newrepublic--2020-11-03--What Do We Do About All These Trump Supporters?

Hockey icon Bobby Orr broke the hearts of millions last week when he declared his support for Donald Trump in a campaign ad in New Hampshire .
Not because he exercised his free-speech rights .
Not because athletes or icons should “ stick to sports ” or because there is reason to think the dubious endorsement— “ that ’ s the kind of teammate I want , ” Orr stupidly wrote—will change the outcome of the election .
But because in choosing to take his stand , in embracing this candidate , Orr inflamed one of the most grievous if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sad discovery for so many of us over the past four years that so many of our friends , neighbors , business partners , and heroes are not who we thought they were .
Like the Civil War , which pitted brother against brother , and the Vietnam War , which pitted father against son , the Trump presidency has cleaved relationships from sea to sea .
It has forced people to take sides .
It ’ s caused psychic wounds that figure to grow worse , not heal , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s angry , divisive tenure has accomplished the destruction Stan Van Gundy , to use another example from the world of sports , surely meant when he tweeted , on September 30 : “ For me the saddest thing about this whole Trump presidency has been finding out that people I knew , liked and respected , including some guys I coached support this racist , misogynistic , narcissistic person .
Painfully disappointing revelations.
” Painfully disappointing , indeed .
I ’ ll get over the fact that my boyhood idol Orr @ @ @ @ @ @ @ isn ’ t that what boyhood heroes are destined to do ?
But I ’ ll have a harder time getting over the tottering relationships I have in my own life with friends and colleagues who don ’ t just support Trump and all he stands for , but whose social media timelines suggest they have swallowed whole all of the rest of his dark worldview .
The ones who send you phony stories from Facebook bolstering conspiracy theories or other lies .
The ones who share racist memes .
The ones who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the flu , or that Joe Biden is a foreign agent , or that Donald Trump is God ’ s gift to humankind .
I admire but can not emulate all the earnest people who have made it their mission this election season to try to convince these people of the errors of their ways .
The patient folks who undertake granular debates with those Trumpists who scorn science and who believe fiction over fact .
The ones telling me to narrow the great divide by respecting the perspectives of the Trumpists in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less those who see the problem in bipartisan terms , as if the two sides are equally to blame for the cognitive dissonance we face .
And , ultimately , no one really has a good solution about how to strongly and honorably respond to the Trump supporter in our lives .
Do we forgive and forget ?
Turn the other cheek after it ’ s been slapped ?
I have good friends , rock-ribbed Republicans , who , until the Trump presidency , I considered the salt of the earth .
Religious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Honorable in business .
Good parents .
Good citizens .
Good-natured .
The type of folks with whom you could genuinely smile , when talk would come to politics , and say , “ We ’ ll just agree to disagree.
” People I admired and respected and whose political differences enriched my own life by pressing me to reconsider my political views .
Now ?
These once-honorable people defend a man with whom they seem to have nothing in common .
Worse , they defend him in the style in which he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deriding the rest of us .
To them , I ’ m the idiot who dares to dissent .

How do you cope with this? How do you respond to the friend in your life, or to the colleague or business associate, who tries to normalize this president, and this presidency, by citing some phony news story or some hoary myth or by regurgitating junk news to you? How do you fairly and accurately respond without saying something that will end the relationship? Something like: “Stop being a racist idiot!” What good would come of that? Nicholas Kristof touched on this a bit in a column that could be a coda for the tense weekend that just passed. Kristof politely tried to explain to his conservative friends why he doesn’t just oppose Trump as a normal politician but as a threat to the nation and democracy itself.
Very noble of him. And he’s not wrong to argue that those who support Trump support an existential threat to the republic without an evident shred of self-doubt or concern. But I have less ambitious goals than Kristof. I don’t even try anymore to talk sense into my friends when they start babbling about how unfairly Trump has been treated or how it’s all still Hlllary Clinton’s fault. I don’t respond when they send me links to disinformation or outrageous takes on the Supreme Court or immigration or the pandemic. I just give up. It’s more than disappointing when your friends let you down. It’s just plain sad. And futile. You can argue all day with a jackass, but in the end, it will still be a jackass and you’ll have wasted a day.
My pacifist approach to the Trumpists in my life has frustrated me, especially lately. It is not in my nature to let bullshit go unanswered. But evidently my muted fury and frustration comes with a deeper layer of meaning. Rachel Kleinfeld, the author and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written a lot lately about political violence. She spoke last week to Joshua Keating at Slate about what we might expect over the next few days, as Trump supporters threaten to “monitor” polling stations, clog up interstate traffic, and endanger motorists. But it was this earlier Kleinfeld quote that caught my eye: “We need to think of those followers on the other side more as believers than as regular political citizens and not try to fight with rational arguments, not try to convince with data and so on.”


newrepublic--2020-11-03--It’s Already Happening Here

It’s Already Happening Here

Fascism is the outcome of a collective incapacity to think .
This is how , in 1939 , Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges explained the success of Adolf Hitler .
From his marginal observation post in Buenos Aires , Borges said that the predominance of an irrational logic was predictable in fascists who fanatically believed in the cult of their leaders .
But what was shocking for Borges was that this irrationality was also present in anti-fascism .
This was unexpected , and for Borges , unacceptable .
Borges cautioned his readers not to engage in this form of escapism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the nation .
Arguments that fascism could not happen here or that it could not be the result of national traditions because the nation and the people were intrinsically good mimic the magical thinking of the fascists .
They replace the fascist cult of the strongman with the uncritical cult of liberalism .
Analyzing this situation at the time of the Nazis , Borges stated that “ exclamations have usurped the function of reasoned thoughts.
” Borges warned against the “ liberal jihad against dictatorships ” that fought them with the help of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ the opinion that the inevitable and trivial fact of having been born in a given country or belonging to a given race ( or a given good mixture of races ) is … a sufficient talisman.
” Borges ’ s arguments hold true today .
Of the many attempts to explain Trumpian attacks against democracy , the most erratic are those that invert Trump ’ s nationalism by claiming that he represents an anomaly situated outside of American traditions and history .
Trump , it ’ s claimed , can not present @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such thing as fascism in America ; this is why Trumpism belongs to a special historical pathway that separates the American caudillo from other global histories , especially the history of fascism and postfascism .
According to these views , Americans are either too good for fascism or they are too dumb .
Trumpism can not be that bad or such a risk to democracy because American democracy will endure .
In this view , rather than a by-product of global and American racist , populist , and fascist traditions reformulated in postfascist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bracketed and summarily dismissed .
Two new books on strongmen and their followers provide powerful evidence against these views .
Ruth Ben-Ghiat ’ s Strongmen : Mussolini to the Present and Carl Hoffman ’ s Liar ’ s Circus : A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump ’ s MAGA Rallies examine the nature of Trump ’ s authoritarianism , and present connections with other autocratic regimes , showing how the past and present of strongmen are deeply intertwined .
While Ben-Ghiat presents a powerful historical reading of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a history from above , Hoffman gives us a narrative from below , sharing his own “ strange ” journey among the Trumpistas .
Whichever way you look at it , a distinct pattern emerges .
Ben-Ghiat distinguishes between three main periods in the history of strongmen : There is the fascism of the 1930s , the dictatorships of the Cold War era , and the resurgence of right-wing populists like Viktor Orbán , Rodrigo Duterte , and Trump , among others in the present .
The first period is characterized by fascism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the affirmation of totalitarian rule , with total war and genocide being the major outcomes .

Propaganda is affirmed through the cult of the leader and violent repression. In the name of the leader, who is presented as the embodiment of the people and the nation, and as its ultimate protector, violence becomes legitimate and even desired. Violence and repression are presented as the way to create transcendental changes in the history of humanity. Hitler exterminated millions of European Jews because he believed it would bring about a new historical era for the Aryan race. Pinochet tortured, imprisoned, and killed thousands of his opponents in Chile, arguing that these acts of extreme repression were at the service of saving civilization.
Both propaganda and repression have changed in our new century, becoming less conspicuous and more overt. If raw violence was the mark of dictators in the eras of fascism and the Cold War, the new-era strongmen like Bolsonaro and Trump have adopted more selective forms of repression and violence. Violence becomes more targeted, and less organized, than in the past (no mass killings or summary executions in the thousands). Deeply repressive acts such as the operation of detention camps in the U.S., the policy of child separation, and the enabling and celebrating of police brutality become structural dimensions of strongman rule. Although state violence is more difficult in a country with a free press, in the new media landscape populist leaders can bypass the press and communicate directly with their followers without scrutiny. In this sense, media and context change but not the patterns of strongman behavior. As Ben-Ghiat observes, “Twitter is for Trump what newsreels were for the fascists: a direct channel to the people that keep him constantly in the news.”
Notably, the strongman’s ultranationalist idea of the past always involves what Ben-Ghiat defines as a “state-assisted machine of libidinal gratification.” The strongman needs to control bodies, and sexual violence and the denigration of women are central to his rule. Machismo is a “strategy of political legitimation and a central component of authoritarian rule.” Strongman regimes put forward a reactionary model of masculinity that starts with the misogynistic monsters at the top. Mussolini was a sex addict who created a “state-assisted machine” to have intercourse with thousands of women, many of whom had just attended his rallies. After these sexual encounters—of which, Ben-Ghiat tells us, there were on average 15 to 20 per week—the women became persons of interest to the state security apparatus:


newrepublic--2020-11-03--The Violence and Hope in Texas Is Our Future

In 2020 in Texas , depending on which county you live in , a voter can head to the polls at 3 a.m. Or they can drive for several hours to drop their ballot off at the one box in their county of millions , and then wait to see if their ballot will be thrown out later in court .
Some voters surround campaign buses in trucks festooned with “ Back the Blue ” flags so tall they block traffic , and other voters could be the ones run off the road .
Texas may be the future : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ protect voting rights and build power through grassroots movements , and the threat of right-wing violence pushing back .
Harris County , home to Houston , is the backdrop for much of this speculation .
In 2018 , 27-year-old Lina Hidalgo was elected as Harris County ’ s chief executive—her title is County Judge—on the Harris County Commissioners Court .
The body oversees the county ’ s jails and hospital system , and this year , they appointed the current county clerk , Chris Hollins , the first Black county clerk in Harris @ @ @ @ @ @ @ youngest ) , who oversees elections .
They ’ ve significantly expanded access to the vote for people in Harris County , which in turn has met with backlash from conservatives in the state legislature and courts .
Over the last few days alone , the Texas Republican party has tried to get more than 120,000 votes tossed out .
And when Texas Trump supporters swarmed a Biden campaign bus in dozens of vehicles , one colliding with a car that was with the Biden campaign , the state Republican Party railed against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Train ’ s support .
“ Against all odds , ” reported the Texas Tribune when County Judge Hidalgo assumed office in 2019 , “ she ’ s running the most populous county in Texas—the first woman and Latina to do so—after riding a blue tsunami in Harris County that swept away several countywide Republican officials and saw Democrats prevail in every county judicial race.
” After those wins , the county increased election budgets from the $ 4 million allocated by the prior Republican administration to $ 31 million for 2020 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ If Biden carries Texas Tuesday , it ’ s quite plausible that a razor-thin Democratic victory in a county-judge race will be a ( if not the ) reason why.
” The decision to keep eight polling places open all night the Thursday before the election was the work of County Clerk Hollins .
On the first night of 24-hour-voting , County Judge Hildago announced on Twitter , “ We just hit our highest voter turnout .
Ever .
Nearly 1.4 million votes have been cast in Harris County and we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vote yet.
” ( Overall , 9.7 million people voted in Texas by October 30 , surpassing before Election Day the total number of voters who turned out in the 2016 election .
“ More Texans have now voted in this election than in any election ever—by about 700,000 and counting , as of Sunday afternoon , ” according to NPR . )
As Texas Monthly reported on the all-night voting scene , voters arrived from their late shifts—public transit workers , Amazon delivery drivers .
One voter , an engineer at an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vote at 1 a.m. , told the Monthly , “ What I like about engineering is that you can ’ t manipulate the laws of physics and mathematics .
As we ’ ve seen lately , election laws are not the same.
” As another way to expand access to the polls , Harris County proposed drive-through voting this year , which was approved by the Secretary of State and tested in an election in July .
The Texas Republican Party filed suit against Hollins over drive-through voting several months later ( in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ akin to the one which handed George W. Bush the presidency in 2000—essentially arguing that different counties having different election policies is a violation of the constitution—and which Justice Brett Kavanaugh has resurrected in a Supreme Court ruling concerning Wisconsin voters ) .
“ Those folks will stop at nothing to make sure that the right to vote in this country is limited to a select few , ” Hollins told local radio station KTSU2 .
“ There is no other way to describe it other than voter suppression .
”

One plaintiff is Texas Republican power broker Steven Hotze, “one of the most prolific culture warriors on the right,” according to the Texas Tribune, who has lobbied for an anti-trans “bathroom bill” in the Texas legislature, unsuccessfully, and who has sued Harris County Judge Hidalgo over coronavirus policies on mask-wearing and stay-at-home orders. In June, days after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, Hotze called Texas Governor Gregg Abbot and left a voice message with his chief of staff, which said, “I want to make sure that [Abbott] has National Guard down here, and they have the order to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting like they have in Dallas, start tearing down businesses—shoot to kill the son of a bitches. That’s the only way you restore order. Kill ’em. Thank you.” He has also used the QAnon oath and espoused some of its conspiracy theories.
As the suit wound through the courts over the last week, some Texas Trump supporters took voter suppression into their own hands—targeting campaign vehicles and the staffers inside. On Friday, Donald Trump Jr. beckoned supporters in a video message: “Hey Laredo, Don Jr. here. I heard you had an awesome turnout for the Trump Train. It’d be great if you guys would all get together, head down to McAllen and give Kamala Harris a nice Trump Train welcome. Get out there, have some fun, enjoy it. Don’t forget to vote and bring all of your friends. Let’s show them how strong Texas still is as Trump country. Get out there, guys.” Later that day, a Biden-Harris campaign bus en route from San Antonio to Austin was surrounded by Trump supporters in trucks, with Trump flags waving behind them. “The confrontation, captured on video, featured at least one minor collision and led to Texas Democrats canceling three scheduled campaign events on Friday,” reported the Texas Tribune. “The campaign officials cited ‘safety concerns’ for the cancellations.”
Over the next few days, the president offered his repeated support to those who tried to intimidate the Biden campaign. He retweeted a video of the trucks trailing the bus, adding, “I LOVE TEXAS.” A Texas GOP statement called the incident “more fake news and propaganda,” adding, “Prepare to lose … stop bothering me. Maybe Soros can cut y’all another check in 2022.” Trump echoed this Monday, when the Federal Bureau of Investigations in San Antonio announced it was opening an investigation: “This story is FALSE. They did nothing wrong. But the ANTIFA Anarchists, Rioters and Looters, who have caused so much harm and destruction in Democrat run cities, are being seriously looked at!”


newrepublic--2020-11-03--The Fate of American Democracy Is in the Hands of Cable News

The 2020 presidential election could very well be messy , complex , and slow , defined by an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots , legal challenges , and possibly recounts reminiscent of the fiasco in Florida in 2000 .
And cable news , which millions of people will be watching throughout Election Night , is pathologically incapable of dealing with messy , complex , and slow stories .
The networks are designed for easy answers that feed simple narratives , and they have shown a tendency to be short-circuited by Donald Trump ’ s chicanery .
He will undoubtedly spend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and how cable networks respond may profoundly impact the result of the election .
Trump is hoping for confusion .
Ever since Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death opened a seat on the Supreme Court—filled last week by conservative Amy Coney Barrett—he has telegraphed that he plans on contesting the results of the election all the way to the top of the American legal system .
On Sunday , Axios reported that he might even declare victory prematurely if he has an early lead in crucial swing states , in an attempt to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heavily favor Democrats and may be counted after Election Night , are evidence of widespread voter fraud .
His gambit would have no legal merit .
It ’ s a stunt so shameless that it has already been widely condemned .
But it ’ s a piece of a larger strategy that will test the media : Trump is insisting that the winner of the election be called on Election Night because he thinks he has a good chance of being ahead in the early going .
As campaign senior adviser Jason Miller @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sunday , “ If you speak with many smart Democrats , they believe that President Trump will be ahead on Election Night ... And then they ’ re going to try to steal it back after the election.
” The president and his allies will undoubtedly try to turn any inch they are given into a mile , whether it ’ s a significant pro-Trump margin among in-person voters on Tuesday , ambiguity about mail-in ballots , or some unexpected factor .
The point of declaring victory prematurely is to pressure the media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and half-formed picture of the actual results .
And there is every reason to believe that cable news will fall for it .
Just think about what happened two years ago .
As with this year , there was a strong sense that the full picture—which would likely portray a “ blue wave ” of Democratic victories—would only fully emerge days , if not weeks , later .
And yet , on Election Day , numerous pundits declared that the Democrats had fallen short of expectations and that the president and his party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That , of course , was quickly proven to be bullshit .

“Journalists at this fraught moment carry a heavy burden to do something that is not in their nature: to be patient, to linger with the uncertainty and to explain relentlessly rather than join a rush to judgment,” wrote The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan. To their credit, news organizations down the stretch have informed their readers and viewers that they should not necessarily expect results the night of the election. Whether they can show restraint when it’s called for, however, is another question entirely.
That is particularly true of cable news networks, which typically devote election night to running state-by-state tallies and featuring panels of pundits that have grown so large that they now resemble Viking feasts. There are long periods when very little happens, which is covered up only slightly by their slavish devotion to expensive technology that shows real-time, county-by-county data. Much of that dead air is filled by pundits, who attempt to create a real-time version of the dreaded New York Times needle, divining the political narrative that is appearing in raw form on the magic screens of John King and Steve Kornacki.
Even in normal times, this is a useless exercise. These pundits, usually talking heads affiliated with the campaigns, provide no insight, and in any case much of what they say is stale within 20 minutes. Their job is to spin the results, not to inform the public. In an election as weird as 2020’s, with one candidate presumed to crush in-person votes and the other with a gigantic mail-in advantage, these narrative swings are even less important. What actually matters is covering the facts on the ground, calling out frivolous challenges to legitimate ballots, and resisting the temptation to spin. “By putting their opinion-havers on camera—even if they only validate Trump’s argument implicitly, by treating it as one of two competing ‘strategies’—news networks will be doing him a favor,” wrote Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilly.


newrepublic--2020-11-05--The Majestic Alaskan Rainforest in Trump’s Crosshairs

“ When we try to pick out anything by itself , we find it hitched to everything else in the universe , ” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1911 .
Last week , news broke that the Trump administration exempted the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from the 2001 Roadless Rule , a regulation prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting in roadless areas .
The immediate implications for logging in the Tongass are complicated and unclear—in part because a diverse group of stakeholders representing tribal , environmental , and business interests will surely challenge the move in court .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risks harm to much more than trees .
Perhaps nowhere else in the United States today is the interconnectedness Muir referred to a century ago more evident than in the Tongass .
And in recent times , it ’ s also been documented in startling ways by cutting-edge science .
Located in Alaska ’ s island-dotted coastal panhandle , the roughly 17 million-acre Tongass together with the adjacent 16 million-acre Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia make up the world ’ s largest intact coastal temperate rain forest .
Steep-forested mountains tower over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coastlines , their exhalations rising through overhanging tree limbs and melding into ever-present rain clouds that drop more than 200 inches of annual precipitation .
Small seabirds called marbled murrelets dive for fish in the ocean and lay a single egg on a moss-covered branch of an old-growth tree .
The Tongass is a place blurring the line between where the forest ends and the sea begins .
And no other species symbolizes this blurred line more than salmon .
In fact , salmon cross the line .
Salmon are in the trees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rivers and streams , then head to the ocean to mature .
Depending on the species , they spend anywhere from one to seven years at sea .
As adults , they use the earth ’ s magnetic field and their sense of smell to navigate back to their birth streams to spawn the next generation .
Then they die .

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1911. Last week, news broke that the Trump administration has exempted the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from the 2001 Roadless Rule, a regulation prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting in roadless areas. The immediate implications for logging in the Tongass are complicated and unclear—in part because a diverse group of stakeholders representing tribal, environmental, and business interests will surely challenge the move in court. But any large-scale commercial logging in this forest risks harm to much more than trees. Perhaps nowhere in the United States today is the interconnectedness Muir referred to a century ago more evident than in the Tongass. And in recent times, it’s also been documented in startling ways by cutting-edge science.
Located in Alaska’s island-dotted coastal panhandle, the roughly 17-million-acre Tongass, together with the adjacent 16-million-acre Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia make up the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rain forest. Steep-forested mountains tower over glacial fjords. Humpback whales hug the coastlines, their exhalations rising through overhanging tree limbs and melding into ever-present rain clouds that drop more than 200 inches of annual precipitation. Small seabirds called marbled murrelets dive for fish in the ocean and lay a single egg on a moss-covered branch of an old-growth tree. The Tongass is a place blurring the line between where the forest ends and the sea begins. And no other species symbolizes this blurred line more than salmon. In fact, salmon cross the line. Salmon are in the trees.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Nothing Was Inevitable About This Election

No presidential candidate had hit 270 electoral votes by the close of Election Day , which was more or less expected .
Other outcomes were cleaner while holding true to prediction : Republicans were still trying to get tens of thousands of votes tossed in Texas , and they ’ d be in court again in Pennsylvania challenging ballots .
The president had tweeted numerous times about how he won , which he did not—at least not yet , if at all .
The rest , well that became harder to tell a tidy story about : a $ 15 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the state went to the president ; people with felony convictions who are on parole in California had their voting rights restored , while gig workers had their labor rights stripped ; and Colorado voters protected the right to an abortion and Louisiana voters amended their state constitution to deny that right .
Progressive candidates won , and they lost .
Republicans held most of their seats .
Your preferred narrative was there for the taking .
It is entirely fair to ask : What led some Florida voters to apparently choose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a pay raise ?
Or why did more or less the same percentage of white women tell exit pollsters that they voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020 , despite what we were told would be an exodus ?
Why did a progressive who backed Medicare for All—with a rare showing of support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—lose to a Republican incumbent in a district that went for Biden ?
None of these stories are the full story—or maybe just not the only story .
There was no resounding defeat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t make a clean sweep , either .
Anyone who has done the slow , incremental work of organizing can recognize what happened here : You lose , you win , you lose by a mile .
The kind of fight we are in is won day by day , not with one decisive gesture .

I was in Columbus last April, when soon-to-be-former prosecuting attorney O’Brien indicted a Columbus police officer for murder, a first. Activists—led by the surviving family members of young people, mostly Black men and boys, killed by police—had wanted O’Brien out for years. I don’t think anyone seriously thought it was going to happen; there wasn’t a big push in favor of O’Brien’s opponent, retired judge Gary Tyack. (One headline in the Columbus Free Press: “Progressives Should Hold Gary Tyack’s Feet to the Fire If He Becomes Franklin County Prosecutor.”) Adrienne Hood, whose 23-year-old son Henry Green was killed by Columbus police in 2016, has worked more or less ever since to find a way to hold police accountable. I asked her this morning, was she surprised by the O’Brien loss? “Absolutely,” she texted me back, “but we were giving him a run for his money. He had so much money BUT I kept telling people it’s the VOTES that matter!!!!” The momentum from the summer’s protests may have helped connect the years of police killings in Columbus, even when they were receding into memory, to the reality of O’Brien’s role and what could be done now.
O’Brien’s loss reminded me a little of former Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, who lost her seat after young Black organizers from groups like Assata’s Daughters and BYP100 launched a #ByeAnita campaign. They weren’t supporting her opponent; they just wanted the prosecutor who they said made it “nearly impossible” to indict police who kill, because she either failed to or was incredibly slow to charge them, out. The pitch to get Alvarez out of office wasn’t contingent on getting people to support her opponent, so much as to understand their vote as a way to hold a top member of law enforcement accountable for failing to hold police accountable. As one of their banners hanging over a highway that election read, they saw “Blood on the ballot.”
These changes are a small chipping-away at a system that destroys lives but that can be broken down into its constituent parts. When it’s clear that breaking that system down is a matter of survival, that there is also a way out to fight for, people will fight. As my colleague Kate Aronoff pointed out, 72 percent of voters said in exit polls that they were somewhat or very worried about climate change and broadly support policies to address it, yet we don’t have them. But that’s not really all on the voters, she writes. “There’s a gap between policies voters claim to want and the politicians they’re choosing (albeit off a limited menu).”


newrepublic--2020-11-04--The Futility of the Democrats’ Record-Breaking War Chest

If the election returns stay on track , Joe Biden will be president , but with a Republican Senate standing in his way .
Good news for a president who was , in the face of all evidence before his eyes , so firmly and consistently committed to the lie that Republicans can be worked with toward any goals held by Democratic voters .
It is Tom Friedman ’ s America now .
I am excited to see what our leaders come up with : perhaps a plan to allow asylum-seekers into the country if they agree to have their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make college affordable by allowing students to make their OnlyFans income tax–free .
It will not be clear What Happened Here for a long time , or why the polls were so wrong .
It might never be fully clear .
We still fight about how Trump won in 2016 , after all ; those of us who really enjoy the pain engage in the “ Would Bernie have won ?
” game , as painful and productive an exercise as slowly driving a pencil into your ear .
The Senate seats that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but the reasons are , for the moment , elusive .
But one thing we can say is that successfully raising hundreds of millions of dollars from earnest , desperate Democrats does not guarantee victory .
This truth was established long before last night : Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 despite massively out-raising Trump .
But this election cycle brought quite a bill of particulars .
Jaime Harrison lost his race , currently by about 14 points , after raising more than $ 86 million .
Theresa Greenfield , who looked poised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , lost by six points after raising $ 47 million , about twice as much as Ernst .
Steve Bullock out-raised Montana senator Steve Daines by a two-to-one margin between July and September and lost by eight points .
Mike Espy , who ran against Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi , out-raised her four-to-one ; according to the latest vote totals , he hasn ’ t broken 40 percent .
And Amy McGrath , who broke records by raising $ 36 million in one quarter , currently sits at 38 percent against Mitch McConnell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Democratic America .

Progressives and centrist Democrats have gone back and forth for years over whether Democrats should run on bolder, more left-wing policies, or whether that would alienate centrist voters in larger numbers than could be gained in the attempt. We have at least two, if not 40, more years of such fights to look forward to. This argument may not be settled, even then. What’s crystal clear is that Democratic Senate campaigns need more to thrive and win than blockbuster fundraising hauls from pissed-off online liberals can alone provide. Perhaps the (seeming) defeat of Trump, 2020’s vaunted Final Boss who inspired wallets across the nation to open in a mad panic, will dampen this dynamic a bit, forcing Democrats down a more fruitful path.
But it feels crushingly likely that we are going to go around this loop again. The aforementioned consultants, stuck on deciding between marble and granite countertops, will breathe a small sigh of relief at having another two years of messaging against the Senate Republicans who won’t let them legislate, free from being measured against expectations of any actual progress.
Meanwhile, Democratic voters will be told that to win, to finally kick out the Republicans and get the policies we need—or even to get campaign finance reform, the thing that would enable us to break the cycle and the merciless barrage of fundraising appeals—they just need voters to cough up one last time. They will be told this in emails that berate them and lie to them, screaming that Barack Obama is VERY UPSET that YOU, JUSTINE, have not donated yet. Still, it’s all for a good cause. Kick in $20, $50, $100, and this time your money will finally count, even if your vote doesn’t. Just pony up, please, and we’ll get there eventually. What we’ll do when we get there doesn’t matter so much.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Voters Said They’re Worried About the Climate. Many Voted for Trump Anyway.

Early Tuesday night , Fox News gave Democratic viewers rare cause for optimism .
Exit polls , the network reported , had found that 70 percent of voters support increased government spending on green and renewable energy .
Seventy-two percent were somewhat or very concerned about the effects of climate change .
It tracked with polling done just before Election Day , which found that the more ambitious green planks of Joe Biden ’ s platform , put there thanks in large part to pressure from his left , are broadly popular .
The numbers were particularly notable for being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of climate denial .
But they raised a more important question , too : If such commanding majorities in the country support big , progressive policies , then why don ’ t we have them yet ?
And why do politicians who support them struggle ?
The disconnect between popular opinion and public policy on this subject isn ’ t surprising .
The same organizations and think tanks that have spent decades spreading climate denial also worked to insulate their corporate funders from democratic majorities .
After the New Deal worked to constrain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , wealthy men set about preventing a recurrence , making their power invulnerable to popular will through voter suppression , stacked courts , trade deals , and gerrymandered congressional districts .
Because telling people you want to suppress their voice has never been terribly popular , gaining electoral power involved both crushing democratic institutions like unions—through mass firings , for instance—and playing up the country ’ s ugliest heritage , to divide groups that might otherwise band together as a majority to fight off plutocratic rule .
White supremacy has been particularly useful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ society .
And in an apartheid state whose constitution was written by and for slaveowners , those looking to exploit racism for profit had a lot of material to work with .
Elites hoping for a bulwark against democracy built and commandeered whole media outlets like the National Review and Fox News and academic departments like the University of Virginia ’ s economics program .
Professors and pundits insisted to the public that slashing corporate taxes and entitlement programs would be good for the economy , that freedom meant free markets , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities , and that climate change was a matter of scientific debate .
It may have taken a few decades and failed presidential bids , but that phenomenally well-funded effort has been hugely successful , not just at winning power but in changing what constitutes common sense for politicians on both sides of the aisle .
Captains of industry may now find Trump a bit unseemly , but they built his presidency all the same .

Granted: There aren’t many successful models for beating back authoritarianism, period. But whatever the Democratic establishment has been chasing since 2016 clearly isn’t working if it took more than 230,000 deaths and a crushing recession for this country to deliver Donald Trump a narrow defeat, at best. And this outcome isn’t about some inborn flaw in human nature that makes us want to elect autocrats or pour carbon into the atmosphere. It’s about a one percent historically hell-bent on suppressing democratic majorities that might have opted for another path.
Where does that leave hopes for climate policy these next four years? To win the presidency, Biden still has to win an Electoral College that can arrive at a very different result than a majority of Americans. He might have to weather a court challenge to make sure all the votes are counted. If he gets to the Oval Office, he’ll be hemmed in by a Senate that gives more say over how the country is run to tracts of land than city-dwellers. Virtually unlimited amounts of political donations and lobbyists will flow in to stop anything that might challenge profits somewhere. Republicans and Democrats alike will listen to both dollars and shills intently. If some left-leaning priorities pass those hurdles—or get handed down via executive order—they’ll likely face federal courts stocked to the gills with right-wing Federalist Society appointees groomed to ossify constitutional originalism and its ultimate outcome: minority rule. The path toward realizing the climate action that an overwhelming majority of the population wants runs through laws and institutions built to make such changes impossible.
Saving democracy—seemingly the raison d’être of every Democrat in the country right now—isn’t a messaging battle, as donors to the Lincoln Project wagered. It’s an organizing and institution-building project and trench warfare against centuries of ideological priming.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Trump’s Legal Threats Have More Bravado Than Merit

President Donald Trump spent election night doing what everyone expected him to do : baselessly claiming that the vote counts were fraudulent and issuing vague legal threats on that basis .
“ This is a major fraud in our nation , ” he said as the results in key states began slowly trending in Biden ’ s direction after midnight , as expected .
“ We want the law to be used in a proper manner .
So we ’ ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court .
We want all voting to stop .
We don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four o ’ clock in the morning and add them to the list.
” Unfortunately for Trump , his long-anticipated threat of using the high court to decide the election is not as straightforward as he thinks .
The Supreme Court is not an Old West saloon with swinging doors through which Trump can dramatically barge in , grabbing the attention of a grizzled barkeep .
He would need to have a specific case at hand that would allow him to contest the results or perhaps even swing them in his favor .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ from clear so far .
As of Wednesday afternoon on the East Coast , former Vice President Joe Biden has command of the board .
He currently holds a strong lead in Arizona and a narrow lead in Nevada , each with few opportunities for Trump to receive large shares of the remaining vote .
Of the big three Rust Belt states that Trump won by razor-thin margins in 2016 , Biden is currently leading in Wisconsin by roughly 20,000 votes with virtually all ballots counted and the race officially called , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mail-in ballots left to count .
If those leads hold , Biden could cross the 270-vote threshold in the Electoral College without winning the three other uncalled states where Trump currently leads : Georgia , North Carolina , and Pennsylvania .

There is also a pending case before the Supreme Court involving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that arrive after the state’s Election Day deadline, which the Trump administration asked to join on Wednesday. Last week, the justices rejected a state GOP request in that case to temporarily block a court-ordered extension that would allow Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day, but they may yet take up the full case on the merits in the coming weeks. It’s unclear how many ballots would be affected by the lawsuit or whether they could change the outcome in the state. If Biden holds his current leads in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, the Pennsylvania cases would not factor into the presidential election’s ultimate outcome.
Another potential pathway to the courts for Trump is through state recount laws. The Trump campaign announced on Wednesday that it would seek a full recount of Wisconsin, which it is entitled to request if the margin of victory is below 1 percent. Michigan and Nevada also allow for candidates to request recounts no matter the margin, but the candidate must pay the state any costs for conducting it. Arizona’s recount laws could make it impossible for Trump to challenge the results there, however: The state only conducts automatic recounts if the margin of victory is at or below 0.1 percent, and it doesn’t allow candidates to request recounts on their own.
Recounts naturally evoke memories of the 2000 presidential election and the Rehnquist Court’s infamous ruling in Bush v. Gore. But Trump faces much less advantageous terrain in the 2020 election than Bush did. Generally speaking, recounts rarely swing enough ballots to the trailing candidate to change the outcome, especially when the margin of victory consists of thousands of votes. Shell-shocked Democrats pushed for recounts in key states in 2016 without success. “After recount in 2011 race for WI Supreme Court, there was a swing of 300 votes,” former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. “After recount in 2016 Presidential race in WI, [Donald Trump’s] numbers went up by 131. As I said, 20,000 is a high hurdle.”


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Never Trust the Polls Again!

Never Trust the Polls Again!

It wasn ’ t supposed to be like this .
Heading into Tuesday ’ s election , the public polling told the same story , over and over again .
Joe Biden had a commanding lead in the national popular vote , somewhere between seven and 10 points .
He was ahead in nearly every swing state , and trailing in several red-leaning states by a nose .
There were many different ways for Democrats to win the presidency , whether via the Rust Belt , the Sun Belt , or maybe even a state like Texas .
The Senate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who were also expected to pick up seats in the House .
Pollsters told us that they had learned the lessons from 2016 .
Yes , polling during a pandemic in the smartphone era was challenging , but this time they wouldn ’ t leave out non-college whites and Republicans , who had been undercounted by about five points the last time around .
A 2016-style polling error , we were told , was unlikely .
Biden ’ s lead was too great .
He didn ’ t carry Hillary Clinton ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Comey letter , which may have swung the election to Donald Trump .
Some went as far as suggesting that an error was indeed possible , but in Biden ’ s favor .
Bullish modelers , most notably The Economist ’ s G. Elliott Morris , saw a historic landslide on the horizon .
More than anything else , polling suggested a race with little turbulence .
Biden ’ s lead was stable and consistent .

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Heading into Tuesday’s election, the public polling told the same story, over and over again. Joe Biden had a commanding lead in the national popular vote, somewhere between seven and 10 points. He was ahead in nearly every swing state, and trailing in several red-leaning states by a nose. There were many different ways for Democrats to win the presidency, whether via the Rust Belt, the Sun Belt, or maybe even a state like Texas. The Senate map looked similarly favorable for Democrats, who were also expected to pick up seats in the House.
Pollsters told us that they had learned the lessons from 2016. Yes, polling during a pandemic in the smartphone era was challenging, but this time they wouldn’t leave out non-college whites and Republicans, who had been undercounted by about five points the last time around. A 2016-style polling error, we were told, was unlikely. Biden’s lead was too great. He didn’t carry Hillary Clinton’s baggage. There was no 2020 equivalent of the Comey letter, which may have swung the election to Donald Trump. Some went as far as suggesting that an error was indeed possible, but in Biden’s favor. Bullish modelers, most notably The Economist’s G. Elliott Morris, saw a historic landslide on the horizon.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Uber and Lyft Bought Themselves Impunity, Again

This year ’ s presidential race has , as initially predicted , refused to end in any kind of timely or tidy manner .
But we do know a bit about what happened last night in several down-ballot campaigns .
One of the bleaker turns : In California , more than 58 percent of voters marked yes on the closely watched Proposition 22 , a ballot measure to exempt companies like Uber , Lyft , and Instacart from treating their workers as employees rather than contractors .
The measure was , from the beginning , a repellant ploy by ride-share @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2019 that classified a significant portion of gig workers in the state as employees .
As The American Prospect ’ s Alexander Sammon wrote of Proposition 22 last month , “ In essence , it would formalize and enshrine an entirely new category of substandard employment for a class of workers that is made up overwhelmingly of people of color and immigrants.
” Deemed contractors under the new exemption , Uber drivers and other gig workers will be largely ineligible for standard worker protections , including minimum wage and overtime , collective bargaining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leave—right in the midst of an ongoing pandemic and economic collapse .
According to a harrowing piece in The Los Angeles Times earlier this week , the passing of Proposition 22 also means that families of gig workers who contract Covid-19 on the job and die won ’ t be eligible for any kind of workers ’ comp .
Though some polling prior to Tuesday had suggested a toss-up , the measure was always the tech giants ’ to win : Between them , they dumped nearly $ 200 million into passing it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measure ’ s opponents raised ) and launched a wildly sleazy propaganda campaign that included Instacart prompting its workers to add stickers in support of the measure to customers ’ grocery bags and Uber barraging its drivers and its office employees alike with various pro-Proposition 22 materials .

This year’s presidential race has, as initially predicted, refused to end in any kind of timely or tidy manner. But we do know a bit about what happened last night in several down-ballot campaigns. One of the bleaker turns: In California, more than 58 percent of voters marked yes on the closely watched Proposition 22, a ballot measure to exempt companies like Uber, Lyft, and Instacart from treating their workers as employees rather than contractors. The measure was, from the beginning, a repellant ploy by ride-share and delivery companies to circumvent legislation from 2019 that classified a significant portion of gig workers in the state as employees.
As The American Prospect’s Alexander Sammon wrote of Proposition 22 last month, “In essence, it would formalize and enshrine an entirely new category of substandard employment for a class of workers that is made up overwhelmingly of people of color and immigrants.” Deemed contractors under the new exemption, Uber drivers and other gig workers will be largely ineligible for standard worker protections, including minimum wage and overtime, collective bargaining rights, unemployment insurance, and sick leave—right in the midst of an ongoing pandemic and economic collapse. According to a harrowing piece in The Los Angeles Times earlier this week, the passing of Proposition 22 also means that families of gig workers who contract Covid-19 on the job and die won’t be eligible for any kind of workers’ comp.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--The U.S. Is Now Officially Out of the Paris Agreement

Symbolic climate pledges have become a problem in recent years .
A recent report from the Third World Network and several other civil society groups across the global north and south argues that “ net-zero ” pledges from both corporations like Shell and the United Kingdom rely on either unproven technologies or vast amounts of land through carbon offsets and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage , or BECCS—a term for harvesting new plants on millions or even billions of hectares of land to generate bioenergy , whose emissions would then be captured and stored underground .
Beyond the question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much land to the project , the technology to capture emissions—as many experts have pointed out—doesn ’ t yet exist at the massive scale many of these optimistic plans assume .
Making climate commitments contingent on future technological breakthroughs amounts to a gamble that critics say distracts from more concrete efforts to reduce emissions in the near term .
That doesn ’ t mean that if he wins , Biden should simply walk away from the Paris Agreement : While many still criticize Paris as being inadequate , there isn ’ t a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ s not much time to build something new in its place .
Without the U.S. in the Paris Agreement , campaigners fear a future of ad hoc climate diplomacy built on shaky net-zero pledges and lacking any clearly defined standards and accountability , however voluntary those may be now .
From a climate perspective , the best option would be for to rejoin the Paris Agreement but this time with a more serious and cooperative approach .
“ When you talk about loss and damage , mitigation in the global south @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. has not been particularly forthcoming .
They ’ ve played an obstructionist role , ” Akinbode Oluwafemi , of Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa , told me by phone .
“ We want to see a Biden presidency moving from the body language shown by the Obama administration into very concrete action : to the U.S. beginning to show that leadership in climate change and funding , in treaties that ensure that polluters pay for the climate catastrophes that are happening down South.… The most important thing is to let the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only about America.
” The U.S. still holds enormous power to shape international climate policy .
Whether signed onto the Paris Agreement or not , the country will still be a party to the UNFCCC and thus can participate in that body ’ s annual meetings and Conference of Parties , like COP 21 , which finalized the Paris Agreement .
Its strongest tools for curbing emissions internationally , though , lie in trade and finance .
Trade agreements and U.S. sway in the Bretton Woods Institutions—namely , the International Monetary Fund @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lower carbon ends , reform arcane intellectual property statutes that make clean energy inaccessible , and push to relieve sovereign debts that put low-carbon development out of reach for poorer countries .

Though the U.S. could reenter as soon as February, should Biden wind up in the White House, climate activists fear that pursuing such a policy in a purely symbolic way carries its own dangers. Martin Vilela, of the Bolivian Platform on Climate Change, a civil society group, worries about a Biden administration rejoining Paris without substantive commitments. “The risk,” he said over email, “is that the U.S. will use their reinstatement politically, to push and reinforce the application of false solutions, such as carbon markets, that will dangerously delay climate action” and spread the “false global public idea that the problem is being addressed.” Prior to leaving the Paris Agreement, the U.S. had committed to reduce its emissions by just 26–28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. To satisfy the terms of the agreement, a Biden White House would at the very least need to present a ramped-up commitment that extends through 2030.
Symbolic climate pledges have become a problem in recent years. A recent report from the Third World Network and several other civil society groups across the global north and south argues that “net-zero” pledges from both corporations like Shell and the United Kingdom rely on either unproven technologies or vast amounts of land through carbon offsets and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS—a term for harvesting new plants on millions or even billions of hectares of land to generate bioenergy, whose emissions would then be captured and stored underground. Beyond the question of whether society can actually devote that much land to the project, the technology to capture emissions—as many experts have pointed out—doesn’t yet exist at the massive scale many of these optimistic plans assume. Making climate commitments contingent on future technological breakthroughs amounts to a gamble that critics say distracts from more concrete efforts to reduce emissions in the near term.
That doesn’t mean that if he wins, Biden should simply walk away from the Paris Agreement: While many still criticize Paris as being inadequate, there isn’t a more attractive alternative on offer. And there’s not much time to build something new in its place. Without the U.S. in the Paris Agreement, campaigners fear a future of ad hoc climate diplomacy built on shaky net-zero pledges and lacking any clearly defined standards and accountability, however voluntary those may be now.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Election Day Was Peaceful—Then Trump Opened His Mouth

The 2020 election was never going to be easy to conduct .
This year saw a pandemic kill more than 230,000 people throughout the country , widespread protests and civil unrest over police brutality against Black Americans , protracted legal battles over the right to vote , and increased fears of political violence .
Despite all that , Election Day appeared to go fairly smoothly across the country—but President Trump threatened to upset that peace by prematurely declaring victory late on election night , potentially setting the stage for unrest as the vote-counting continues .
There were no outbursts of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or anywhere else in the country .
Armed pro-Trump militants did not stalk the streets of Detroit , Philadelphia , or other Democratic strongholds to intimidate would-be voters .
And while Trump-aligned convoys disrupted traffic over the weekend in New Jersey , New York , and other states , similar episodes did not strangle highways and thoroughfares across the country .
While some technical issues hindered voting in some precincts and counties in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania , there were no widespread or systemic breakdowns in the electoral process .
In Georgia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the city of Atlanta and a major share of the state electorate , election officials announced that a burst pipe in a storage room would delay the counting of absentee ballots stored there .
Officials said that the ballots themselves were not affected by the mishap .

The 2020 election was never going to be easy to conduct. This year saw a pandemic kill more than 230,000 people throughout the country, widespread protests and civil unrest over police brutality against Black Americans, protracted legal battles over the right to vote, and increased fears of political violence. Despite all that, Election Day appeared to go fairly smoothly across the country—but President Trump threatened to upset that peace by prematurely declaring victory late on election night, potentially setting the stage for unrest as the vote-counting continues.
There were no outbursts of political violence at polls in battleground states or anywhere else in the country. Armed pro-Trump militants did not stalk the streets of Detroit, Philadelphia, or other Democratic strongholds to intimidate would-be voters. And while Trump-aligned convoys disrupted traffic over the weekend in New Jersey, New York, and other states, similar episodes did not strangle highways and thoroughfares across the country.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--There Will Be No Emphatic Rejection of Trump

It has become an All About Eve election .
Everything that happened before 1 a.m. on Wednesday has fulfilled Bette @ @ @ @ @ , “ Fasten your seatbelts , it ’ s going to be a bumpy night.
@ @ @ @ @ a massive , unequivocal repudiation of Donald Trump for his mishandling of the pandemic , @ @ @ @ @ , and his disdain for the rule of law .
Instead , there was the @ @ @ @ @ s support in key states like Florida was , in truth , greater than the @ @ @ @ @ with the TV networks demonstrating admirable restraint in not rushing to project swing states , @ @ @ @ @ , Texas , and Ohio .
And while Democrats have some reason for optimism in @ @ @ @ @ also looking dicey for the former vice president .
In many key states , the @ @ @ @ @ on through Wednesday or even later .

But maybe an emotionally wrenching election night was inevitable. Despite Democratic optimism (which I shared), nothing in life has ever come easy for Joe Biden, from the death of his infant daughter in a 1972 car crash to the brain tumor that killed Beau Biden in 2015. Then there were two failed presidential campaigns and Biden’s embarrassing defeats in the 2020 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Throw in a pandemic that prevented Biden, an old-fashioned, hand-shaking pol, from running a traditional presidential campaign.
There will be plenty of time to analyze why the polls produced an unrealistically high level of confidence in a Biden sweep. Even Nate Silver’s cautious website ended up giving Biden an 89 percent chance of victory. Covid-19 also limited the ability of reporters to do on-the-ground interviews in swing states, which, in the past, has been a check on overreliance on poll numbers.
Yes, Biden ran a cautious campaign, and some will argue it was too cautious. But Biden also unified the Democratic Party in a way that few thought possible at the beginning of 2020. At a moment of deep stress in the nation, with the Covid death count topping 1,000 per day, Biden ran as the person he always was—a healer who believed in national unity.


newrepublic--2020-11-04--Even the Pandemic Couldn’t Kill Trumpism

The promise at the heart of Joe Biden ’ s campaign wasn ’ t simply that he would beat Donald Trump , although his entire candidacy was premised on the idea that he could do that better than any of the dozens of Democrats vying for the party ’ s presidential nomination .
It was also that the 2020 election was an opportunity to send a stinging rebuke to Trumpism itself .
In the weeks leading up to the election—during which Trump was hospitalized for Covid-19—America seemed on the cusp of doing just that .
In the language of pollsters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victory .
Trump had basically one way to win : The way he won in 2016 , give or take a state or two .
Biden had a lot .
There were scenarios in which the former vice president took Georgia and Texas , pipe dreams only four years ago .
The Senate seemed like it would flip to Democrats .
Seats in the deep-red Deep South , in South Carolina and Alabama , were in play .
This vision augured a break from the past and a better future .
With control @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could aggressively fight climate change , reform the judiciary , and end gridlock .
America ’ s slide toward petty authoritarianism would be stopped in its tracks , then reversed .
At the same time , the teeth-grinding anxiety of the Trump years would also be behind us .
This would , paradoxically , be a time when Democrats could achieve hitherto unimaginable goals and when many Americans could simply stop worrying about politics all the time .

His apparent success in Florida and Ohio, his ability to drive out his rural base to nearly unimaginable levels, his apparent in-roads with Black and Latino voters—all make him a model for future Republican political aspirants. Trump’s never-ending parade of cultural resentment is the Republican Party. We saw it in the election’s victors: Madison Cawthorn, a 25-year-old who celebrated his election to the House of Representatives by tweeting “cry more lib,” and QAnon promoter Marjorie Taylor Greene are not outliers—they are Trump’s heirs.
Even if Trump loses, Biden will likely preside over a closely divided Senate. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans will stymie Biden wherever they can, aiming to succeed where they failed in 2008 and make Biden a one-term president. Republicans across the country will have gotten the message, and Trump will goad them by never going away, claiming the election was snatched away from him illegally. With Trump showing significant strength even in the face of multiple challenges that would have obliterated most candidates, Republicans will be incentivized to continue emulating Trump, not disown him. Republicans will contend for congressional seats and, eventually, the party’s presidential nomination by playing up their connection to and deep reverence for the president.
And if Trump ends up winning, whether legitimately or by way of a barrage of dubious legal challenges, then the last four years will only be a prelude of what’s to come. The president does not have a second-term agenda; there are no policy goals or plans. The only thing guaranteed is that Trump will use his come-from-behind victory as an excuse to purge his administration of any remaining nonsycophants and sic his Justice Department on his political rivals—the last four years, only more so. It is almost too terrible to imagine.


newrepublic--2020-11-03--This Was Always Going to Become Normal

This Was Always Going to Become Normal

The warnings started early : Just weeks before the 2016 election , after the leak of the Access Hollywood tapes that captured Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault , Michelle Obama told a crowd at a campaign event in New Hampshire , “ This is not normal .
This is not politics as usual .
This is disgraceful , it is intolerable.
” “ He is not normal .
He is abnormal , ” John Oliver declared on his show the Sunday after Trump won the election anyway .
The sentiment seemed omnipresent in those early , heady days : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be to refuse to allow the normalization of Trump , ” New York Representative Jerry Nadler wrote in a statement .
Cautioning against complacency under autocracy , The New Yorker ’ s Masha Gessen told ProPublica , “ Understand that ‘ normal ’ is going to drift and shift and all sorts of things are about to happen and part of our job is to notice and document how it ’ s happening.
” You could find the same message on the pages of The New York Times , the lazy sketches on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Trump , everyone seemed to agree in the stunned aftermath of the last presidential election , was an aberration that marked a dangerous point of departure for the nation .
The project would be to keep that knowledge close—to resist .
For the better part of four years now , the Democratic Party and the media have been content to continue that narrative .
Liberals have meticulously logged each and every one of the norms that the president has managed to violate during his time in office ; the most famous of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Washington Post by former Wall Street executive Amy Siskind .
Among Trump ’ s many documented transgressions are his refusal to release his tax returns ; his appointment of his daughter Ivanka and her husband , Jared Kushner , to official White House positions ; his constant vilification of the media ; the revolving door of White House staffers and Cabinet members ; and his meetings with North Korean dictator , Kim Jong Un .
Trump ’ s first term also saw the Stormy Daniels saga , the impeachment , and three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
To this day , Trump has egged on white supremacists and refused to get a dog .

Trump’s time in office, if beset by never-ending scandal, has perfectly aligned with American politics as usual in a number of ways. There’s maybe no greater continuity between the president and the Republican Party that he supposedly spurned than the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts, which significantly reduced taxes on corporations and the wealthy. The bill was historically unpopular among the public but sailed through Congress with the enthusiastic support of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and every Republican in the Senate save John McCain (who was battling cancer at the time but had apparently promised to return to the floor if his party needed his vote to carry the bill over the line). George W. Bush, the last Republican president prior to Trump, had also signed into law a series of tax cuts that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities determined had primarily benefited the top one percent of earners and fed the rise of inequality. The Trump administration’s signature legislation, in other words, was largely a standard-fare continuation of the Republicans’ perpetual fealty to business and the rich.
Trump’s White House likewise worked at a furious clip to shave down the social safety net, including by repeatedly attempting to cut food stamps during a pandemic and recession in which food insecurity doubled. In perfect lockstep with congressional Republicans, Trump has also sought to ax the Affordable Care Act, a move that would terminate health insurance coverage for as many as 23 million people. And despite his 2016 campaign pledge to preserve Social Security, Trump has nudged it toward the chopping block by proposing the elimination of the payroll tax that funds much of the program. All of these callous, ill-conceived policies guarantee more hardship for the majority of Americans—and are also completely par for the course for Republicans. None of these measures, furthermore, require anything like an autocracy; unethical dealings with Russia; or even, really, any actual violation of established political norms to be carried out.
The same goes for Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, all of whom were chosen in close collaboration with (and much acclaim from) his party. Most recently and notoriously, Senate Republicans blithely fast-tracked Amy Coney Barrett to the bench while Democrats decried the hypocrisy of the same party that had blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland during the last year of the Obama administration. (Naturally, this complaint moved precisely zero Republicans.) It wasn’t some unprecedented corruption or sleaziness on Trump’s part that cemented Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court; it was the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the process itself, which grants an unrepresentative Senate the ability to install justices to lifelong posts.


newrepublic--2020-11-05--The Cops Protested This Election, Too

The Cops Protested This Election, Too

Kettling is , by definition , a trap .
It is a tactic most commonly used by police to surround and immobilize a group of people , often protesters , in an attempt to stymie and diffuse their momentum , even if unnecessary .
On Wednesday night , as the election count crawled past the 24-hour mark , anti-Trump protesters in New York had committed no crime other than briefly holding up traffic in Manhattan and shaking some street signs .
For all of the public concern shown by Manhattan businesses boarding up their storefronts over the weekend , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ destruction committed by the protesters , save for a handful of trash can fires .
Nonetheless , New York police officers kettled the hell out of the group .
They surrounded them , using their bikes as a barrier , then slowly moved in , throttling whoever they could get their hands on and tossing them to the ground and then into vans .
When it was all finished , a dozen people had been arrested .
NYPD Chief Terence Monahan told The New York Times afterward , “ My message to anyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is , don ’ t even try it.
” His department , it seems , must have skimmed the memo .
Other protests come with a different story .
In Detroit , Trump supporters flocked inside polling precincts and accosted poll workers , trying to halt their operations .
Across the country , only one of these groups was consistently aiming to suppress the vote , yet this was not the group that was met with a violent police response .
This is not a novel discovery—we have a summer ’ s worth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a terrible country , making this plain .
But to see this dynamic play out against the backdrop of an election made it crystal clear , once again , what side the cops are on , what they perceive as a threat , and where they see their interests being expressed—or challenged—on the streets .

The unrest in the face of an election this contentious was expected. Police, like any other person that knew Election Day was slated for November 3, understood that protests and marches would likely ensue. They also knew, or should have, that election centers would be a hotbed for those looking to contest or halt ballot-counting operations. So the discrepancy in their response to these public disruptions feels less like a random outcome and more like the result of an established culture of siding with the group that is frequently more friendly and heavily armed. In an investigation published earlier this week, Times reporters, reviewing hundreds of videos from the summer protests following the police killing of George Floyd, found that “at times, police officers gave the benefit of the doubt to armed far-right groups and individuals, which can embolden vigilantes and lead to violence.”
If Trump supporters and their fellow purported far-right patriots are protesting, there’s little incentive for police to treat them the same as they would a Black Lives Matter march or an anti-Trump contingent, because that would be burning their natural allies. This is horrifying for all kinds of reasons. It’s also why more towns and cities, like Los Angeles, are proving to be fertile ground for successful grassroots campaigns looking to divert funds from police departments and toward services that actually help the community.
Because why let an institution cannibalize money for health care and housing just so it can turn around and club you for having the audacity to protest a president who says he wants to steal an election?


newrepublic--2020-11-05--The Trump Campaign’s Farcical Attempt to Steal an Election

In the chaos following Fox News ’ s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night , Donald Trump ’ s son-in-law and adult doll Jared Kushner got to work .
He picked up the phone to try to find a “ James Baker–like figure , ” per The New York Times , to lead the president ’ s legal strategy in states that he was losing by tightening margins .
That Kushner ’ s mind jumped to Baker was not surprising .
The former secretary of state led George W. Bush ’ s ruthless legal strategy during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lead-up to the 2020 presidential election , the nation was gripped by Bush v. Gore nightmares .
With voting changes brought about by the pandemic and tight elections in several states , it was easy to imagine a kind of nationalized version of Florida in the 2000 election : Bush v. Gore 2 , this time in a half-dozen states or more .
The president and his team , moreover , spent the weeks before the election flexing , particularly after Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court .
The GOP @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that occurred—like Joe Biden getting more votes—with a raft of lawyers .
This , after all , is what Republicans do , and Barrett and fellow Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts all worked on Bush v. Gore .

The Trump campaign and numerous GOP-aligned groups have tried a similar strategy in 2020, urging supporters to go to vote-counting locations and make their voices heard. The plan beyond showing up—and in some cases showing up heavily armed—is not at all clear, however. The president and his allies are insisting that the election is, once again, being stolen, but its messaging is characteristically all over the place. In Arizona, supporters gathered to chant “Fox News sucks”—the network has become public enemy number one on the right for calling the state for Biden earlier than others—and demand that the count continue, in the hopes that enough votes materialize to keep the state red.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, there have been wild allegations of voter fraud with no basis in fact—normal election results, like 80 percent of Philadelphia voters supporting Biden, are being presented as completely fraudulent. In fact, Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature is partially responsible for the order in which votes have been counted: The state’s millions of mail-in votes were not allowed to be counted before Election Day, resulting in a process that has dragged on for days. In both cases, the president and his supporters demanded that vote counting stop right away.
The protests themselves have been characteristically Trumpian: both menacing and incoherent. Guns are everywhere. In Michigan, protesters tried to gain access to a room where ballots were being counted, banging on the windows and demanding to enter—like a dog chasing a car, it’s not clear what they actually intended to accomplish. In Arizona, an armed man threatened a reporter and a photographer covering the protest, saying he would find out where they live. Right-wing websites have circulated images of a man bringing in mysterious crates to Michigan’s mail-in vote-counting center: It turned out to be a cameraman carrying equipment.


newrepublic--2020-11-05--What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?

Early Tuesday evening , left-of-center Twitter users began sharing images of polling results taken from Fox News , out of a sense of amusement at seeing this particular data on that particular channel .
In the words of The Daily Dot , the polls “ accidentally show Americans are liberal.
” And indeed , the conclusion one would draw from these polls is not just that America is a liberal country but that it is a robustly left-of-center one .
Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care , more state intervention in the economy , and more government support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of course , just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling , but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors .
That Democrats can not translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop .
It is of course true that on many of these issues , like health care , the Democratic Party firmly rejected the left ’ s popular proposals in favor of a confusing and diluted alternative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do .
Perhaps that is what the electorate punishes them for .
But that same electorate also regularly elects Republicans , who are very vocally opposed to all of those fine , popular ideas .
This highlights the special challenge Democrats have faced in running against Donald Trump , who constantly backtracks and contradicts himself on policy , especially when he grasps that certain policies are broadly popular .
( Trump has said in the past , in fact , that he supports a $ 15 minimum wage . )
There is also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Ryan Cooper has written ) simply do not believe the Republican Party is as extreme as it is , based on the ( logical ! )
belief that such a party would never win elections .

Early Tuesday evening, left-of-center Twitter users began sharing images of polling results taken from Fox News, out of a sense of amusement at seeing this particular data on that particular channel. In the words of The Daily Dot, the polls “accidentally show Americans are liberal.” And indeed, the conclusion one would draw from these polls is not just that America is a liberal country but that it is a robustly left-of-center one.
Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care, more state intervention in the economy, and more government support for clean energy. We have, of course, just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling, but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors. That Democrats cannot translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop. It is of course true that on many of these issues, like health care, the Democratic Party firmly rejected the left’s popular proposals in favor of a confusing and diluted alternative. That is what Democrats nearly always do. Perhaps that is what the electorate punishes them for. But that same electorate also regularly elects Republicans, who are very vocally opposed to all of those fine, popular ideas.
This highlights the special challenge Democrats have faced in running against Donald Trump, who constantly backtracks and contradicts himself on policy, especially when he grasps that certain policies are broadly popular. (Trump has said in the past, in fact, that he supports a $15 minimum wage.) There is also the wider problem that many Americans (as Ryan Cooper has written) simply do not believe the Republican Party is as extreme as it is, based on the (logical!) belief that such a party would never win elections.


newrepublic--2020-11-05--The Majestic Alaskan Rain Forest in Trump’s Crosshairs

“ When we try to pick out anything by itself , we find it hitched to everything else in the universe , ” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1911 .
Last week , news broke that the Trump administration has exempted the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from the 2001 Roadless Rule , a regulation prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting in roadless areas .
The immediate implications for logging in the Tongass are complicated and unclear—in part because a diverse group of stakeholders representing tribal , environmental , and business interests will surely challenge the move in court .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ forest risks harm to much more than trees .
Perhaps nowhere in the United States today is the interconnectedness Muir referred to a century ago more evident than in the Tongass .
And in recent times , it ’ s also been documented in startling ways by cutting-edge science .
Located in Alaska ’ s island-dotted coastal panhandle , the roughly 17-million-acre Tongass , together with the adjacent 16-million-acre Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia make up the world ’ s largest intact coastal temperate rain forest .
Steep-forested mountains tower over glacial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , their exhalations rising through overhanging tree limbs and melding into ever-present rain clouds that drop more than 200 inches of annual precipitation .
Small seabirds called marbled murrelets dive for fish in the ocean and lay a single egg on a moss-covered branch of an old-growth tree .
The Tongass is a place blurring the line between where the forest ends and the sea begins .
And no other species symbolizes this blurred line more than salmon .
In fact , salmon cross the line .
Salmon are in the trees .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and streams , then head to the ocean to mature .
Depending on the species , they spend anywhere from one to seven years at sea .
As adults , they use the earth ’ s magnetic field and their sense of smell to navigate back to their birth streams to spawn the next generation .
Then they die .


Sidewalks

I saw my breath this morning from a shiver of an engine in between sleep and consciousness today I don @ @ @ @ @ socks to stay warm my windows are not barred my door is not a fence @ @ @ @ @ in no cops have been called to my antics I am declared sane to live @ @ @ @ @ 40 % of police killings involve the mentally-ill those who lost the ability to control @ @ @ @ @ and others fear in uniform shoots blood splatters onto sidewalks a mother ’ s tears @ @ @ @ @ the deep sigh of weapons licensed to kill and sometimes 60 % of myself condemns @ @ @ @ @ trunks graffitied carved initials skin branded ropes hang from branches belts sway to an old @ @ @ @ @ who whipped the shit out of his boys who later molested his grandchild a hard @ @ @ @ @ through the cement to not be labeled insane from this to not be so wounded @ @ @ @ @ against you you against the world

I saw my breath this morning from a shiver of an engine
in between sleep and consciousness today I don’t need
any hospital socks to stay warm my windows are not
barred my door is not a fence for you to be safe in no
cops have been called to my antics I am declared sane
to live in this city where over 40% of police killings
involve the mentally-ill those who lost the ability to control
desires urges to harm self and others fear in uniform
shoots blood splatters onto sidewalks a mother’s tears
heave the torn umbilical cords the deep sigh of weapons
licensed to kill and sometimes 60% of myself condemns
the other 40 memories tree trunks graffitied carved
initials skin branded ropes hang from branches belts
sway to an old tune of a drunken father who whipped the
shit out of his boys who later molested his grandchild
a hard lesson to learn resiliency push through the cement
to not be labeled insane from this to not be so wounded
to believe the world is against you you against the world


newrepublic--2020-11-06--Yaa Gyasi Versus the Identity Trap

Yaa Gyasi Versus the Identity Trap

Late in Homegoing , the debut novel by the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi , a character named Marcus is introduced .
Marcus is getting a Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University , and—as happens—is struggling to decide what to write his dissertation about .
He wants to study the convict-leasing system in the United States that essentially re-created the conditions of slavery for many African Americans in the South , including his own grandfather , but he feels the story can not begin or end there .
“ How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H ’ s story , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north , fleeing Jim Crow ?
” Further still , “ if he mentioned the Great Migration , he ’ d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in .
He ’ d have to talk about Harlem.
” Marcus extrapolates further , until he sees no way to complete the project without also including the crack epidemic of the 1980s , the war on drugs , racial disparities in policing , and the way his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made others uncomfortable .
The moment reads as a guide to Homegoing itself .
That novel is daringly expansive , its structure eschewing the idea that the story of Black people could be contained within a single generation or moment .
It begins in eighteenth-century Ghana with the story of two half sisters , Effia and Esi .
Effia , married off by her stepmother to a British officer , lives a life of luxury in the Cape Coast Castle , the infamous slave-trading fort that millions of Africans were trafficked through before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Esi is one of those enslaved Africans ; when we first meet her , she is being held in the castle ’ s underground dungeon .
The novel follows the next seven generations ; we see Effia ’ s line live through the Anglo-Asante wars , respond to the advent of cocoa farming on the Gold Coast , and tangle with the reality of African complicity in the slave trade .
Esi ’ s descendants in the United States endure the failed promises of Reconstruction , flee Jim Crow as part of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ firsthand , and later become enveloped in the heroin epidemic of the 1960s .
This transatlantic epic was Gyasi ’ s effort to work through her own sense of disconnectedness from African American identity .
In an op-ed for The New York Times titled “ I ’ m Ghanaian-American .
Am I Black ?
, ” Gyasi explains , “ I had been brought up to see myself as set apart from what my family called ‘ black Americans , ’ who stood a rung below what my family called ‘ white Americans.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be.
” It was in college that she first learned the word diaspora .
Reading Chinua Achebe alongside Toni Morrison , she began the process of reconnecting for herself the dots between Africa and Black America through literature .
The result was a novel that , though refreshingly ambitious , tended to under-develop its characters , imbuing them with more history than personality at times .
Particularly in its ending , Homegoing did little to complicate the idea of diaspora , a concept fraught with tension since its inception .
In Stuart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he warned against seeing identity as something “ taking us back to our roots , the part of us which remains essentially the same across time.
” We should instead , Hall encouraged , recognize that “ identity is always a never-completed process of becoming , ” always in flux .

Late in Homegoing, the debut novel by the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi, a character named Marcus is introduced. Marcus is getting a Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University, and—as happens—is struggling to decide what to write his dissertation about. He wants to study the convict-leasing system in the United States that essentially re-created the conditions of slavery for many African Americans in the South, including his own grandfather, but he feels the story cannot begin or end there. “How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story,” he thinks, “without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow?” Further still, “if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem.” Marcus extrapolates further, until he sees no way to complete the project without also including the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the war on drugs, racial disparities in policing, and the way his very presence in the Stanford University library made others uncomfortable.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi Buy on Bookshop
The moment reads as a guide to Homegoing itself. That novel is daringly expansive, its structure eschewing the idea that the story of Black people could be contained within a single generation or moment. It begins in eighteenth-century Ghana with the story of two half sisters, Effia and Esi. Effia, married off by her stepmother to a British officer, lives a life of luxury in the Cape Coast Castle, the infamous slave-trading fort that millions of Africans were trafficked through before boarding ships bound for the Americas. Esi is one of those enslaved Africans; when we first meet her, she is being held in the castle’s underground dungeon. The novel follows the next seven generations; we see Effia’s line live through the Anglo-Asante wars, respond to the advent of cocoa farming on the Gold Coast, and tangle with the reality of African complicity in the slave trade. Esi’s descendants in the United States endure the failed promises of Reconstruction, flee Jim Crow as part of the Great Migration, witness the Harlem Renaissance firsthand, and later become enveloped in the heroin epidemic of the 1960s.


newrepublic--2020-11-06--Will the Democrats Ever Make Sense of This Week?

So how did he win ?
Was it policy ?
Those already proliferating the thesis that his victory proves , again , that America is a center-right country should reckon with the fact that Biden has likely won with a platform that , particularly on climate , housing , and poverty , was more progressive than Hillary Clinton ’ s .
Trump , meanwhile , abandoned the heterodox rhetoric that characterized his 2016 run for a more conventionally Republican campaign—much of the Republican National Convention this year was about school choice , of all things—and has likely lost .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backseat this cycle , just as it did in the last , to questions of character and competence .
To the extent that the pandemic was a major policy issue , voters likely went to the polls less with a real command of Biden ’ s plans on coronavirus than with a general sense that he would manage the situation more capably and responsibly than Trump has .
This is the dynamic Biden bet on from the outset—that voters in both the Democratic primary and the general election would be animated less by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to put a seemingly good and sensible person in the White House .
And despite a dogged effort , Trump and Republican operatives failed to taint Biden with the patina of scandal and impropriety they placed on Clinton .
There ’ s a real Goldilocks quality to what Biden seems to have pulled off : a campaign that eroded Trump ’ s strength with core white constituencies without leaning into cultural dogwhistles , that got where it needed to with black voters despite Biden ’ s record on criminal justice and the year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stepped to the left of the last Democratic campaign even as Biden issued public repudiations of the progressives that got him there .
All of it was wrapped up with a bow by a quasi-spiritual message about a return to decency , comity , and bipartisanship .
It was the perfect moderate campaign , and it was enough to win .
And yet it was also a disaster .
Leaving aside the fact that Biden ’ s apparent victory is narrow enough that Trump very plausibly might have won absent the pandemic or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign did seemingly nothing whatsoever to help Democrats downballot .
The failure to produce a real legislative mandate , as nearly a quarter of a million Americans lie dead in a situation the president has plainly worsened and mismanaged , is a disturbing and catastrophic setback not only for progressives but for moderates telling themselves now that Biden ’ s personal qualities might cajole Senate Republicans into cooperating with him if Democrats fail to take the Senate in January .
They will not .
It is already being said that the Democrats ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of implacable progressives set on accomplishing superfluous items on a frou-frou wishlist of policy goals .
But that wishlist included a large recovery package commensurate with the damage the coronavirus has done and is continuing to do to large segments of our population and economy .
We ’ re now likely to get , instead , a response to a now deepening pandemic constrained by a speedy return to fiscal austerity and deficit hawkery from the center and right .
The wishlist included climate legislation that would have put the United States on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shortening timeframe the scientific community has told us we have to prevent the climate crisis from fully upending stable civilization .
It will be truly remarkable now if the Senate manages to pass a climate bill of any kind at all .
And it was hoped , particularly over the last several weeks with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court , that a Senate Democratic majority might shore up voting rights , address the party ’ s atrophying standing within our skewed political institutions , and disempower the Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans control the Senate , those hopes are obviously dead .

All that said, the assumptions underpinning Democratic identity politics aren’t coming away from the campaign unscathed.
All that said, the assumptions underpinning Democratic identity politics aren’t coming away from the campaign unscathed. The notion that minority representation and visibility and rhetoric about Trump’s bigotry would sweep not only Trump but Trumpism and the GOP away seems to have taken a real beating, particularly given, again, the gains Trump made among voters of color. So too has the idea that Democrats couldn’t improve their standing among Trump’s core white constituencies without actively engaging in Trumpism. Biden didn’t have to.
So how did he win? Was it policy? Those already proliferating the thesis that his victory proves, again, that America is a center-right country should reckon with the fact that Biden has likely won with a platform that, particularly on climate, housing, and poverty, was more progressive than Hillary Clinton’s. Trump, meanwhile, abandoned the heterodox rhetoric that characterized his 2016 run for a more conventionally Republican campaign—much of the Republican National Convention this year was about school choice, of all things—and has likely lost. But policy, of course, took a back seat this cycle, just as it did in the last, to questions of character and competence. To the extent that the pandemic was a major policy issue, voters likely went to the polls less with a real command of Biden’s plans on the coronavirus than with a general sense that he would manage the situation more capably and responsibly than Trump has. This is the dynamic Biden bet on from the outset—that voters in both the Democratic primary and the general election would be animated less by a policy agenda than by an urgent desire to put a seemingly good and sensible person in the White House. And despite a dogged effort, Trump and Republican operatives failed to taint Biden with the patina of scandal and impropriety they placed on Clinton.
There’s a real Goldilocks quality to what Biden seems to have pulled off: a campaign that eroded Trump’s strength with core white constituencies without leaning into cultural dog whistles; that got where it needed to with Black voters despite Biden’s record on criminal justice and the year’s tumult; and that substantively stepped to the left of the last Democratic campaign, even as Biden issued public repudiations of the progressives that got him there. All of it was wrapped up with a bow by a quasi-spiritual message about a return to decency, comity, and bipartisanship. It was the perfect moderate campaign, and it was enough to win.


Free Will

So letting the bath run I sat on the toilet & thought about keeping the plug in till the water @ @ @ @ @ if all things have as their cause what happened how can you change course , @ @ @ @ @ or an unseen drain blocked with gunk .
In the case of cloves it wasn @ @ @ @ @ drove the Dutch to kill & pillage but that it told them they were near @ @ @ @ @ to get it , it being what would spill through them unabated .
Last year @ @ @ @ @ smell what the Dutch smelt , the air was full of burning cloves .
The @ @ @ @ @ smoking clove cigarettes , smoke rising off him like a taxi outside Schiphol airport in @ @ @ @ @ ’ by Gerry Rafferty was playing on the speakers & you were still in mourning @ @ @ @ @ every sound spill through & out of you like water .

So letting the bath run I sat
on the toilet & thought about
keeping the plug in till the water
spilt which made me think if
all things have as their cause what
happened how can you change
course, prior will spilling through
you or an unseen drain blocked
with gunk. In the case of cloves it
wasn’t that the smell drove the
Dutch to kill & pillage but that it
told them they were near & maybe
would do anything to get it, it
being what would spill through
them unabated. Last year, when
I tried to smell what the Dutch
smelt, the air was full of burning
cloves. The crematorium guard sat
near us smoking clove cigarettes,
smoke rising off him like a taxi
outside Schiphol airport in March.
‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty
was playing on the speakers & you
were still in mourning, moaning
inwardly, letting every sound spill
through & out of you like water.