Tag: Donald Trump

Republicans Speak Trump; Democrats, Esperanto

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens. —Aristotle, Politics

Supreme Court interior, Washington, D.C. Photograph in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Aristotle was an optimist. Try to visualize an old Greek guy in a himation as a talking head on one of the Sunday shows. He’s never getting an invite to the White House—and it’s not just because of the clothes. Limits on an American President? This American President?

It is grim out there if you are a Democrat. The House, gone; Senate, gone; White House, so far away the distance is measured in light years. SCOTUS, nauseatingly gone. Day after day, Trump, with the cunning of an outlaw biker President, uses his power to taunt, punish and utterly dominate anyone who had or has the temerity to oppose him. Based on the number of prominent people and institutions that have knelt before him, he’s darn good at it. He’s also darn good at speaking to his supporters, and particularly skilled at keeping his fellow Republicans in line. Trump speaks fluent Trump, and Republicans, increasingly, are learning repeatable, debate-ready whole paragraphs of Trumpiness to be used in almost any circumstance. It’s a “Newspeak” modernized from 1984, and it works. People understand it. They react to it viscerally.

How about Democrats? With some notable exceptions, they mostly speak Esperanto. Excellent at cocktail parties with your photos of the Prado (“The Goyas were amazing!”), but not all that useful for everyday conversation.

Full stop. I am not going on an extended “TDS” rant, or its post-November 2024 variant of perpetual Democratic self-flagellation. Newspeak is also a definite no. Let’s talk about power in our system, the extent and implications of it, how it’s expressed and constrained, and the political application of it. In short, let’s channel our inner Aristotle and survey the role of the Rule of Law in contemporary politics.

Perhaps it is best to state the obvious at the beginning: What role? The Rule of Law is a losing argument in recent elections—and it is a losing argument to make to politicians. Maybe that will change, maybe it’s a temporary phenomenon of the Trump Era, maybe it just lacks a compelling spokesperson, but many voters don’t care—and in fact, some cheer its failure.

What is it they are rejecting? What is the Rule of Law? Read more »

Ken Burns, Donald Trump, and the Lies that Bring Us Together

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt 

Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and his speech soon made the rounds on the internet. As is the way with commencement addresses, there were signposts pointing towards what awaited the graduates, and plenty of pablum on how to live a good life. But Burns also delivered his address as the nation was staring down the barrel of the 2024 election, and so in addition to vague life advice, he offered up ruminations on the near future.

Burns’ films strive to unite modern Americans through a shared understanding of the past. Personal displays of political partisanship would make that difficult, so beyond stumping for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Burns’ has always remained publicly neutral on the day’s political events and issues. Yet during his speech at Brandeis, Burns broke with this tradition, and voiced dire political concerns. Without naming Donald Trump directly, he warned of the potential calamity a second Trump presidency would bring.

Trump’s hyper divisiveness is in direct contrast to Burns’ plaintive, gather-round-the-maypole interpretation of America. And even nearly a year ago, Burns already grasped the threat that Trumpism poses to U.S. constitutionalism and democratic institutions. In many ways, Burns and Trump couldn’t be less alike, and Burns spoke with gravitas, as if he felt duty-bound to move beyond his comfort zone and warn the nation, even if he was preaching to the choir at Brandeis.

Yet the distance between Donald Trump and Ken Burns is neither so simple nor so vast as it seems. It may sound counterintuitive, but Ken Burns’ version of U.S. history actually has quite a bit in common with Trump’s version. I say this as a professor of history, and I think that if we’re willing to look past all their obvious differences, and identify their subtle intellectual overlap, we can perhaps learn more about what it means to be American today than we ever could from Burns’ saccharine films or Trump’s racist rants alone. Read more »

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

What Was So Great About America Again?

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »

Monday, January 27, 2025

In Search Of Normalcy

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Puck cover illustration, titled “Money Talks.” September 12, 1906. Library of Congress.

Senator Warren Harding had a big appetite: for food, for whisky, for cigars and cards and hanging around with his cronies. For spittoons and smoke-filed rooms. For another man’s wife when he had one of his own—Carrie Fulton Phillips, with whom he carried on (sorry) for about 15 years. Their passion ended badly when, in late 1919, he felt an urge for higher office, and she felt an urge for a little monetary compensation.

The best evidence we have is that both urges were satisfied. Carrie was consoled by a bit of largess. Harding stopped writing coded-but-torrid letters and focused more on a stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was as it had to be. It was an era in which the prurient was taboo—but it was also an era where few spoke on the record about it. Harding wouldn’t be the only aspiring candidate with a spotty record on fidelity. In general, boys will be boys, so long as what they do in private is kept private.

Urges aside, Harding “looked like a President”—handsome, good chin. He spoke like a President: mostly vacuously but with a roll that imparted a sense of some deeper wisdom. He was from Ohio, then, as now, a key state. He had influential friends, like Harry Micajah Daugherty, a powerbroker in the Ohio GOP, who saw him as the perfect compromise candidate—the man others would turn to after a bit of Convention turmoil. So, why not Harding for President?

That was Daugherty’s plan, and he executed it perfectly. In 1920, Republicans had a great many men who saw themselves as “papabile.” They even had several who had the standing for the job, but when the GOP assembled in hot, steamy Chicago in June, none of those men, qualified or not, could get enough traction to get a majority of the 984 Delegates. Harding was fifth after the first round, didn’t break 100 until the seventh ballot, and only made it to 135 on the eighth. Then, reputedly, the wired-in wise men of the Party—the Daugherty-types—went into a room and, after the prodigious consumption of tobacco products and alcohol, coupled with lively and creative horse-trading, made a decision. Harding went from distant third to clear first on the ninth ballot and closed it out on the tenth. Popular Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge was quickly selected as Veep. Read more »

Thursday, January 16, 2025

The Normalization of Sexual Violence

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

1. Bloodthirsty

Swedish journalist Kim Wall in a 2015 portrait taken in Trelleborg. Wall died aboard Danish inventor Peter Madsen’s submarine.

I have a morbid personality; sometimes I stay up late at night, googling serial killers and rapists. In the light of the computer screen, scrolling through articles on websites published by amateur sleuths, I feel the dark pull of the unspeakable deed. But my fascination isn’t for the blood and gore; there is no thrill bubbling up inside, no voyeuristic kick. Nor am I moved by an urge to understand the killers’ psychological predicament or the geometry of their desire. The pull I feel is not toward their person or otherwise banal lives, but that point of no return when the not-yet-killer gives in to the irresistible urge, forfeits his allegiance to society, and defects to the other side. How strong does that urge have to be?

I worry. The brain is an organ, it’s unreliable, prone to illness; a sick brain thinks sick thoughts. There was a point in the killer’s life, I think, when he or she hadn’t yet committed the crime, a point when it would have been possible to stop and reflect on the inevitable consequences—not a life of adventure and freedom, but the monotony of prison, of incarceration and boredom, isolation, enforced celibacy. Could this happen to me—could something push me over that tipping point, and I’d find myself a moment later in a foreign land? I am horrified by physical violence; a bloody scene in a movie makes me turn my head away. The mirror neurons in my body tingle in response when I see someone else’s wound. What happens to people who lose this visceral reaction, who grow numb and enter a realm in which the divide between the self and the other is so absolute that they live as though in a vacuum, sealed off, in communion with their darkest compulsions, indifferent to the living reality of another human being’s existence?

I scroll through reports of repulsive deeds: the Danish inventor who murdered the young journalist who came to interview him because he was convinced that the rush he would experience at the very moment he was annihilating her would be superior to all the orgasms he’d had previously; the Coloradan who strangled his wife and smothered his two children in the expectation that the life he would then be free to live with his girlfriend could be happy and carefree, unencumbered by child support payments and filled with the real-life equivalents of the emojis and exclamation marks that decorated his love letters to her. Unremarkable, contemptible people on nearly every level. In the first case: megalomania and a history of power issues and abusive relationships; in the second, murderous intent hidden behind a mild-mannered demeanor and a stupidity so dumbfoundingly obvious that the footage of his interrogation at the hands of a brilliant woman detective deftly guiding him toward claims that proved effortlessly refutable is almost a pleasure to watch. And yet: there’s something I’m not getting. What is it that draws me in? Read more »

Monday, December 30, 2025

The Melting Pot Melts Down

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? —Thomas Jefferson, 1801

“Spoiling the Broth,” political cartoon by E.W. Gale, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1920.

Last month, after 3 Quarks Daily published my “A Requiem For Post Mortems,” I got a direct email from a reader politely critiquing it. We exchanged emails afterwards, and I asked him if I could raise some of his points in a subsequent post. I’ve chosen one, not intending to diminish his other ideas, but because this one, where he said I’d “misse[d] first on the importance of the migration issue, i.e., that … Trump was right and Dems wrong on the need to control migration [and] that Trump controlled migration much better than Biden, who didn’t even try until the 3d trimester” has the most salience right now.

So, since Elon and Vivek and Laura Loomer and pretty much all of MAGA-land are talking about immigration, let’s go there. Let’s do something we have never ever been good at and talk about immigration.

We can start by acknowledging my correspondent’s point, although I would phrase it differently. Certainly, from an electoral perspective, Trump was right on the need to control illegal immigration. Biden didn’t do it until very late in his term, too late to help Harris in the election. It is not clear to me why Biden didn’t move more aggressively earlier, but, during his four years in office, aggregate immigration, legal and illegal, rose to a level not seen since 1850. I can ascribe to Biden a good-hearted intention—a genuine desire to ease the suffering of others—but it cannot be ignored that part of a President’s job is to be practical and even a little cold-hearted when the situation requires it, and Biden, for whatever reasons, wasn’t. We don’t have hard polling data that indicates that swing voters, and even some Biden 2020 voters, went Trump in 2024 solely because of the immigration issue, but it could not have helped Harris.

Would voters have been less critical of Biden’s approach if he had been able to curtail illegal immigration while otherwise maintaining a generous posture? Hard to say, not just because of the potency of the issue and the effectiveness of Republican messaging, but also because of the layering of how policy is determined and applied. Read more »

Monday, December 2, 2024

A Requiem For Postmortems

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

We might have been a free and a great people together, but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. —Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson Draft” of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. 

“Despair,” by Edvard Munch, 1894. Munch Museum. Oslo.

George Washington may have been the “Indispensable Man” whose strength we used as our North Star, Benjamin Franklin the cherubic, ever optimistic face we showed to the outside world, James Madison the primary architect of our Constitution, but, for raw emotion wedded to soaring eloquence, no other American of the Revolutionary period quite approached Thomas Jefferson. 

I have never been a big Jefferson fan. He runs a little hot for my taste. I prefer the brooding-yet cerebral miniaturist approach of Lincoln, who says, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

My passion right now is somewhat strained, and I’m concerned that being a free and great people together might be a bit far-fetched. Like just about everyone else on my side of the divide, I want to know what happened and why. How on Earth did we manage to break the GPS and end up right back where we started? 

Let us take a deep breath, and, with the cool professionalism of the Federal Railroad Administration’s Accident Management Branch, examine the wreck. Yes, I know, Trump has targeted the Agency and plans to roll back safety regulations on hazardous gas transit, crew member requirements and fatigue risk, but this is only December 2024, and we are still living the good life.  

OK, exhale. 

This was not a landslide, not actually, and not by any historical metric. Harris clearly lost, Trump clearly won, but Trump’s popular and Electoral Vote margins are more in sync with the trench-warfare-limited-gains of the non-Obama elections we’ve had since 2000. Similarly, it was not a mandate for anything, no matter how often Trump and his team in Congress and the media claim that.    

Why does this feel like a landslide, when historical context tells us it isn’t anywhere near one? Read more »

Friday, November 22, 2024

Make Art Dangerous Again

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed umbrellas, and battered car parts. These strange and playful conglomerations looked as though the bric-a-brac and refuse had been plucked together by some invisible furious force to house a spirit or daemon. They were, of course, carefully composed works by the late African-American artist Curtis Cuffie, one of the many ephemeral assemblages he created in the streets of downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

Cuffie installed his improvised ensembles of found objects on fences, window grilles, sidewalks, and traffic signs in Cooper Square, the Bowery, and elsewhere; they were always temporary, and only a few of his works have survived. Cuffie periodically lived on the streets around Cooper Square and his homelessness must have made his emotional tie to the treasures he found and wheeled around in shopping carts all the more urgent. Most of the works he created from this repertoire of materials were abstract, shrines that seemed to grow out of the flotsam and jetsam of a city in constant transformation; seen from a passing car, they flashed in the sideview mirror like otherworldly apparitions. But there were also figurative sculptures: ragged garments strung on wire and string and adorned with hats or wigs became animated spirits on a secret mission. Today, the few remaining works by Cuffie that were not taken down and destroyed by the police or street cleaners are shown and sold in the pristine white spaces of uptown Manhattan galleries, stripped of their context and also, perhaps, a good deal of their meaning. Read more »

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Frozen Thought

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.

So, we get on well in the world of medium sized dry goods, where things can be dropped on your foot and the train leaves at 7.00 AM.  Common sense carries us a long way here. For common sense is what we know already, what we can assume and the things we know how to do because we know what they are.

There are limits, though. We begin to run into difficulties when we apply the categories of the understanding – the normal way we think of things – into areas which look as if they are same kind of thing, but are not. I’m thinking of anything to do with long term change, of the way in which structures underlie what we see, of the complex interactions of the economy and politics. The kind of thinking that we might call common sense is the ‘spontaneous ideology of everyday life’, and it has problems with the larger and longer-range things that both run through our lives and have a history that we should try to grasp.

If we fail to make that effort, we typically find ourselves falling back on the notion that these are just things that we can assume to be the case. This can lead to quite problematic positions.  So, a friend of mine – intelligent, well educated – announced to me, apropos of Trump et al ‘half of America is just sick’. Perhaps on reflection he’d think that a bit inadequate, but it does represent the baffled contempt many have for the people who support a party and a politician who they see, rightly, as a threat to whatever democracy remains in the USA. Read more »

Monday, July 29, 2024

Chess, Greasy Pigs, and American Politics

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams

In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.

I like to think that President Biden played a bit of Kasparovian chess in delaying his withdrawal from the November election until after the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I don’t know if there’s any truth to my fantasy, but in many ways the timing was perfect. The entire Trump campaign was centered around defeating an aging president who was showing alarming signs of mental decline. Despite some real accomplishments like the passage of the infrastructure bill and multiple wins for conservation of the natural world, Biden appeared to be headed for defeat. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump galvanized an already cultish following and the Democratic Party was in the doldrums—vanquished and confused.

Oh what a difference a week makes!

At this writing, no one yet knows who the Democratic nominee will be now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, and frankly a lot of us aren’t that choosy as long as he or she has a pulse and beats Donald Trump in November. It appears that Kamala Harris will be chosen and money—the singular expression of enthusiasm in American politics—is rushing in like a storm. Harris raised more than $80 million in just 24 hours. Read more »

Monday, May 20, 2024

Movement Conservatism In The Funhouse Mirror

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

“Summer Schedule,” July 24, 1947, by Clifford Berryman. U.S. Senate Collection, Center for Legislative Archives.

The optimistic yet somewhat dyspeptic-looking gentleman to your right (quite appropriately to your right) is Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, a/k/a “Mr. Republican.” Senator Taft was the son of former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a devoted former member of Herbert Hoover’s staff, and an Isolationist who hinted that FDR had encouraged the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor as a way of inducing America to enter the war against Germany. He was also a fervent proponent of small government and big business, opposed expansion of the New Deal, and in 1947, helped override a Truman veto of the thoroughly anti-Labor Taft-Hartley Act.

In short, Mr. Republican was the real deal. In a 2020 essay for the Heritage Foundation, the conservative historian Lee Edwards wrote:

Before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater, there was Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. From 1938 until his unexpected death in 1953, Taft led the conservative Republican resistance to liberal Democrats and their big-government philosophy.

The man could have been President. He certainly tried—running for the GOP nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952—and, although he fell short, he inspired a generation of limited-government conservatives and left his name “Taft Republicans” to posterity. Taft, and Taft Republicans, are a starting point for what is called “Movement Conservatism.”

Beginning in the early 1950s, their ideas were adopted, co-opted, and expanded upon, perhaps most notably by the young William F. Buckley, Jr. and his National Review. Buckley and other Movement Conservatives went beyond issues like small government and anti-Communism. They explicitly rejected Abraham Lincoln’s vision that America was “dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal” and instead insisted that the Founders’ core value was the  protection of private property. The role of government was to get out of the way—except when advancing the interests of the owners of private property.  Read more »

Monday, February 26, 2024

Why Donald Trump Might be a Vampire

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

What do we know about vampires?

  • They are selfish to a degree that is sociopathic
  • They are consumed by vanity
  • They roar against anyone who contradicts them
  • Their skin is oddly discolored
  • They demand sycophantic followers
  • All they care about is fucking, feeding, and being complimented
  • They are capable of hypnotizing people into ignoring all their horrible vampiric misdeeds

At first glance then, it seems as if Donald Trump might actually be a vampire. But of course the thought is ridiculous. Just the hysterical ramblings of an unmoored Ukraine-supporter. The above is nothing more than a list of random, vague coincidences. Or so I thought. And then I found the following excerpt from Bram Stoker Steve Bannon’s journal.

3 May. Palm Beach.–Left NYC Trump Tower at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Washington, D.C. early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late because Amtrak is full of losers. DC seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and there were Democrats everywhere.

The impression I had was that we were leaving the North and entering the South; the most splendid of Confederate monuments over at the Capitol, which are here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Jim Crow rule.

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Atlanta. Here I stopped for the night at the Waffle House. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a steak done up some way with blood red sauce, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem. get recipe for Melania.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “steak well done with ketchup,” and that, as it was Trump’s favorite dish, I should be able to get it anywhere. Read more »

Monday, February 5, 2024

A Tale of Two Appliances

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

Our air fryer adorned with lyrics by Garrett Hedlund
Our air fryer adorned with lyrics by Garrett Hedlund

Part One

This story begins, as no great story ever has, with a dustbuster.

That’s right: A cordless, rechargeable handheld vacuum cleaner. If you don’t know, consider yourself lucky. It means you have had so much household help, that you never needed to recognize that dustbusters exist. Align yourself with George H.W. Bush, amazed, as he was, by a supermarket scanner.

A dustbuster once infiltrated my life and as much as I would like to make it the culprit of part one of this story, I blame two other operatives. For a dustbuster to be an actual culprit it would have to star in an anime film—or take on the alternative meanings assigned to it by the Urban Dictionary. (Don’t go there for this particular word, unless  you want to read about raunch—or worse—ice hockey.)

As for the actual culprits, they are my husband Jim Mulvaney and his late mother, Eileen O’Keefe Mulvaney. My husband is an intrinsically good guy. But nobody is perfect. My mother-in-law—whom I loved deeply—had her own flaws. Super practical, but  more about other people’s needs as opposed to her own. When we cleaned out her house, we found scores of nearly identical striped, button-down oxford shirts in their original packaging. I realized it was the shirt she wore on a daily basis. She was not a serious hoarder. She just hated going to the dry cleaners. Read more »

Monday, November 6, 2023

Sympathy for the Deplorables?

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

While grading papers last week, I turned on Max (the streamer formerly known as HBO) and watched The Insurrectionist Next Door. This documentary was made by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. I’d read a little about the film beforehand, and I was curious how the younger Pelosi would find a way to profile her subjects—characters in various amounts of trouble with the law due to their actions at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—without her kinship with the elder Pelosi getting in the way. But this connection turns out to be the central gimmick, and Pelosi makes no secret of it, casting herself as a shocked diplomat to Trump’s deplorables.

“What do you think of your dad’s song, ‘Fuck Joe Biden’?” she asks an older daughter in one scene as Dad, a White rapper with the words PROUD BOY tattooed across his forehead, sits with a younger child on his lap. Pelosi presents herself as frankly confused by the Trumpists. The White rapper, Billy Knutson, is thought by his family to be a good dad and good husband, and we watch his wife and children cry as they leave him at the prison for a six-month stint.

All leads of The Insurrectionist Next Door face, or have already served, time in prison. Another interviewee, the ex-pornographer Felipe Marquez, is shown baking a cake for Pelosi at his home in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where he is under house arrest. As Marquez tells his story, Pelosi refuses to believe it. “So a hooker broke up with you and that turned you into a Christian conservative?” she asks.

“I thought she was just a regular woman who would have a family with me, and we would watch conservative news together,” says Marquez.

Pelosi presses him on this, exasperated. “You’re telling me that the left is responsible for your prostitute girlfriend leaving you, and therefore you took it out on the left by storming the capitol and participating in an insurrection?”

“Men are weird,” he says, frowning while stirring in the eggs. Read more »

Monday, February 27, 2023

How Do I Know My Youth Is All Spent?

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

In the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire…. We’ll have term limits for Congress. And mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old. —Nikki Haley, age 51, announcing her candidacy.

William Henry Harrison, by Nathaniel Currier, 1841. From the National Portrait Gallery.

Yes, she did. Nikki Haley went there. Of course, her ostensible target is America’s best-known octogenarian (the guy with the malaprops and the Ray-Bans), but it could not be ignored that Former President Donald Trump tips the chronological scales at 76. Twenty months from now, shortly after the 2024 election, Joe will either be a jubilant 82-year-old; a grim, packing-the-china 82-year-old; or a wistful I-could-have-won-if-I-ran 82-year-old. Trump will be a 78-year-old Donald Trump—with title, without title, still a Donald Trump. In November of 2024, barring anything traumatic, these two will be whatever luck, genetics, and environmental factors cause them to be. If one of them also happens to be President-elect, then their issues will become our issues through 2028. That is something to ponder.

Haley may have been a bit blunt, in the process angering not only Former Guy, but perhaps potential supporters in Congress (roughly 1/3 of the Senate is at least 70), but the discussion of whether Dad should still be driving at night (or riding on Air Force One) is not an unreasonable one. We aren’t some sleepy principality somewhere, ruled by a hereditary monarch whose most impactful decisions involve whether we should subsidize domestic clock-making. This is a challenging world, and Dad needs to be up to it. There’s a terrific Ron Brownstein interview in The Atlantic of Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network. Rosenberg notes, “But with China’s decision to take the route that they’ve gone, with Russia now having waged this intense insurgency against the West, the assumption that…[Western democracy] is going to prevail in the world is now under question…. [I]t’s birthing now… a different era of politics, where we must be focused on two fundamental, existential questions. Can democracy prevail given the way that it’s being attacked from all sides? And can we prevent climate change from overwhelming the world that we know?”

Those are big questions to answer, and most of us, unless our politics occupy a fringe, should be deeply invested in the answers. They are also truly multi-generational, with the biggest stakeholders being the younger cohorts. My Boomer generation can offer something in the way of experience and expertise, but we’ve had a lot of time to work on solutions, and our results speak for themselves—we absolutely must give multiple seats at the table to younger voters. And, at some point, and that point may have already been reached, my Boomer Generation needs to follow Nancy Pelosi and to give way entirely. “Senior leadership” does not automatically mean “Senior” leadership. Read more »

Monday, October 11, 2021

The Coupist’s Cookbook

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog…

Mary Hoare, “The Three Witches from Macbeth: Double Double, Toil and Trouble,” Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

It could have worked. It almost did. It may in the future.

A lovely little coup attempt by Former President Trump and his posse. A little violence. A sprinkling of eager state and local “public servants” who planned to please the then-President by spinning gossamer tales of phantom voters and secret shredders. Brigades of lawyers, a few absolute kooks, but others both well-placed in government or in influential positions, and deadly serious. This last group included 17 State Attorneys General who looked in their mirrors each morning and saw “Future Really Important Republican Persons” staring back at them.

Let’s not back away from the obvious. January 6th wasn’t a single, isolated moment of acting-out by an angst-driven set of peaceful patriots driven mad by the loss of their idol. It was the punctuation mark on an intense stretch of unrelenting pressure by Trump and his allies to crush the democratic process. That the Ship of State eventually stayed afloat, that people, including many Republicans, pushed back enough to block Trump’s power grab, is to its and their credit. But, to quote Star Trek’s Scottie when the Enterprise was under assault, “I dannae if she can take any more, Captain!”

The more we learn, the worse it gets. Let’s start with 45. I don’t know whether Donald Trump actually believes much of what he says, but, late in life, he’s found a role he can play where accountability doesn’t exist. He knows his followers love a good show. He knows the media, even the so-called liberal media, would rather cover someone colorful and newsworthy than old, boring Joe Biden. And, through all of it, it doesn’t matter what the 1/6 Committee, or investigative reporters, or state prosecutors might find. He knows he’s untouchable. Others may pay a price, but not Trump. Read more »

Monday, March 1, 2021

Epilog: Peace and Horror

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Two profound horrors have plagued the world in recent times: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump presidency. And after years of dread, their recent decline has brought me a brief respite of peace.

Not that my peace was ever disturbed as much as many others’. One reason is that unlike the ICU patient or the undocumented immigrant child, neither horror has ever afflicted or assailed me directly. Another is that I have long been comfortable with impermanence, the reality that nothing lasts forever. Not the United States. Not me. Should the one be toppled by a dictatorial demagog or the other felled by a microscopic, multiplying coronavirus, so be it. All must end eventually.

Yet here we are, steps closer to but still somewhere short of the Great Undoing that the pathogen and the politician relentlessly dragged us towards. And only now, as their grips finally begin to release a bit, can I recognize more fully how each, in its own way, had previously commanded my attention, either undermining my peace or at least forcing me to redefine it.

First, the blinding orange glow.

Just the other day it dawned on me that not only hadn’t I thought about Donald Trump for a couple of weeks, but I also had not spent much energy charting the republic’s precipitous decline and decay. That is not to say I see Joe Biden as some kind of savior, or even have high expectations for his administration. I don’t. Nor am I convinced that the world is better off with the United States than without it. There are strong arguments either way. But regardless, to live in the United States during the Trump presidency, and to recognize the very real threat it posed to American culture and to U.S. constitutional systems and democratic and institutions, meant that you had to, at the very least, pay close attention to their ongoing perversion and erosion. Because it’s one thing to be intellectually okay with the United States’ eventual demise. It’s another to live through various stages of it while facing down the very real prospect of increased oligarchy, theocracy, nativism, and racism. Read more »

The Third Transition: Trump to Biden and the Return of Politics

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Some may belittle politics, but we know, who are engaged in it, that it is where people stand tall. And although I know it has its many harsh contentions, it is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. And if it is on occasions the place of low skullduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes, and I wish everyone, friend or foe, well, and that is that, the end. —Tony Blair, ending his last PMQ, June 27, 2007

Mask From UVA Center For Politics

Yes, that was Tony Blair, the man everyone loves to hate, but in those few short words, he managed to capture the highs and lows of a democratic system. Politics can be rough and tawdry, but debates can be substantive, goals high, and accomplishments, perhaps not as high, but still advancing the good of the many. In the end, you fight like cats and dogs, but you shake hands, accept the verdict, and prepare yourself for the next battle.

This belief, that there is always next time, is predicated on three key assumptions—that, in our system, there is, in fact, always a next time, that even winning coalitions will screw up enough to ensure that the next time may be viable, and that the loser (if the incumbent) will cooperate in the orderly transition of power.

That is the theory, and, for most of our history, that has also been the reality. Winning coalitions stay winning because they deliver policies that a majority support. They fray when internal discipline breaks down (usually because of unsatisfied desires or ambitions), and/or when they become so sclerotic, doctrinaire, or just wrong that enough of the public rejects them. Lincoln’s election in 1860 reflected a reality that the disparate needs of North and South could no longer be reconciled within the status quo. FDR’s trouncing of Hoover was the rational judgment of the voters that Hoover had simply failed, and would continue to fail. Trump’s victory in 2016 was a reminder of not only Hillary Clinton’s flaws as a candidate, but also Barack Obama’s shortcomings as a President. As much as I admired Obama, he didn’t do enough for enough people to earn transferable loyalty during a time when, as my friend Bill Benzon notes, the tectonic plates were moving. The voters really do choose. Read more »

White America Needs to Clean House

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

10 Ways to Get Rid of Your Old Junk | LoadUpWhite Americans get a lot of things wrong about race. And not just the relatively small number of blatant white supremacists, or the many millions (mostly over 50, conservative, and/or Republican) bitter about the supposedly undue attention, sympathy, and “breaks” that minorities receive; who insist actual racism was a problem only in the past, because Civil Rights “fixed” it; who believe anyone complaining about racism is just looking for an unfair edge in America’s level, color-blind playing field; who decry so-called “reverse racism”; who actually believe it is harder to be white in America than to be black or brown; or who simply minimize and downplay the existence racism.

Not just them. Even the small majority of whites who recognize that race remains a big problem in America often get it wrong. For example, many (most?) of them think that race is primarily about black and brown people. It’s not. Racism is primarily about white people.

Minorities suffer the effects of racism, and we must acknowledge and work to end that; however, you cannot cure an infection by simply placing a band-aid over the sore. You must clean out the wound thoroughly, surgically if need be, disinfect it, and then attack the infection at its root with antibiotics. In the old days it might have meant cutting off an appendage or limb. Similarly, racism won’t end or even be substantially reduced by strictly focusing on the suffering of its victims and making amends. Those are important and necessary first steps, but they don’t get at the core of the problem. Minority suffering is racism’s result, but racism is caused by what white people think and do.

White people empathizing with black and brown people is important, and it is vitally important that whites listen to minority voices. However, ending or substantially reducing racism will not come about until white people talk to each other and sort themselves out. Because racism is a white problem. Read more »