which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read. In this conversation, taped in November 2022, we discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.

Mentioned:

Sacred and Secular (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

“Exploring drivers of vote choice and policy positions among the American electorate (https://perryundem.com/wp-content/upl...

Book Recommendations:

Popular Dictatorships (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Aleksandar Matovski

Spin Dictators (https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...) by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman

The Origins of Totalitarianism (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-orig...) by Hannah Arendt

The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times Podcasts

[plethoraworldatlas]

While calling this year’s presidential election against Donald Trump the most critical ever, the Democratic Party is using the same old playbook for this year’s campaigns.

The same old obsession with raising record amounts of money at the expense of presenting an authentic, vibrant agenda that will motivate millions of voters to vote for Democratic candidates.

The same old corporate-conflicted political and media consultants are controlling what the candidates say and do so as not to upset the monied interests and the lucrative consulting business for corporate clients.

We will see the same old exclusion of experienced grassroots and national citizen groups, with millions of members, who just might have some good ideas about policies, strategies, tactics, messaging, rebuttals, slogans, and ways to get out the vote, that the “politicians” have never thought of or, in their arrogance, ignored. (See winningamerica.net).

Expect the same old retention of Party apparatchiks wallowing profitably in their sinecures, never looking themselves in the mirror and asking themselves why they can’t landslide the worst GOP in history. Republican candidates are openly anti-worker, women, children, consumers, and the environment. If your name ends in INC the GOP might be on your side.

Get ready for the same old resistance to infusing the party with energetic young leaders to start replacing older, smug bureaucrats who lose to the GOP in eminently winnable races at local, state, and national levels, yet have victory parties when their losses are less than the pundits or polls had predicted. (They celebrated their 2022 loss of the House of Representatives to the vicious, cruel, ignorant GOP.)

The same old scapegoating of Third Party candidates, spending gobs of money and filing frivolous lawsuits to block them from the ballot so as not to give voters more voices and choices, and to stifle any voters who might choose Third Party candidates, is in full swing. Instead of focusing on getting more of the 120 million non-voters to vote for Democratic candidates this year, the Democratic Party is focused on denying the First Amendment rights—free speech, petition, and assembly—of Third Party candidates and their minuscule number of voters.

As Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, so cogently points out, just getting out 10-15% more low-wage and poor voters would easily help the Democrats win the national presidential election. Instead, the Democrats feed reporters material that leads newspapers to feature stories like TheNew York Times March 21, 2024 article titled “Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats.” What they mean is being heavy on obstructing their access to the ballot.

The same old plans to waste huge amounts of money that allow media consultants to reap 15% on campaign ad buys instead of really going for the ground game are underway. For example, one pro-Democratic Party PAC announced it would spend $140 million to put real-life voter testimonials on television praising President Joe Biden and his party. They think that’s a winner, right out of the practice of dramatized testimonials by Madison Avenue advertising firms.

Note the same old stories reporting periodic fundraising totals fed to eagerly waiting reporters comparing the Dems and the Reps money totals unattached to any programs, agendas, or commitments to the people. Thus, the March 20, 2024, New York Times dreary headline: “Outside Groups Pledge Over $1 Billion to Aid Biden’s Re-Election Effort.”

They include environmental groups, labor unions, and other “liberal PACs” that shell out the money without asking the Democratic Party to commit to any reforms or to address long-avoided necessities for the people. It’s enough that the Dems are against Trump and the GOP—assuring a race to the bottom in the presidential election.

The lengthy Times article goes on and on reporting announcements by assorted Democratic moneypots and their GOP counterparts. Similar dreary “cash-register politics” articles will appear in the coming weeks and months with ever more frequency.

Heaven forbid that reporters start writing about how all this money inhibits candidates from reforming the campaign finance system that is rotten to the core. Congress and the White House are for sale or rent! For example, the Democrats could—but do not—advance a much overdue agenda to curb the corporate crime wave; repeal anti-labor laws (like the notorious Taft-Hartley Act); junk the corrupt tax system written by big corporate tax escapees; debloat the vast, wasteful, redundant military budget; and push for the popular Medicare-for-All legislation languishing for years in Congress—for starters.

...

The same old inability to confront shrinking support or turnout from their base—African Americans and Hispanic Americans—is inexcusable. The Democrats can’t seem to convincingly say that the party is not taking them for granted and to build the relationships that could motivate these voters to return to the fold.

How about not being able to recover the loss of many unionized workers to Trump, of all demons, and show all workers why their livelihoods would improve with a Democratic victory? The Dems don’t even know how to use LABOR DAY to showcase their sincerity with events on the ground in every locality.

[old-school-butch]

I used to make the same comparison between Trump and Caligula (before writing this, I tried to dig up the list I made of batshit cruel sadistic things they both did), but recently I've been thinking of him as "If Julius Caesar Were An Idiot":

• alternately beloved by the poor he uplifted with hopes of restoring a former glory to the republic and by the rich he benefited or reviled as the single biggest threat to the nation's democratic* system

• sought a re-election partially but not entirely because it would exempt him from legal prosecution for long-standing serious allegations

• expanded and abused the extent of his power in a long-term attempt to have permanent and complete power over the state in the highest executive position

• effectively marched his armed supporters – who believed in his seemingly impossible promises despite many of them going without wages for multiple years as a direct result of supporting him – on the capital in a confusing sort of non-coup coup

• lied to make himself look wealthier than he was, then got himself more money through some sketchy schemes

• forged personal relationships with foreign rulers and oligarchs both to enrich himself and to strengthen his political foothold as aspiring dictator

• bought, blackmailed, and browbeat the part of the Senate that wasn't already in his camp into excusing crimes for which he might have otherwise faced the maximum possible sentences for treasonously endangering the integrity of the republic, and allowing him to continue pursuing even more power

except, unlike our "Idiot Caesar", the real Caesar actually did follow through on some of his outlandish promises to his followers and actually did improve many of their lives substantially. and the real Caesar had a vision for improving the country's future that wasn't just about himself and his ego (though of course that played a part). I do still think that Trump and Caligula share more in terms of character and perversion and arbitrary aggression.

I like that analysis! I think you have to include the caveat of 'like an idiot' because the single glaring difference is that I'm not sure Trump actually understands how government works. He's in 'business', and is so bad at it that if he just invested his inheritance in the S&P500 and not tried to run his own companies, he would actually be wealthier.

Look at his non-response to covid - this isn't 'small government' at work, it's 'why do people expect us to do stuff?' at work. We are also lucky that he didn't realize that 100% of coups require military support. He tried to call them in and they firmly declined. He's not sure how or why. He tried to Godfather that States to 'find him more votes' but those institutions also refused. He's just not very good at this game.

Which, of course, brings the worry that if he's re-elected his people will understand that they need to get the political rank and file firmly under control in their 4 year term, to pave the way.

I think if that happens, though, we will see more Caligula and less Julius Caeser.

[sun-in-retrograde]

6 Things I'm Looking Forward to in 2024's Astrology

1. The Stelliums

This year starts with the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars within 37 degrees of each other. So the first half of the year is a series of stelliums. Here’s what we have - for the purposes of this I’m counting Pluto and Eris as planets but that’s it. 

Sagittarius stellium - 30 December - 6 January

Capricorn - 6 January - 20 January; 24 January - 7 February

Aquarius - 5 February - 12 March

Pisces - 19 Feb - 1 May

Aries - 20 March - 29 April, 1 May - 16 may 

Taurus -  19 April - 27 May

Gemini - 26 May - 17 June

Cancer 21 June - 2 July

Leo - 22 July - 26 July

This means that in the first part of the year, seasonal energies could hit relatively hard. Aries particularly lingers, but then, of course it does. Eris has been in Aries since 1922, through World War II, cold wars and every intense thing. It wouldn’t surprise me to see us have to confront the reality of war next year. I think its a safe bet that the Aries season will be intense. 

In general, though, it’s a good year to follow the wheel of the year in spiritual practice. It’s also a good year to think about Aquarius energy - the Sun leaves Aquarius pretty soon into a stellium forming there, so we have a really long time with this energy and some interesting things to do.

2. Pluto’s eventful entry into Aquarius 

On 21 January, Pluto enters Aquarius. I enjoy that this means it enters Aquarius conjunct the Sun. Astrologers have been talking about Pluto in Aquarius for a while and it seems right that this entry is really mindful of the energies Pluto is invoking. It’s the start of a new year and it’s time to think about how we want the world to be. 

The nice thing is, after that there’s a procession of planets over Pluto to really power up that Aquarius energy - Mercury on 5 February; the Moon on the 8th; Mars on the 13th; and Venus on the 17th. A lot of energy encourage Pluto to really bring in some transformation. I’m hoping for  world that’s a little bit more eccentric, a little bit more open minded; a little bit more communal without losing any love for the freaks. Ultimately I think what we want is an end to the Pluto Capricorn period that started in 2008 and saw economic crisis, Brexit, Trump, Pandemic and war. 

I’m not an idealist. In 2043 when Pluto enters Pisces we’ll all be glad the Pluto Aquarius season is over. The thing about revolutions is they go around. But when a season has been this miserable and it’s coming to an end, I’ll take it and work out the details later. 

We might get to see some of those details in miniature though. On 2 May Pluto goes retrograde and a series on planets will oppose it, giving us a sense of weakened, inward looking Pluto Aquarius energy when it’s doing the hard work. Mercury is first again, on 2 July; Venus on the 12th; and the Sun on 22 July. Then, on 1 September Pluto re-enters Capricorn. It’ll be there for the US presidential election and probably the election in the UK as well. Which is fun given this has been miserable energy in many ways. 

3. Sedna’s eventful entry into Gemini

Sedna takes over 11,000 years to go through all the zodiac signs so we’re currently living through the Sedna return of agriculture. It’s a distant world but one of the most important of the dwarf planets and it’s currently traveling just about as fast as it can. It will come as close as it ever does to the Sun in July 2076 in Cancer. In terms of a 11,000 year cycle, that’s nothing at all. 

For mythological reasons Sedna is often associated with trauma and survival and to a degree, I get that. Sedna carries deep evolutionary anxieties - just by its nature it invites us to consider 10,000 years ago and 10,000 years in the future. Sedna in Gemini is an opportunity for us to think more long term and talk more openly. 

On 27 April, Sedna enters Gemini. On 20th May it’s Conjunct the Sun; Venus on the 24th; Jupiter on the 27th; Mercury on 3rd June; and the Moon on 5th June. This means Sedna enters Gemini and activates our core self and emotions along with the ruler of Gemini. The common belief is that Sedna is the higher Octave of the Moon and that makes sense - but I always think of it as a higher octave of Venus - seeking values that are beyond what we can know in the lifetime of a single civilisation. So personally, I’m very happy to see Venus singing in the new era.

The other fun thing is that Sedna enters Gemini trined to Pluto in Aquarius and all the planets that conjunct Sedna will then go on to have trines with Pluto. More energy that really empowers Pluto Aquarius and hopefully starts that new era off just right. 

4. Jupiter Uranus Conjunction

In April 2024 there will be a Jupiter Uranus conjunction. This is another sign for big change. It would be a good time for labour saving innovations or political ideas to make our lives easier. But it’s also a good time for money making ideas and political ideas to ensure that those who don’t want to change don’t have to. 

I would like to note that the last conjunctions were 1997 and 2010 - the last two times the UK government changed its party in power, and this is very much expected to happen again in 2024. The time before that, in 1983, the government stayed the same but the group that would become the Lib Dems appeared as our 3rd party. Hopefully we use this energy for good.

5. Neptune Pluto Sextile

This sextile is ridiculous because its been active for longer than most of us have been alive. But it has periods when it can go exact: 1947-1960; 1975-1988; and 2024 to 2034. Between July and September the sextile will be within 1 degree and this is a good time to tap into creativity and art; spirituality and intuition. Then, we have it twice a year for a decade. If you want some weird energy - 2 to 4 September is the last time in our lifetimes we’ll have Pluto in Capricorn closely sextile Neptune. 

6. Mars Jupiter conjunction 

This is a pretty common one - it happens every 2-3 years and generally comes with positive thinking, optimism, energy and courage. It last happened in Gemini in 1989, 1942 and 1906. The only reason I mention it here is so I can remember to track the moon on this day because as the Prophecy says

When the moon is in the Seventh House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius

Age of Aquarius

Aquarius

Aquarius!

(sorry)

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

So, I think I’m going to go back and finish The Bugle. It’s a bit weird that I haven’t finished it already, given that it’s one of my favourite things in the world. I left it off after episode 4200, which means 200 episodes into the post-John Oliver era, because for reasons that Andy Zaltzman thinks are funny, he labelled the first post-Oliver one as episode 4001.

The John Oliver era had 295 official episodes, 383 if you count all the filler episodes during off weeks, from October 2007 to June 2016 (395 if you count the entertainingly opinionated daily special reports that Andy Zaltzman did during the 2012 Olympics). Then John Oliver left to go be famous or whatever, and Andy Zaltzman re-invented it as a thing he’d host with a rotating cast of guests from various countries (mainly still England and America, but Australians Alice Fraser and Tom Ballard are among the most common guests, and there are a few regular ones from NZ and India as well).

The first of these, episode 4001, aired in October 2016, but there was a longer gap than there seems based on those dates. By early 2015, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight commitments got significant enough so episodes became sporadic at best, they put out a lot of filler episodes at first, but eventually the gaps were so long that they gave up on that and just had breaks. Breaks that were interrupted by more filler episodes in which Andy Zaltzman would tell us that they’re going to be back soon because John Oliver swears he’ll have time next week, and then there’s another gap of like three months. The final proper Bugle episode from that era was in March 2016; they then came back with a filler episode in April to tell us they’d be back soon, and finally, one June to say they were giving up on it. I listened to all of those 2015-2016 episodes within a couple of days, and fucking hell, it was painful. By the end, I was shouting Monty Python quotes at them: “This is an ex-podcast! Stop nailing it to its perch and trying to sell it back to us! For the love of God, put it out of its misery with some dignity! Let Andy Zaltzman go roam free in the fjords, or whatever the message of that sketch was!”

Anyway. I listened to all those John Oliver-era episodes in one go, almost literally. It took me just under three months, and that might have been a level of fixation that went too far even by my standards. I had The Bugle playing during every second of my life that I wasn’t asleep, or doing something I absolutely had to do for work. It was probably too concentrated a dose, which would be why I felt genuinely depressed when I got to the end of it. Well, that and the inherent tragedy in the way someone can spend so many years building up something amazing and then outgrow the project and their collaborator, everything beautiful ends, nothing gold can stay, and in the words of Andy Zaltzman, if the sun is going to run out of fire at some stage in the future, what’s the fucking point of doing anything now? I might have been projecting my own issues a little.

I didn’t go back to it for a while, because I knew that if I went straight into the post-Oliver Bugle, I would immediately hate it for not being the old thing, and I wanted to give it a better chance than that. I eventually did start from episode 4001, which aired a few weeks before America’s 2016 election, and was a stilted conversation between Andy Zaltzman and a fairly confused Hari Kondabolu, who clearly did not quite know what he’d signed up for. I spent the whole episode trying not to hate Hari Kondabolu for the crime of not being John Oliver, and it only sort of worked. Since then, The Bugle has found its stride, Hari Kondabolu has figured out what it is, and he’s now one of my favourite guests for them to have on, I’ve even gotten into his own stand-up off the back of his Bugle appearances.

Andy Zaltzman himself has admitted it was a rocky transition. He’s said it wasn’t easy to go from the rapport he’d built up for years with John Oliver, to trying to create something similar with people he didn’t know nearly as well. It got better when he stopped trying to make it another version of what it was before, and let it be something else.

It helped when they started occasionally, and then regularly, having two guests at a time, so they could bounce off each other as well, and the chemistry between Andy Zaltzman and one guest didn’t have to carry the episode by itself. Which is good, because Andy Zaltzman had pitch-perfect chemistry with John Oliver, but does not appear to have that with anyone else in the world. It really is amazing, how the John Oliver/Andy Zaltzman thing is the best chemistry I’ve ever heard (not just between two double act partners, but between any two people who’ve tried to do comedy together in any way), but Andy Zaltzman seems incapable of having a natural-seeming interaction with any other human.

Andy Zaltzman has this combination of a fairly niche sense of humour (vaguely surreal in a way he never explains), a penchant for relatively obscure topics and references in his humour, and just a socially awkward personality, that means that isn’t going to work with almost anyone. In several interviews, I’ve heard him stop just barely short of actually saying he knows he got lucky in 2002 to work with the one person in the world who fit perfectly into his style, and that’s why he created a way to stick with that partnership for as long as he possibly could, even when his partner moved across an ocean and pursued different career directions.

It’s difficult to explain exactly what made the Zaltzman and Oliver thing work so well, but I’m going to try. I think it’s the way they could play off each other during pre-written material as easily as most people do when improvising. Normally on a podcast or TV show or anything like that, you get one or the other. Either it’s pre-written, so it’s dense and high-quality really funny stand-up, or you get the spontaneous back-and-forth of two people just talking to each other. Zaltzman and Oliver managed to do both at the same time, which I’m pretty sure is only possible if two people know each other’s comedy styles incredibly well, and have those styles fit together.

They’ve said that the way they did The Bugle was a phone call a few days before recording to agree on what topics they’d discuss, and then they’d separately write material on those topics, and then take turns reciting that material and mutually riffing on it in the actual recording. I don’t think I know of anything else that does things that way. Gets in solid chunks of properly written material, and then does improvised back-and-forth on top of it. I’m going to guess that the reason most people don’t do that is it’s really really difficult.

It's impressive just to write that much material. Yeah, they sporadically take weeks off in which they release filler episodes. And there have been a few extended gaps – they were gone for much of 2015/2016, and they took the summer of 2014 off. But aside from that, Andy Zaltzman has been regularly writing enough new material to fill his half of a 30-45-ish-minute episode on a weekly basis since late 2007. Obviously not every single second of it is solid gold, but still. A hell of a lot of what he comes up with is very good, and that’s a lot more than most comedians write in a year.

This is why when Daniel Kitson starts talking shit about podcasts, and I immediately find myself getting defensive and saying “Okay, okay, I’m all for complaining about the newfangled internet media that those young people are doing these days, but let’s not start disparaging Andy Zaltzman’s life’s work here,” I then remind myself that this isn’t what he means. Most podcasts are just people talking, mostly unscripted, and it probably is fair to suggest that it’s kind of bullshit for that to be considered on par with actually writing strong material (though also I do think unscripted podcasts can be great fun, and some cover important topics and can say important things, and some are just funny because completely unscripted back-and-forth can be very funny even if that isn’t fair to the people who work hard on crafting material, improv is a skill too, and also Daniel Kitson has done much of his complaining about podcasts on his own unscripted radio shows, though to be fair to him, he also talks about how he doesn’t get paid for those radio shows because he knows they don’t count as actual art or work or whatever, anyway this is another subject). But The Bugle does use carefully written material, and add the other stuff that makes podcasts good, and it’s brilliant. It’s fucking brilliant.

But that goes back to what makes the Zaltzman and Oliver thing special, because you just couldn’t do that with most pairs of comedians. They’d worked together a lot before starting The Bugle – on a few joint Edinburgh shows, hosting the Political Animal gig together in Edinburgh and London for a few years, writing and performing the radio show The Department together, getting joint writing credits on a few TV things like that Rory Bremner sketch. And that pretty much was their careers, from 2003-2006. They had a few other things – I assume they did separate stand-up gigs sometimes; John Oliver did Mock the Week a few times, did guest spots on a few other TV things like Armando Iannucci’s Gash, and had “additional material” writing credits on a few TV shows; Andy Zaltzman had a few Radio 4 guest spots – but just about their entire careers were built on stuff they wrote together. Anything either of them wrote at that time would be heavily influenced by the other.

That did change a bit after that, but only on one side. John Oliver had really really significant other things going on, like writing and performing in the premiere political satire show in America, and Andy Zaltzman was doing the same stuff they’d been doing before, stuff that John Oliver has since described as shit (I do understand why the compulsively self-deprecating John Oliver likes to say his career in England was terrible, but hearing him do too much of that does, once again, trigger my “Okay, let’s not disparage Andy Zaltzman’s life’s work here” defensiveness). Which would be why John Oliver described his experience on The Bugle as great fun and because he got to listen to his friend and brilliant comedian Andy Zaltzman be funny for an hour every week, and Andy Zaltzman has described The Bugle with the words “It saved my career.”

This would also be why, when they talked a lot of shit about Rupert Murdoch in 2011 and then got their funded pulled by TimesOnline (not saying there’s causation there, but definitely correlation) and it looked like The Bugle might not be able to keep running, John Oliver said he’d hate to lose thing he loved doing, and Andy Zaltzman used the words “I’ve got Jack K. shit else going on” to explain why he sounded palpably more desperate to find an alternative funding source.

Honestly though, it is cool that even if the desperation wasn’t nearly as significant, John Oliver did still sound invested in finding a way to keep The Bugle going into 2012, and once they did find a way, he stayed with it for a few more years. He barely needed The Bugle when they started it in 2007, and definitely did not need it by 2012. By then was one of the most successful Daily Show writers/correspondents and regularly traveled all over the United States to perform stand-up – no way did he need the money or any extra fame he’d get out of The Bugle. He was just doing it for the love of the game by then, the world got way more years of John Oliver doing a trans-Atlantic topical podcast than they had any right to, which I try to remind myself when I’m annoyed that it didn’t last forever. I’ve just said it’s impressive that Andy Zaltzman writes as much material as he has to for The Bugle – John Oliver was doing that as his side gig next to the Daily Show.

Having said that, that is why, while they were definitely equal co-hosts and no one was anyone’s sidekick (fuck you, Dominic Maxwell), Andy Zaltzman tended to have more minutes of prepared material in most episodes, and why he was the one doing things like the Bugle blog, finding a lot of the stories, coming up with the more complicated concepts and conceits to try out. Which means that while John Oliver was writing with lots of different people and for lots of different audiences and in lots of different mediums, almost everything Andy Zaltzman wrote was for The Bugle, and therefore for getting picked apart with John Oliver. They established their comedy styles together, and then they kept developing together, with everything Andy wrote and at least some things John wrote getting tested out on each other each week. They didn’t just learn each other’s humour, they created it. Obviously there had to be some compatibility to start with – they both had a few years of trying comedy before 2003, and they both just brought different skills to the table, and at some point figured out that what they already had fit together well. But after that, they had years of taking something that worked, and developing it in the direction of working more and more.

I am convinced that all of this was required to create the magic in those first seven-ish years of Bugle episodes. That’s how they could come to the table with material they had not already tested on the other person, and be confident that it would work. They’ve said they never heard each other’s material before the actual recording, which was a cool way to make the reactions natural, but they didn’t plan it that way specifically to manufacture that effect – it was just done because Johnny Showbiz (as Andy affectionately nicknamed him for seven years, and then repeated with at least a little genuine bitterness in his voice during some of the low points of 2015) could only carve out so much time.

That’s how they were able to create lightning in a bottle with the quality and precision of something pre-planned, and the fun of spontaneity. They were each so good at knowing when to pause in their material to let the other come in on something, and knowing when to keep going because what they had next was going to be better than the interjection. And they knew when to interrupt and when to let the other stay on their roll. They knew how to elicit certain reactions out of each other, and how to react in ways that set up the next bit, even when they didn’t know exactly what the next bit would be. They knew when to go off script and how to go back. They knew how to add bits of their material into the middle of the other’s monologue. They knew how to write their bits so they not only wouldn’t clash with what the other one would write, but would build on it.

Every once in a while there would be some little awkward misstep, like if one of them read out their material on a topic and the other admitted… “Well that’s basically what I had, so no point in me doing mine.” But that sort of thing almost never happened, and when you think about it, that’s fucking impressive. The existence of a few missteps just highlights how impressive it is that they were rare.

They also had other sources of natural double act chemistry. It helps that they clearly find each other genuinely funny. Every Andy Zaltzman monologue is made more delightful by the sound of John Oliver stifling giggles in the background, and every John Oliver rant is made better by hearing Andy Zaltzman choke on his words a little as he tries to respond. You know that thing where people on panel shows will laugh too loudly at someone’s joke, and sometimes I’ve heard that joke said on a different show and those people were both there at that time so they’re clearly just pretending that this is their first time hearing it? I don’t even really mind that, I know that’s how panel shows are going to work. But The Bugle was the absolute opposite of that, and it’s great. No one was pretending anything. They had so much shared history, and if one of them said something the other had heard before, the other would point that out, probably accompanied by some story of who scored the last goal in the football game at which they first told that joke or something like that.

I’ve compared it to a sport before, and I maintain that that comparison. Sometimes, when they get into a really good rhythm, listening to it is exactly as impressive as watching two people who are really really good at a sport do that sport at each other for an extended period of time, with no interruptions, just the purest form of what they do.

In my own sport, you sometimes get that kind of magic when you have two training partners who’ve known each other and worked together for a long time. Person A learns exactly how to respond to everything Person B does, so Person B has to learn how to counter those responses, and then Person A learns how to counter that, and so on and so on. We talk in the sport about first-line/second-line/third-line defence, but if two people work together for long enough, they get into seventh-, eighth-, ninth-line defense. What do you do if you do this and then they do this and then you do this but they do this and you do this and they do this? No matter how good two athletes are, they don’t get that far against opponents they don’t know. The highest level of the sport I’ve ever seen in person has not been in the finals of national championships or at the international tournaments I’ve attended, it’s been in a practice room between two high-level athletes who are longtime training partners.

That’s the best analogy I have for why Zaltzman and Oliver worked. They kept trying to find ways to impress each other and surprise each other, kept finding different ways to respond to the other’s material, kept finding new ways to fit their ideas together. Learned exactly which way to go when one person tries one thing, and then how to respond to that, and they sound like they could go forever.

I’ve found it really sad, in my time in sport, when longtime training partners get split up because one moves away or moves on or something else. It’s a loss to the sport. You can’t just create that again. They were doing something that most people can’t do, and I hate seeing a dynamic that pushed the sport’s boundaries get dissolved.

I did think that when the initial era of The Bugle ended. Though I have to admit… okay, I hate ever admitting that any kind of change might have any upsides, because as a rule, I am no fan of change. But I have to admit that Andy Zaltzman’s comedy did start getting noticeably stronger in the few years that followed that. It had been getting better at a steady rate before that, you can hear it develop as the early Bugle years progressed, but there was a steep incline around 2017, as he began the new era of The Bugle. He jumped a couple of levels all at once.

I’m sure there are multiple reasons for that. He’s a topical and political comedian doing a trans-Atlantic podcast, and this did coincide with some major political shake-ups, trans-Atlantically. So he had new stuff to work with, and maybe some genuine emotional responses that created a more visceral feel to the comedy.

But also, as beautiful as a longtime training partnership can be, I have also, as a coach, sometimes moved around an athlete who’d been working with one person for too long. Told them that I know what they do with their main training partner is great, but there are massive holes in their game in the shape of all the things that one partner doesn’t do, and they need to work with other people to be more well-rounded. I’ve sometimes made the mistake of not doing that in time, and then taken an athlete who did amazing things in the training room with their one partner, sent them into a tournament they should have been good enough to win, and watched them get caught in something easy and obvious because they’d never learned how to respond to it.

I realize I’m stretching the metaphor here, possibly beyond the point where it makes sense, but that might have come into play with Andy Zaltzman. Like I said, John Oliver had other shit going on, but Andy Zaltzman, for years, wrote everything with the intention of fitting it into John Oliver’s contributions. I’ve heard his stand-up from those years – clips of it were often released as Bugle filler episodes, and a few other recordings of it are floating around – and it sounds like pretty much all his stand-up shows consisted of stuff he’d originally written for The Bugle. Which makes sense – he wrote so much for that podcast, he’s not going to write a whole extra hour for Edinburgh every year. He’s going to take the best of what he has.

Andy Zaltzman started trying new things when he wasn’t working with John Oliver anymore. He started combining the surreal stuff with the grounded political points in ways he never had before. Started injecting a little more real emotion into it, possibly because he was no longer playing the dispassionate foil to John Oliver’s grandstanding. I think he might be a better individual comedian now than he would have been if that hadn’t changed.

So he had the new and improved material, and he had new partnerships. Lots of new Bugle co-hosts, all of whom brought different things to the table, and gave him different things to play off. It was awkward at first, but he figured it out. Not really by getting less awkward, but by learning to work around it. Having multiple co-hosts who could play off each other. Starting live shows so they could play off the audience. Making the show about the variety of personalities and comedy styles, about the new features and the advances in Andy Zaltzman’s comedy, rather than the rapport between just two people.

And it’s not like he never had anything going with anyone else. I’d say the real turning point for The Bugle, back into something great, even if different, was when Alice Fraser got on board. She became a regular, and now appears in most episodes, alongside whoever else is there that week. Having that consistency again is good, and of course it’s good that it comes with someone who’s so individually funny, and who fits into The Bugle. Because she is, and she does. She has a similar sense of humour to Andy Zaltzman. She knows Andy’s sense of humour, she’s talked about having listened to The Bugle in the Zaltzman and Oliver days, she knew what she was getting into.

But still… Zaltzman and Fraser are very funny together, I would not call it the same level of “chemistry” as Zaltzman and Oliver. Same with Zaltzman and Kumar, even though Nish is on there a lot as well, and with his longtime friendship with Andy and longtime fandom of the original Bugle, he definitely knew what he was getting into and was the right fit for the show. Alice Fraser and Nish Kumar play effortlessly well off each other when they’re on together. And they clearly both have massive respect for Andy Zaltzman – I get the impression that they would both die for him and/or throw hands to defend his honour, if necessary. And they clearly both find Andy very funny. But still, there is a bit of a beat missing in their back-and-forth with him.

That still works, though. Andy Zaltzman’s relentless lack of chemistry with anyone in the world who isn’t John Oliver (and maybe Mark Steel) can be very, very funny. Awkwardness is funny. The awkwardness that stubbornly sticks around in Andy’s interactions, even with fellow comedians he likes and gets along with and shares a sense of humour with, can definitely be funny. There’s a difference between the awkwardness in early 4000-series Bugle episodes, when Andy clearly had no idea what to do with this Hari Kondabolu person, and the awkwardness of Andy Zaltzman just trying to talk to someone he knows and likes but isn’t quite in step with. The latter is quite entertaining.

Anyway. That’s what The Bugle is. I listened to episodes 4001-4200, from October 2016 to July 2021, last year. I listened to it stumble as it tried to rebuild, and then slowly find its feet, and then turn into something new and fantastic in its own way. I listened to that relatively recent interview in which Tiff Stevenson sounded like she was kind of trying to lead Andy Zaltzman toward admitting that the reborn version of The Bugle is actually better than the original version, and he politely (and awkwardly, as always) declined to do so, saying they’re both excellent and too different to compare.

And then I stopped. It was October 2022, and it was getting too close to the present. I’d started listening to The Bugle for the escapism, and the topical stuff was getting close enough to no longer be escapist. I decided I needed a break, so I put The Bugle on hold while I got into other things. I knew I’d go back and finish it, and I expected to do so sooner than this. I got rather distracted. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting my search for, among other things, Daniel Kitson recordings, to be quite so successful (honestly I lucked into it being unbelievably successful, it got rather out of hand). I was a bit busy discovering the collected works of the greatest comedian of his generation, and telling him to stop being a dick about Andy Zaltzman’s life’s work (and occasionally coming across a recording of Kitson performing with Zaltzman, which is always hilarious due to the absolute dearth of chemistry between them, Kitson has one story about a time when hanging out with Andy Zaltzman for a night was so fucking awkward that he had to cut off a dead pig’s head just to salvage the evening – there were other factors at play to make that evening difficult, but I think Andy Zaltzman also just has that effect on people, they find out they don't have as many human buffers as they were expecting between themselves and Andy, and they start cutting up farm animals).

So I’m going back to The Bugle. I’ve listened to every episode they’ve put out between October 2007 and July 2021, and I really may as well listen to the last couple of years worth of episodes, and bring it up to date. Episode 4261 aired last week, so that’s 61 episodes to catch up on. As I wrote that, and realized there are only 61 more episodes out of the hundreds I’ve already heard, I remember that I also put it on hold because I enjoy it so much that I don’t want to get to the end of it. But it’s all right, because they’re still putting out new ones regularly. Andy Zaltzman has dragged this podcast through so many changes and so many threats to its existence, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be around as long as he still has breath in his lungs and that shed in his backyard where he does his writing and personally keeps political comedy in the UK alive.

[mariacallous]

In Russia’s presidential election in mid-March, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially won his fifth term with 87 percent of the vote and the highest reported turnout in the country’s post-Soviet history. Indeed, by most measures, Putin remains popular. Opinion surveys just before the election pegged his approval rating above 80 percent. Some voters are likely afraid to tell pollsters otherwise, of course, but for an autocrat, that kind of fear is almost as good as real support. Either way, Russians are generally avoiding open protest. This helps the Kremlin get away with touting Putin’s sweeping election victory as an endorsement of both the president and his signature policy, the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, these numbers are far from a reliable indicator of popular support for the war. Many Russians, including Putin voters, are skeptical of the Kremlin’s determination to continue the two-year-old conflict. Although Putin’s approval ratings are impressive, survey data from the Russian Election Study (RES), which we lead, indicate that only a slim majority of his supporters now favor staying the course in Ukraine. In fact, despite the Kremlin’s massive effort to drum up support, nearly one in four Putin backers opposes continuing the war, and roughly the same number say they are unsure whether they support the war (19 percent) or decline to answer the question (four percent). This means that only slightly more than half of Putin supporters—54 percent—think Russia should continue the war that Putin has championed since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Among all Russian voters, support for Putin’s war is even softer. In October 2023, just 43 percent of Russians said they backed continuing what the Kremlin refers to as its “special military operation.” When asked to identify their position on the war, a third of those surveyed chose the response, “No, I do not support the continuation of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine,” and nearly a quarter declined to state an opinion. These figures are surely known to the Kremlin, which conducts its own polls and allows independent surveys to operate as well. Because it is easier to govern as a popular autocrat than an unpopular one, Putin closely tracks public opinion. The Kremlin works tirelessly to shape these opinions, but its efforts to drive up support for Putin himself have been more successful than its attempts to boost support for the war.

These findings are both good and bad news for Ukraine and its allies. Waning support for the war among Russian citizens will not, in itself, compel Putin to end his assault on the country. Given the Kremlin’s extensive suppression of civil society and public dissent, he can continue to wage war without strong popular backing for it. The lack of popular enthusiasm, however, could complicate this effort. Putin will need to rely more heavily on repression to forestall opposition. Lack of popular enthusiasm for the war’s continuation also makes it harder to recruit soldiers and maintain morale and raises the cost of buying public support. In a televised address following the March 22 terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall, Putin made a call for unity, while alleging Ukrainian involvement in the attack. His remarks suggest that the Kremlin will seek to use the attack to bolster support for aggression against Ukraine or for tougher terrorism laws that would further stifle domestic dissent. Winning the election was easy; stiffer challenges lie ahead.

BUSINESS AS USUAL?

In some respects, the RES’s most recent survey provides a sobering view of public support for the Putin regime. Contrary to some observers’ hopes that declining support for the war might trigger the collapse of Putin’s rule, the findings suggest it is not so simple. Led by a team of scholars supported by the National Science Foundation, the RES has contributed to understanding the evolution of Russian public opinion and voting behavior for nearly three decades. In national surveys conducted around each Russian presidential election in which Putin has featured as a candidate, the team has found that his support is multidimensional. This month’s election supports that pattern. The Russian leader continues to draw on a broad base among ordinary Russians—support built over nearly a quarter century that can prop him up even if many of these backers sour on the war itself. Putin’s appeal also continues to rest on his management of the country’s economy, his hypermasculine image, and—increasingly—his association with conservative values that resonate with many Russian citizens.

Manipulating these other sources of support has been part of Putin’s strategy all along, a tactic often overlooked in Western analyses of Russia’s war strategy. Since the start of the invasion, for example, he has frequently downplayed the so-called special military operation, suggesting that the armed forces will take care of it, leaving most ordinary Russians to go about their lives as usual. He has also stressed the message that Russia has remained stable and continued to flourish during the war.

Consider the economy. Russians who support Putin despite opposing the war are generally optimistic about how the economy has performed in the face of Western sanctions. About half of them think the economy is either unchanged or has even recovered over the last 12 months. (By contrast, just 14 percent of Russians who do not support Putin and are against the war see the Russian economy in this positive light.) Russians who are pro-Putin but antiwar are also much more likely to have avoided personal financial losses since the invasion of Ukraine: three in four report that their household finances have remained the same or improved over the past year. More than half of respondents who oppose both Putin and the war say their economic situation has worsened.

But there is a tension in the Kremlin’s efforts to downplay the war and promote a sense of normality. At various moments, including the launch of Putin’s reelection campaign in December 2023, he has emphasized that Russia’s fight—in Ukraine and against the West—is an existential one and that every Russian must do their part. Another such moment was when Putin ordered the “partial mobilization” in the fall of 2022, calling up hundreds of thousands of Russians to fight. Such moves contradict the Kremlin’s other messaging that seeks to minimize the war. Raising the stakes of the war effort is a risky strategy in itself. Should Putin continue to push an existential narrative and his supporters tire of the war, they may become more likely to break with him if developments take a negative turn in other areas they care about, such as the economy.

This risk could increase if opposition to the war grows or if Russia’s economic outlook deteriorates. For example, our research shows that Putin supporters who oppose continuing the war are still divided about whether financing the offensive should take priority over social programs. This may partly reflect the Kremlin’s success, at least so far, in increasing social spending and maintaining a sense of economic stability even as it put the economy firmly on a war footing. If Russia experiences an economic decline or a demand for more social spending, this acquiescence to the war could diminish, eroding Putin’s base.

IT’S THE WAR, STUPID

A larger potential concern for the Kremlin is the specific nature of popular opposition to the war. The most recent RES survey shows that some groups from which Putin has traditionally drawn support now oppose the military campaign. For one thing, Russians who are skeptical about the war are disproportionately women, and more than a quarter of Putin’s female supporters want the special military operation to end. For another, Putin’s supporters in rural areas are more opposed to prolonging the war than his backers in Russia’s major urban centers, with one in three saying they are against continuing it. These rural areas have been hit harder by military recruitment than urban centers. If antiwar sentiment among these Russians begins to align with anti-Putin sentiment, as it more often has in cities, it could be a turning point for the Kremlin.

Added to these potential problems is the possibility that the Kremlin might be compelled to order another round of mobilization. Such a decision would have a particular impact on women and rural Russians. Men from rural areas are far more likely to be mobilized than those from major cities. And wives and mothers of soldiers, who are particularly concerned about high casualty rates and eager for their loved ones to be rotated home from the front, have already become a key source of public protest against the government’s war strategy. To mollify this constituency, the Kremlin could rotate frontline troops more frequently—but that could, in turn, require fresh rounds of mobilization.

Among Putin supporters, opposition to the war is particularly concentrated in groups that are more likely to be recruited for military service and facing economically precarious circumstances. In remote ethnic regions in Siberia such as Buryatia, Altai, and Zabaykalskii Krai, where death rates among men of military age have been among Russia’s highest, as many as two-thirds of Putin supporters are outright against continuing the war. On average, in these regions and in other ethnic republics, such as Chuvashia and Udmurtia, roughly half of all Putin supporters express antiwar sentiments. Similarly, less-educated Putin backers are more likely to oppose continuing the war than their counterparts with advanced degrees.

Faced with this ambivalence toward the war in the very regions where the Russian military has been concentrating its recruitment efforts, the Kremlin has taken no chances. After initially allowing the antiwar opposition candidate Boris Nadezhdin to register for the presidential election, the Russian authorities disqualified him on the grounds that the signatures he had collected were invalid. Clearly, the Putin regime thought that it was too dangerous for Nadezhdin to press his case to an electorate already skeptical about continuing the “special military operation.”

To paper over antiwar sentiment, Russian state television regularly broadcasts displays of pro-military fervor and bellicosity, and Russian schools have doubled down on patriotic education. But such efforts have been unable to quash doubt, even among the war’s supporters. For example, only half of Russians who support continuing the war say that the best path available in February 2022 was “starting a full-scale military operation.”

THE THREAT FROM WITHIN

For Putin to retain his base of support, an electoral victory is less important than what comes after. In the past, he has sometimes deferred unpopular moves until after elections. A new wave of mobilization is the most opposed potential policy on the horizon. Even many backers of the war do not seem interested in making personal sacrifices to advance the effort. In a recent RES survey, seven of ten respondents who support the war said they were opposed to a fresh mobilization. In a hypothetical election scenario, support for a candidate declined by 25 percentage points when respondents were told that the candidate advocated mass conscription. Even Putin backers reduced their support for this hypothetical candidate by 16 points. All these findings suggest that there is only so much Putin can ask Russians to sacrifice for the war without fomenting more serious opposition.

For now, the Kremlin’s official position is that no new mobilization is needed. It has recruited enough soldiers on lucrative contracts over the past year to carry out some limited rotation and forestall the demand for more troops. The Kremlin’s strategy for avoiding a new mobilization appears to be to place the principal combat burden on politically marginalized groups—ethnic minorities, the rural poor, and convicts—and to pay big salaries and bonuses to those who volunteer to fight.

At the same time, the Kremlin has asked the wives and mothers of soldiers at the front to be patient, promising new benefits and social mobility for combat veterans who return home. Putin has assured loyalists—war supporters and those who have served—that they are the “true elite” and will be showered with rewards. Only time will tell whether he will uphold his promise to place and promote them in state companies, education, public associations, and government, a pledge he made in his annual address in February. Further battlefield setbacks for Russia, however, would make signing up new contract soldiers and other volunteer forces the Kremlin has used to fill manpower gaps more difficult. If fewer Russians volunteered, this would raise the pressure for more extensive mobilization, an option that Putin is clearly trying to avoid. A stagnating economy would compound this challenge, reducing his room to maneuver and making it more likely that he would effectively have to choose between the war and his core supporters.

To make either scenario more likely, Western countries must challenge Moscow in its current bet that Western war fatigue is eroding support for Kyiv. Although Western analysts have suggested in recent assessments that Russia may be gaining the upper hand over Ukraine, that trend can be reversed. The West must supply Ukraine with the military support it needs to make Russia’s rotation of troops more urgent and the Russian costs of volunteering high. At the same time, Western nations should send Russian audiences a message that the economic and military costs of continuing the war in Ukraine outweigh the benefits. In doing so, the West could exploit the fact that war fatigue is now a problem for Moscow itself and that popular dissatisfaction with continuing the offensive is real—even among Putin’s own supporters.

Such efforts to capitalize on Russian opposition to the war will not automatically drive Putin from office. It is hard to oust an autocrat, especially in wartime, and even autocrats who lose wars often stay in power. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein survived ruinous wars against Iran and Kuwait. But the dissonance among the Russian leader’s base must unnerve the Kremlin. After the February death of Alexei Navalny, it may seem that the regime has all but eliminated viable sources of opposition. But Putin’s greatest threat may now come from his own current supporters.

Putin’s policies have not always followed public opinion, but he has generally avoided taking steps—such as steep increases in the pension age—that are broadly unpopular, and military mobilization certainly falls within this category. Moreover, despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, even staunch Putin supporters are largely ambivalent about the war. That the Kremlin devotes so much energy to snuffing out even trivial forms of antiwar activity suggests that it is acutely aware of the danger that such discontent poses—a danger that even an overwhelming electoral victory cannot hide.