Tom Hull: Tom Hull - on the Web

I wound up spending much of today processing and responding to the news that Francis Davis has died. Nate Chinen's piece, cited below, is beautifully written and covers much of what needs to be said. I will probably write more over the next couple weeks, but at the moment, I'm having trouble composing myself. I do much appreciate the notes I've seen so far, and will go back over them in due course. One side effect of this is that I took a good look at obituaries so far this year, and came up with the fairly long list below. The biggest surprise for me was another notable jazz critic, Larry Appelbaum, who has voted in every Jazz Critics Poll since its inception, so I counted him as another old and dear friend.

As these occasional posts are never really done, their timing is pretty arbitrary. But I figured I had enough saved up, and might as well call it a day. (Well, it slipped a day, so I wound up adding a few things, but nothing major.)

Eric Levitz: [01-10] Have the past 10 years of Democratic politics been a disaster? "A conversation with Matthew Yglesias." I found this tab open from back in January, but never really got through it, and still haven't. At some point, I want to go back over all of Levitz's "Rebuild" pieces, as I think they're about half right, and the wrong half is probably the more interesting, at least to write about. Given the interviewee, this one is probably more than half wrong.

Yglesias is a very smart, very productive guy who has from the very beginning always been one step ahead of where internet punditry is going. I read all of his Vox stuff with great interest, most of what came before, but not a lot of what came after. He's always had a good feel for where the neoliberal money was going, and with his Substack newsletter, his Bloomberg columns, and his hyper-Friedmanesque One Billion Americans book, he's clearly arrived as an oracle for the cosmopolitan liberal set. Still, in glomming onto his own special donor class, he's kind of lost touch with everyone else. His prescription that what Democrats need is to give up on the left gestures of Hillary-Biden-Harris and return to solid Obama moderation is credulous on every front.

David Klion: [03-10] The Loyalist: "The cruel world according to Stephen Miller." Review of Jean Guerrero's book, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Hamilton Nolan: [04-01] Divergence From the Interests of Capital: "Trump will ultimately make rich people poorer. Why?" This is a fairly quick overview, and he didn't even get to some big things, like climate change. Just who do you think owns all that beach front property that's going to get liquidated? Who needs to be able to afford disaster insurance? What about capital investments in in things like agriculture that will have to move as climates shift? And then, when it all goes to hell, whose heads will be on the line when the mob rises up? Since Clinton, Democrats have been telling their rich donors that they're better off with Democrats in power, and they have at least 30 years of data to prove their point. But are the rich listening? Some, but most still prefer the Republicans, because by degrading and humiliating the poor, they make the rich feel more important, more powerful, richer.

Batya Unger-Sargon: [04-02] I Used to Hate Trump. Now I'm a MAGA Lefty. "The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American Dream in 60 years. That's why I support him." That's all I could read before hitting the paywall -- looks like "TheFreePress" isn't free after all.Author "appears regularly on Fox News," and has published two books: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (2021), and Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women (2024), both on right-wing Encounter Books. For more of her spiel, look here. If you want to take this more seriously than it deserves:

Ben Ehrenreich: [04-03] You Don't Get Trump Without Gaza: "Fascism doesn't just appear. It must be invited in -- and the bipartisan repression of the anti-genocide movement did just that." This is a brilliant piece, setting up its main argument with a recap of Brecht's Arturi Ui, about the improbable rise of a Trump-like -- sure, he was thinking of Hitler, but he hadn't seen Trump yet -- to take over Chicago gangland's "Cauliflower Trust":

Much more quotable here, including "The Atlantic, the thinking man's propaganda organ for the exterminatory wars of empire." I don't recall reading that particular Brecht play, but I've read many, and recognize the title. In my relative ignorance, I've been thinking of Trump more in terms of Ubu Roi, but farce, no matter how grotesque, can only last in an environment deprived of power.

Ofer Aderet: [04-04] Looking Back, Israeli Historian Tom Segev Thinks Zionism Was a Mistake: "For decades, historian Tom Segev has critically documented momentous events involving Jews, Israel and its neighbors. Recently, he has also looked back at his own life story. Now, at 80, he weighs in on the current state of the nation."

Yair Rosenberg: [04-04] Trump's Jewish Cover Story: "The Trump administration has not surgically targeted these failings at America's universities for rectification; it has exploited them to justify the institution's decimation." I have no doubt that most Jews in America -- perhaps even most of those who wholeheartedly defend Israel's decimation of Gaza -- feel uneasy about being used as the pretext for Trump's wholesale attack on freedom of speech at elite universities, but the author doesn't just say that, he repeats blatant slanders -- e.g., "those behind Columbia's encampment repeatedly cheered Hamas's murders of civilians" -- against students whose "crime" was nothing more or less than protesting against Netanyahu's continuing systematic crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the unconditional support Biden provided (a policy which Trump has continued, as he had promised to do).

Rob Lee: [04-06] We Still Live in Nixonland: An Interview with Rick Perlstein. Some interesting notes on his writing process, although it's hard to imagine the massive notes his actual books are reduced from. Still no date on the much-promised leap into the "last 25 years" (Bush II to Trump, skipping Reagan's presidency, Bush I, and the anti-Clinton insanity, which could easily fill several volumes).

Spencer Ackerman: [04-07] El Salvador and the Dark Lessons of Guantanamo: "CECOT, the Salvadoran slavery-prison now used for migrant renditions, reflects 2002-4-era Gitmo -- with some updates."

John Ganz: [04-07] Dog Eat Dog: "The books of Donald Trump." One of those "I read this shit so you don't have to," in case you ever felt the need.

Richard Silverstein: [04-08] Why the world should boycott Trump's America. I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure the logic works. Boycotts are more likely to cause self-harm than to intimidate their targets, especially ones that pile arrogance on top of a sense of victimhood. Israel is the prime example here, but the US shares both traits, plus two more novel factors: massive size, which would take an incredibly huge boycott to move, and heterogeneity (for lack of a better word), which makes it hard to focus pain on the people actually responsible for the offense. No nation is democratic enough that inflicting pain on its poor will have any real effect on its leaders. Boycotts and sanctions are more likely to rally support for the rulers, while marginalizing internal opposition, and squandering any influence and leverage you might actually have. The cases where such tactics have actually worked are few and far between. About the only thing that can be said for them is that they give one the satisfaction (or moral smugness) of doing something where there are no practical alternatives. On the other hand, if one actually does have leverage -- as, say, Japan does in hosting US bases, or the US does in supplying Israel arms -- wouldn't it be much better to use that leverage to mitigate bad behavior than to strike a mere public stance of moral merit?

TJ Dawe: [04-09] I Didn't Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong: I'm not sure whether the quality of thinking declined dramatically in 2024 or was never really there in the first place. It could just be that we were lulled into complacency, knowing that even "the most powerful person in the world" wouldn't possibly be allowed to disrupt, much less destroy, business as usual. After all, we had "checks and balances" -- not just a Constitution designed to obstruct change, but a system of campaign finance and lobbying to make sure no reform got too radical. After all, the system had proven robust enough to contain Trump in his first term. Why not let the people have some fun with the illusory power of their votes?

Some of this I can explain through a model that I've long had about how the presidency operates. At first, the job seems overwhelming, so an incoming president is effectively a prisoner of his staff. Sure, they're supposed to be his staff, but they immediately become independent agents, able to limit and filter his choices, and each new person they get him to pick further limits his options. I could give you examples from any presidency since FDR (who, for reasons we don't need to go into here, was a rather different case from another era), but Trump I offers by far the most ludicrous examples, starting with Reince Priebus and the so-called "adults" -- at least they were able to derail some of Trump's more outrageous whims, like H-bombing hurricanes, or "solving" the pandemic by no longer counting deaths.

Still, over time, presidents reclaim the power of the office, which in principle they had all along. They tune out tasks they can delegate, and start to press for their own way on matters they care about. Even the most devious staff remind them they're in control, and they can replace anyone who doesn't suit them. Where most presidents start with administrations of old party regulars, they gradually wind up with personality cults. Clinton and Obama offer good examples of this -- which is probably why their personal successes correlate with partisan ruin -- but they at least valued competency. Trump demands even more sycophancy, but with him it's untethered to reality. Trump may be some kind of genius at political messaging -- at least in the Fox universe -- but that's all he knows and/or cares about.

This model usually works smoothly through a second term, but before that ends, the president has turned into a lame duck, and often not just metaphorically, dulling the ego inflation. Some presidents (like Wilson, Eisenhower, and less dramatically Reagan) are further slowed by health issues. But Trump, at least for the moment, is supercharged. His four years out of office have given him all the publicity he had as president but saddled him with none of the responsibility for the many things he would have screwed up. It also gave Republicans time to sort themselves out so Trump has been able to start his second term with a full slate of fanatic followers and enables. This is a combination we've never seen before, and hardly anyone is prepared for what's coming. Donkey Kong is a fanciful metaphor for what's happening. It only seems funny because we know it's not real. But it's hard to come up with anything more real that more accurately reflects the depth of thought that Trump is putting in, because nothing like this has ever worked before.

Melissa Gira Grant: [04-10] The sickening Reason Trump's Team Treats ICE Raids Like Reality TV: "This isn't only about entertainment for sadists. Kristi Noem's right-wing content creation allows the administration to terrorize more people than then can logistically deport." The one thing you can be sure of with Trump is that if he/they do something that looks bad, that's because they want it to look bad. Thinking through implications and consequences is way beyond them, but they live and breathe for gut reactions.

Timothy Noah: [04-10] The Sick Psychology Behind Trump's Tariff Chaos: "This isn't trade strategy. It's Munchausen syndrome by proxy." Clever, but groping for reasoning where little exists.

Eric Levitz: [04-10] The problem with the "progressive" case for tariffs: "Democrats shouldn't echo Trump's myths about trade." I've been somewhat inclined to humor Trump on the tariff question, not because I thought he had a clue what he was doing, or cared about anything more than throwing his presidential weight around, but because I've generally seen trade losses as bad for workers, and because I've never trusted the kneejerk free trade biases of economists. The one caution I always sounded was that tariffs only make sense if you have a national economic plan designed to take advantage of the specific tariffs. That sort of thing has been done most successfully in East Asia, but Americans tend to hate the idea of economic planning (except in the war industry), so there is little chance of doing that here. (Biden's use of tariffs to support clean energy development, semiconductors, etc., tried to do just that. How successfully, I don't know, but they were sane programs. Trump's is not.)

Nonetheless, Levitz has largely convinced me, first that tariffs are a bad tool, and second that they are bad politics. If I had to write a big piece, I'd probably explain it all differently, but our conclusions would converge. There are other tools which get you to the ends desired much more directly. As for the politics, it really doesn't pay to humor people like Trump. We went through a whole round of this in the 1980s and 1990s when conservatives were all hepped up on markets, and Democrats thought, hey, we can work with that. Indeed, they could -- markets tend to level out, making choices more competitive and efficient, so it was easy to come up with policies based on market mechanisms, like carbon credit trading, or the ACA.

Several problems there: one is that real businesses hate free markets, which is why they do everything possible to rig them, and dismantling their cheats is even harder once you agree to the market principle in the first place; second is that it shifts focus from deliberate public interest planning, where you can simply decide to do whatever it is you want to do, and the "invisible hand," which turns out to require a lot of greasing of palms; third is that when you implement market-based reforms, folks credit the market and not the reformers, so you don't build up any political capital for fixing problems. Obama got blamed for every little hiccup in ACA, most of which were the result of private companies gaming the system, and got none for delivering better health care while saving us billions of dollars, which the program actually did do.

One of the points I should have worked in above is that Trump's tariffs are not going to produce "good manufacturing jobs." Even if he does manage to generate more domestic manufacturing, it will only be in highly automated plants with minimally skilled workers, who will have little if any union leverage. And even that is only likely to happen after the companies have shaken down government at all levels for tax breaks and subsidies, along with the promise of continuing tariffs to keep their captive market from becoming uncompetitive.

I should also note that the main problem with the trade deals that Clinton and Obama negotiated had nothing to do with reducing tariffs. The real problem was that they were designed to facilitate capital outflows, so American finance capital (much of which, by the 1990s, was coming back from abroad) could globalize and protect their business interests from regulation by other countries, while ensuring that other countries would have to pay patent and copyright tribute to IP owners. The result was a vast expansion of inequality not just in the US but everywhere.

On the other hand, if what we wanted to do was to reduce inequality and improve standards of living everywhere, a good way to start would be by negotiating a very different kind of trade deal, as Stiglitz has pointed out in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (2006), and Making Globalization Work (2006).

Sasha Abramsky: [04-11] America Is Now One Giant Milgram Experiment: Back in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram "sought to understand whether ordinary Americans could be convinced to inflict pain on strangers -- in the parameters of the experiment, escalating electric shocks -- simply because a person in authority ordered them to do so." He found that they could, would, and did, which is to say they'd be as willing to follow Nazi leaders as "the Good Germans" under Hitler. This is one more facet of why the Trump/Fascism analogies continue to haunt us. Sure, Hitler was sui generis, but the history of his and others' fascist regimes has many parallels with right-wing reactionaries here and now.

Liza Featherstone: [04-11] Why Billionaire Trumpers Love This Dire Wolf Rubbish: "No, dire wolves are not 'back.' But pretending they can be brought back is a good excuse to gut regulations that protect real endangered species."

Cory Doctorow: [04-11] The IP Laws That Stop Disenshittification: I trust I'm not alone in not being able to parse that title. The main subject is anticircumvention laws, which are extensions to IP laws (patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc.) which prevent you not only from copying and/or reselling products, they also aim to keep you from figuring out how they work, especially so you can repair them. Personally, I'd go even further, and tear down the entire IP edifice. But laws that force you to serve the business interests of monopolists are especially vile, on the level of slavery.

Melody Schreiber: [04-11] Measles Is Spreading, and RFK Jr. Is Praising Quacks: "For every semi-endorsement of vaccines, the Health and Human Services secretary seems to add several more nonsensical statements to muddy the waters."

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-11] Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs? Short answer to his question is: the bond market. Wasn't that the same excuse Clinton gave for his lurch to the right after winning in 1992? (Although he has a long quote showing that Clinton's "lurch" was lubricated by Wall Street money at least a year earlier.) One quote: "Trump's really emphasizing the poor in Standard and Poor's, as if he wants to make Poor the new Standard." Another: "Those MAGA people are going to be so broke after Trump's tariffs start to bite they'll have to rent the libs instead of owning them."

Dean Baker: [04-13] The Trump Plan: Unchecked Power to Total Jerks: Of many posts worth reading this week, we'll start with the highest-level, most self-evident title. Also see, all by Baker:

George Monbiot: [04-13] Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature: And which truth is that? He blames economic inequality, and I have no doubt that's the underappreciated problem, but what is the mechanism by which impoverished people gravitate toward demagogues who will only make them poorer and more miserable?

Garrett Graff: [04-15] Has America Reached the End of the Road? "Donald Trump has forced the one crisis that will tell us who we are." Author calls his blog Doomsday Scenario. (Graff's book Raven Rock was about Cold War plans to preserve essential elements of government in the event of nuclear war.) I'm afraid I'm a bit jaundiced regarding posts like this: I've been watching the train wreck of American democracy at least since the mid-1960s, so I tend to be a bit impatient with people who only think to scream right now. Many similar posts on the site, if you still need to catch up (and yes, it's serious this time, not that it ever wasn't). I was steered to this one by No More Mister Nice Blog, which continues as one of the best blogs anywhere:

Nate Chinen: [04-16] Francis Davis, a figurehead of jazz criticism, has died. This is a very substantial review of the eminent jazz critic's life and work, published before I could even compose myself to post a brief notice on the Jazz Critics Poll website. I will try to write something more in due course, but start here.

Obituaries: [04-16] Back when I was doing this weekly, I wound up having enough notable obituaries to have a regular section. Since I stopped -- not just writing but reading newspapers -- I've been blissfully ignorant of lots of things I had previously tracked (not least the NBA season; I only looked up who was playing in the Super Bowl the day before, when my wife anounced her intention to watch it). However, I did finally take a look at the New York Times Obituary page today. I only decided to collect a list here after I ran across a surprise name that I felt I had to mention (long-time jazz critic Larry Appelbaum; I started the search looking for Francis Davis, whose obituary wasn't available, but should be soon). So I've gone back and combed through the page to compile a select list (or two, or three). The first just picks out people I know about, but who (in general) weren't so famous that I knew they had died. The second are more people I wasn't aware of, but possibly should have been, so I can partially compensate by bringing them to your attention. Finally, the third is just a checklist of names I did recognize but didn't include in the first two.

Finally, other names I recognize (no links, but easy enough to look up; * don't have NYT obituaries but noted in Wikipedia and/or Jazz Passings), grouped roughly by categories: Actors/Movies: Richard Chamberlain, Gene Hackman, Val Kilmer, David Lynch, Joan Plowright, Tony Roberts; Music: Eddie Adcock, Susan Alcorn, Roy Ayers, Dave Bargeron, Clem Burke, Jerry Butler, Marianne Faithfull, Roberta Flack, George Freeman*, Irv Gotti, Bunky Green*, Garth Hudson, David Johansen, Gwen McRae, Melba Montgomery, Sam Moore, Mike Ratledge*, Howard Riley*, Angie Stone, D'Wayne Wiggins, Brenton Wood*, Peter Yarrow, Jesse Colin Young; Politics: Richard L Armitage, David Boren, Kitty Dukakis, Raul M Grijalva, J Bennett Johnston, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alan K Simpson; Sports: George Foreman, Lenny Randle, Boris Spassky, Jeff Torborg, Bob Uecker, Bob Veale, Fay Vincent, Gus Williams; Writers (Fiction): Barry Michael Cooper, Jennifer Johnston, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tom Robbins, Joseph Wambaugh; Writers (Non-Fiction): Edward Countryman, Jesse Kornbluth, David Schneiderman.

Saree Makdisi: [04-17] Trump's War on the Palestine Movement Is Something Entirely New: "Never before has a government repressed its citizens' free speech and academic freedom so brutally in order to protect an entirely different country." The "different country" bit might be right, but one could counter that under Miriam Adelson they're just separate fronts for the same trust. But everything else we've seen as bad or worse in the post-WWI and post-WWII red scares, including the use of deportation and travel bans. What is most useful here is the reminder that pro-Zionists have been compiling lists and pressing academic institutions to cancel critics of Israel for a long time now.

Seems like a good day to print out my accumulated file of scraps and links, making use of the one-day window between yesterday's initial attempt at a catch up Book Roundup and tomorrow's regularly scheduled Music Week, before checking out for cataract surgery on Tuesday, and whatever disoriented recovery follows that.

I quit my long-running weekly Speaking of Which posts after the election, figuring I had shot my wad trying to exercise what little influence I might have had, and realizing I had little stomach for what was almost certainly to come. I've usually done a pretty good job of following the news, but I've never been a junkie. I learned early on that the sure sign of addiction was that withdrawal was painful. My wife and her father were news junkies. We took a long car trip to the Gaspé Peninsula once -- quite literally the ends of the earth -- and I noticed how twitchy they became as they were deprived of their news routines (so desperate they clamored even for bits of radio in French they hardly understood; I, of course, had my CD cases, so I usually resisted requests for radio). This became even more clear to me when I spent 4-6 weeks in fall 2008, in Detroit working on her father's house after he passed. I only noticed that the banking system had collapsed one day when I stopped to pick up some food, and glimpsed a bit of TV news where I noticed that the Dow Jones had dropped 5000 points from last I remembered. I had no clue, and that hadn't bothered me in the least.

So I figured I could handle a break, especially in the long stretch of lame duck time between election and inauguration, when speculation ran rampant, and everyone -- morose, paranoid losers as well as the insufferably glib winners -- would only double down on their previous expectations. I had made plenty of pre-election predictions, which would be proven or disproven soon enough. I made some minor adjustments in my final post, nothing where I could that the doom and gloom wasn't inevitable, but also remaining quite certain that the future would be plenty bad. As I was in no position to do anything -- and, let's face it, all my writing had only been preaching to the choir -- I saw nothing else to do.

And I've always been open to doubts, or perhaps just skeptical of certainty. So when, just before the election, my oldest and dearest comrade wrote -- "From what you wrote, I think the Republicans/Trump are not as evil as you think, and the Democrats are not as benign as you hope" -- I felt like I had to entertain the possibility. I knew full well that most of my past mistakes had been caused by an excess of hope -- in particular, that the far-from-extravagant hopes I once harbored for Clinton and Obama had been quickly and thoroughly dashed. (Curiosly, Biden entered with so little expectations that I found myself pleasantly surprised on occasion, until his war fumbling led him to ruin -- pretty much the same career arc as Lyndon Johnson, or for that matter Harry Truman.) Of course, I could have just as easily have favored the Republicans with hope. On some level even I find it hard to believe that they really want to destroy their own prosperity, or that their wealthy masters will allow them to sink so low.

I also understood a few basic truths that advised patience. One is that most people have to learn things the hard way, through the experience of disaster. This really bothers me, because as an engineer, my job (or really, my calling) is to prevent disasters from happening, but the temptation to say "I told you so" rarely if ever helps, so it's best to start over from scratch. (FDR's New Deal wasn't a masterplan he had before the Crash. His only firm idea after the Crash was that government should do something fast to help people. He found the New Deal by trial and error, but only because he was open to anything that might work, even ideas that others found suspiciously leftish.)

The second is that what people learn from disasters is very hard to predict, as the brain frantically attempts to find new order from the break and dislocation -- which even if generally predicted often differs critically in details. What people "learn" tends very often to be wrong, largely because the available ideas are most often part of the problem. To have any chance of learning the right lessons, one has to be able to respond to the immediate situation, as free as possible of preconceptions. (By "right" I mean with solutions that stand the test of time, not just ones that gain popular favor but lead to further disasters. Japan's embrace of pacifism after WWII was a good lesson learned. Germany's "stab-in-the-back" theory after WWI wasn't.)

The third is that every oppression or repression generates its own distinctive rebellion. Again, there's little value in trying to anticipate what form it will take, or how it will play out. Just be aware that it will happen, prepare to go with (or in some cases, against) the flow. (Nobody anticipated that the response to the Republican's catastrophic loss in 2008 would be the Tea Party -- even those who recognized that all the raw materials were ready to explode couldn't imagine rational beings doing so. This is a poor example in that the disaster felt by Republicans was nothing more than hallucination, whereas Trump is inflicting real pain which even rational people will be forced to respond to, but that only reiterates my point. And perhaps serves as a warning against paranoid overreaction: the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, was a real event which caused real pain, but Israel's lurch into genocide, which had seemed inconceivable before despite being fully overdetermined, is another example.)

So I knew not only that the worse Trump became, the sooner and stronger an opposing force would emerge. And I also knew that to be effective, it would have to come from somewhere beyond the reach of my writing. I may have had some ideas of where, but I didn't know, and my not knowing didn't matter. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that yesterday's Democratic Party leaders are toast. The entire substance of their 2024 campaign (and most of 2020 and 2016) was "we'll save you from Trump," and whatever else one might say about what they did or didn't do, their failure on their main promise is manifest. But I'm happy to let them sort that out, in their own good time. I'm nore concerned these days with understanding the conditions that put us into the pickle where we had to make such terrible choices. And putting the news aside, I'm free now to go back to my main interest in the late 1960s -- another time when partisan politics and punditry was a mire of greater and lesser evils, when the prevailing liberalism seemed bankrupt and defenseless against the resurgent right -- which is to think up utopian alternatives to the coming dark ages.

More about that in due course. But in everyday life, I do sometimes notice news -- these days mostly in the course of checking out my X and Bluesky feeds -- and sometimes notes. They go into a draft file, which holds pieces for eventual blog posts (like this one). I used to keep a couple dozen more/less reliable websites open, and cycle through them to collect links. I still have them open, but doubt I'll hit up half of them in the afternoon I'm allotting to this. So don't expect anything comprehensive. I'm not doing section heads, although I may sublist some pieces. Sort order is by date, first to last.

Mike Konczal: [02-02] Racing the Tariffs: How the Election Sparked a Surge in Auto and Durable Goods Spending in Q4 2024: "An extra 188,500 total cars sold anticipating Trump's tariffs?" I've been thinking about buying a new car for several years now, but simply haven't gotten my act together to go our shopping. Usually, waiting to spend money isn't a bad idea, but this (plus last week's tariff news) makes me wonder if I haven't missed a window. I still have trouble believing that the tariffs will stick: popular opinion may not matter for much in DC, but the companies most affected have their own resources there. By the way, Konczal also wrote this pretty technical but useful piece: [02-14] Rethinking the Biden Era Economic Debate.

Janet Hook: [03-18] Michael Lewis's Case for Government: Lewis's The Fifth Risk was one of the best books written after Trump won in 2016, not least because it was the least conventional. Rather than getting worked up over the threats Trump posed to Americans, he focused on the people who worked for the government, in the process showing what we had to lose by putting someone like Trump in charge. His The Premonition: A Pandemic Story took a similar tack, focusing on little people who anticipated and worked to solve big problems on our behalf. This reviews his new book Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a set of profiles of government workers mostly written by his friends.

Thomas Fazi: [03-24] Europe's Anti-Democratic Militarization: "Europe is being swept up in a war frenzy unseen since the 1930s. Earlier this month, the European Union unveiled a massive $870-billion rearmament plan, ReArm Europe." The proximate cause of this is Trump, whose election lends credence to doubts that the US will remain a reliable partner to defend Europe against Russia. These fears are rather ridiculous, as the US is almost solely responsible for turning Russia into a threat, but also because the reason the US became so anti-Russia was to promote arms sales in Eastern Europe (and anti-China to promote arms sales in East Asia, the main theater of Obama's "pivot to Asia"). There are many things one could write about this hideous turn -- Europe has been ill-served by its obeisance to America's increasingly incoherent imperial aims, so the smart thing there would be to become unaligned -- but one key point is that the center-left parties in Europe have given up any pretense of being anti-war, anti-militarist, and anti-imperial, so only the far right parties seem interested in peace. Even if they're only doing so because they see Putin as one of their own, many more people can see that interventionism, no matter how liberal, is tied to imperialism, and they are what's driving refugees to Europe. You shouldn't have to be a bigot to see that as a problem, or that more war only makes matters worse. Or that "defense" is more temptation and challenge than deterrence.

Jeet Heer: [03-25] Group Chat War Plans Provide a Window Into Trump's Mafia State: "American foreign policy is now all about incompetent shakedowns and cover-ups." On the Jeffrey Goldberg "bombshell", the events he reported on, and the subsequent brouhaha, which is increasingly known as the Signal Scandal (or Signalgate), more focused on the lapse of security protocol than on the bad decisions and tragic events those involved wanted to cover up. Jeer reduced this to five "lessons":

Darlene Superville: [03-27] Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for programs with 'improper ideology': Oh great, not only are the federal employees who act as custodians of our national history subject to arbitrary dismissal and possibly rendering, now they have to spend every day of the next four years arguing with Trump's goons about political correctness!

Liza Featherstone: [03-28] Welcome to the Pro-Death Administration: "From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn't really government's business anymore." Title was too easy, given the anti-abortion cult's "pro-life" conceit. Still, although there are certain kinds of death the Trump administration unabashedly favors -- capital punishment, bombing Yemen, providing blank check support for Israeli genocide -- the clear point of the article is the administration's extraordinary lack of concern for public health and any kind of human welfare. What's hard to say at this point is whether this frees them from any thought about the consequences of their actions, or their thoughtlessnes and recklessness is the foundation, and carelessness just helps them going.

Saqib Rahim: [03-28] Trump's pick for Israel Ambassador Leads Tours That Leave Out Palestinians -- and Promote End of Days Theology: Mike Huckabee, who started as a Baptist minister, became governor of Arkansas, ran for president, and shilled for Fox News, has finally found his calling: harkening the "end of days." Most critics of America's indulgence of Israeli policy find it hard to talk about Christian Zionist apocalypse mongering, probably because it just seems too insane to accept that anyone really believes it, but Huckabee makes the madness hard to ignore. That he's built a graft on his beliefs with his "Israel Experience" tours is news to me, but unsurprising, given the prevalence of conmen in the Trumpist right. On the other hand, "erasing Palestinians" is just par for the course. Huckabee's own contributions there have mostly been symbolic, which doesn't mean short of intent, but as US ambassador he'll be well on his way to an ICC genocide indictment. Too many more horror stories on Israel to track, but these stood out:

Jackson Hinkle: [03-31] tweet: Entire text reads: This is one of the most evil people in history." Followed by picture a smiling (and younger than expected) Barrack Obama. I don't know who this guy is, but he obviously doesn't know jack shit about history, even of the years since his subject became president.[*] But the bigger problem is what happens when you start calling people evil. It's not just that it throws you into all sorts of useless quantitative debates about lesser or greater evils, the whole concept is akin to giving yourself a lobotomy. You surrender your ability to understand other people, and fill that void with a command to act with enough force to get other people to start calling you evil. But to act with such force one needs power, so maybe what's evil isn't the person so much as the power?

[*] Hinkle appears to be a self-styled American Patriot (note flag emoji) with a militant dislike of Israel, succinctly summed up with a picture of him shaking hands with a Yemeni soldier (Google says Yahya Saree) under the title "American patriots stand with Yemen," along with meme posts like "Israel is a terrorist state" and "Make Tel Aviv Palestine again." So I suppose I should give him a small bit of credit for not inventing Obama's "evil" out of whole cloth (like Mike McCormick, whose latest book on Obama and Biden is called An Almost Insurmountable Evil), but all he does is take sides -- his feed also features pure boosterism for Putin and Gaddafi, as if he's trying to discredit himself -- with no substance whatsoever.

In other words, everybody's right, let's try it all, only, you know, win this time. The thing is, this prescription is pretty much what Harris tried in 2024, and somehow she still lost. Her approximate grade card on these five points: 70/90/90/80/90 -- sure, she could have bashed the rich more, but they reacted as if she did, and Bregman pulls as many punches on this score as she did, so it's hard to see how they could have landed; and her "big tent" extended all the way to Dick Cheney -- the people who were excluded were the ones who had misgivings about genocide (although I suppose the Teamsters also have their own reason to beef).

The problem is that even when Democrats say the right things -- many advocating policies which on their own poll very favorably -- not enough people believe them to beat even the insane clowns Republicans often run these days. Their desperate need is to figure out how to talk to people beyond their own camp, not so much to explain their better policy positions as to dispel the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and establish their own credibility for honesty, probity, reason, respect, and public spirit.

Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen through introspection. (I remember describing 9/11 as a "wake-up call" for Americans to re-examine their consciences and resolve to treat the world with more respect and care -- and, well, that sure didn't happen.) As Bregman's list of oracles shows, the standard response to a crisis of confidence -- which is the result of the Harris defeat, especially for anyone who believed she was saying and doing the right hings -- isn't self-reflection. It's a free-for-all where everyone competes with their own warmed-over pet prescriptions: the names in 1-4 have been kicking their policy ideas around for years, looking for any opportunity to promote them (although only Sanders and AOC have any actual political juice, which Bregman wants to tap into but not to risk offending his neoliberal allies; 5 is another reminder to water down any threat to change).

If Democrats can't figure out that war is bad, not just morally but politically, they will lose, and deserve to lose, no matter how bad their enemies are, even on that same issue. (Sure, it's a double standard: as the responsible, sensible, human party, Democrats are expected to behave while Republicans are allowed to run crazy.) If Democrats can't figure that much out, how can they convince people that public services are better than private, that equal justice for all is better than rigging the courts, that protecting the environment matters, and much more?

By the way, I've read Bregman's book Utopia for Realists, and found it pretty weak on both fronts. (Original subtitle was The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, which was later changed to And How We Can Get There).

I also saw a tweet where Bregman is raving about the new book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I wrote a bit about the book for an unpublished Book Roundup, which I might as well quote here (I'll probably rewrite it later; I haven't committed to reading it yet):

Jessica Piper/Elena Schneider: [04-02] Why Wisconsin's turnout suggests serious trouble for the GOP right now: 'Democrats keep overperforming in down-ballot elections, and the Wisconsin results suggest it's not just about turnout." I knew that night that Musk's attempt to buy a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin had failed, but I hadn't looked at the numbers, which were pretty huge.

I'm also seeing tweets about and by Randy Fine, a Republican who won a House seat from Florida this week. About: "AIPAC's Randy Fine calls for 5 year prison sentences for distributing anti-Israel flyers, calling it a hate crime." By: "There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood." I can kind of understand, without in any way condoning or excusing, where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir are coming from, but I find this level of callousness from Americans unfathomable (and note that Lindsey Graham is one reason I'm using the plural).

Matt Ford: [04-03] Take Trump's Third-Term Threats Seriously: Don't. It's hard to tell when he's gaslighting you, because lots of stuff he's serious about is every bit as insane as bullshit like this. The first thing here is timing: this doesn't matter until 2028, by which time he's either dead or so lame a duck that not even the Supreme Court will risk siding with him. But even acknowledging the threat just plays into his paranoid fantasies, a big part of what keeps him going.

Bret Heinz: [04-03] Rule by Contractor: "DOGE is not about waste and efficiency -- it's about privatization." I'm not sure I had a number before, but "Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on last year's elections." That's a lot of money, but it's tiny in comparison to this: "Overall, Musk's business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support."

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-04] Roaming Charges: Welcome to the Machine. Tariffs, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have to provide a sublist of tariff articles, so I might as well hang it here. Personally, I've never had strong feelings on tariffs or free trade. I have long been bothered by the size of the US trade imbalance, which went negative around 1970, about the time that Hibbert's Peak kicked in and the US started importing oil. I thought that was a huge mistake, that should have been corrected with substantially higher gas taxes (which in addition to throttling consumption and reducing the trade deficit would also have had the effect of blunting the 1970s price shocks). In retrospect, a tariff would have had a similar effect, and probably stimulated more domestic production, which would have had the unfortunate side effect of making oil tycoons -- by far the most reactionary assholes in America -- all that much richer. But tariffs aren't very good for equalizing trade deficits: by targeting certain products and certain nations, they can lead to trade wars, which hurt everyone. A better solution would be a universal tax on all imports, which is keyed to the trade balance. That clearly identifies trade balance as the problem, with a solution defined to match it, and disincentivizes retaliation. Perhaps even easier would be to simply devalue one's currency, which makes imports more expensive (without the clumsiness of a tax) and exports cheaper. But no one talks about these things, probably because few of the people involved seem to worry much about trade imbalances. They have their own reasons, and they don't want to talk about them either.

The classic rationale for tariffs is to protect infant industries from competition from cheaper imports. This makes sense only if you have a national economic plan, which the US has traditionally refused to do. (Biden has actually done things like this; e.g., to promote US manufacturing of batteries, but Trump has no clue here. Republican tariffs in the 19th century effectively did this, although they never called it this.)

Nor do I regard the issue as especially major. I think the people who have sounded the alarm over Trump's tariff plans have often exaggerated the danger. While the immediate effects, like the stock market tumble, seem to justify those fears, if he stays the course, businesses will adjust, and while the damage will still be real, it won't be catastrophic. But it seems unlikely that he will hold out. The reaction from abroad just goes to show how much American power has slipped over recent decades. When Biden was sucking up to Europe and the Far East, they were willing to humor him, because it cost them little, and the predicability was comforting. Trump offers no such comforts, and is so obnoxious any politician in the world can score points against him, or become vulnerable if they don't. While backing down will be embarrassing, not doing so will be perceived as far worse. I don't think he has the slightest clue what he is doing, and I suspect that the main reason he's doing it is because he sees it as a way to show off presidential power. That still plays to his fan base, but more than a few of them are going to get hurt, and he has no answer, let alone sympathy, for them.

David Dayen: [04-04] No Personnel Is Policy: "The Trump administration is accomplishing through layoffs what it couldn't accomplish through Congress."

Elie Honig: [04-04] Trump's war on big law. Not that I have any sympathy for the law firms Trump has tried to shake down -- least of all for the ones who so readily surrendered -- but this is one Trump story I had little if any reason to anticipate. Trump must be the most litigious person in world history -- James D Zirin even wrote a book about this, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits. One good rule of thumb is that anyone involved, even inadvertently, in 1% of that many lawsuits is unfit for office.

Nina Quinn Eichacker: [04-05] The End of Exorbitant Privilege as We Know it: Some technical discussion of the pluses and minuses of seeking trade surpluses, noting that the advantages aren't large, and that for an economy as large as the US the costs of running persistent deficits aren't great -- barring some unforseen disaster, which leads to this:

But what the Trump administration seems to really be trying to do is demolish that exorbitant privilege, by torching any desire from countries around the world to purchase goods from the US, and to form economic alliances that insulate them from the chaos coming from inside the US government. People ask me all the time whether I think that there's a point at which the US could have too much debt, and I've always said that something really catastrophic would have to happen for the US to be deposed as the currency hegemon of the world. Now I think we're teetering on the brink, and I hate it.

The author also notes: "Will these tariffs lead to more manufacturing? They're a painful way to get ther, with a lot of degrowth along the way."

Adam Tooze: [04-07] Chartbook 369 Are we on the edge of a major financial crisis? Trump's Chart of Death and why bonds not equities are the big story. I can't say I'm following all of this, but I am familiar with the notion that equity and bond markets normally balance each other out, so the idea that both are way out of whack seems serious. And the odds for the "Trump is a genius" explanation are vanishingly small.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday working outside on my shed. I got the screening done on the door side, and got the ramp treated with linseed oil and firmly attached to the shed -- it had been loose all these years, slid out of place, and was rotting around the edges, so work I've long been meaning to do. I expected a cold front on Wednesday to disrupt my work. We got some rain when it came through, and a tiny bit of snow when it settled down towards freezing.

I was plenty sore from the work, and wanted no part of the cold, so I resolved to stay inside and fiddle with trivial computer tasks. I updated software, which involved rebooting and restarting Firefox. I found I had a bunch of extra tabs open to various articles that looked promising, so I thought, why not just plug them into one of my Daily Log notebook entries, so I can close them. Then it occurred to me that it would be a bit easier just to create a blog post for them. It wouldn't be part of a series, just a scattered one-shot, like my recent Hobsbawm posts. I didn't finish in one day, so took a second. So this is it.

Pieces are sorted by date, with some clusters underneath a lead article. The tabs were mostly opened based on links from X or Bluesky, or sometimes from mail. I've made very little effort to sort through my usual array of sources. I've rarely looked for further articles, and haven't singled out any topics I wanted to pick on. I don't have any real agenda here. I'm just seeing where the wind blows me.

Semler focuses more than I would on economic effects of war -- coming out of WWII, many Americans (especially Democrats) saw guns and butter not as exclusive but as linked, although the effect has steadily reduced over time, especially participation. On the other hand, the risks associated with foreign wars have grown, and support for politicians who have blundered into wars has dwindled. Even if Biden wasn't in his 80s, his inability (or unwillingness) to end wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine cast doubts on his competency.

Semler does make points about the end of pandemic relief measures as a contributor to widespread economic hardship. Democrats did a very poor messaging job around them: first in not taking adequate credit for the measures -- which Trump only agreed to because the stock market was tanking -- and in not blaming Republicans for loss. Granted, they were meant to be temporary, but most worked well enough they should have been refashioned into more permanent programs. Had Democrats campaigned on them in 2022, they might have gotten a more favorable Congress, and extended them further, leading to a better story for 2024. A better Congress (including ending the filibuster) could also have implemented measures for limiting price gouging and excessive interest rates -- failing to do so, which one could blame squarely on Republicans (and a couple lobbyist-owned "Democrats"), had a big impact on the 2024 election. Instead, Democrats campaigned on the status quo as their big accomplishment, instead of as a work in progress where the big obstacle is too many Republicans in power.

Semler's big thing is making charts ("visualizing politics through a class lens"). Some more recent posts:

Rhoda Feng: [01-28] Pulled in All Directions: Review of Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I don't watch his TV show, but I have read his two previous books -- Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) and A Colony in a Nation (2017) -- and in both cases was impressed by his ability to take big subjects and focus them into tight arguments. This could be another one, but the topic risks being too amorphous to focus on -- I'm reminded of James Gleick's Faster, another great idea that the author, coming off a series of brilliant books, couldn't quite handle. Unclear from the review how much he made out of it, but picking Apple as a villain was a start I can relate to.

Thomas Frank: [02-19] Why the Democrats Fear Populism: Interview by Nathan J Robinson, of the author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), which taunted Republicans for never delivering on their promises (and inadvertently turned them into a more more dangerous party), and Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016), which chided Democrats for their own failures to deliver promised change (much less successfully), and which tried to remind Democrats that populism was originally a party of the left. Like Frank, I'm a history-minded Kansan, so I know the Populist Party, and have deep sympathies for them -- unlike your fancy elites (including Hofstadter), who tried to write the people off as bigots and fools.

Eric Levitz: [03-01] The twisted appeal of Trump's humiliation of Zelenskyy: "Why some conservatives took pride in a national disgrace." I don't think there is any issue where mainstream Democrats think they have a bigger popular advantage over Trump than Ukraine/Russia -- and are more wrong about it. Most Americans want to see the war end, either because they understand that war is bad for everyone or because they realize that a prolonged stalemate is all risk with no possible reward. But Ukraine has become an issue that the so-called Defense Democrats are very passionate about, and not just because many of them blame Putin for Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss. They had already pivoted against Putin from back when Clinton was Secretary of State, seeing the vilification of Putin as their meal ticket to another profitable Cold War, but with Putin's "election interference" and Trump's surprise win, they increasingly came to see Trump and Putin in each other's image. While Republicans had few problems with using Russia as a threat to sow fear and sell arms to Europe, they started to react when Democrats made Zelenskyy out to be their hero in impeaching Trump.

While Biden and Zelenskyy generally escaped blame for Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Biden had little trouble getting Republican votes to funnel massive amounts of arms to Ukraine, Biden's nonchalance about ending the war eventually trademarked the Democrats as the war party, paving the way for Trump's 2024 comeback win. Although there was no reason to think that Trump would be anything but worse than Harris on Israel/Palestine -- anyone who voted against Harris on that count did so from sheer spite, in total disregard for what was well known by then about Trump and his backers -- it wasn't unreasonable to hope that Trump would be able to put the Russia/Ukraine war to rest. That he hasn't done so shows us that he's as deluded in his own way about the war as Biden is in his. But also that he'd rather play the conflict for his fans than to do anything serious about it.

By the way, I think Levitz's explanations for Trump's "twisted appeal" are off base. Trump's performance -- and let's face it, the whole thing was staged as such -- appealed to his base because they want to see Trump in full bully mode. That's big part of why they voted for him. And Trump knows that his berating of Zelenskyy will drive Democrats crazy, reinforcing their commitment as the war party. (Which, needless to add, has once again worked like a charm, as when Slotkin spent a big part of her Trump rebuttal speech on Ukraine when she could have attacked Trump on firmer grounds.) I really doubt that Trump cares one whit about Bannon's Putin-friendly International Brotherhood of Fascists. (Bannon may well make good money off his hustle, but the autocrats themselves are mostly content to rule their own roosts: after all, their real enemies are their own people.)

Needless to say, just because Levitz misunderstands Trump doesn't make Trump right. (The right doesn't love Putin or Modi or Millei, not like they love Trump; at most, they envy that they are able to do things to their enemies that Americans cannot. They probably don't love Netanyahu either, but the envy there is really severe.) As diplomacy, Trump's performance was a complete disaster. He could have worked Zelenskyy over in private, then took a deal to Putin that could have let everyone come off smelling, well, not great but a good deal less rotten. As it is, he's squandered a big part of his influence with Zelenskyy, while exposing himself to the argument -- which admittedly doesn't bother him, because it's central to his Trump Derangement Syndrome defense -- that he's in Putin's pocket. Not only has he blown his chance to act as the great mediator -- and probably pick up a Nobel Peace Prize, like Teddy Roosevelt did for brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 -- he's given both Zelenskyy and Putin fresh angles to break up NATO, or at least to cut the US out of the equation. (Which would be a big deal, as the whole reason for NATO these days is to sell overpriced US arms to countries that don't need them. And arms sales was a major focus of Trump I, although Biden far exceeded him in that regard.)

Some more articles from Vox, which used to be my primary go-to source, but often these days I can't read at all:

Kenny Stancil: [03-05] The Case for a Shadow Cabinet: "High-energy progressives can provide a compelling daily account of everything going wrong and coordinate opposition to the Trump-Musk nightmare." I've mentioned this before -- I loved the idea first time I heard of it as regular practice in the UK -- and endorse it once again. One thing I would do is instead of staffing it with Congressional office holders, I'd set up non-profit foundation (which, sure, one would have to guard against donor capture) and hire experts and staff for each position. Democrats need a go-to person on each issue, all the more so as Trump "floods the zone" with his bullshit.

Stephen Prager: [03-05] You Really Can Just Do Things: "When Republicans take power, they abuse it. When Democrats take power, they refuse it." I've probably see a hundred pieces urging Biden to use executive powers to just sign an order, which he failed to do out of some respect or fear for some "norm" somewhere. One thing we're likely to see more and more of is arguments that Democrats should be willing to do any arbitrary crap that Republicans try, but the brands are so asymmetric that it's not even clear that's a good idea, let alone that it would work. Much will now depend on whether the Republican-packed courts will side with Trump, especially on cases where there is no precedent that they should. Democrats don't have that margin for error. Even though Biden did less than many Democrats wanted, much of what he did do didn't get past the courts.

Jeffrey St. Clair: [03-07] Roaming Charges: Political Personality Crisis in America: He's the one "pundit" I have been reading consistently during the long winter of discontent. Here he starts with a Max Horkheimer quote, after a title that recalls the late David Johansen.

John Ganz: [03-07] The Juggler: "Understanding Trump's Economic Moves." Title comes from a line from Marx, about Louis Napoleon III, also the subject of his "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce":

PS: I should also have mentioned this article by Baker (either here, or elsewhere where I mention Ezra Klein's interview with Daniel Shor): [03-18] Ezra Klein, David Shor and Elite Excuses: The Hermetically Sealed TikTok Influencer. Klein claims that the New York Times bears no responsibility for Trump's win because most Times readers voted for Harris, so Trump must have won elsewhere. Baker disagrees, and points out numerous cases where the Times distorted Biden's record on Afghanistan and the economy, framing issues in ways that could extend way beyond their direct readership. While looking at Baker's articles, also note:

[03-21] Patent Monopolies: The Biggest Tax No One Knows About "I have to give the right lots of credit here, they transfer more than $1 trillion a year, an amount close to half of after-tax corporate profits, from the rest of us to those in a position to benefit from govdernment-granted patent and copyright monopolies, and no one even talks about it."
[03-21] Donald Trump Declares April 2 "Tax Day": Tariffs.

Kayla Gogarty: [03-14] The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces: "A new Media Matters analysis found 9 out of the top 10 online shows assessed are right-leaning." That supposedly was a big part of Trump's success, but Trump would be the natural beneficiary of rage-fueled pitches to folks with little grasp of issues and little concern for their effects on others. I've seen arguments that we need to create our own counterprogramming to fill this space without own bullshit. On the other hand, consider:

John Ganz: [03-17] There Was Never Any "Fascism Debate". Maybe not a debate in the proper sense, but there certainly was a lot of blathering, with lots of people spouting their pet theories while talking past one another. Even this article, which is subtitled "They Refused to Engage," manages to slip past its supposed opponents without landing even glancing blows. I don't know why I keep being drawn into this question, but after kicking this article around, I finally broke down and ordered Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a 2024 book edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, even though it's missing as much as it includes. (I ordered the cheaper pre-election hardcover as it appeared to be identical to the post-election paperback, although the post-election case has gotten much more compelling.) So I'll probably write more about this in the future -- indeed, I probably already have elsewhere.

One side comment here for now: after Scott Lemieux mentioned "professional anti-anti-Trump pundits," I recalled Dan Nexon's comment here on "the anti-anti-Trump left," I started wondering what the hell (or more specifically, who) they were talking about. I don't have a good answer (although I made some notebook notes in researching). Provisional conclusion is that no such people exist, as least in significant quantity. It's possible that some confusion is caused by two other groups: right-wing trolls who react to criticism of Trump by belittling the critics (e.g., by diagnosing them with Trump Derangement Syndrome), possibly because they can't think of any credible defense of Trump; and those who are so focused on the evils of US foreign policy that they ignore or (naively, I suspect) defend Trump's schizophrenic posturing. The trolls may be "professional pundits" (in the sense of getting paid to spout nonsense), but they are not from the left. I have doubts about the others, too, but the solution is not to simply counterattack but to respond with clear thinking.

Of course, you don't have to be a leftist to oppose Trump. Pretty much everyone has plentiful reasons if only they can cut through the thicket of propaganda and bullshit to see them. We leftists are just much quicker to seeing Trump and his followers for the danger they present, because we sense immediately that they want to kill us, while non-leftists are often in denial until it's too late. There only was one Hitler in history, and he set an impossible standard for other would-be Führers to live up to, but once you allow that there can be a current generalization beyond the historical specifics of his club with Mussolini, you can start to discern the type, and to see analogies take shape, evolve, and permutate. And within that framework, you can anticipate actions, ask questions, consider how best to stop him (and realize how important it is to do so). Nobody is going to change their mind about Trump just because you -- or for that matter, John Kelly -- call him a name. But you might decide that he's crossed some line and become so dangerous that you need to overcome your reluctance to form a Common Front to stop him. And you might recall that even that sacrifice isn't guaranteed to work.

Part of the problem is that very little (if any) of what we grasp of current events can be perceived as such. It is filtered through our memory and far-from-perfect understanding of history. Here one big problem is that most people don't remember much, and much of what they've been told is wrong. Even the history of Nazi Germany, which is about as famous and notorious as anything 80-90 years old can be, is recalled by very few people, and most who have even an inkling do so through distorted clichés -- like the oft-repeated capitulation at Munich. But those of us who do know some history are likely to start wondering whether Jan. 6 wasn't Trump's Beer Hall Putsch -- an unlikely thought at the time, but where else have we seen the coddling of criminality by the courts, leading to installation in power arranged by rich elites and the abuse of that power not just to "violate norms" but to run roughshod over law and order? Maybe you can find some better-fitting obscurity, but no other analogy gets the blood pumping faster than fascism.

PS: I also ran across this (partly because Bessner seemed to be tagged as an anti-anti-Trump leftist):

Connor Echols: [03-18] Oligarchy in overdrive: "Two months into his second Term, Trump is making mere plutocracy seem quaint." There's a chart here where 48% of "likely voters" say the US is moving toward oligarchy.

Matt K Lewis: [03-17] Democrats have four theories to beat Trump. Wish them luck: Actually, wish them better theories. I'm a sucker for clickbait like this because I've thought a lot about tactics over the past year, both upside and downside of November 5. And while I don't claim to have the answers, it's pretty clear to me that these aren't them:

Eventually, rather than picking one, he throws his hands into the air and calls for a combination of all four. But read the fine print and watch them disintegrate: "This is the Tik Tok era, baby." "If they want to win, they need to talk like normal human beings again." "Politics is now show business, and Trump understands this. He's not a candidate -- he's a spectacle." Democrats need "someone like The Rock, Mark Cuban or Stephen A. Smith." (Link added for Smith, because I had to look him up, which in itself makes me doubt he's a "rock star.") And remind me again how effective Cuban was on the campaign trail with Harris?

Joel Swanson: [03-18] What Are We Allowed to Say? "How Trump's Department of Education has made it harder for me to teach Jewish Studies." The idea, of course, is to make it difficult to teach anything that goes against the Trump party line. The campaign against anything or anyone that remotely smacks of Woke or DEI is just the first front of attack, an easy way to show who's the boss now, without having to split many hairs. I didn't say "any" here, because as this article points out:

This is problematic for both obvious and subtler reasons. (Designating Jews as a privileged class sets them up for further backlash, as the author notes in his discussion of "the court Jew," although I can think of further examples; doing so to deflect criticism of genocide is disingenuous and even more likely to backfire.) Among other things, this article pointed me to several other pieces worth noting:

Kenny Stancil: [03-19] DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans: I haven't been following news and/or opinion site for months now, but based on rare sampling it's possible that The American Prospect has been the most reliable source of solid news about the extraordinary damage the Trump administration is inflicting on the American people. Some headlines:

Robert Christgau: [03-19] Xgau Sez: March, 2025 (also here): I mention this for the lines: "I'm a patriotic democrat/Democrat. So is almost everyone I know except a few out-and-out leftists." I must be one of the latter, because I hardly qualify for the former -- I haven't made a show of being patriotic since Boy Scouts (although I did eventually concede to stretch my legs at ball games -- it's not like I need to make a point at every opportunity), and I only registered capital-D when I realized there was no alternative. Still, nice to be acknowledged and respected, even though I'm not sure I've ever swayed his position on an issue.

On the other hand, I haven't tried all that hard, because I don't think we're far apart in principle. When he describes Trump as a "vindictive, pathologically resentful, racist greedhead," he's not just accurate, but speaking from values we share. When he says "barely literate" and "evil" I understand but would have put it differently. There are plenty of literate fools, notably his VP. I make a distinction between ignorance (what one doesn't know) and stupidity (what one knows that is wrong), and Trump is off the charts in both dimensions. But what bothers me most is that Trump has somehow managed to turn his mental defects into some kind of superpower: not only does it do no good to expose his idiocy, it seems to make him stronger.

As for "evil," that's a word I'm very wary of: it's been used way too often not just to decry bad acts from bad intentions, but to imply that the only recourse is to kill the evil-doer. The characterization of Saddam Hussein, or Putin, or all Palestinians, as evil has often been an argument for war, and an excuse to avoid negotiation, because how can peace coexist with evil? While acts can be judged on their own merits, intentions are much harder to understand, and people who throw the word around rarely seem to make much effort. On the other hand, as a writer, I sometimes find myself looking for some succinct word to sum up bad acts committed for no good reason, and "evil" is pretty tempting. Is Trump evil? Well, he certainly does a lot of bad things for bad reasons, and the more power you give him, the worse he gets, so it's easy to see why people might think that.

The one thing I would caution on is against confusing the person with the power. When I was a tyke, I learned that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Maybe the problem with Trump isn't so much that he is evil as that his accession to power -- first his wealth, then his fame, then his votes, and now his cult of the Unitary Executive Theory -- has allowed his fairly common animal spirits to overflow and to instigate bad acts, unfettered by his dearth of heart, soul, and brains. While I don't believe that Evil exists as a force on its own, Trump is as worthy of the word as anyone. (The historical standard for Evil is probably Adolf Hitler, who as a person, disregarding historical details, differs from Trump mostly in having considerably more brains. Whether Trump turns out worse or not so bad is still undetermined, but the main variable is power.)

Unwinding from that aside, the "vindictive . . . evil" quote actually came in response to a different question, one where the reader concluded, "I'm truly concerned for your soul," after "And you have no idea how despicable and damaging your ideologies are or how deficient your understanding." I'm tempted to say zero -- this reads like a quantitative question -- but perhaps the more important point to make is that ideas and understanding are personal, so only affect oneself, and as such have negligible effect. Ideology is not something everyone has a personal edition of. An ideology is a set of beliefs that is presented to others. That, too, tends to have little if any impact, unless one's arguments are extremely persuasive -- which is almost always because they are already widely shared -- or because one has the power to impose ideology on others. The obvious example (and certainly uncontroversial) example here is Stalin, but as far as ideology goes, in America most power is soft, proportional to one's fame, money, and institutional clout. Judging from metrics like X followers, Christgau can reach about 10 times as many people as I can (8000 vs 600), but Christgau has a pretty small following, compared to other people on the left I follow, like Astra Taylor (35k), Robert Wright (49k), and Nathan J Robinson (125k). Someone who's actually famous, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has 12.7M followers, so 20 for every one who follows Robinson. And she trails way behind Musk (219M) and Trump (102M, plus more on his own network -- 10 million?), but at their level, the more important advantages are in money and clout (including lawyers and lobbyists on call, media contacts and influencers, direct and indirect hires, extending in Trump's case to the whole CIA).

The only thing the letter writer has to worry about Christgau (or for that matter, the whole left, from top to bottom) is that our "ideology" might make more sense to ordinary voters than the much more widely disseminated fulminations of the rich and powerful.

PS: Here's an extra paragraph I wrote earlier but decided I didn't need in place. An earlier draft was more nitpicky about Christgau's terms, which reminded me of a common complaint about leftists who obsess over language (often derided as "political correctness," "virtue signaling," and/or "cancel culture"): I don't think it helps to go around "correcting" the language of people who have basic good intentions. Doing so makes you look snide and morally supercilious, and risks adding you to the list of grievances of people who could, if you didn't make such a point of insulting them, become allies. The right-wing reaction to "political correctness," "woke," etc., is a cynical scheme to politically exploit the tendency of some people on the left to criticize others over language. But just as I don't feel like correcting those who should have spoken better, I also don't blame those who do insist on correcting for their excess principle-driven zeal. To pick one obvious example, while I personally try to speak very carefully about Israelis and Palestinians, I can't blame any Palestinian for overstepping my mark, because deep down the complaint they're trying to express is a valid one.

Jasmine Mooney: [03-19] I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped: "I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was lucky." I have no idea how many stories like this are coming to light -- Mahmoud Khalil's is by far the most publicized one, probably because the Trump goons figure that targeting a Palestinian gives them the best possible spin on a policy they intend to target far more broadly, and indiscriminately. The Wikipedia page on Khalil notes: "Several journalists and human rights organizations have noted similarities between this law and McCarthyism." No doubt, but this is much more similar to the CIA "renditions" of suspected terrorists on foreign soil -- except that it's being done here in America to legal residents. McCarthyism, as far as I know, never involved kidnapping. It was a systematic program of slander, meant to bully people into "naming names," encouraging discrimination against those named, and thereby spreading the slander, aiming at isolating and marginalizing the entire political left, solidifying support for the anti-communist Cold War, and dividing and demoralizing the labor movement. The Trumpist campaign against DEI and other signs of "wokeness" has more in common with McCarthyism, at least as concerns its individual targets, although the political agenda is much the same. Related here:

Within days of the Gaza uprising of Oct. 11, 2023, I concluded that Israel has crossed whatever line separates genocide from whatever it is you call the state of menace and siege that existed in Gaza from the 2006 withdrawal until then: "occupation" didn't seem right, with no ground presence, and no semblance of control, but the barriers Israel erected between Gaza and the world, along with the threat of instant death always present (and periodically illustrated, lest anyone doubt Israel's resolve). Baruch Kimmerling got the concept right in his 2003 book, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, but it takes some effort to realize just how thin the line is between stripping a people of all political rights and killing them. It now seems clear that as soon as Sharon sealed the border Gaza was fated to end this way. The only question was timing. When would some small group of Palestinians to flip their switch from patient cruelty to frenzied slaughter? Or when would the pervasive racism of Israelis finally erode their inhibitions against committing genocide? The Oct. 11 revolt was marginally larger and more invasive than previous acts of desperation, but that hardly explains the qualitative shift in Israel's behavior. Under Netanyahu, Israel was already aching to take it all, to finish Gaza off once and for all. They hardly debated at all.

Since the uprising I wrote about the genocide every week until I shut down Speaking of Which after the November election. (By the way, my original term was the more literal "prison break," but the desperation behind it reminded me more of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1944, when doomed Jews finally fought back against Nazis -- I won't even claim any irony to the sides, as that had flipped 20, 40, possibly 60 years ago.) Since then, I haven't even checked out my most reliable source, Mondoweiss. I knew what to expect, including that the nominal ceasefire of Biden's last days in office wouldn't last once Trump returned. In particular, I predicted that Trump would approve of the eventual forced transfer of the last Palestinians in Gaza to somewhere. (Ok, I wasn't thinking of Uganda, but sure, I get the joke, even if I don't laugh.) And yes, even on this, his absolute worst issue, I already miss Biden. So this article just explains one small bit. I don't feel any need to search out more, although I did have one open tab, so I might as well slot it here:

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