#the press blaming democrats

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

The media is normalizing Trump's victory by “blaming Democratic elites” and criticizing the Democratic campaign.

The defining feature of Trump's campaign was its appeal to racism, misogyny, and white supremacy. He pushed those themes despite pleas from his advisers to focus on the economy. Having campaigned on themes of hate and division, he won decisively. The most compelling inference from those facts is that Trump's campaign themes appealed to a broad swath of the voters who supported him.

But the media is (again) sane-washing Trump's depravity. Rather than acknowledge—or even mention—his dominant campaign themes in analyzing his victory, the media insists that Trump won because Democrats are “elitists” who somehow “alienated” major portions of the electorate or that Democrats lost because Kamala Harris and her advisors refused to run her campaign in the manner demanded by the legacy media.

Saturday brought a new spate of such articles—many of which were forwarded to me by readers who seemed to agree with the “I told you so” tone of the articles.

Okay. I’ll play that game. Let’s assume that Democrats made mistakes in the execution of Harris’s nearly flawless campaign. Let’s assume that despite the dozens of policies designed to help the working and middle classes, Democrats are not connecting with those voters. Even accepting those assumptions, the story of what happened on Tuesday is not that Democrats deserve a tongue-lashing by professional scolds.

The story is that America elected a convicted felon for the first time its history. It is that America elected an adjudicated sexual abuser as its president. It is that America elected a man who attempted a coup and incited an insurrection the last time he was president. It is that America elected a president who declares that those Americans who oppose him are “enemies from within.” It is that the man the media is currently lionizing has threatened to shut down CBS, ABC, the New York Times, Google, and other outlets that have accurately reported the truth about Donald Trump. It is that he has promised to fire the prosecutor who is pursuing two indictments issued by grand juries of his peers.

Here's the point: Choosing to write stories that “blame elitist Democrats” ignores the real story of what happened on Tuesday. That distraction normalizes the grotesque, existential threat of Trump's electoral victory. Trump could not buy more favorable and helpful coverage if he paid for those stories with Elon Musk’s billions.

The media again fails to comprehend the moment, much less rise to it. It is like reporting on the sinking of the Titanic by criticizing the viscosity of the oil in Engine Number Two. While the Titanic’s engineers might have used underweight oil, ignoring the iceberg’s role in the Titanic’s sinking is unforgivable.

The failure of the media is even more unforgivable because Trump represents an ongoing threat to democracy. Such petty, “inside baseball” reporting is fatuous under normal circumstances. It is journalistic malpractice in this perilous moment.

It is also insulting to the millions of Democrats who worked their ***** off to help elect Kamala Harris. While it is true that the Democratic Party has high-paid consultants and political insiders, they are the tiniest fraction of the party. The real Democratic Party includes Black women who staffed nearly every polling station in the South. It includes young, first-time voters who believe fervently in the promise of America. It includes retirees living on Social Security walking precincts despite aching knees and anxious hearts. It includes young married couples, straight and gay, who are desperately hoping for a better future for their children. It includes the out-of-work middle-aged mechanic with a pre-existing condition who worries about not qualifying for health insurance on the open market.

So, when clueless but know-it-all wags criticize the “elitist Democrats,” that is who they are criticizing. In fact, those who choose to criticize “Democratic elites” are revealing their profound ignorance of who makes up the backbone of the Democratic Party.

It is especially offensive to exhibit glee while chastising “Democratic elites” when most everyone in the party is experiencing raw emotions of bewilderment and despair over the fact that America would elect a convicted felon-sexual abuser-insurrectionist as our president. So, please desist.

There will be a time and a place to discuss how Democrats governed under Biden and how they campaigned under Harris. But rubbing people’s faces in grudge-settling op-eds by smug journalists is counterproductive, graceless, and offensive. Exhibit some empathy and humanity. Rather than explaining why you believe Democrats lost, consider asking someone whose heart is broken how they are doing after giving their all in the hope that Kamala would win and that Trump would lose.

I sometimes receive criticism from readers saying that my comments are “over the top” or intemperate. That may be true. However, Rebecca Solnit (of The Guardian) feels even more passionate about this subject than I do. For those of you who know Solnit, she is one of the finest writers of our generation. See her Facebook post, link here: Rebecca Solnit – F*ck the media explanations that Trump won because of the economy . . . . For those of you who do not have a Facebook account, I have excerpted the posting in a Google Doc, accessible to all here: Rebecca Solnit Facebook Doc.

Democrats tried to stop Trump. They lost because Trump’s feral instincts knew that a substantial portion of the electorate would respond to his racist, sexist, white supremacist platform. Sadly, he turned out to be correct—for now. But he is wrong about who the American people are. When more of them vote, his dark vision of America will be repudiated, and the arc of the moral universe will once again bend toward justice.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

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/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[lynati]

(Oh, the author of this is having FUN!)

"Vance's speech, on the other hand, wasn't just underwhelming but a little uncanny. Despite using room dividers to shrink the space, the campaign could not hide that the crowd felt like a medium-sized wedding, albeit a pathetic one where no one cares for the couple. Vance, perhaps recognizing charisma isn't his strong suit, spoke briefly before bringing up a series of local citizens ready to blame Mexicans for their familial tragedies of drug addiction. He spoke for a couple more minutes, before taking the reporters' questions about cat ladies. 

"Even in his short speech, it seemed Vance — like the Trump campaign overall — is still struggling to accept that they are running against Harris and not President Joe Biden. It felt like the speechwriter had typed Ctrl-F "Biden" and replaced every instance with "Harris," whether it made sense or not. Vance accused Harris of hiding from the press with a "basement campaign." Never mind that Harris is now the young and spry candidate who can keep up with an aggressive schedule, while Trump is the tired old man who can barely campaign between naps. 

"One upside to the Vance event: There was no line to use the ladies' room. Sure, there were women in attendance, but the gender ratio felt like the guest list on Joe Rogan's podcast.

"There was one kind of diversity in this small but weirdly intense crowd. Every type of white man that gets a hasty "swipe left" on his dating profile was in attendance: 'Roided out dudes with bad tribal tattoos. Older men radiating "bitter divorce" energy. Men with enormous beards that have never known the touch of a trimmer. Skinny fascists wearing expensive suits, despite the oppressive heat. Glowering loners staring at the two women under 40 like cats watching birds out a window. 

"There's a lot of chatter in MAGA circles about how the enthusiasm for Harris is "manufactured," as if all the people bringing down the house on an early Tuesday evening in Philadelphia are phantoms instead of real people. 

"But boy, I was there, and they are very real. More than that, the contrast with the Vance event underscored the Democratic messaging about "normal vs. weird."

"The people who flooded the Temple stadium looked like any cross-section of America on any given night. There was old, young and all in-between. There were tattooed hipsters and soccer moms. There were people of every race, dressed in every which way. It could have been a crowd of people chosen at random from the streets of Philadelphia, or any city in America, really. They were brought together by the chant quickly becoming the Harris campaign slogan: "Not going back."

(The full article is longer than this, and you should give the whole thing a read.)

[covid-safer-hotties]

With the toll of new COVID-19 infections regularly topping 1 million a day and weekly deaths creeping toward the 1,000 mark, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a campaign aimed not at protecting the public from this ongoing pandemic, now in its fifth year, but at washing its hands of responsibility.

CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen held a press conference August 23 to review the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage the public to get their winter COVID-19, RSV and flu vaccines once they are made available. While bluntly acknowledging that “COVID is with us,” she tried unconvincingly to assure reporters and viewers that “we have the tools to protect ourselves.” She then added, as a way of shifting the blame, “We just need to use them!”

Dr. Cohen was silent on who was responsible for the failure of most Americans to get booster shots or otherwise protect themselves from a disease, which can be fatal for many and cause lifelong debilitation for many more.

She could have named the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which ended the COVID-19 emergency more than a year ago and treats the pandemic as a thing of the past. She could have named Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the promoter of quack remedies like ivermectin and bleach, who recently welcomed into his campaign the anti-vaxxer and enemy of science and public health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And if she had been equipped with a mirror—and a conscience—she could have pointed to herself and other top CDC officials, who have collaborated in the anti-scientific rampage to shut down both mitigation efforts and even elementary data collection on cases of illness, hospitalization and death.

Most importantly (and therefore least likely) she could have acknowledged that within the framework of the capitalist system, the profits of giant banks and corporations are far more important than the lives of human beings. That is the meaning of the incessant claims that schools, factories, public transportation and facilities must be kept open, to save “the economy,” despite the inevitable spread of the infection as a result.

Dr. Cohen, like her predecessors and colleagues at the top of the public health establishment, puts political pressures above science and medicine. The nearly hour-long briefing was simply political theater, where a panel of experts attempted to place the public health agency in the best light despite acknowledging the monumental number of daily infections that have seen hospitalizations and fatalities climb.

Meanwhile, schools across multiple states have announced closures—affecting thousands—just as the new academic year has begun, in response to mass infections among faculty and students.

So far this year, more than 26,000 Americans have died from acute COVID-19 complications, and more than 800 per week are being killed by a preventable infection, a figure 20 percent higher than last year this time. At the current rate, it is expected that between 50,000 to 60,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 in 2024, a rate two to three times higher than fatalities from flu. However, these do not take into consideration excess deaths, and given the complete dismantling of the reporting systems, these figures are known undercounts.

Such figures could only appear low in comparison to the colossal death toll of the first three years of the pandemic, when 352,000 died in 2020, 464,000 in 2021 and 260,000 in 2022. In 2023, 76,000 COVID-19 deaths were recorded. All these numbers are underestimates, as excess mortality figures are considerably higher. The cumulative death toll from COVID-19 is likely well over 1.4 million in the United States and approaching 30 million worldwide.

Neither did the panel address any concerns over the fact that millions continue to suffer from Long COVID, which has taken a significant toll on the health of Americans and the world over. It bears mentioning that a recent study noted that 410 million people across the world have had Long COVID with a $1 trillion impact on global GDP. Yet, no treatment for this condition exists. Without health insurance and means, issues of brain fog, chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances become part of one’s physiognomy.

Much about Dr. Cohen’s characterization of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is deeply flawed and should have been taken up by the press, who remained silent on the matter. First and foremost, her claim, in response to a direct question that COVID-19 “is endemic,” is completely misleading.

An infection is endemic when it is contained, not spreading uncontrolled and not causing significant impact on the society. COVID-19 is none of these. It remains a pandemic, with new waves of infections where millions are being infected daily by a virus whose mutation far outstrips the efforts of public health agencies and pharmaceutical companies to provide vaccines, medicines and mitigation practices. It continues to cause large-scale social disruption, economic loss and general hardship.

The opposition of both capitalist parties to any significant effort to fight the pandemic was on display last week. The Democratic National Convention, like its Republican counterpart in July, was a massive superspreader event, with thousands of delegates and media personnel congregating in an enclosed arena, where there was continuous cheering, shouting and singing. There are already anecdotal reports of widespread sickness in state delegations returning from Chicago.

As for the Republicans, Trump staged his appearance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday afternoon, beaming as Kennedy announced he was folding up his independent presidential campaign and endorsing the ex-president and would-be dictator. Kennedy said he was working with Trump on staffing agencies like the CDC, NIH, FDA and USDA from the standpoint of ending the “chronic disease crisis.” By this he means, of course, ending efforts to fight diseases and letting children, the elderly, and the entire American population suffer the consequences.

Fundamentally, all large epidemics and pandemics are serious social issues that require broad-scale infection control in place to disrupt and prevent disease. And with respect to COVID-19 and all future pandemics, these require an international collaborative perspective.

In 2024 so far, 179 million people were infected in the United States, a total that is eventually expected to surpass 2023, when more than 248 million Americans, or three-quarters of the population, caught COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels throughout the pandemic suggest that there have been more than 1.1 billion infections in the United States, between three and four for every person in the country.

This begs the question how are those most vulnerable, such as the elderly, immunocompromised, and those with chronic disabling medical conditions, which represent a significant portion of the population, to protect themselves from perpetual mass infection?

For the CDC director to present public health efforts as a matter of individual, personal choice is a gross falsification of reality. The policy of mass infection has been forced on the population.

As for having the tools to protect themselves, what is being offered are simply vaccines and more vaccines as a means to prevent COVID-19. As the WSWS recently noted, “Despite the limitations, the uptake of the vaccines is vital for the health of the population. The shots have a strong, proven safety record and do prevent severe disease and potentially reduce the risk of Long COVID, as studies have indicated. However, they do not prevent infections and the immunity they offer is short-lived given the constant mutation of the virus.”

The vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna carry a cost of $120 to $130 per shot. In some regions, these can be as high as $160 or even $200. However, the rescinding in March of $4.3 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services in COVID-19 supplemental funding means access to free vaccines for the 26 million uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured, essentially all from working class families, will only mean that the vaccination campaign will simply languish as it did last year when only 7 million Americans accepted the boosters within six weeks of their delivery to pharmacies.

As for other tools in their toolbox, Cohen refers to anti-viral treatments like Paxlovid, which are regularly being denied to patients by their physicians or when they actually are given a prescription, face the daunting price tag of $1,300 to $2,400 per course because their insurance denies them coverage. Meanwhile, repurposed medications like Metformin, a drug that treats diabetes, which has shown anti-viral properties and shown in randomized trials to reduce COVID-19 viral loads and decrease risk of Long COVID, remain unmentioned. In particular, this raises the question of why there are so few tools in the toolbox, and why some are being removed, such as the ability to wear N95 masks in public.

The arrest of an 18-year-old New York man in Nassau County on Tuesday who was wearing a black ski mask utilizing the recently passed mask-ban legislation will only embolden police departments and threaten the public who face possible detentions and arrest simply on charges of police suspicion.

At the Democratic National Convention, guidance was issued forbidding mask wearing by attendees unless “it was necessary due to a disability” and this at the discretion of security.

[simply-ivanka]

How the Biden-Harris Economy Left Most Americans Behind

A government spending boom fueled inflation that has crushed real average incomes.

By The Editorial Board -- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris plans to roll out her economic priorities in a speech on Friday, though leaks to the press say not to expect much different than the last four years. That’s bad news because the Biden-Harris economic record has left most Americans worse off than they were four years ago. The evidence is indisputable.

President Biden claims that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but this isn’t close to true. The economy in January 2021 was fast recovering from the pandemic as vaccines rolled out and state lockdowns eased. GDP grew 34.8% in the third quarter of 2020, 4.2% in the fourth, and 5.2% in the first quarter of 2021. By the end of that first quarter, real GDP had returned to its pre-pandemic high. All Mr. Biden had to do was let the recovery unfold.

Instead, Democrats in March 2021 used Covid relief as a pretext to pass $1.9 trillion in new spending. This was more than double Barack Obama’s 2009 spending bonanza. State and local governments were the biggest beneficiaries, receiving $350 billion in direct aid, $122 billion for K-12 schools and $30 billion for mass transit. Insolvent union pension funds received a $86 billion rescue.

The rest was mostly transfer payments to individuals, including a five-month extension of enhanced unemployment benefits, a $3,600 fully refundable child tax credit, $1,400 stimulus payments per person, sweetened Affordable Care Act subsidies, an increased earned income tax credit including for folks who didn’t work, housing subsidies and so much more.

The handouts discouraged the unemployed from returning to work and fueled consumer spending, which was already primed to surge owing to pent-up savings from the Covid lockdowns and spending under Donald Trump. By mid-2021, Americans had $2.3 trillion in “excess savings” relative to pre-pandemic levels—equivalent to roughly 12.5% of disposable income.

So much money chasing too few goods fueled inflation, which was supercharged by the Federal Reserve’s accommodative policy. Historically low mortgage rates drove up housing prices. The White House blamed “corporate greed” for inflation that peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, even as the spending party in Washington continued.

In November 2021, Congress passed a $1 trillion bill full of green pork and more money for states. Then came the $280 billion Chips Act and Mr. Biden’s Green New Deal—aka the Inflation Reduction Act—which Goldman Sachs estimates will cost $1.2 trillion over a decade. Such heaps of government spending have distorted private investment.

While investment in new factories has grown, spending on research and development and new equipment has slowed. Overall private fixed investment has grown at roughly half the rate under Mr. Biden as it did under Mr. Trump. Manufacturing output remains lower than before the pandemic.

Magnifying market misallocations, the Administration conditioned subsidies on businesses advancing its priorities such as paying union-level wages and providing child care to workers. It also boosted food stamps, expanded eligibility for ObamaCare subsidies and waved away hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. The result: $5.8 trillion in deficits during Mr. Biden’s first three years—about twice as much as during Donald Trump’s—and the highest inflation in four decades.

Prices have increased by nearly 20% since January 2021, compared to 7.8% during the Trump Presidency. Inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings are down 3.9% since Mr. Biden entered office, compared to an increase of 2.6% during Mr. Trump’s first three years. (Real wages increased much more in 2020, but partly owing to statistical artifacts.)

Higher interest rates are finally bringing inflation under control, which is allowing real wages to rise again. But the Federal Reserve had to raise rates higher than it otherwise would have to offset the monetary and fiscal gusher. The higher rates have pushed up mortgage costs for new home buyers.

Three years of inflation and higher interest rates are stretching American pocketbooks, especially for lower income workers. Seriously delinquent auto loans and credit cards are higher than any time since the immediate aftermath of the 2008-09 recession.

Ms. Harris boasts that the economy has added nearly 16 million jobs during the Biden Presidency—compared to about 6.4 million during Mr. Trump’s first three years. But most of these “new” jobs are backfilling losses from the pandemic lockdowns. The U.S. has fewer jobs than it was on track to add before the pandemic.

What’s more, all the Biden-Harris spending has yielded little economic bang for the taxpayer buck. Washington has borrowed more than $400,000 for every additional job added under Mr. Biden compared to Mr. Trump’s first three years. Most new jobs are concentrated in government, healthcare and social assistance—60% of new jobs in the last year.

Administrative agencies are also creating uncertainty by blitzing businesses with costly regulations—for instance, expanding overtime pay, restricting independent contractors, setting stricter emissions limits on power plants and factories, micro-managing broadband buildout and requiring CO2 emissions calculations in environmental reviews.

The economy is still expanding, but business investment has slowed. And although the affluent are doing relatively well because of buoyant asset prices, surveys show that most Americans feel financially insecure. Thus another political paradox of the Biden-Harris years: Socioeconomic disparities have increased.

Ms. Harris is promising the same economic policies with a shinier countenance. Don’t expect better results.

[mariacallous]

I LOVED this article. Leslie Gray Streeter expresses it perfectly.

https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/opinion/column/kamala-harris-no-press-interviews-OPD4MAXYKRB4XJHB2TFB6ZJX6Q/

Since becoming the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Kamala Harris has done myriad public appearances and given speeches but has not, as of this writing, talked to journalists outside a brief session on the tarmac before a flight.

I’m a journalist and have been for more than half my life. And you know what? I don’t blame her one bit.

Because of her refusal to sit for an interview with any print or broadcast media, Harris has been the target of a lot of indignant insistence that she change her mind — that she’s not giving the American public answers they deserve. Critics say she’s subverting an expected system that all other elected officials have gone through. They say she’s hiding behind a wall of hype and “irrational exuberance” that is proof she lacks the toughness to hold the office she seeks.

Be ever so real, y’all. You know that quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”? It would be insane to subject yourself to unfettered questions by an industry that doesn’t seem to know how to handle interviews with true journalistic integrity and practices. Why beat your head against a wall you know is made of brick and disinformation?

Harris has seen a media landscape that arguably legitimized soon-to-be-President Donald Trump as a normal candidate when he was sowing seeds of unrest, writing about him agreeing to accept the 2016 election results, “if I win,” and then denying those results in 2020 with not an nth of the absolute pushback and condemnation it deserved. She saw, as we all did, major outlets referring to obvious racist attacks by the current Republican nominee and others as “racially tinged” and to blatant bloody lies as “falsehoods” and “misstatements.”

The vice president recently approached the press gaggle with a deliberately direct “Whatcha got?” That is the same thing my late daddy used to ask me point-blank when I’d been calling and calling and he knew I wanted something. The reporters had been clamoring for this. And their response? A bunch of requests for a response to crazy stuff Trump said about her.

This is the same industry that initially wrote presidential fanfic pondering replacement candidates that weren’t Harris. Then, when President Joe Biden stepped down from the race and named her as his chosen successor, they compiled panels ruminating on Trump’s assertions about her racial identity. Fox News has gone on the attack about her every day, but she’s being called a coward for not agreeing to a debate on that network in front of an arena of opposing fans.

Yeah, no. She is not, as we say in my culture, Boo Boo the Fool, nor is she, as she’s stated, falling for the okey-doke. Would you rush to sit down to withstand more of that foolishness? I would not. Despite the protestations of several writers from traditional media absolutely aghast at her avoidance of them, the truth is that Kamala Harris doesn’t need them.

Just as Trump has flocked to friendly outlets like Fox and a live conversation on X with app owner Elon Musk (or what Harris’ team referred to as “whatever that was”), Harris has done speeches at a rally in North Carolina and last week in Prince George’s County, and she has her savvy and very online comms team to get her message out. It’s smart, because most outlets have proven they don’t know how to approach her.

The vice president has expressed interest in setting something up, but I wouldn’t be shocked if she sidesteps your Dana Bashes and Kristen Welkers and does something inventive. If I were her, I’d talk to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who has himself been critical of media colleagues, including his own network.

Maybe she should completely pivot and do something fun like “Hot Ones,” where she can answer policy questions while eating spicy wings. Talk to Teen Vogue. Do podcasts. Hang out with “The Real Housewives of Potomac.” I know these sound like lightweight options, but are any of these suggestions less weighty than Harris’ opponent, who bleats lies and racism on his own app, or his approved media partners who go on about Harris’ laugh, dating history and heritage? It’s all a circus. I say make your own big top.

And if madam vice president decides to talk to the traditional media, be it the New York Times or CNN, I think she should only do so with interviewers who have proven themselves to have cultural competency about race, gender, historically Black colleges and universities, the Divine 9 Greek system, step parenting and being a baddie in the 1990s. I’m not saying it has to be a friendly person like Trump seeks, but it does have to be someone who respects Harris enough as a candidate to do research and not spend the whole time asking gotcha questions about her opponent’s lies. Heck, I’ll do it! I know this is a long shot, but at least I know what okey-doke means.

I am excited for Harris’ future media choices because they are sure to be unprecedented, just like her candidacy. And it’s going to be on her terms. Everyone gets to set theirs, after all.

[determinate-negation]

What is important to understand about that moment was that Zionism was a political choice — not only by western imperial powers, but also by Jewish leadership. They could have fought more strenuously for Jewish immigration to the United States. And a lot of the Zionist leaders actually fought against immigration to the United States. There were a number of stories reported in the Jewish Communist press about how Zionists collaborated with the British and Americans to force Jews to go to Mandate Palestine, when they would have rather gone to the United States, or England. There’s a famous quote by Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, who said the only reason the United States sent Jews to Palestine was ​“because they do not want too many more of them in New York.” And the Zionists agreed with this.

While this may seem like ancient history, it is important because it disrupts the common sense surrounding Israel’s formation. ​“Yes, maybe there could have been peace between Jews and Palestinians, but the Holocaust made all of that impossible.” And I would say that this debate after 1945 shows that there was a long moment in which there were other possibilities, and another future could have happened

[…]

Question: Who or what is responsible for the erasure of this history of Jewish, left anti-Zionism?

I wouldn’t blame the erasure solely on the Soviet Union or Zionism, because we also have to think of the Cold War and how the Cold War destroyed the old Jewish left, and really drove it underground and shattered its organizations. So I think we also have to see how the turn toward Zionism was understood as something that would normalize Jews in a post-war era.

With the execution of the Rosenbergs, the Red Scare of the late 1940s and ​’50s, and the virtual banning of the Communist Party, which had been throughout the 1930s and ​’40s half Jewish, for much of the Jewish establishment, aligning themselves with American imperialism was a way for Jews to normalize their presence in the United States. And hopefully that moment has to some degree passed. We can see the emptiness and barrenness of aligning ourselves with an American imperial project, with people like Bari Weiss and Jared Kushner. Why would someone like Bari Weiss, who describes herself as liberal, want to align herself with the most reactionary forces in American life?

It’s a bloody matrix of assimilation and whiteness that emerged out of the Cold War suburbanization of the 1950s. Israel was part of that devil’s bargain. Yes, you can become real Americans: You can go to good U.S. universities, you can join the suburbs, enter into the mainstream of American life, as long as you do this one little thing for us, which is back the American Empire. Hopefully, with the emergence of new grassroots organizations in the United States, among Jews and non-Jews who are questioning the U.S. role supporting Zionism, this calculus can begin to change. With the rise of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Movement for Black Lives all taking a serious stance against U.S. support for Zionism, the common sense in the Jewish community has begun to move in a different direction, particularly among the younger generation. The battle is very far from over, but it makes me just a little optimistic about the future.”

- The Forgotten History of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice:

A near-majority of American voters willingly reelected Donald Trump. This harsh reality is a collective moral failure, but it’s also not a choice made in sound mind. Consider that voters believed Trump’s first presidency was a roaring success and Joe Biden’s only term a Carter-level catastrophe. It’s an upside-down Bizarro World view that ultimately played a key role in dooming Kamala Harris.

Trump’s 2024 platform was rooted in an obvious lie — that the nation under Biden’s leadership is a flaming dumpster fire and everyone was much better off when Trump was president. Democrats challenged this false reality with facts, but they ultimately lost the messaging war. Their best efforts were no match for the most powerful weapons in Trump’s propaganda arsenal — a timid press and a right-coded social social media environment. Greg Sargent reports in the New Republic that the Harris campaign’s own internal polling revealed an alarming trend: “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency — even if they saw these things negatively — were his fault.” According to exit polls, Trump decisively won the questions “who do you trust more to handle the economy?” and “who do you trust most to handle a crisis?” Of course, in reality Trump utterly botched the 2020 pandemic response, which researchers concluded resulted in 40 percent more deaths than necessary. And yet swing voters are willing to risk it all again in hopes of cheaper eggs and cruelty against outgroups.

Disinformation on demand

Legacy media shoulders significant blame for their “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherency and deteriorating mental state. Voters believed Trump could fix a steadily improving economy despite his promotion of inflationary tariffs. The media even presented Trump’s rants as cogent discussions of economic theory.

It’s worth noting, however, that an NBC poll from April revealed that voters who received news primarily from legacy media (newspapers, cable news, etc.) still overwhelmingly supported Biden. Trump owes his victory in great part to low-propensity voters of all races, including young men, and those voters don’t necessarily form their views based on mainstream media reporting. Rather, far too many are stuck in an online social media bubble where they are delivered a steady diet of rightwing propaganda. The median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, and liberals have joked about the network “brainwashing” their conservative parents. But rightwing social media content has effectively targeted and radicalized younger people, who — unlike the typical Hannity-obsessed grandpa — can vote for the next several decades. TikTok, which Trump joined in June, has 170 million users in the United States, and according a Pew Research survey, more than half of them said they regularly get their news from the platform. That’s up from just 22 percent in 2020. This is a serious concern because the far right uses TikTok to advance unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies.

[...]

Lower income Americans, particularly young people, do spend more of their income on groceries, rent, and gas. That’s why Republicans were so laser focused on the price of eggs. Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of liberal content countering the negative vibes. Of course, explaining the post-pandemic economic recovery is complex and requires more than a punchy one-minute video can convey. Although people might idly scroll TikTok all day, consuming 60-second quick hit videos like potato chips, they will balk at reading an extensive, well-reported news article. That’s too filling a meal.

According to a University of Oregon study, 40 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans surveyed said they’d become more conservative from their TikTok usage. Half of the Democrats surveyed said they’d grown more liberal, but a lot of far-left content on TikTok is downright alienating and can sound like MAGA’s idea of a strawman leftist. For instance, one user boasted that she “didn’t care” if liberal economic and social policies “hurt the economy,” thus conceding that those policies are in fact harmful to economic progress. TikTok’s artificial “vibecession” dominated the discourse, while abortion-related content was actively suppressed even while pregnant women were bleeding out in parking lots. Users of the platform resorted to disguising the word “abortion” as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n” in order to reach an audience. TikTok has a longstanding policy against promoting abortion services, which it classifies as “unsuitable businesses, products or services.” However, TikTok, YouTube, and Meta have allowed users to spread and monetize anti-abortion misinformation. Studies have shown an interesting gender gap in where young people receive their news on social media: For most women, it’s TikTok, while most men learn about the world from YouTube, X, and Reddit, all of which have become havens of crude masculinity.

On YouTube, 56 percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 44. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that researches extremism, conducted a four-part research project this year that determined YouTube’s algorithm consistently steers users to rightwing and Christian content. The algorithm does this even with seemingly apolitical search terms, like “male lifestyle guru,” which YouTube reflexively associates with conservative ideology. Rightwing news content was also more frequently recommended, including anti-vaxxer videos. As far back as 2019, both YouTube and Facebook’s autofill search boxes would return content that promoted anti-vaccine misinformation.

[...]

Why rightwing content has the edge

When Kamala Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, host Alexandra Cooper told her listeners, “I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everyone feels comfortable tuning in.” Left-leaning podcasters/social media content creators often avoid politics for fear of turning off their right-leaning fans. Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports don’t bother with such apologies when they have rightwing guests because it doesn’t compromise their brand. They are rightwing cultural influencers. Liberal podcaster Hasan Piker recently commented on the impact rightwing influencers have on young men of all races.

“There is a massive amount of rightwing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces. Everything is completely dominated by rightwing politics,” he said. “If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it’s playing video games, whether it’s working out, whether it’s listening to a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is completely dominated by center right to [the] Trumpian right. Everything they see is rightwing sentiment.”

Rogan and Portnoy might not present as overtly political as Walsh and Shapiro, but their edgy, hyper masculine personas are pure MAGA. Even billionaire CEO Elon Musk likes to present himself as a “disrupter,” an agent of change who boldly confronts the status quo. Anyone who’s seen the more popular indie films of the 1970s would realize how compelling this narrative is to young men. The subtle way that Rogan and Portnoy infuse politics into their personas presents a contrast with left-leaning social media content. The liberal TikToker or YouTuber who releases videos about home makeovers might endorse Democratic politicians during election season while wearing their “just voted” sticker, but rightwing influencers prime their audience on a daily basis. Young men marinate in a stew of rightwing sentiment and end up resenting the libs.

Stephen Robinson wrote in Public Notice a very valid case that a right-coded media environment gave Donald Trump the decisive boost to get elected, such as praising the disastrous Trump reign as a “success.”

Social media algorithms heavily favored right-coded and pro-Trump content, despite the never-ending whining about “censorship” from conservatives.

[hussyknee]

Unrolled twitter thread by Progressive International (@ProgIntl)

30 Sept 24 • 4 minute read • Read on X

On 30 September 1965, the Indonesian military, working closely with the US government, initiated a coup that would depose President Sukarno and install the brutal, 30-year dictatorship of General Suharto.

In the dark years that followed, the dictatorship massacred over a million Indonesian communists, with the CIA and US diplomats drawing up “kill lists” for the Indonesian military. The operation would become a template for the US’s regime change operations for decades to come.

Major-General Suharto with Indonesian Army in 1966

In 1945, President Sukarno led Indonesia to independence from Dutch colonial rule. He championed the Non-Aligned Movement and hosted the historic Bandung Conference, a meeting of Afro-Asian states, in 1955.

First President of Indonesia Sukarno making a speech circa 1945

Opening the conference and forecasting what was to come, Sukarno said: “We are often told ‘Colonialism is dead’. Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that… Colonialism also has its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small, but alien community within a nation.”

Leaders attending the Bandung Conference 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. From left: Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghanian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, Egyptian Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser, President Sukarno, and Yugoslavian Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito.

By 1965, Indonesia possessed one of the world's largest communist parties, the PKI. The PKI had a mass membership and mobilized vast numbers of people in the battle against Indonesia’s ruling class.

Campaign of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in September 1955.

Terrified by the strength and organization of Indonesia’s people, the Indonesian military’s 30th September Movement began to purge the PKI.

Men suspected of being IPK members being transported under guard by an armed Indonesian soldier

In the early hours of 1 October, a group of military conscripts murdered six high-ranking generals. Blaming the deaths on the PKI, Suharto used the attacks as a pretext to seize power. CIA communications equipment allowed him to spread false reports around the country and begin a long campaign of anti-communist propaganda.

The US had tried to overthrow Sukarno for years; in 1958, the CIA backed armed regional rebellions against the central government. In 1965, they did all they could to aid Suharto’s murderous power grab.

The campaign soon became genocidal. On islands like Bali, up to 10% of the population was massacred — and luxury hotels soon began to appear over the killing fields.

One US embassy staffer told the US press that Suharto’s military “probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad.”

Time Magazine referred to the killings as “the West’s best news for years in Asia”.

A cable from the US embassy’s first secretary, Mary Vance Trent, to the State Department referred to events in Indonesia as a “fantastic switch which has occurred over 10 short weeks”. It also included an estimate that 100,000 people had been slaughtered.

Cementing his power, Suharto became president in 1967. His ‘New Order’ policy allowed Western capitalism to exploit Indonesia’s cheap labour and plunder its natural resources. Civil rights and dissent were suppressed.

In one of the world’s most populous countries, any possibility for the emergence of a new, democratic political project was eliminated. Richard Nixon described Indonesia as “the greatest prize in Southeast Asia”. Suharto would not leave office until 1998.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan stands with Indonesian President Suharto in the White House South Lawn at the arrival ceremony for Suharto's State Visit. Oct 12, 1982

CIA officers described Suharto’s rise to power and anti-communist purge as the “model operation” and “Jakarta” soon became the codeword for anti-communist extermination programs in Latin America, where hundreds of thousands were massacred in regime change efforts engineered by Washington.

[beardedmrbean]

CBS News has a fine heritage and some great news talent, but the folks in charge seem determined to destroy its reputation.

Start with the ludicrous blowback to CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s Sept. 30 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Dokoupil pressed Coates on crucial facts he’d left out of his new anti-Israel book, such as the fact that the Jewish state is “surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it.”

They were all completely reasonable questions to ask about a polemic of its author, an intellectual who certainly should be able to defend his work.

But other network staff were furious at this act of Journalism 101: You’re not supposed to question lefties about their claims, it seems.

Surely they weren’t angry just because Coates is black, or anti-Israel?

Whatever: The suits pulled Dokoupil into a meeting with CBS News standards and practices team and its “Race and Culture Unit,” and reportedly chewed him out on a staff call, claiming his questioning of Coates didn’t meet CBS’ “editorial standards.”

CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon and her lieutenant Adrienne Roark reprimanded him for bringing “bias” to the interview, but failed to explain exactly how.

The re-education effort was also to feature a followup staff meeting moderated by Dr. Donald Grant, whom management called a “mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer” — but that got squelched after outside critics exposed Grant as wacko whose social-media posts include a racist smear of Sen. Tim Scott.

Meanwhile, Coates on a Trevor Noah podcast suggested that Gayle King (who was also sitting in on the interview, along with Nate Burleson) had told him before the sitdown what she planned to ask.

That sounds a lot more like a violation of good news practice than what Dokoupil did, but there’s no sign of any trouble for King.

Then came Bill Whitaker’s entirely professional interview of Kamala Harris, where she time and again dodged any substantial answers, prompting him to follow up, only for the Democratic candidate for president to dissolve into fresh word-salads and other evasions.

Once again, the higher ups felt compelled to intervene — by blatantly editing the package to make Harris look less awful.

Yes, blatantly: Soon after taping, the network released the raw footage of her hopeless answer to a question about Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

But by the time it aired that night, they’d edited in a “response” that was actually pulled from earlier in the conversation, and so make her seem more competent and less, well, Harris-y.

That is: CBS literally faked the “news.”

The editing also featured dubbing in narration by Whitaker over some of her responses, thereby burying more of the inconvenient truths revealed by the interview.

It’s hard to blame the Trump campaign for demanding that CBS release the raw transcript: It’d be one honorable response to being exposed as blatantly partisan hacks.

All this, incidentally, follows the thumb-on-the-scale work of CBS’ moderators in the J.D. Vance-Tim Walz debate, including Margaret Brennan’s utterly partisan and counter-factual “fact-check” of Vance.

CBS should be proud of Dokoupil and Whitaker’s work, ashamed of King and Brennan, yet management instead seems determined to teach up-and-comers to avoid honest journalism.

Ultimate owner Sheri Redstone has publicly supported Dokoupil and implicitly slammed the suits who came down on him.

Redstone’s trying to sell off CBS, but she might want to demand a management housecleaning now, since the folks running the news division seem determined to mis-manage its value down to zero.

[kattvez]

Heil Trump! 100 years on repeat.

This might make you pause and think, "No way—that could NEVER happen again!" But let’s look more closely, because the similarities are alarmingly real. Germany didn’t turn into Nazi Germany overnight; it was a slow descent, almost imperceptible at first. You may have heard the analogy of a frog in a pot of water, where the temperature rises so gradually that the frog doesn’t realize it’s being boiled alive until it’s too late. That’s what happened in Nazi Germany—and it’s what we risk today in the United States if we don’t pay attention to the warning signs.

In the early 1930s, many Germans, including Jewish citizens, dismissed Hitler as a passing phenomenon. They thought he was just a fringe figure—a "spook" who would fade away. They believed his extremist views wouldn’t gain traction. But Hitler’s appeal grew as he presented himself as a charismatic leader promising to restore Germany’s glory. His message was simple: make Germany great again. Sound familiar?

With the world reeling from the Great Depression, Hitler gained widespread support through his protectionist economic policies, offering a vision of economic relief and national revival. Many Germans, desperate for stability, ignored the darker, insidious rhetoric that came with his promises. Today, millions of Americans, feeling left behind by globalization and the rise of the tech economy, similarly turn to promises of economic revival and national pride. Like in 1930s Germany, the allure of quick fixes to complex problems can make people overlook the dangerous ideologies lurking beneath the surface.

One of Hitler’s key strategies was to undermine core democratic institutions, eroding public trust in Germany’s legal and political framework. We’re seeing echoes of this in Donald Trump’s actions. As both a candidate and a former president, Trump has repeatedly undermined the credibility of institutions when they don’t align with his interests—the courts, the electoral process, even the certification of an election. His rhetoric suggests that any institution not serving his goals is suspect, creating a divide in the public’s trust in these democratic systems.

A hallmark of Trump’s approach has been his relentless attack on the media, branding it as “fake news” whenever it criticizes him or his policies. The Nazis used a similar tactic, calling independent journalists the “Lügenpresse,” or "lying press." In both cases, this tactic seeks to sow doubt about any information that challenges the leader’s narrative. By discrediting the media, both Hitler and Trump attempt to shape reality to fit their own agendas, isolating their followers from independent sources of truth.

Scapegoating minorities has also been a disturbing common thread. Hitler blamed Jewish people for Germany's economic problems, stirring up public resentment against them as the "internal enemies" of the nation. Trump has similarly focused on specific groups, notably undocumented immigrants, portraying them as the root of America's economic and social issues. He has created a crisis around illegal immigration, expanding the role of ICE to target this group, often painting them as threats to safety, jobs, and stability. Today, similar tactics are being used against transgender individuals, who represent a tiny fraction of the population but have become a focal point of political and social resentment. Trump's rhetoric fuels these hostilities, using marginalized communities as scapegoats to rally support and divert attention from more complex issues.

Furthermore, Hitler relied on affiliated militias like the SA and SS to intimidate opponents and enforce Nazi ideology. Trump, while not formally organizing militias, has encouraged self-recruiting groups and militias, famously asking them to “stand by” during moments of tension, as seen during the January 6th Capitol riot. His cozy relationships with authoritarian leaders, like Putin, echo the alliances between Hitler and Mussolini, reinforcing the dangerous allure of authoritarianism.

The situation today may even be more dangerous because of technology. In the past, hateful rhetoric and propaganda required physical presence at rallies or the reading of pamphlets. Now, hateful content—whether anti-Semitic, anti-trans, or racist—finds its way to people’s screens, reaching millions in an instant. Algorithms amplify divisive content, pushing more extreme narratives into the mainstream, often without individuals even seeking it out.

It’s easy to believe that “it could never happen here,” but history shows that democracy is fragile, and small shifts in public sentiment, unchecked power, and targeted scapegoating can lead to devastating consequences. The parallels between Germany’s descent into Nazism and aspects of today’s political culture are a reminder of the importance of vigilance, empathy, and a commitment to protecting democratic values before it’s too late.

[comeonamericawakeup]

As an "unhinged" Donald Trump vies for a second White House term, the press is failing America, said Parker Molloy in The New Republic. Faced with an "incoherent" candidate who has blamed wind power for the high price of bacon and insists that Latin American countries are sending legions of "Hannibal Lecters" across the border, the media routinely engages in "sanewashing" - laundering Trump's insane rants to make him sound far more coherent than he actually is. They're failing to adequately convey the threat of a candidate who's vowing to wage a "bloody" campaign to deport millions of illegal migrants and impose "long-term prison sentences" on Democratic lawyers and election officials who work to ensure voting integrity. As Trump veers further off the rails, the "dangerous disconnect" between what this demagogue says and what's reported is widening. "It isn't just poor journalism; it's a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy."

THE WEEK September 20, 2024

The media is failing us.

[zvaigzdelasas]

US Threats led to rupture of vital military ties, Nigerien leader says - WaPo

A crucial military relationship between the United States and its closest West African ally, the country of Niger, ruptured this spring after a visiting U.S. official made threats during last-ditch negotiations over whether American troops based there would be allowed to remain, according to the country’s prime minister.

In an exclusive interview, Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine put the blame for the breakdown squarely on the United States, accusing American officials of trying to dictate which countries Niger could partner with and failing to justify the U.S. troop presence, now scheduled to end in the coming months. Niger has been central to efforts to contain a growing Islamist insurgency in West Africa.

The rift between the former allies has created an opportunity for Russia, which has moved quickly to deepen its relationship with Niger, dispatching troops to the capital, Niamey, last month to train the Nigerien military and supplying a new air defense system. Russian and U.S. troops now occupy opposite ends of an air base.

After a military coup d’état ousted Niger’s democratically elected president last year, the United States froze security support as required by U.S. law and paused counterterrorism activities, which had involved intelligence gathering on regional militant activities from a massive drone base in the country’s north. The United States has kept more than 1,000 military personnel in place while negotiating with Niger over their status and urging the junta to begin restoring democracy.

“The Americans stayed on our soil, doing nothing while the terrorists killed people and burned towns,” Zeine said. “It is not a sign of friendship to come on our soil but let the terrorists attack us. We have seen what the United States will do to defend its allies, because we have seen Ukraine and Israel.”

Niger’s insistence that American troops depart culminated in the U.S. announcement last month that it would withdraw them. The pullout, which two U.S. officials said would begin in coming months, represents a significant setback for the Biden administration and will force it to reconfigure its strategy for countering Islamist extremists in the volatile Sahel region.

Though tense discussions between U.S. and Nigerien officials have been previously reported, Zeine’s remarks revealed the extent of the disconnect between the two countries. While the Americans were pressing their counterparts over democracy and their relations with other countries, Niger was asking for additional military equipment and what it considered a more equitable relationship between the two forces, according to his account. He also revealed just how exasperated the Nigeriens had become with the United States.

Relations with the United States have been strained since the junta took power, appointing Zeine, an economist, as prime minister two weeks later. The U.S. government condemned the coup and called for the release of President Mohamed Bazoum, who was put under house arrest.

Zeine said leaders of Niger’s new government, known as the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland, or by its French initials CNSP, were bewildered that the United States had frozen military support while insisting on keeping the troops in the country without justifying their continued presence. The American response in the wake of Niger’s coup contrasted sharply with that of other nations, including Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, he said, which have welcomed the new Nigerien leaders with “open arms.”

He said the Nigerien leaders took particular umbrage at remarks by Molly Phee, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, who he said had urged the government during a March visit to Niamey to refrain from engaging with Iran and Russia in ways objectionable to Washington if Niger wanted to continue its security relationship with the United States. He also said Phee had further threatened sanctions if Niger pursued a deal to sell uranium to Iran.

“When she finished, I said, ‘Madame, I am going to summarize in two points what you have said,’” recounted Zeine, who has led negotiations with the United States. “First, you have come here to threaten us in our country. That is unacceptable. And you have come here to tell us with whom we can have relationships, which is also unacceptable. And you have done it all with a condescending tone and a lack of respect.”[...]

Since 2012, the United States has maintained a military presence in Niger, with most U.S. personnel stationed at the Agadez drone base, which cost about $110 million to build. That base has been “impactful” for counterterrorism efforts across the region, said Gen. Michael E. Langley, who heads U.S. military operations in Africa. In an interview earlier this year, Langley warned that the U.S. losing its footprint in Niger would “degrade our ability to do active watching and warning, including for homeland defense.”[...]

When Phee first arrived in Niger in December, Zeine said, he showed her photographs of Nigeriens waving American flags during protests against France, Niger’s former colonial power. While protesters set fires and smashed windows at the French Embassy, he noted, they left the U.S. Embassy untouched.

“Nigeriens were saying, ‘Americans are our friends, they will help us this time to annihilate the terrorists,’” said Zeine. “But there was radio silence.” He added that Niger would have not looked to Russia and other countries for help if the United States had responded to requests for more support, including for planes, drones and an air defense system.[...]

Although Niger is insisting that the U.S. military leave, Zeine said that his government wants to continue economic and diplomatic relations with the United States and that “no Nigerien considers the United States as the enemy.” He said he told Phee and Campbell that Niger would rather have American investors than soldiers.

“If American investors arrived, we would give them what they wanted,” he recounted telling the States Department officials. “We have uranium. We have oil. We have lithium. Come, invest. It is all we want.”

14 May 24

[anti-ao3]

i don't want trump to win as you all know. but god please STOP blaming arabs, muslims, palestinians etc. in the US for not voting for kamala or hell, for criticizing her - because we are not allowed to criticize democrats without liberal idiots making up scenarios where we get fucking murdered or smth. or acting like things are not bad now.

we have to keep pressing kamala and every single politician involved. they can't keep getting away with their countless crimes, and especially with israel bombing not only gaza, but also syria, iran, and lebanon!

[simply-ivanka]

WHO CAN BLAME HIM ? After 2016!

TRUMP IS DOING THIS HIS WAY AND THAT IS THAT! TRUMP 2024!

Trump Campaign May Decline Feds' Transition Help

By Charlie McCarthy    |   Thursday, 29 August 2024 11:28 AM EDT

The Trump campaign reportedly is prepared to pass on receiving transition help from the federal General Services Administration (GSA) in anticipation of President Donald Trump winning the November election.

The GSA normally plays a role in the transition from one administration to the another. It provides office space, technology, and other back-end support that can be crucial to a presidential transition operation.

Trump, the Republican nominee, is opposing Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee, in the race for the White House.

Politico reported Thursday that with an Aug. 31 deadline looming, sources say the Trump team is poised to reject GSA assistance.

While transitions kick into high gear after Election Day, when a president-elect must begin selecting and vetting about 4,000 federal political appointees, success depends on the infrastructure built during the pre-election period, including identifying agency review teams, and beginning the background check process for national security staff.

GSA is required by law to make available federal office space, IT support, and other resources to transition teams, but only once it has entered into memoranda of understanding with representatives for each nominee, which Congress requires the agency to do "to the maximum extent practicable," by Sept. 1.

A GSA spokesperson confirmed that the agency had made its offer to the two candidates.

The Trump campaign, though, has concerns about working with

GSA.

First, accepting GSA help means adhering to $5,000-per-donor contribution limits in funding overall costs that can exceed $10 million. Trump allies would prefer fewer people cutting bigger checks.

Second, Politico reported that Trump's team does not trust the GSA after what it experienced in 2016, when there were leaks of potential administration hires and widespread dismay with the agency's decision to hand over transition records to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Some Trump allies blamed federal workers for the leaks.

"The GSA presidential transition support model has run its course and either campaign should have the option to operate their transitions independently in order to have the most flexibility for fundraising, information security, and operations," Ken Nahigian, executive director of Trump's 2016 transition, told Politico.

Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes told Politico that no final decision has been made regarding GSA this time around.

"With transition leadership in place, and many talented leaders to work with, President Trump will have what he needs to build a world-class and effective administration starting on day one," Hughes said.

Partnership for Public Service President Max Stier told Politico that GSA could help with quickly arranging security clearances and in preventing cyberattacks.

Stier added that a transition organization without GSA could be set up as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, meaning no public financial disclosures.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

[mariacallous]

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦