thenation--2020-11-03--What Will a Texas-Sized Turnout Mean for Trump and Cornyn?

The last time US Senator John Cornyn was up for reelection in 2014 , he skated to a third term with 62 percent of the vote—outperforming every other statewide GOP candidate on the ballot who had a contested election in Texas .
Six years later , Cornyn may as well be running in a different state .
Texas is now the biggest battleground state in the country .
On Wednesday , top election analysts shifted Texas into their presidential “ toss-up ” column as the state leads the nation in early vote totals and many polls show President Donald Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden .
Cornyn has never faced a viable threat to his Senate seat ; now , he faces a strong reelection challenge in an unprecedented and unfriendly political climate .
The Republican in the White House is a political liability in Texas ; turnout is expected to reach unprecedented heights ; and his Democratic challenger , MJ Hegar , outraised him nearly three times over in the first half of October .
The transformation of Texas since Cornyn was last on the ballot is remarkable .
Just 4.6 million Texans—a third of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out to vote in 2014 .
Mirroring the state ’ s population boom , Texas has added about 3 million new voters to the rolls since then .
By the start of the second week of early voting , Texas had surpassed the entire 2014 vote total .
By Thursday , about 8.4 million Texans had already turned out—marking 94 percent of the total 2016 vote .
Nearly 2 million of those voters did not vote in the last presidential election , and turnout is sure to eclipse 2016 levels ; some analysts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will surpass 12 million .
How 3 Democratic Women in Swing States Aim to Win This Week Many of these new Texas voters are unfamiliar with Cornyn .
The old-line Republican rose to power in the 1990s—first as a state Supreme Court justice and then as state attorney general—while the GOP took control of Texas .
He ascended to the US Senate in 2002 , following the rise of President George W. Bush .
For the past two decades , Cornyn has quietly lurked in Washington , steadily climbing the ranks and eventually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s top lieutenant .
Along the way , he ’ s become a master of political subservience , faithfully shapeshifting to fit the prevailing winds within his party—from the Tea Party to Trumpism .
While he has grown powerful during his 18 years in the US Senate , he is a fairly unknown entity in his home state .
In early September , a poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler found that more than a quarter of surveyed voters didn ’ t know enough about Cornyn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this weakness to reporters after voting early this week in Austin , saying , “ Obviously it ’ s been six years since I was last on the ballot and there ’ s been a lot of changes in the state…and there are a lot of folks who , frankly , have not heard a lot about me.
” Hegar has aggressively gone after Cornyn for what she sees as his ineffectual leadership and political cowardice—often calling him a “ bootlicker ” who sold out Texans—while introducing herself to voters as an “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who rides a Harley .
As a former Republican voter who got involved in Democratic politics in the Trump era , she has tried to tap into the anti-Trump malaise that has moderates and independents—suburban women in particular—looking for an alternative to the GOP status quo .
A Round Rock native , Hegar made a name for herself in her 2018 bid against Republican Congressman John Carter , becoming a viral fundraising sensation as she narrowly lost in the reliably red Central Texas district .
But while the presidential polls in Texas show @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has struggled to make similar inroads against Cornyn .
After emerging from a competitive March primary and July runoff that consumed time and resources , Hegar got off to a slow start and initially struggled to raise enough money to compete against Cornyn ’ s massive war chest .
Then the pandemic halted the sort of in-person campaigning and rallies that fueled Beto O ’ Rourke ’ s magnetic 2018 run , forcing Hegar to ramp up a largely virtual statewide campaign .
Cornyn still looks to have a fairly comfortable lead , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week showed Hegar trailing Cornyn by 10 percentage points , though most polls have her within single digits .
However , Hegar has brushed off the polls and insists the race is a tight one .
She has hit a fundraising streak , repeatedly outraising Cornyn—a prolific cash-grabber in his own right—since July .
While she hasn ’ t matched O ’ Rourke ’ s record-breaking fundraising hauls , she ’ s been aided in the home stretch by Democratic groups ’ flooding money into the race .
Most notably , a liberal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ titans who announced last-minute plans to spend , in partnership with a coalition of allied Democratic groups , as much as $ 28 million on ad buys supporting Hegar .
Now , Cornyn is trying to fend off a late-stage insurrection .
He ’ s embarked on a road trip—with stops in College Station , Houston , and Tyler—in a sleek coach bus wrapped in a Texas flag graphic with his name and the words “ Thoughtful .
Leadership .
For Texas.
” plastered across it .
Meanwhile his allied super PAC Texans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bankrolled by Texas mega-donors , spent $ 6.5 million on ads attacking Hegar in the final weeks of October .
But there are additional hurdles for Cornyn .
The suburbs that once formed the foundation of Texas Republicans ’ statewide dominance are no longer reliably red as their populations grow and diversify .
Trump has proven a potent accelerant for these shifts .
As The New York Times found in its Texas poll , Trump is leading Biden by 4 points among likely voters .
But Biden is doing exceedingly well in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump among voters in 12 competitive congressional districts—largely centered in affluent and diversifying neighborhoods across Texas .
That ’ s a seismic shift from 2016 , when Trump won those districts by 8 points .
Most strikingly perhaps , Trump ’ s support among white college graduates has evaporated from a 24-point margin in 2016 to just 2 points in 2020 , according to the Times .
Those numbers could drag down Cornyn too , if the electoral gag reflex to Trumpism extends past the top of the ticket .
In an effort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lobbed repeated attacks at his opponent , casting Hegar as a radical liberal who is beholden to Washington Democrats and hell-bent on defunding the police and destroying the state ’ s oil and gas industry .
( Hegar supports the Campaign Zero platform for criminal justice reform and doesn ’ t support the Green New Deal . )
Cornyn has pitched himself as a seasoned and sensible leader .
Though he ’ s been a loyal foot soldier for Trump ’ s agenda , he claims that he ’ s privately voiced concerns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because , as I ’ ve observed , those usually don ’ t end too well , ” he said in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram .
He said his relationship with the president is “ maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they ’ re going to change their spouse , and that doesn ’ t usually work out very well.
” Texas and the Long Tail of Voter Suppression Despite the rosy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , polls have shown that Biden may be struggling to galvanize the state ’ s large population of Hispanic voters—which Texas Democrats have long seen as the key to winning statewide elections .
Though polling Latinx voters in Texas is always difficult and has been especially sketchy this year , some surveys have shown that Biden is underperforming among Hispanic voters .
Biden leads Trump 57-34 , according to the Times poll , a slight downturn from Hillary Clinton ’ s performance in 2016 .
Also , while early vote turnout has surged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regions of El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley , it ’ s still trailing the upswing in the big cities and surrounding suburbs .
In the final week before Election Day , Texas is abuzz with last-minute activity—on both the virtual and in-person fronts : Governor Greg Abbott is hitting the campaign trail and tapping into his political war chest to stave off a Democratic takeover of the Texas House .
Kamala Harris has been dispatched to Fort Worth , Houston , and McAllen on the last day of early voting .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the persistent public prodding from top Texas Democrats for the campaign to make a strong play for the state .
There ’ s a long history of Democrats getting their hopes up about Texas , only to be crushed by the Republican machine .
But that machine has functioned , in part , through repressive voting laws that have made Texas the most difficult state to vote in , resulting in a disengaged electorate and low turnout .
That machine isn ’ t built for an election like this one , where turnout @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Texas-sized .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was reported in collaboration the Texas Observer.
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The last time US Senator John Cornyn was up for reelection in 2014, he skated to a third term with 62 percent of the vote—outperforming every other statewide GOP candidate on the ballot who had a contested election in Texas.
Six years later, Cornyn may as well be running in a different state.
Texas is now the biggest battleground state in the country. On Wednesday, top election analysts shifted Texas into their presidential “toss-up” column as the state leads the nation in early vote totals and many polls show President Donald Trump neck and neck with Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Cornyn has never faced a viable threat to his Senate seat; now, he faces a strong reelection challenge in an unprecedented and unfriendly political climate. The Republican in the White House is a political liability in Texas; turnout is expected to reach unprecedented heights; and his Democratic challenger, MJ Hegar, outraised him nearly three times over in the first half of October.
The transformation of Texas since Cornyn was last on the ballot is remarkable. Just 4.6 million Texans—a third of the state’s 14 million registered voters—turned out to vote in 2014. Mirroring the state’s population boom, Texas has added about 3 million new voters to the rolls since then. By the start of the second week of early voting, Texas had surpassed the entire 2014 vote total. By Thursday, about 8.4 million Texans had already turned out—marking 94 percent of the total 2016 vote. Nearly 2 million of those voters did not vote in the last presidential election, and turnout is sure to eclipse 2016 levels; some analysts are projecting that the final vote total will surpass 12 million. Related Article How 3 Democratic Women in Swing States Aim to Win This Week Joan Walsh
Many of these new Texas voters are unfamiliar with Cornyn. The old-line Republican rose to power in the 1990s—first as a state Supreme Court justice and then as state attorney general—while the GOP took control of Texas. He ascended to the US Senate in 2002, following the rise of President George W. Bush. For the past two decades, Cornyn has quietly lurked in Washington, steadily climbing the ranks and eventually becoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s top lieutenant. Along the way, he’s become a master of political subservience, faithfully shapeshifting to fit the prevailing winds within his party—from the Tea Party to Trumpism. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
While he has grown powerful during his 18 years in the US Senate, he is a fairly unknown entity in his home state. In early September, a poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler found that more than a quarter of surveyed voters didn’t know enough about Cornyn to form an opinion. He acknowledged this weakness to reporters after voting early this week in Austin, saying, “Obviously it’s been six years since I was last on the ballot and there’s been a lot of changes in the state…and there are a lot of folks who, frankly, have not heard a lot about me.”
Hegar has aggressively gone after Cornyn for what she sees as his ineffectual leadership and political cowardice—often calling him a “bootlicker” who sold out Texans—while introducing herself to voters as an “ass-kicking” combat veteran and working mom who rides a Harley. As a former Republican voter who got involved in Democratic politics in the Trump era, she has tried to tap into the anti-Trump malaise that has moderates and independents—suburban women in particular—looking for an alternative to the GOP status quo. A Round Rock native, Hegar made a name for herself in her 2018 bid against Republican Congressman John Carter, becoming a viral fundraising sensation as she narrowly lost in the reliably red Central Texas district. Current Issue View our current issue
But while the presidential polls in Texas show Biden in contention against Trump, Hegar has struggled to make similar inroads against Cornyn. After emerging from a competitive March primary and July runoff that consumed time and resources, Hegar got off to a slow start and initially struggled to raise enough money to compete against Cornyn’s massive war chest. Then the pandemic halted the sort of in-person campaigning and rallies that fueled Beto O’Rourke’s magnetic 2018 run, forcing Hegar to ramp up a largely virtual statewide campaign. Cornyn still looks to have a fairly comfortable lead, and a New York Times poll this week showed Hegar trailing Cornyn by 10 percentage points, though most polls have her within single digits.
However, Hegar has brushed off the polls and insists the race is a tight one. She has hit a fundraising streak, repeatedly outraising Cornyn—a prolific cash-grabber in his own right—since July. While she hasn’t matched O’Rourke’s record-breaking fundraising hauls, she’s been aided in the home stretch by Democratic groups’ flooding money into the race. Most notably, a liberal super PAC financed by Silicon Valley tech titans who announced last-minute plans to spend, in partnership with a coalition of allied Democratic groups, as much as $28 million on ad buys supporting Hegar.
Now, Cornyn is trying to fend off a late-stage insurrection. He’s embarked on a road trip—with stops in College Station, Houston, and Tyler—in a sleek coach bus wrapped in a Texas flag graphic with his name and the words “Thoughtful. Leadership. For Texas.” plastered across it. Meanwhile his allied super PAC Texans for a Conservative Majority, which is bankrolled by Texas mega-donors, spent $6.5 million on ads attacking Hegar in the final weeks of October.
But there are additional hurdles for Cornyn. The suburbs that once formed the foundation of Texas Republicans’ statewide dominance are no longer reliably red as their populations grow and diversify. Trump has proven a potent accelerant for these shifts. As The New York Times found in its Texas poll, Trump is leading Biden by 4 points among likely voters. But Biden is doing exceedingly well in the suburbs, running 5 points ahead of Trump among voters in 12 competitive congressional districts—largely centered in affluent and diversifying neighborhoods across Texas. That’s a seismic shift from 2016, when Trump won those districts by 8 points. Most strikingly perhaps, Trump’s support among white college graduates has evaporated from a 24-point margin in 2016 to just 2 points in 2020, according to the Times.
Those numbers could drag down Cornyn too, if the electoral gag reflex to Trumpism extends past the top of the ticket. In an effort to maintain his edge, Cornyn has lobbed repeated attacks at his opponent, casting Hegar as a radical liberal who is beholden to Washington Democrats and hell-bent on defunding the police and destroying the state’s oil and gas industry. (Hegar supports the Campaign Zero platform for criminal justice reform and doesn’t support the Green New Deal.) Cornyn has pitched himself as a seasoned and sensible leader. Though he’s been a loyal foot soldier for Trump’s agenda, he claims that he’s privately voiced concerns on some matters. “What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well,” he said in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He said his relationship with the president is “maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well.” Related Article Texas and the Long Tail of Voter Suppression Michael Barajas and The Texas Observer
Despite the rosy projections for Democrats in the ’burbs, polls have shown that Biden may be struggling to galvanize the state’s large population of Hispanic voters—which Texas Democrats have long seen as the key to winning statewide elections. Though polling Latinx voters in Texas is always difficult and has been especially sketchy this year, some surveys have shown that Biden is underperforming among Hispanic voters. Biden leads Trump 57-34, according to the Times poll, a slight downturn from Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016. Also, while early vote turnout has surged in the heavily Hispanic, deep-blue border regions of El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, it’s still trailing the upswing in the big cities and surrounding suburbs.
In the final week before Election Day, Texas is abuzz with last-minute activity—on both the virtual and in-person fronts: Governor Greg Abbott is hitting the campaign trail and tapping into his political war chest to stave off a Democratic takeover of the Texas House. Kamala Harris has been dispatched to Fort Worth, Houston, and McAllen on the last day of early voting. That’s a minor nod to the persistent public prodding from top Texas Democrats for the campaign to make a strong play for the state.
There’s a long history of Democrats getting their hopes up about Texas, only to be crushed by the Republican machine. But that machine has functioned, in part, through repressive voting laws that have made Texas the most difficult state to vote in, resulting in a disengaged electorate and low turnout. That machine isn’t built for an election like this one, where turnout, at long last, is truly Texas-sized.


thenation--2020-11-03--545 of the Children Separated From Their Parents at the Border

The parents of these kids have not been found .
De facto orphans now , their lives are blighted .
@ @ @ @ @ need to ask : Why haven ’ t those who did this been indicted ?

This article appears in the November 16/23, 2020 issue.
The parents of these kids have not been found.
De facto orphans now, their lives are blighted.
A question that we really need to ask:
Why haven’t those who did this been indicted?


thenation--2020-11-03--Letters From the November 16/23, 2020, Issue

Thank you for the stunning article about Haiti and the Bahamas [ “ After Dorian : No Exit ” by Sonia Shah , October 5/12 ] .
Haitians deserve to be acknowledged as great revolutionaries , miraculously kicking out the French , and—until conquered by our own “ great country ” —leading egalitarian lives close to the land .
Along with climate justice , we desperately need working folks to stick together ; that is what it will take to turn the world upside down , because we can not live without labor .
Michele Marlowe Re “ Swamp Thing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ] : Please , this will be a Mitch McConnell wipeout .
Funny how the Democratic National Committee funded Amy McGrath before the Kentucky Democratic primary , with solicitations as if she were the only one to take on “ Moscow Mitch ” and ignoring Charles Booker and Mike Broihier , two progressives espousing policies similar to Bernie Sanders ’ s .
Support another DINOcrat neoliberal candidate like before ?
Those worked out so well .
The same playbook is being used in the presidential campaign .
Marvelous .
I ’ m a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the best design in a long time [ “ Not Just a New Look ” by D.D .
Guttenplan , October 5/12 ] .
Thanks for scrapping the TMI look in favor of more penetrating analysis .
Gloria Sparrow mill valley , calif. As a longtime reader , subscriber , and occasional contributor , I object to the new font size .
I find the print too small to read , so I missed out on reading new pieces by Michael Kazin and Katha Pollitt and one on Orlando Patterson .
Make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the journal , with much regret .
Jules Chametzky northampton , mass .
Congratulations on the new look .
I like it a lot better than the old one .
But I am disappointed that , having gone to all the trouble to change your style , you chose to maintain the tiny point size for normal text .
As a 75-year-old who has been a steady subscriber for decades , I am probably typical of your print audience .
My eyes can no longer easily read the small print without fatigue .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ online on their device screens and can adjust the text size as they please .
We older print readers don ’ t have that luxury .
Couldn ’ t you increase the size ?
I canceled my subscription to Jacobin because the point size is too small .
The sleek layout and imagery don ’ t matter to me if I can ’ t read the articles .
I hope I don ’ t have to cancel The Nation as well .
David Schonfeld west hartford , conn. Editor ’ s note : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ font and type size ( Janson , 9.5 points ) as before .
If reading online is an option for you , a digital version of all stories in our print edition is available to subscribers at TheNation.com .

This article appears in the November 16/23, 2020 issue.
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L’Union Fait la Force
Thank you for the stunning article about Haiti and the Bahamas [“After Dorian: No Exit” by Sonia Shah, October 5/12]. Haitians deserve to be acknowledged as great revolutionaries, miraculously kicking out the French, and—until conquered by our own “great country”—leading egalitarian lives close to the land. Along with climate justice, we desperately need working folks to stick together; that is what it will take to turn the world upside down, because we cannot live without labor.
Michele Marlowe
A Familiar Playbook
Re “Swamp Thing” by Bob Moser [October 5/12]: Please, this will be a Mitch McConnell wipeout.
Funny how the Democratic National Committee funded Amy McGrath before the Kentucky Democratic primary, with solicitations as if she were the only one to take on “Moscow Mitch” and ignoring Charles Booker and Mike Broihier, two progressives espousing policies similar to Bernie Sanders’s.
Support another DINOcrat neoliberal candidate like before? Those worked out so well. The same playbook is being used in the presidential campaign. Marvelous.
Edward Thompson Current Issue View our current issue
The Fine Print
I’m a subscriber of 71 years, and this is the best design in a long time [“Not Just a New Look” by D.D. Guttenplan, October 5/12]. Thanks for scrapping the TMI look in favor of more penetrating analysis.
Gloria Sparrow
mill valley, calif.
As a longtime reader, subscriber, and occasional contributor, I object to the new font size. I find the print too small to read, so I missed out on reading new pieces by Michael Kazin and Katha Pollitt and one on Orlando Patterson. Make it more legible, or I quit the journal, with much regret.
Jules Chametzky
northampton, mass.
Congratulations on the new look. I like it a lot better than the old one. But I am disappointed that, having gone to all the trouble to change your style, you chose to maintain the tiny point size for normal text. As a 75-year-old who has been a steady subscriber for decades, I am probably typical of your print audience. My eyes can no longer easily read the small print without fatigue. Your younger readers probably do their reading online on their device screens and can adjust the text size as they please. We older print readers don’t have that luxury. Couldn’t you increase the size? I canceled my subscription to Jacobin because the point size is too small. The sleek layout and imagery don’t matter to me if I can’t read the articles. I hope I don’t have to cancel The Nation as well.
David Schonfeld
west hartford, conn.
Please Don’t Go!
Editor’s note: Our redesigned pages have the same main font and type size (Janson, 9.5 points) as before. If reading online is an option for you, a digital version of all stories in our print edition is available to subscribers at TheNation.com.


thenation--2020-11-03--Before All of This

Before All of This

And as usual , early summer seems already to hold , inside it , the split fruit of late fall , those afternoons we ’ ll soon enough lie down in , their diminished colors , the part no one comes for .
I ’ m a man , now ; I ’ ve seen plenty of summers , I shouldn ’ t be surprised—why am I ?
As if everything hadn ’ t all along been designed—I include myself— to disappear eventually .
Meanwhile , how the wind sometimes makes the slenderest trees , still young , bend over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I can almost believe in that—until the trees , like fear , spring back .
Then a sad sort of quiet , just after , as between two people who have finally realized they ’ ve stopped regretting the same things .
It ’ s like they ’ ve never known each other .
Yet even now , waking , they insist they ’ ve woken from a dream they share , forgetting all over again that every dream is private… Whatever the reasons are for the dead under-branches of the trees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ persist is enough ; for me , it ’ s enough .

This article appears in the November 16/23, 2020 issue.
And as usual, early summer seems already to hold, inside it,
the split fruit of late fall, those afternoons we’ll
soon enough lie down in, their diminished colors, the part no one
comes for. I’m a man, now; I’ve seen
plenty of summers, I shouldn’t be
surprised—why am I?
As if everything hadn’t all along been designed—I include myself—
to disappear eventually.
Meanwhile, how the wind sometimes makes
the slenderest trees, still young, bend over
makes me think of knowledge conquering
superstition, I can almost
believe in that—until the trees, like
fear, spring back. Then a sad
sort of quiet, just after, as between two people who have finally realized
they’ve stopped regretting the same things. It’s like they’ve never
known each other. Yet even now, waking, they insist they’ve woken
from a dream they share, forgetting all over again
that every dream
is private…
Whatever the reasons are for the dead
under-branches of the trees that flourish here, that the dead persist
is enough; for me, it’s enough.
The air stirs like history
Like the future
Like history


thenation--2020-11-05--When Raving Was Radical

When Raving Was Radical

In Der Klang der Familie , the definitive oral history of the birth of Berlin ’ s techno scene in the wake of German reunification , it is said that the city ’ s inaugural acid house party , a series called Ufo , began one night in 1988 in an old potato cellar in Köpenicker Straße .
The ceiling barely hit seven feet , and plaster chips drifted down onto stacks of records as squelching basslines shook the building ’ s foundation .
The basement flooded when it rained , and power strips floated around in the muck like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A year later , at the very first Love Parade , which became an annual open-air electronic music festival that later typified Berlin ’ s club milieu ’ s most commercial leanings , 150 people danced and marched in the streets of West Berlin .
They came together under the motto “ Friede , Freude , Eierkuchen , ” or “ Peace , Joy , Pancakes , ” a political commitment to disarmament , music as the route to understanding , and fair food distribution .
1 As one of the founders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Picciotti recalled , this sort of sincere public display wasn ’ t quite in line with the usual Berliner attitude of the time , especially at the tail end of the punk movement .
“ At the beginning , everyone was embarrassed , ” she remembers .
“ It was not at all something Berliners usually got behind .
In Berlin , you were serious , intellectual , avant-garde .
Or at least dramatically addicted to drugs.
” With this call for pancakes , cuddle puddles , and peace , a new social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ madness of that old potato cellar , one propelled by a relentless desire to experience more mind-bending music with like-minded freaks.2 It wasn ’ t until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 that these early techno raves migrated to a youth hall in the East under the name Tekknozid .
With the reunification opening up vast swaths of vacant buildings in the West , techno had plenty of room to expand and mutate .
As one early raver remembers , those Tekknozid parties evoked , “ the sound of mines : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and Wolle DXP , the party ’ s promoter , says that drugs weren ’ t even necessary to find transcendence .
“ People were totally spaced out , beyond good and evil , ” he says in Der Klang der Familie .
“ No one was accessible , but hardly anyone was on drugs .
They were on the music and in the music .
Some people had to be carried off the pedestals when we stopped around 6 a.m .
They were totally gone , time and space forgotten .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” 3 This mid-rave feeling of being utterly present , devoid of any sense of time , place , or ego , is exceedingly difficult to capture in any sort of strictly representational art form , but German writer Rainald Goetz ’ s 1998 novel Rave manages to convey the black hole of a dissociative dance floor experience with clarity .
Newly translated by Adrian Nathan West , Rave avoids the saccharine tropes that most writing about dance music succumbs to , whether it be the glorification of excess , the distorting effects @ @ @ @ @ @ @ euphoria.4 Instead of trying to forcibly carve a narrative of the madness and hedonism of techno ’ s early days , Goetz embraces the transience of a night out , stitching together scenes of open-air parties in Munich and languid Ibiza nights .
What unites the disparate locales is a combination of chatter and somatic response : snatches of random conversation and the babble of drug-induced breakdowns bleed into each other ; the feelings of bliss and depravity that race through a person over the course of hours spent on a dance floor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collectivism inherent in the act of raving , Goetz doesn ’ t even center his ostensible protagonist , himself ( or someone like him , also named Rainald ) , a character whose incessant jabs at techno music journalism and Kraftwerk are easier to patch together than any more conventional understandings of his personality or disposition .
Rainald ’ s friends momentarily flit in and out as narrators , and their experiences are given as much weight as are those of the fictionalized Rainald .
5 Goetz is less concerned with charting his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Berlin techno than he is with reconstituting the entire social matrix of these experiences , one where corny music journalists are trying to spin this nascent cultural energy into prime time television shows , and an earnest recognition of the art of deejaying exists in parallel with the boredom and self-destruction that eventually catch up to every raver .
Goetz ’ s account of Berlin dance floors isn ’ t just a straight transmission from his own eyes and ears—he tells the story of those days by loosely following each stray glance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , piecing together a mosaic of this scene that avoids idealization .
If some Berliners were dismissive of raving in favor of what they perceived as more cerebral cultural forms , Goetz offers the opposite claim : At the parties at which he found himself , he sensed that in techno there was a sense of art , politics , and language that was much more visceral than what prose alone could ever convey .
6 Rave isn ’ t Goetz ’ s first literary experiment with taking this shattered approach to narrative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slice of his five-part survey of ’ 90s pop culture and pop art , Heute Morgen .
It also includes his play , Jeff Koons , yet another work that skirts around any strict narrative or real sense of character development as indistinguishable voices seem to flesh out the world of artist Jeff Koons ( although this is just implied—his name is only mentioned in the title ) .
With Rubbish for Everyone , his Internet diary centered on the media and consumerism , which is widely considered to have been the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ established himself as a writer deeply invested in the democratizing effects of popular art in its interaction with mass culture .
Before he became a literary figure , Goetz pursued a career in the medical field—he obtained two doctorates , in history and medicine , before publishing Irre ( “ Insane , ” ) in 1983 at the age of 30 .
In this debut work , he fuses at times technical and at other times disorienting descriptions of a doctor working at a psychiatric institution with the unhinged spirit of Germany ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ patients ’ perspectives to the confused inner monologue of the main character , Dr. Raspe .
7 In that same year , 1983 , Goetz further solidified his status as a subversive literary force as a finalist for the esteemed Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with his televised reading of his unpublished manuscript Subito .
Not only did Subito satirize the very prize itself—in Goetz ’ s fictional rendering , a few critics on the jury doze off while another covertly scratches his balls underneath the table—but in the middle of his frenetic reading of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blade diagonally across his forehead .
A stream of blood dripped down onto the manuscript as he read it , saturating the bottom of the page red .
He didn ’ t win that prize , but the stunt raised his profile exponentially .
In 2015 , Goetz received the George Buchner Prize , one of Germany ’ s most important literary awards.8 In Rave , Goetz lays out the polar contradictions of a lifestyle dedicated to nightlife , cycling through flashes of enlightenment and tenderness to despair and cynicism .
There are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rainald ’ s sense of self is sublimated in complete identification with the music : “ From the margins came legs and light , feet , flashes , paces and bass , surfaces and murmurs , equivalencies of a higher mathematics .
He himself was the music.
” In less ecstatic moments , Goetz dials in on the inescapable self-aggrandizing stemming from petty scene politics .
“ So then : there ’ s all this mad stupid babble , loads of it , above all in nightlife , of course , about music @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , lines , sounds .
As soon as you post up next to someone who for some reason thinks he ’ s intelligent , you ’ re disappointed to hear him blurt out his super-mega-interesting divergent opinion.
” 9 More than just an inside look at the fleeting nature of the early German rave scene , Goetz ’ s novel succeeds in translating into black and white an embodied and ineffable experience , something prose isn ’ t especially equipped to accomplish .
At one point early on in the text , Rainald @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writing in a discussion with a friend : “ The difficulty was a fundamental one : how would a text about our lives have to sound ?
I had a sort of inkling inside of me , a bodily sensation that writing had to articulate.
” 10 The answer to this question is in the way Rave renders stilted dance floor conversations and inner monologues into a kind of sonorous poetry .
Later on , Goetz says that the endless hours of music , dancing , and drugs , “ had altered at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ individual , and at the same time the collective space where language sways back and forth , to test whether language even halfway conveys everything thought intended.
” He describes the spirit of these halcyon techno days as a time that ’ s both yearning to understand itself and to elude comprehension , leaving behind a sense of confusion that starts to wear away at the edges of one ’ s ego but strangely can then start to pull people together .
11 In the midst of a party stretching out nonstop over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Goetz acknowledges that there was a time before there really were words to describe the hedonistic experience he is undergoing .
“ It was the wordless time , when we were always looking around with our big eyes so strangely in every possible situation , shaking our heads , and could almost never say anything but : speechless—pf–brutal—madness–speechless , really— ” he says , then describing it further as “ an expression of the feeling that we had never experienced and couldn ’ t imagine anything cooler and more dope etc etc @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Where am I , what was that ?
Hm ?
” 12 On a more down-to-earth level , Rave ’ s patchwork of thoughts on aesthetic theory and on the media outlets , editors , and critics that sprang up around this fledgling scene does seem prescient if at times disorienting .
Goetz ’ s incessant satirization of the popular culture that orbited around German techno foretells the eventual breakdown of an industry concerned more with turning out fawning profiles and programs than confronting more difficult and messy truths .
At an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s answer to MTV that debuted in 1993 , journalists flash their plastic press passes that read : “ No idea whatsoever about anything at all , ” and a poodle commands the decks .
“ The poodle hasn ’ t got a clue how to mix… Same as everyone else , his relationship to music is primarily anecdotal , he ’ s heard this about that , picked this up from so-and-so.
” Goetz spends pages riffing on the lesson plan of the Red Bull Music Academy , which has since become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Day 1 starts with learning the importance of rhythm , day 2 goes on to an appreciation of tempos , and by the end of the program , the student needs to listen , look , and lean into the social aspect of DJing without forgetting what is “ the central and highest purpose of all academies , congresses , fairs , discussion circles , and readings ” : partying and sex.13 Goetz ’ s critiques of the vapid nature of the music industry in some ways anticipated its fate .
The Red @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year , almost all of the music magazines that he mentions are out of print now , and EDM ’ s rise and fall reflected its ability to turn dance music into a billion dollar industry only for a few solvent years .
As chronicled in Der Klang der Familie , by the time major clubs like Tresor opened in 1991 , some DJs and ravers were already convinced that the whole techno thing was over .
Wolle DXP , the promoter of that first acid house party , viewed the growing commercial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and he called the sound systems in now iconic clubs in Berlin embarrassing in comparison to the spirit of the spontaneous parties that started it all .
( “ It was like listening to music in your kitchen , ” he said . )
Meanwhile , DJs like Westbam , whom Goetz collaborated with on Mix , Cuts und Scratches , a treatise of sorts on the art of DJing , felt that techno had already made its mark on the underground and that it was time to make a big pop statement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over a million people danced through the wide Berlin avenues as part of the Love Parade .
But in 2010 , the annual event was permanently canceled after the ramp that served as the only entrance and exit point of the festival became greatly overcrowded ; 21 people died from suffocation , and at least 500 were injured.14 Tanith , the DJ of a seminal party called Cyberspace , met Rainald Goetz at Mayday , an event that was basically the winter version of the Love Parade .
They had both climbed up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a spot where it wasn ’ t so crowded and there was room to dance .
Goetz was one of Tanith ’ s favorite writers , but Tanith found Goetz ’ s unbridled enthusiasm for raving disappointing .
“ I knew him as the RAF writer ; that guy , I loved , ” Tanith said in reference to Irre .
“ Later , he schlepped records for Sven Väth and Westbam .
He was completely changed .
I saw in him what ecstasy could do , even to creative artists.
” 15 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a similar scene at the Love Parade , he decenters his own experience to focus in on what he finds most valuable about a crush of people , a situation he feels is unfairly politically maligned .
To Goetz , an event like the crowded Love Parade can represent the full spectrum of human potential .
It ’ s a reversal of the usual conception of a crowd ’ s power to suggest a narrow ideological point .
Goetz instead finds beauty in the meeting of many different vantage points .
“ Everyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place bodily and sees it with open eyes sees himself with revulsion and ecstasy amid this million-sharded mirror , is shaken and moved and inevitably must say something like : Yeah , that ’ s me .
I ’ m one of those , too .
A so-called person.
” Goetz is less concerned with subjective , drug-addled introspection than he is with the collective that he witnessed forming around him , one in which losing yourself in a crowd could actually make you feel more human.16

In Der Klang der Familie, the definitive oral history of the birth of Berlin’s techno scene in the wake of German reunification, it is said that the city’s inaugural acid house party, a series called Ufo, began one night in 1988 in an old potato cellar in Köpenicker Straße. The ceiling barely hit seven feet, and plaster chips drifted down onto stacks of records as squelching bass lines shook the building’s foundation. The basement flooded when it rained, and power strips floated around in the muck like inner tubes coasting down a lazy river. A year later, at the very first Love Parade, which became an annual open-air electronic music festival that later typified Berlin’s club milieu’s most commercial leanings, 150 people danced and marched in the streets of West Berlin. They came together under the motto “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen,” or “Peace, Joy, Pancakes,” a political commitment to disarmament, music as the route to understanding, and fair food distribution. Books in Review Rave By Rainald Goetz Buy this book
As one of the founders of the parade, artist Danielle de Picciotti,recalled, this sort of sincere public display wasn’t quite in line with the usual Berliner attitude of the time, especially at the tail end of the punk movement. “At the beginning, everyone was embarrassed,” she remembers. “It was not at all something Berliners usually got behind. In Berlin, you were serious, intellectual, avant-garde. Or at least dramatically addicted to drugs.” With this call for pancakes, cuddle puddles, and peace, a new social form started to arise from the controlled madness of that old potato cellar, one propelled by a relentless desire to experience more mind-bending music with like-minded freaks.
It wasn’t until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 that these early techno raves migrated to a youth hall in the East under the name Tekknozid. With the reunification opening up vast swaths of vacant buildings in the West, techno had plenty of room to expand and mutate. As one early raver remembers, those Tekknozid parties evoked “the sound of mines: down the shaft to hammer stones,” and Wolle DXP, the party’s promoter, says that drugs weren’t even necessary to find transcendence. “People were totally spaced out, beyond good and evil,” he says in Der Klang der Familie. “No one was accessible, but hardly anyone was on drugs. They were on the music and in the music. Some people had to be carried off the pedestals when we stopped around 6 a.m. They were totally gone, time and space forgotten. They’d danced themselves into oblivion.”
This mid-rave feeling of being utterly present, devoid of any sense of time, place, or ego, is exceedingly difficult to capture in any sort of strictly representational art form, but German writer Rainald Goetz’s 1998 novel Rave manages to convey the black hole of a dissociative dance floor experience with clarity. Newly translated by Adrian Nathan West, Rave avoids the saccharine tropes that most writing about dance music succumbs to, whether it be the glorification of excess, the distorting effects of nostalgia, or ham-fisted descriptions of euphoria.
Instead of trying to forcibly carve a narrative of the madness and hedonism of techno’s early days, Goetz embraces the transience of a night out, stitching together scenes of open-air parties in Munich and languid Ibiza nights. What unites the disparate locales is a combination of chatter and somatic response: snatches of random conversation and the babble of drug-induced breakdowns bleeding into each other; the feelings of bliss and depravity that race through a person over the course of hours spent on a dance floor. And in a nod to the collectivism inherent in the act of raving, Goetz doesn’t even center his ostensible protagonist, himself (or someone like him, also named Rainald), a character whose incessant jabs at techno music journalism and Kraftwerk are easier to patch together than any more conventional understandings of his personality or disposition. Rainald’s friends momentarily flit in and out as narrators, and their experiences are given as much weight as are those of the fictionalized Rainald. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Goetz is less concerned with charting his own personal experiences of the golden age of Berlin techno than he is with reconstituting the entire social matrix of these experiences, one where corny music journalists are trying to spin this nascent cultural energy into prime-time television shows, and an earnest recognition of the art of deejaying exists in parallel with the boredom and self-destruction that eventually catch up to every raver. Goetz’s account of Berlin dance floors isn’t just a straight transmission from his own eyes and ears—he tells the story of those days by loosely following each stray glance and overheard phrase from those around him, piecing together a mosaic of this scene that avoids idealization. If some Berliners were dismissive of raving in favor of what they perceived as more cerebral cultural forms, Goetz offers the opposite claim: At the parties at which he found himself, he sensed that in techno there was a sense of art, politics, and language that was much more visceral than what prose alone could ever convey.
Rave isn’t Goetz’s first literary experiment with taking this shattered approach to narrative form. The novel is just one slice of his five-part survey of ’90s pop culture and pop art, Heute Morgen. It also includes his play, Jeff Koons, yet another work that skirts any strict narrative or real sense of character development as indistinguishable voices seem to flesh out the world of artist Jeff Koons (although this is just implied—his name is mentioned only in the title). With Rubbish for Everyone, his Internet diary centered on the media and consumerism, which is widely considered to have been the first literary blog in Germany, Goetz further established himself as a writer deeply invested in the democratizing effects of popular art in its interaction with mass culture. Before he became a literary figure, Goetz pursued a career in the medical field—he obtained two doctorates, in history and medicine, before publishing Irre (“Insane,”) in 1983 at the age of 30. In this debut work, he fuses at times technical and at other times disorienting descriptions of a doctor working at a psychiatric institution with the unhinged spirit of Germany’s punk scene, jumping from nameless patients’ perspectives to the confused inner monologue of the main character, Dr. Raspe.
In that same year, 1983, Goetz further solidified his status as a subversive literary force as a finalist for the esteemed Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with his televised reading of his unpublished manuscript Subito. Not only did Subito satirize the very prize itself—in Goetz’s fictional rendering, a few critics on the jury doze off while another covertly scratches his balls underneath the table—but in the middle of his frenetic reading of the text, he swiped a razor blade diagonally across his forehead. A stream of blood dripped down onto the manuscript as he read it, saturating the bottom of the page red. He didn’t win that prize, but the stunt raised his profile exponentially. In 2015, Goetz received the George Buchner Prize, one of Germany’s most important literary awards.
In Rave, Goetz lays out the polar contradictions of a lifestyle dedicated to nightlife, cycling through flashes of enlightenment and tenderness to despair and cynicism. There are moments of drug-induced spiritual experiences, when Rainald’s sense of self is sublimated in complete identification with the music: “From the margins came legs and light, feet, flashes, paces and bass, surfaces and murmurs, equivalencies of a higher mathematics. He himself was the music.” In less ecstatic moments, Goetz dials in on the inescapable self-aggrandizing stemming from petty scene politics. “So then: there’s all this mad stupid babble, loads of it, above all in nightlife, of course, about music. About labels, DJs, styles, lines, sounds. As soon as you post up next to someone who for some reason thinks he’s intelligent, you’re disappointed to hear him blurt out his super-mega-interesting divergent opinion.”
More than just an inside look at the fleeting nature of the early German rave scene, Goetz’s novel succeeds in translating into black and white an embodied and ineffable experience, something prose isn’t especially equipped to accomplish. At one point early on in the text, Rainald sums up this approach to music and writing in a discussion with a friend: “The difficulty was a fundamental one: how would a text about our lives have to sound? I had a sort of inkling inside of me, a bodily sensation that writing had to articulate.”
The answer to this question is in the way Rave renders stilted dance floor conversations and inner monologues as a kind of sonorous poetry. Later on, Goetz says that the endless hours of music, dancing, and drugs, “had altered at once the space of resonance in each individual, and at the same time the collective space where language sways back and forth, to test whether language even halfway conveys everything thought intended.” He describes these halcyon techno days as a time that’s both yearning to understand itself and to elude comprehension, leaving behind a sense of confusion that starts to wear away at the edges of one’s ego but strangely can then start to pull people together.
In the midst of a party stretching out nonstop over days that headily roll into each other, Goetz acknowledges that there was a time before there really were words to describe the hedonistic experience he is undergoing. “It was the wordless time, when we were always looking around with our big eyes so strangely in every possible situation, shaking our heads, and could almost never say anything but: speechless—pf–brutal—madness–speechless, really—,” he says, then describes it further as “an expression of the feeling that we had never experienced and couldn’t imagine anything cooler and more dope etc etc. Great wonder, then great bafflement. Where am I, what was that? Hm?”
On a more down-to-earth level, Rave’s patchwork of thoughts on aesthetic theory and on the media outlets, editors, and critics that sprang up around this fledgling scene does seem prescient, if at times disorienting. Goetz’s incessant satirization of the popular culture that orbited German techno foretells the eventual breakdown of an industry concerned more with turning out fawning profiles and programs than confronting more difficult and messy truths. At an event sponsored by VIVA, Germany’s answer to MTV that debuted in 1993, journalists flash their plastic press passes that read: “No idea whatsoever about anything at all,” and a poodle commands the decks. “The poodle hasn’t got a clue how to mix.… Same as everyone else, his relationship to music is primarily anecdotal, he’s heard this about that, picked this up from so-and-so.” Goetz spends pages riffing on the lesson plan of the Red Bull Music Academy, which has since become a sort of electronic music institution. Day one starts with learning the importance of rhythm; day two goes on to an appreciation of tempos; and by the end of the program, the student needs to listen, look, and lean into the social aspect of deejaying without forgetting what is “the central and highest purpose of all academies, congresses, fairs, discussion circles, and readings”: partying and sex.
Goetz’s critiques of the vapid nature of the music industry in some ways anticipated its fate. The Red Bull Music Academy closed its doors last year; almost all of the music magazines that he mentions are out of print now; and EDM’s rise and fall reflected its ability to turn dance music into a billion-dollar industry only for a few solvent years. As chronicled in Der Klang der Familie, by the time major clubs like Tresor opened in 1991, some DJs and ravers were already convinced that the whole techno thing was over. Wolle DXP, the promoter of that first acid house party, viewed the growing commercial electronic music industry as the enemy, and he called the sound systems in now iconic clubs in Berlin embarrassing in comparison to the spirit of the spontaneous parties that started it all. (“It was like listening to music in your kitchen,” he said.) Meanwhile, DJs like Westbam, whom Goetz collaborated with on Mix, Cuts und Scratches, a treatise of sorts on the art of deejaying, felt that techno had already made its mark on the underground and that it was time to make a big pop statement. By the mid-’90s, over a million people danced through the wide Berlin avenues as part of the Love Parade. But in 2010, the annual event was permanently canceled after the ramp that served as the only entrance and exit point of the festival became greatly overcrowded; 21 people died from suffocation, and at least 500 were injured.
Tanith, the DJ of a seminal party called Cyberspace, met Rainald Goetz at Mayday, an event that was basically the winter version of the Love Parade. They had both climbed up on the traverse above the stage, a spot where it wasn’t so crowded and there was room to dance. Goetz was one of Tanith’s favorite writers, but Tanith found Goetz’s unbridled enthusiasm for raving disappointing. “I knew him as the RAF writer; that guy, I loved,” Tanith said in reference to Irre. “Later, he schlepped records for Sven Väth and Westbam. He was completely changed. I saw in him what [the drug] ecstasy could do, even to creative artists.”
In Goetz’s fictional rendering of a similar scene at the Love Parade, he decenters his own experience to focus on what he finds most valuable about a crush of people, a situation he feels is unfairly politically maligned. To Goetz, an event like the crowded Love Parade can represent the full spectrum of human potential. It’s a reversal of the usual conception of a crowd’s power to suggest a narrow ideological point. Goetz instead finds beauty in the meeting of many different vantage points. “Everyone who is actually present in such a place bodily and sees it with open eyes sees himself with revulsion and ecstasy amid this million-sharded mirror, is shaken and moved and inevitably must say something like: Yeah, that’s me. I’m one of those, too. A so-called person.” Goetz is less concerned with subjective, drug-addled introspection than he is with the collective that he witnessed forming around him, one in which losing yourself in a crowd could actually make you feel more human.


thenation--2020-11-05--The Election Nobody Won

The Election Nobody Won

Joe Biden appears positioned to win enough battleground states to put himself in the White House—possibly pending four weeks of courtroom brawling that Americans anticipated but desperately hoped to avoid .
Democrats , who have been focusing intensely on the opportunity to take down Trump for four years , could treat this as the brink of an enormous victory .
Instead , a feeling of disappointment and defeat prevails even with an outcome—Trump ’ s impending defeat—that would have inspired unbridled joy six months ago .
The underwhelming Democratic performance in House and Senate races combine with , at best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unsatisfying result .
But the reality is that this election was never going to feel like a real victory ; the problems the Trump presidency has exposed run far deeper than a “ blue wave ” could resolve .
As things have turned out , the next two to four years promise to be a grind of crushing austerity , Hunter Biden investigations , and Mitch McConnell–led gridlock supervised by a president whose campaign emphasized that we should all just get along again .
That ’ s simply tough to get excited about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problems like police violence and economic inequality because of his long track record of , and preference for , moderate New Democrat–style politics .
Throughout the campaign the left was notably unenthusiastic about Biden ’ s eagerness—website platform promises notwithstanding—to pursue these problems with the vigor it would take to make meaningful progress .
Even with the benefit of a Democratic House and Senate , there has been ample telegraphing of Biden ’ s intention to take what could favorably be called an incremental approach .
You ’ re Only As Free as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promised gains in the House and Senate disappearing , Biden ’ s ceiling has been lowered even further .
He can replace the half-clown , half-convict crew of people that surrounds Trump in the White House , and he offers a baseline level of sanity and competence that many Americans have missed over the past four years .
But this election outcome forces us to be brutally honest : This is a country with serious problems .
And they ’ re not getting fixed anytime soon .
That is why the potential defeat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the kind of celebrating that we might have expected .
What is more , Democrats expecting a big-blowout repudiation of Trump were curiously out of step with the conservative , careful choice of nominating Biden and having his campaign aim to run as safe a race as possible .
Simply showing up with a warm body on the ballot doesn ’ t produce 40-state landslides ; in reality , Biden ’ s campaign did what it set out to do : play it safe and win back three states Clinton lost narrowly in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pennsylvania .
That it added Arizona to the Democratic column is more than such a tepid , low-risk campaign could have been expected to do .
One issue the Democratic Party must address going forward is how better to navigate between successful fundraising and deluding its followers about the odds of taking the Senate .
Disappointment is being felt most keenly now among people who not only looked forward to a Biden win but a Democratic Senate majority .
Making that seem plausible required pushing a narrative that a few Senate races that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact very close .
Breathless ( and endless ) exhortations to shovel money into the campaigns of Amy McGrath and Jamie Harrison—both of whom were routed—were framed as ways to contribute to winnable races .
It turned out that not only were those long shots unrealistic , but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee could not even allocate resources ( and attention ) well enough to deliver seats that looked far more winnable ; the widely loathed Thom Tillis somehow managed to win reelection in North Carolina , for example , as did Susan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ handily .
As with the House , where top Democrats Nancy Pelosi , Steny Hoyer , and Jim Clyburn are 80 , 81 , and 80 , the aging leadership in the Senate ( Chuck “ Spring Chicken ” Schumer is a mere 69 ) simply does not seem to be very good at its most basic job .
The DSCC raises huge amounts of money but struggles to allocate those resources productively .
Plans for leadership succession in both chambers are long overdue .
Gerrymandering presents a challenge for House Democrats , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the botched Census 2020 and relative Republican success in state capitals this year .
But despite predictions of winning an additional 10-plus seats on Tuesday , House Democrats managed to underperform 2018 , and new district boundaries will only make things harder .
In short , Democrats managed the curious feat of dislodging Trump while making no progress in retaking the Senate , losing ground in the House , and failing to meaningfully alter the balance of state political power across the country .
Watching Trump leave the White House for a final @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smiles to more than a few faces , but there is no getting around the miserable politics that await us in the near future .
For a country that has appeared at times to teeter toward social , economic , and political collapse over the past year , the promise of four years in which nothing gets fixed just isn ’ t a reason to celebrate .

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Joe Biden appears positioned to win enough battleground states to put himself in the White House—possibly pending four weeks of courtroom brawling that Americans anticipated but desperately hoped to avoid. Democrats, who have been focusing intensely on the opportunity to take down Trump for four years, could treat this as the brink of an enormous victory. Instead, a feeling of disappointment and defeat prevails even with an outcome—Trump’s impending defeat—that would have inspired unbridled joy six months ago.
The underwhelming Democratic performance in House and Senate races combine with, at best, a Biden nail-biter to produce an unsatisfying result. But the reality is that this election was never going to feel like a real victory; the problems the Trump presidency has exposed run far deeper than a “blue wave” could resolve. As things have turned out, the next two to four years promise to be a grind of crushing austerity, Hunter Biden investigations, and Mitch McConnell–led gridlock supervised by a president whose campaign emphasized that we should all just get along again.
That’s simply tough to get excited about.
Biden is ill-equipped to handle entrenched problems like police violence and economic inequality because of his long track record of, and preference for, moderate New Democrat–style politics. Throughout the campaign the left was notably unenthusiastic about Biden’s eagerness—website platform promises notwithstanding—to pursue these problems with the vigor it would take to make meaningful progress. Even with the benefit of a Democratic House and Senate, there has been ample telegraphing of Biden’s intention to take what could favorably be called an incremental approach. Related Article You’re Only As Free as You Are Wealthy Ed Burmila
Now, with the promised gains in the House and Senate disappearing, Biden’s ceiling has been lowered even further. He can replace the half-clown, half-convict crew of people that surrounds Trump in the White House, and he offers a baseline level of sanity and competence that many Americans have missed over the past four years. But this election outcome forces us to be brutally honest: This is a country with serious problems. And they’re not getting fixed anytime soon.
That is why the potential defeat of Donald Trump hasn’t inspired the kind of celebrating that we might have expected. What is more, Democrats expecting a big-blowout repudiation of Trump were curiously out of step with the conservative, careful choice of nominating Biden and having his campaign aim to run as safe a race as possible. Simply showing up with a warm body on the ballot doesn’t produce 40-state landslides; in reality, Biden’s campaign did what it set out to do: play it safe and win back three states Clinton lost narrowly in 2016: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That it added Arizona to the Democratic column is more than such a tepid, low-risk campaign could have been expected to do.
One issue the Democratic Party must address going forward is how better to navigate between successful fundraising and deluding its followers about the odds of taking the Senate. Disappointment is being felt most keenly now among people who not only looked forward to a Biden win but a Democratic Senate majority. Making that seem plausible required pushing a narrative that a few Senate races that were not close at all were in fact very close. Breathless (and endless) exhortations to shovel money into the campaigns of Amy McGrath and Jaime Harrison—both of whom were routed—were framed as ways to contribute to winnable races. Current Issue View our current issue
It turned out that not only were those long shots unrealistic, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee could not even allocate resources (and attention) well enough to deliver seats that looked far more winnable; the widely loathed Thom Tillis somehow managed to win reelection in North Carolina, for example, as did Susan Collins in Maine, which Biden carried handily. As with the House, where top Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Jim Clyburn are 80, 81, and 80, the aging leadership in the Senate (Chuck “Spring Chicken” Schumer is a mere 69) simply does not seem to be very good at its most basic job. The DSCC raises huge amounts of money but struggles to allocate those resources productively. Plans for leadership succession in both chambers are long overdue.
Gerrymandering presents a challenge for House Democrats, a problem that will only worsen with the botched Census 2020 and relative Republican success in state capitals this year. But despite predictions of winning an additional 10-plus seats on Tuesday, House Democrats managed to underperform 2018, and new district boundaries will only make things harder.
In short, Democrats managed the curious feat of dislodging Trump while making no progress in retaking the Senate, losing ground in the House, and failing to meaningfully alter the balance of state political power across the country. Watching Trump leave the White House for a final time will be cathartic and will bring smiles to more than a few faces, but there is no getting around the miserable politics that await us in the near future. For a country that has appeared at times to teeter toward social, economic, and political collapse over the past year, the promise of four years in which nothing gets fixed just isn’t a reason to celebrate.


thenation--2020-11-05--Biden Is Piling Up a Popular-Vote Mandate for Ending Trumpism

On Wednesday morning , Joe Biden swept past the 50 percent mark of total ballots counted thus far in the presidential election .
By mid-afternoon on Wednesday , the Democratic candidate was leading Donald Trump by 3 million votes , and the margin expanded with each passing hour .
In most countries , a popular-vote lead of that size would have put a candidate ’ s supporters ’ minds at ease , but not in the United States .
Even as Biden ’ s popular-vote lead was expanding , “ battleground state ” –obsessed television networks were still describing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” and Trump was claiming—falsely , by every measure—that he had “ won.
” For too many of our pundits , the work of assessing presidential election results begins and ends with the tabulation of Electoral College votes .
To his credit , Biden recognized the legitimizing power of the popular-vote numbers , mentioning them in late Wednesday afternoon remarks to the nation .
“ Of special significance to me is that we won the majority of the American people , ” he said .
“ Every indication is that this majority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was not yet prepared to claim victory .
But Maurice Mitchell , the national director of the Working Families Party , looked at the data and argued : When all the votes are counted , I believe it will be clear that the people have chosen Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States .
Americans turned out in record numbers , braving a global pandemic and voter suppression .
It is already clear that Trump has been soundly rejected by a majority of voters—by a margin of millions that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vote is counted , it will also be clear that Joe Biden has won the presidency and Donald Trump has lost .
Mitchell ’ s review is a sound one .
In addition to securing a popular-vote win , Biden has a clearer route than Trump to an Electoral College win and the presidency .
But it remains a circuitous route that could take days or even weeks to complete ; and that is likely to include recounts , court fights , and all the chaos that Trump promised in his preelection threats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ afford him another four years as grifter in chief .
Biden : ‘ It Ain ’ t Over Till Every Vote Is Counted , Every Ballot Is Counted ’ The Democrat Who Could Prevent Democrats From Winning a Georgia Senate Seat It is no secret to anyone who has been paying attention to recent election cycles that the specter of chaos is all-but-guaranteed by the Electoral College , an archaic remnant that lingers from the time when wealthy white slaveholders put the clampdown on democracy for both their time and ours .
Twice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has prevented the winner of the popular vote from assuming the presidency ( in 2000 and in 2016 ) , and now , even with Biden ’ s commanding popular-vote lead , his score in the Electoral College could see him winning by a narrow margin .
If that is the case , it will make his efforts to unite the country and govern in a time of crisis dramatically more difficult .
Defenders of this country ’ s convoluted method of choosing presidents , which was developed at a time when the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to vote , still claim that it contributes to stability .
Wrong !
It is the source of our current instability .
Biden had , by midday Wednesday , already won more than 70 million votes—the highest figure ever for a presidential candidate .
And that number could well grow to 75 million or more .
Trump will get a lot of votes , but Biden will get a lot more , as millions of additional ballots are counted in California and the other high-turnout West Coast states that solidly favor the former @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next many days , we will be concerning ourselves with the question of whether Biden ’ s 21,000-vote lead in Wisconsin can withstand a recount demand from Trump , whether Biden ’ s lead in Michigan will extend sufficiently to thwart talk of a review , whether Pennsylvania ’ s long count will be disrupted by legal challenges before it can reveal a Biden win .
Then there ’ s the wrangling over Arizona , Nevada , and perhaps Georgia .
‘ It ’ s Just a Slaughter ’ : Montana Goes From @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It Should Not Be This Close More in this series None of this would ever have to happen again if we simply abolished the Electoral College .
Of course , this is not a simple project .
But even if we don ’ t get around to abolishing the institution immediately , we should work on abolishing the Electoral College mentality that so frequently undermines honest consideration of signals sent by the electorate .
That mentality infects the political and media elites who guard the doorways of democracy and spin fantasies about who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be .
Before the 2020 election , polls consistently showed Trump trailing Biden , which stood to reason .
Trump has been a horrible president , who has sought to divide and conquer this country with racist and xenophobic rhetoric , who has denied the reality of the climate crisis and the insanity of the ever-expanding Pentagon budgets that fund a bloated military-industrial complex , and who has deliberately failed to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and the mass unemployment that extends from it .
Trump ’ s track record demanded a rebuke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to suggest it was coming .
Yet on Election Night all we heard was “ too close to call ” and “ the polls were wrong.
” And to be sure , plenty of polls were wrong—especially in the battleground states—but the national polls that showed Biden with a substantial lead weren ’ t that far off .
The final average of late-in-the-campaign polls by Real Clear Politics had Biden with 51.2 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Trump .
As I write this , Biden ’ s already at 50.2 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ number will rise to 51.2 percent and keep right on rising .
Trump ’ s at 48.2 percent , and his numbers are likely to fall—nationally and in the battleground states—as more votes are tabulated .
So Trump was rebuked—not sufficiently , but substantially .
Unfortunately , the Electoral College mentality does not afford us the space we need to speak the truth about the rebuke—let alone to act upon it .
That mentality frames a lie that suggests Trump is more popular than he has ever been .
The fact is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes .
He has already lost the 2020 election by a wider margin—and that margin just keeps growing .

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On Wednesday morning, Joe Biden swept past the 50 percent mark of total ballots counted thus far in the presidential election. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday, the Democratic candidate was leading Donald Trump by 3 million votes, and the margin expanded with each passing hour. In most countries, a popular-vote lead of that size would have put a candidate’s supporters’ minds at ease, but not in the United States. Even as Biden’s popular-vote lead was expanding, “battleground state”–obsessed television networks were still describing the contest as “too close to call,” and Trump was claiming—falsely, by every measure—that he had “won.”
For too many of our pundits, the work of assessing presidential election results begins and ends with the tabulation of Electoral College votes.
To his credit, Biden recognized the legitimizing power of the popular-vote numbers, mentioning them in late Wednesday afternoon remarks to the nation. “Of special significance to me is that we won the majority of the American people,” he said. “Every indication is that this majority will grow.”
Biden explained that he was not yet prepared to claim victory. But Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, looked at the data and argued:
When all the votes are counted, I believe it will be clear that the people have chosen Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. Americans turned out in record numbers, braving a global pandemic and voter suppression. It is already clear that Trump has been soundly rejected by a majority of voters—by a margin of millions that is still growing. And when every vote is counted, it will also be clear that Joe Biden has won the presidency and Donald Trump has lost.
Mitchell’s review is a sound one. In addition to securing a popular-vote win, Biden has a clearer route than Trump to an Electoral College win and the presidency. But it remains a circuitous route that could take days or even weeks to complete; and that is likely to include recounts, court fights, and all the chaos that Trump promised in his preelection threats to reject any results that did not afford him another four years as grifter in chief. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
It is no secret to anyone who has been paying attention to recent election cycles that the specter of chaos is all-but-guaranteed by the Electoral College, an archaic remnant that lingers from the time when wealthy white slaveholders put the clampdown on democracy for both their time and ours. Twice in 20 years, the august body has prevented the winner of the popular vote from assuming the presidency (in 2000 and in 2016), and now, even with Biden’s commanding popular-vote lead, his score in the Electoral College could see him winning by a narrow margin. If that is the case, it will make his efforts to unite the country and govern in a time of crisis dramatically more difficult. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Defenders of this country’s convoluted method of choosing presidents, which was developed at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans were not allowed to vote, still claim that it contributes to stability. Wrong! It is the source of our current instability.
Biden had, by midday Wednesday, already won more than 70 million votes—the highest figure ever for a presidential candidate. And that number could well grow to 75 million or more. Trump will get a lot of votes, but Biden will get a lot more, as millions of additional ballots are counted in California and the other high-turnout West Coast states that solidly favor the former vice president.
Yet, for the next many days, we will be concerning ourselves with the question of whether Biden’s 21,000-vote lead in Wisconsin can withstand a recount demand from Trump, whether Biden’s lead in Michigan will extend sufficiently to thwart talk of a review, whether Pennsylvania’s long count will be disrupted by legal challenges before it can reveal a Biden win. Then there’s the wrangling over Arizona, Nevada, and perhaps Georgia. Election 2020 The Promise of Justice in Fani Willis’s Indictment Joan Walsh Please, Please Stop Blaming “Progressives” for Donald Trump’s Fascism Joan Walsh Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money? Jeet Heer
None of this would ever have to happen again if we simply abolished the Electoral College. Of course, this is not a simple project. But even if we don’t get around to abolishing the institution immediately, we should work on abolishing the Electoral College mentality that so frequently undermines honest consideration of signals sent by the electorate. That mentality infects the political and media elites who guard the doorways of democracy and spin fantasies about who we are and what our country might be.
Before the 2020 election, polls consistently showed Trump trailing Biden, which stood to reason. Trump has been a horrible president, who has sought to divide and conquer this country with racist and xenophobic rhetoric, who has denied the reality of the climate crisis and the insanity of the ever-expanding Pentagon budgets that fund a bloated military-industrial complex, and who has deliberately failed to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and the mass unemployment that extends from it.
Trump’s track record demanded a rebuke by the electorate, and polls seemed to suggest it was coming. Yet on Election Night all we heard was “too close to call” and “the polls were wrong.” And to be sure, plenty of polls were wrong—especially in the battleground states—but the national polls that showed Biden with a substantial lead weren’t that far off. The final average of late-in-the-campaign polls by Real Clear Politics had Biden with 51.2 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Trump. As I write this, Biden’s already at 50.2 percent of the popular vote. That number will rise to 51.2 percent and keep right on rising. Trump’s at 48.2 percent, and his numbers are likely to fall—nationally and in the battleground states—as more votes are tabulated.
So Trump was rebuked—not sufficiently, but substantially. Unfortunately, the Electoral College mentality does not afford us the space we need to speak the truth about the rebuke—let alone to act upon it. That mentality frames a lie that suggests Trump is more popular than he has ever been.
The fact is that Trump is not popular. He lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes. He has already lost the 2020 election by a wider margin—and that margin just keeps growing.