#core set 2020

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Rugged Highlands

Artist: Eytan Zana TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[art-of-mtg]

Spectral Sailor (Core Set 2020) - Cristi Balanescu

More cards with art by Cristi Balanescu on Scryfall

[magicmalcolm]

Negate

“As one, nature lifts it's voice to tell you this: ‘No’.”

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Mountain (Magic 2020 Promo Pack Ver) by Piotr Dura

[joansblondells]

Grace Van Dien as Ellie Lansing in LADY DRIVER (2020)

[yuyu-bubu]

shoutout to helplessness, gotta be one of the top ten worst emotions fr fr. i am but a poor Webkinz plush a child has decided to pour milk on and throw against the wall

[sheep-in-the-attic]

Okay so which one of you bitches put us all in a time machine and sent us back to 2020, because there's no reason i should be feeling the same way I did back then

[isaacathom]

my dice collection, which I just went through resorting and putting away :)

My current count is 27 full sets (3 of which are metal, and i think 3 of which are sharp edge in some capacity), 30 d20s (1 of which is The Big Metal One, and 1 is obsidian), 12 d12, 7 d%, 23 d10, 6 d8, 29 d6 (1 of which is the Big Wood One, and 1 is amethyst), and 8 d4 :)

I've also included at the bottom the 'character sets' im currently using my two ongoing campaign characters, Naielle Odelia and Zimri Maier respectively. They each have a core set (clear with pink-flower-esque inclusions and translucent blue-pink with gold inclusions, respectively) and then a bunch of other dice pilfered from my other sets. Zimri should arguably have way more d6, but I'm gonna start rolling most of their spells digitally because On God.

[glutenfreedragonpotion]

My "bad take" that I'm too scared to say on another site is that himi gauche sets are shite because they mold so easily

If you paint daily or weekly you'll be fine but if your like any other artist that only paints when depressed or feeling like shit. Himi gauche isn't for you.

That thing is so moldy but I refuse to throw it away cause I'm making the most of the £16.50 of my universal credit

[wordsinhaled]

i’m so totally normal about the fact that aziraphale’s last (known) deliberate foray into the queer community was when he learned the gavotte at the fictionalized hundred guineas club (!!!) in the 1800s and now in the 2020s he’s like “grindr? what’s that?”

many are talking about his repression which is very valid… and yet the thing to me that stands out about aziraphale is that he’s actually… incredibly stable in his identity and that identity IS incredibly queer. queer by the standards of heaven AND by human standards as well

metatron describes his “de facto partnership” with crowley as “irregular.” and in fact aziraphale in his entirety is irregular. he likes and makes it his business not only to understand but to be a connoisseur of all manner of things angels aren’t supposed to even remotely care about. food. music. books. theatre. sleight of hand. and more.

it’s the sort of behavior that would’ve gotten him othered, treated as a bit odd, in heaven even if he hadn’t chosen to consort all across the earth with a literal demon. and it IS treated that way - the fact is aziraphale even as an angel has got proclivities that set him apart from the rest of the host (even after offering him the highest position in heaven, metatron still acts deeply dismissive of him… like aziraphale’s bookshop is merely a quaint little hobby of his that can be easily transferred to another custodian, and not a literal extension of who aziraphale has become, full of his tartan and unique bibles and special vintages of wine and the books arranged in a very specific way)

so. aziraphale is a queer angel but of course he’s also queer to other humans. but in such a way that… he had his realization a LONG time ago, and put the matter very much to rest after that. aziraphale is perpetually something like several centuries behind schedule. he owns an ancient computer that probably continues to run windows 98 simply because aziraphale’s decided it should. he wears the same waistcoat and coat for generations because he simply likes them precisely the way they are and sees no reason to change them. but the idea that he doesn’t know how he comes across to others - of course he does. he knows he looks like your prim and proper grandfather and he prefers it that way

aziraphale looked around at humans in the 1880s and said: ah yes. this is where i fit. and promptly ensconced himself in that queer subculture. learned the gavotte. read his austen. loved crowley from afar. aziraphale is fiercely and vibrantly queer. just with the sort of assurance of someone who lives with his lover in a commonlaw marriage for decades and then shows up at city hall for the certificate once society decides it’s ‘allowed.’ like… he hasn’t had any need to know what grindr is because aziraphale’s ‘scene’ was a century and a half ago and it defined romance for him too.

but my favorite thing about aziraphale is how much of him is about appearances versus the truth. he can lie straight to angels’ faces and sleep at night. he knows he comes off soft but he once wielded a flaming sword. he dissembles helplessness but he’s far from it and he knows precisely how it makes others treat him. and at the core of aziraphale is rigidity, inflexibility of ideas… his sense of self is stable where crowley’s is malleable, and so on, and so on

and the fact that he’s continuously fixated on trying to misguidedly do the right thing, the fact that he seeks heavenly approval and wants to fit the world into his schema of good vs evil… in no way do i think that means he isn’t one hundred percent aware of how he feels about crowley or what it means about him by angelic or human standards. i’ve seen some folks saying that aziraphale doesn’t want to like kissing crowley and like… as much as i love me some brideshead revisited/atonement flavored angst; i put forth that it’s not internalized homophobia or queer panic but simply: “i’m trying to do the right thing for both of us and you won’t let me.” and “i wanted our first kiss to be different.” he was envisioning an entirely different flavor of romance than what he got but he emma woodhoused too close to the sun

like, y’all. aziraphale in all likelihood has a glorious collection of historical queer erotica. he just has a feathery diva coat hanging in his closet, and for what. “oh, good lord” he says at crowley’s revolutionary outfit in the bastille, while eyeing him up like an entire meal. he’s so good at affected propriety, at carefully constructed stuffiness, but between the two of them aziraphale’s got to be the one who has experience

aziraphale had been physically throwing himself at crowley the entire season. he orchestrated an entire regency ball so they could touch hand to hand. he spends the entire season (well, and season 1) looking at crowley like he’s particularly coveted. he looked at crowley before the fall like he was glorious and beautiful. aziraphale’s queer and he knows it and i think that isn’t his problem, it’s the fact that he wants to build a different sort of future for the two of them but crowley’s gone and thrown a wrench in it by reminding him of everything he can finally have. like. that’s the heartbreak. it’s how dare you make this ugly? i forgive you for our first kiss being all pain and salt. it’s my dearest, i wanted to make heaven as beautiful as you deserve. as sacred and safe for us as our bookshop. and i can do that for us, because once i held a flaming sword and i still remember how the hilt felt in my hands. and now the taste of you is in my mouth.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Gorging Vulture

Artist: Caio Monteiro TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[robertreich]

Why Trump Is Partnering With Christian Nationalists

Donald Trump is portraying himself as a religious savior. He says Election Day will be: …”the most important day in the history of our country, and it’s going to be Christian Visibility Day.”

Trump has repeatedly compared his criminal trials to the crucifixion of Jesus, promoted videos calling his reelection “the most important moment in human history,” and that describe him as a divinely appointed ruler.

He claims to be a holy warrior against an imaginary attack on Christianity.

TRUMP: They want to tear down crosses//But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration. I swear to you.

He’s even selling his own version of the Bible.

Trump is playing to a rising white Christian Nationalist movement within the Republican Party.

Christian Nationalists believe that the law of the land is not the Constitution, but instead the law of God as they interpret it. Under this view, atheists and people of other faiths (including Christians of other denominations) are all second-class citizens.

Trump’s supporters are increasingly overt in their calls to replace democracy with a MAGA theocracy.

The idea that the will of voters is irrelevant because God has anointed Trump was a recurring message in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In previous videos, I’ve highlighted how MAGA Republicans have embraced core elements of fascism. They reject democracy, stoke fear of immigrants and minorities, embrace a gender and ethnic hierarchy, and look to a strongman to lead and defend them.

The combination of fascism and Christian Nationalism is called Christofascism, a term first used half a century ago by the theologian Dorothee Sölle. Fascists rise to power by characterizing their opponents as subhuman. Christofascists take it a step further by casting opponents as not just subhuman, but actually demonic.

Framing opponents as enemies of God makes violence against them not only seem justifiable, but divinely sanctioned, and almost inevitable.

Christofascists want to strip away a wide range of rights Americans take for granted. Former Trump staffers involved in developing plans for a second Trump term have called for imposing “Biblical” tests on immigration, overturning marriage equality, and restricting contraception.  

And MAGA-aligned judges are already setting their dogma ahead of the Constitution. In his concurring opinion on the case that declared frozen embryos are people, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker cited God more than forty times and quoted the Book of Genesis and other religious texts.

Nothing could be more un-American than the Christian Nationalist vision. So many of America’s founders came here as refugees seeking religious freedom. The framers of the Constitution were adamant that religion had no role in our government. The words “God,” “Jesus,” and “Christ,” don’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. And the very first words of the Bill of Rights are a promise that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Christofascism, or any religion-based form of government, is a rejection of everything America has aspired to be — a secular, multi-racial society whose inhabitants have come from everywhere, bound together by a faith in equal opportunity, democracy, and the rule of law.

Beware.

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Lightning Stormkin by Rudy Siswanto

[solaireez]

untitled

Luke Castellan x fem!reader

warning: smut, sub!luke if you squint, not very good writing, not proofread😭

wc: 1.1k

a/n: i was bored and i want to post it so 🤷‍♀️ kinda slow build up towards the actual smut part. i had no idea how to transition from a non sexual setting so, mac n' cheese.

i apologize if my writing is poor, the only thing i’ve wrote besides this was a Draco malfoy fanfic back in 2020 which was so much worse. and i’ve never posted anything on tumblr.

Summer air fills my lungs, camp was being more calm as usual. The campfire glowed dimly beneath the daylight. Luke sat next to me, eating through his lunch. His left hand placed delicately on my right thigh. I glanced up at him, his dark curls practically poking through his eyes.

“you should let me cut it.” I laughed, raising my right hand to push his hair away from his face.

 I took a strand and pulled, measuring how far his hair went. It sat right below his eye. He looked up at me. He smiled despite his mouth being full of mac n’ cheese. His scar scrunching up as he tried to hold his laugh. He quickly tried to swallow his food so he could reply.

“fuck, no” he pulled his head away from my grasp on his hair, laughing.

“why?” I asked firmly. My hand reached back up to mess up his hair.

He grasped on my wrist, both of them. He pushed them away from him. We stopped abruptly, staring at each others eyes. His drifted briefly to my lips. Our breaths were heavy. His grip still tight against my wrist, I was sure he could feel my pulse. He let go, chugging the glass of water before standing up and dragging me to his cabin.

It was empty. It was just us.

My back gently hit the wall by his bed. His hands falling down from my neck down to my waist. Our lips crashed, my hands reached back into his hair. The sounds of people screaming from afar was drowned out by our own breaths. I hummed, pulling away. My fingers traced his scar, I felt him twitch from the touch. He rested his forehead on mine. I pushed against him, guiding him to sit down on the bed. He followed my lead, looking up to me from his position. I stood in front of him, my hand stayed on his cheek, his hand still on my waist.

I slowly climbed on him. Carefully setting each knee beside him. Our eyes still locked. Our breaths still thick around us. I settled above him, refusing to sit on his lap. He had his head tilted back to look at me. My hand supporting the back of neck. Our lips met again, I pulled his head further up. I deepened the kiss, causing him to fall back to the bed. He laid down, watching me sit above him, his eyes never left me. I reached the hem of my shirt, slowly raising it to reveal my skin. That was when his eyes left mine for the first time. He watched me slowly remove the bright orange shirt. His breath hitched as I revealed my tits. His eyes were hungry. Hungry for me. I stepped off the bed, letting him reposition himself on the bed. I unbuttoned my shorts, watching his eyes try to decide where to look. The way I slid my shorts off forced a moan out of Luke. His eyes staring back to mine. He took his bottom lip between his teeth. His hands quickly took off his shirt, then his pants. He was naked before I made my way back on the bed. I still had my bra and panties on. I was on my knees above him. His hand reached behind, fiddling with my bra clasp. I smiled, letting him know he could take it off. He quickly did, with one hand, while the other rested on my waist. I let my bra fall down my body. His eyes falter, falling to my bare tits. my hands trace along the hem of my panties, the stop on each side of my waist. I pull them down slowly, purposely teasing Luke. He took a deep breath as I reveal my pussy. His cock twitched against his abs. I got back up, completely removing my panties.

I finally settled down on his thighs. The base of his cock sat inches from my core. I moved closer to his face, he moved forward, expecting me to kiss him. I held his head in place, roughly cupping his chin, causing his lips to part.

“open.” I commanded.

His mouth opened wider. I inched closer, and closer. I let our lips almost touch, before I shoved my tongue in his mouth. This kiss was different. We were desperate. I sat up, my left hand going down and guiding his cock into me. We moaned into each others mouths. We felt dirty. I lifted my hips, before slamming back down. His hands now gripping my ass. His grasp limiting my movements. He slowly pushed my body toward him, making me grind on his dick. Our mouths still latched on each other. He kept his place on my ass, helping me move. Our moans filling the empty cabin. I pulled away from him. My head lowered to his neck, biting down on his adams apple. His head fell back, allowing me more access. I chuckled at him, my lips kissed the skin. Occasionally biting down, hard enough to leave marks. Every time my teeth sank down, a whimper make its way out his throat.

“fuck…” he whispered, his nails digging into my skin. My hips maintained a rhythm against his cock. His hands leave my ass, moving up to my back. Then he was hugging me. His head falling, he rested his head on my collarbone.

“Luke.” His name left my mouth like a plea. He lifted his head, looking back to my eyes. We kissed again, this time it was softer. It felt reassuring. My arms sat around his neck. Our movements became sloppier, the rhythm lost within the pleasure. I felt his cock twitch inside me. A familiar feeling bloomed in my stomach. Our faces rest against each other as we caught our highs. His cum spilling inside me.

We let our breaths slow, embracing each other. My forehead touching his. I kissed his face, every part I could reach without moving too much. He softly gripped my hips. I understood what he meant. I got off from my place on his lap, his cock slipping out of me. He carefully laid down, leaving space for me in his arms.

“I’m pretty sure we have archery right now.” He groaned at my reminder. His arm went to cover his flushed face. I laughed at his behavior. I dressed myself, watching Luke complain and try to get me into his arms.

“we have to go Luke!” I threw his shirt to his face, then his pants, which he did nothing about, laying still. I removed the clothes from his face, and threw his boxers instead, which triggered him to get up. He hugged my body and threw me back into bed. He caged me. I couldn’t move one bit.

“I’m letting you have 5 minutes.” I grumbled, burying my face into his bicep.

He only hummed in response.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent. In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?

[...]

The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can. But the party’s leaders are to blame, not that many in the center have cared or even seemed willing to reflect on a decade of catastrophe. Has anyone who complained that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion would cost Democrats votes due to the extremism of its associated demands reckoned with the empirical finding that the opposite proved true? That the narrow victory of Biden in 2020 was likely attributable to noisy protests that liberals wished would be quieter and calmer? Has anyone acknowledged the unique popularity of Sanders with Latinx voters, a once-core constituency that the Democrats are now on the verge of losing outright? The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and cultivate relations with corporate allies.

8 November 2024