1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.
2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.
5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.
15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”
This is a good time to revisit Snyder’s original list as well. Like Cadwalladr, I think about this one all the time:
1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
I honestly did not read most of this article, but I wanted to draw your attention to some facts about the recent presidential election that you might find surprising:
While Mr. Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, he garnered just 50.1 percent nationally, according to the latest tabulation by The Times, just 1.8 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. When the slow-counting blue giant of California finally finishes tallying its votes, that margin is likely to shrink a bit more. The Cook Report already calculates that his percentage has fallen below 50 percent, meaning he did not win a majority.
Wherever it eventually falls, Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in the national popular vote will be one of the smallest in history. Since 1888, only two other presidents who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote had smaller margins of victory: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. (Both Mr. Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000 won the Electoral College, and therefore the presidency, without winning the popular vote.)
Mr. Trump can boast that he increased his margin in the Electoral College, winning 312 votes this year to the 306 he garnered eight years ago. But according to nearly complete totals, he secured his most recent victory by just a cumulative 237,000 votes in three states that, had they gone the other way, would have meant victory for Ms. Harris.
It’s fine for Trump to crow about his massive election win, but everyone else should realize how historically small his victory actually was. And how he might not have won at all if not for the pressure the Republicans have put on our systems of voting over the past decades (all manner of voter suppression), the billionaires propping up his campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars when he couldn’t keep pace with his opponent in non-PAC fundraising, and the will of post-pandemic voters worldwide who wanted the incumbents out no matter what. Mandate schmandate.
Note: You wouldn’t even need all of those “cumulative 237,000 votes” to go the other way β all you’d need is half + 1. So we’re talking about ~118,500 voters out of ~155 million. That’s razor thin.
The NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board, which I’m reproducing here in its entirety:
What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument. If you were inclined to follow these links, you could spend hours reading about how unfit Trump is for office.
A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats β bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!
How the links are deployed is an integral part of how the piece is read; it’s a style of writing that is native to the web, pioneered by sites like Suck in the mid-90s. It looks so simple, but IMO, this is top-notch, subtle information design.
No seriously, how is everyone doing today? We’re coming down to the wire on the most cuckoo bananapants presidential election campaign in recent memory. There’s so much at stake and there are so many unknowns, a potent cocktail for anxiety. If that’s where you are right now, I hope you know you’re not alone. If you’re feeling confident, that’s great and I’m happy for you. If my Instagram feed is any indication, many of you have already voted and are volunteering to knock on doors, phone bank, or to cure ballots in swing states β thanks so much for doing that! (Greg Pak’s list of last minute actions is a good place to start if you want to pitch in.)
Me? Last week was a rough one β lots of anxiety about the election and other things. I’m feeling better this morning; I got out for some exercise this weekend, spent some really nice time with my son, and generally kept social media at arm’s length. Even though it’s pretty cold here today, I’m heading out for a bike ride this afternoon to load up on some good dopamine. I started season two of The Diplomat last night and it seems to have picked up right where it left off last season β the perfect diversionary viewing for me.
But I’m also struggling to work out what to post here this week. I am very nearly done with anything political in nature (I don’t want to contribute to doomscrolling) but posting anything else at this critical juncture, when people’s actual lives and freedoms are on the line, seems frivolous. I suppose I’ll figure it out, but heads up: things might be a little lighter than usual around here β or maybe the opposite? We’ll see.
In the meantime, if you don’t mind sharing, let us know how you’re doing in the comments.
This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances. The first half is a short lesson on how our present Constitution came to be, which might differ slightly from the version you learned in school:
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain β and contain β the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”
The second part of the piece plainly and succinctly lays out the stakes of a second Trump presidency (emphasis mine):
America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
We don’t, in 2024, hear much talk of guardrails anymore. And for good reason. The guardrails failed. Every single one of them. The Republican Party failed to police its own boundaries, welcoming Trump when it should have done everything it could to expel him. The impeachment process, designed to remove a rogue president, was short-circuited, unable to work in a world of rigid partisan loyalty. The criminal legal system tried to hold Trump accountable, but this was slow-walked and sabotaged by sympathetic judges (and justices) appointed by Trump or committed to the Republican Party.
When the states tried to take matters into their own hands, citing the clear text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court stepped in to rewrite the amendment, turning a self-executing prohibition on insurrectionists in office into a mechanism that required a congressional vote those justices knew would never come.
Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media β too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.
I love Patel’s use of the collective action problem to frame his argument. From earlier in the piece:
Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.
I also thought this was a really interesting observation regarding the challenge facing Democrats (of fitting moderate conservatives, the far-left, and everyone else who isn’t in favor of authoritarianism under the same tent):
Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.
Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means β and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to β the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
An attempt to rapidly deport twelve million people will also change everyone else. As Trump has said, such an action will have to bring in law enforcement at all levels. Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe. And of course the diversion of law enforcement resources to deportation means that crimes will not be investigated or prosecuted. So some people will be radically less safe, but everyone regardless of status will in fact be less safe.
Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation then becomes a culture. If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented. This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader. You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself. This painful choice can be avoided not at a later point but only now, by voting against mass deportations.
The Trump campaign is telling us straight out that this is their plan β they are not hiding it! at all! β and historians are letting us know what has happened in similar situations in the past and it’s just not all that confusing or complicated to understand. Even if they try and don’t succeed, it’s going to be absolutely brutal. Those are the stakes.
Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.
I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.
The hero of one of my favorite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.
There are a lot of honest people in Russia-tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.
The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.
There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?
The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.
Two years later, Navalny was dead, murdered by Russia’s leader, dictator Vladimir Putin. I do not think it is hyperbole to read Navalny’s words as a warning, a harbinger of what happens to a country and its people when they come under undemocratic leadership.
I got a lot out of this interview with The Message author Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart for The Daily Show.
Best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates sits down with Jon Stewart to talk about his latest book, “The Message,” and reconciling past and present vestiges of oppression. They discuss his visits to Senegal, South Carolina, and The West Bank, how past atrocities like slavery and the holocaust can create a zero-sum game of control, the need for safety and statehood despite morally problematic systems, his exposure to Palestinian stories that have been hidden in American media, understanding the physical traumas of the Black community, and the purpose in writing to shape the world around us.
When we learned about the extent of far-right extremism, Hitler worship and Holocaust denial on Substack, you pressed us to investigate. And when we published our findings, you overwhelmingly encouraged us to find a new home on the web.
During this time, I talked to several high-profile writers who collectively make millions of dollars writing on Substack. Their readers were also asking them to leave, too. In the end, almost none of them did. They bet that they could simply put their heads down and wait for the controversy to pass. And it worked!
Substack’s Nazi problem continues, but the news cycle has moved on. I suspect it will swing back around eventually. But in the meantime, I’m proud that when Platformer was asked to actually live its values β to stand up for the idea that basic content moderation is good and necessary β we did.
Having principles can be annoying and expensive. (And make you insufferable to talk to at parties.) But it beats the alternative.
Huge respect to Newton and the Platformer team for making the move from Substack even though it was inconvenient and painful.
These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new β in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” β but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.
It’s really disheartening and maddening to witness how the press has failed to meet this important moment in history.
See also Jamelle Bouie’s NY Times piece this morning, straining against the normalizing currents at his own publication to actually call out Trump’s “incoherence” and “gibberish” and parse out what he’s actually trying to tell us about his plans for a second term:
Trump, in his usual, deranged way, is elaborating on one of the key promises of his campaign: retribution against his political enemies. Elect Trump in November, and he will try to use the power of the federal government to threaten, harass and even arrest his opponents. If his promise to deport more than 20 million people from the United State is his policy for rooting out supposedly “foreign” enemies in the body politic, then this promise to prosecute his opponents is his corresponding plan to handle the nation’s domestic foes, as he sees them. Or, as he said last year in New Hampshire, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
When you woke up this morning, you probably didn’t think the most interesting & thought-provoking thing you’d read today was about Colonial Williamsburg. Laura Jedeed’s piece for Politico, Where MAGA Granddads and Resistance Moms Go to Learn America’s Most Painful History Lessons, is about how folks at the living museum strive to accurately interpret the past while remaining accessible to those who might feel challenged by those truths.
In this excerpt, Jedeed describes how long-time museum interpreter Stephen Seals approaches portraying James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved man who served as a spy for the American forces during the Revolution:
James Armistead Lafayette’s story encapsulates the paradox at the heart of America’s founding; enslavers who founded a nation to preserve liberty from tyrants. “To get a guest to understand that β to many of them it completely destroys their self-worth,” Seals said. “My job is to minimize their feelings of that destruction.”
That job can require a deft hand and emotional control, as when an older Southern man visiting Colonial Williamsburg with his granddaughter complained about what he saw as the museum’s hyperfocus on American chattel slavery when slavery has existed for millennia. “He’s like, ‘I’m kind of an expert in that sort of thing,’” Seals recalls. “My mind went, ding ding ding! Because that’s also something that I’ve read a lot about as well, which means I can have a conversation.” Seals asked the guest about the realities of enslavement in Greece and Rome, and how those institutions differed from slavery in Colonial America. The differences quickly became apparent. Classical slavery was not hereditary or explicitly based on theories of superior and inferior races, and enslaved people in Greece and Rome had many avenues to attain freedom and become full citizens.
“He actually said to me, ‘I never thought of it that way,’” Seals said. “I didn’t have to embarrass him in front of his granddaughter, which would have completely shut him down.”
In some ways, this was the exchange between two equals that it appeared to be on the surface. But Seals had to do most of the emotional and intellectual work to bridge that divide. At bottom, interpretation is a customer service job, and the power imbalance in favor of the guests is baked in. “Sometimes I’ve got to put myself to the side β actually, most of the time I have to put myself to the side β to think about where [the guests] are and what they need,” Seals remarked.
Read the whole thing, it’s interesting throughout.
I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped shape the logo of every Democratic president in the twenty-first century (hflr.io/biden, hflr.io/obama), let me say from experience that campaign typography is *completely* unlike graphic design: it’s a strange and fascinating agility sport, marked by limited information, a ticking clock, unimaginable pressures, and serious consequences. It’s Iron Chef, but in Adobe Illustrator.
Imagine a client asking for a logo in 24 hours, but not telling you the name of the company! That’s what it’s like to participate in the veepstakes. Nobody who commented on the Biden/Harris logo realized that Robyn Kanner and I were busy developing *dozens* of possible identities in parallel, completely firewalled from the political side of things, awaiting the news until 40 minutes before press time.
This piece by Lydia Polgreen on The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids is so good β straightforward and informative, especially when compared to the incoherent nonsense that the NY Times has run about trans people over the past few years. The piece is about, in Polgreen’s words, “the sneaky effort to use what looks like science to justify broad intrusions in our personal freedom”.
I usually don’t do this, but I’ve excerpted the article’s conclusion here because it just gets right to the heart of an urgent concern: the freedom to control our own bodies.
Imagine that your health care required objective justification, if access to birth control or erectile dysfunction medications required proving that you were having monogamous sex, or good sex, or sex at all. Or if fertility care was provided only if you could prove that becoming a parent would make you happy, or you would be a good parent. Or that abortion would be available only if you could prove that it would improve your life.
In a free society we agree that these are private matters, decided by individuals and their families, with the support of doctors using mainstream medical science as a guide, even when they involve children. We invite politicians and judges into them at great peril to our freedom.
What “Center” Is That, Exactly? A.R. Moxon on the continuing pleas from political “centrists” for the Democratic Party to find common ground with a party dedicated to extremist white Christian nationalism and whose party members joyously brandish MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at party conventions.
It must be a center that exists between two points one of which pretty clearly reads MASS DEPORTATION NOW, and I suppose Chait would have it that the other point is apparently so far to the right of basic acts of governance like feeding hungry schoolchildren that such acts don’t appear in between. The center is apparently now a cruel enough place that decency doesn’t live there, and Chait, who has never believed that Democrats should ever do anything other than seek the votes of those who hate decency, now believes that Democrats should once again run away from decency, as a strategic matter.
So maybe “the center” isn’t a position. Maybe it’s an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of “us,” and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.
Maybe “the center” is just whatever no-man’s land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we’ve travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won’t have to do the work of opposing them.
I think it might be that.
Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
Immediately after Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s VP pick, the memes started. Most zeroed in on Walz’s potent Midwestern dad energy; he’s the kind of guy who would help a neighbor fix a car, pick you up from the airport, or bring you some soup when you’re sick. For his supporters, Walz is bringing the same kind of energy and hope to the presidential race as Obama did in 2008 and Bernie Sanders did in 2016.
And so of course someone made Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle; it’s a collection of things Walz would do for you because he’s just that kinda guy.
Each time you refresh the page, you get a new saying; some of the other ones:
Tim Walz remembers where you parked your car.
Tim Walz has room for a little slice of pie.
Tim Walz is glad to give you a hand with your stroller down those stairs.
Honan even turned the site into a book. A few months later, folks on Twitter started sharing all the wonderful things that would happen when Obama won the Democratic nomination and I collected a bunch of those tweets into this site.
Thus concludes this short episode of Know Your Meme. βοΈ
Michelle Goldberg writes about a new book, a fascist manifesto, written by antisemite and white nationalist Jack Posobiec (and his ghostwriter) called Unhumans.
The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings β that they are, as the title says, unhumans β and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.
As Goldberg notes, the endorsement of the book by prominent Republicans is a reminder of how extremist and far away from reality the Republican Party is now. Trump’s running mate JD Vance wrote a blurb for it and so did Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor. Steve Bannon wrote the foreword. These guys are weird and unhinged and dangerous because they are somehow at the center of the Republican Party. (See also Project 2025.)
3. Walz credits his rural upbringing for his values: “A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I’m at today. Those are real stories in small towns.”
6. Walz’s father, a school administrator, died of lung cancer when Walz was 19. Walz said this moment fueled his views on health care access: “The last week of my dad’s life cost my mom a decade of going back to work to pay off hospital debt.”
15. He was the faculty adviser for [Mankato West High School’s] first gay-straight alliance chapter in 1999.
24. Walz won re-election five times in southern Minnesota’s mostly rural, conservative 1st District, serving in the House for 12 years.
28. Walz once earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association and the group’s endorsement. In 2016, Guns & Ammo magazine included him on its list of top 20 politicians for gun owners.
29. He later denounced the NRA and supported gun-control measures, such as an assault weapons ban. During his first campaign for governor in 2018, the NRA completely downgraded his rating. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”
33. Walz frequently defends his policies, such as the universal school meals bill signed into Minnesota law earlier this year, as common sense: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn and women are making their own healthcare decisions,” Walz said jokingly.
Klein: If a Democrat is president in 2025 and there’s a governing trifecta, what do you think Democrats should pass first? What would make the biggest difference for people?
Walz: I think paid family and medical leave. We’re the last nation on earth basically to not do this. It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude β strengthen the family.
If JD Vance is right about this: that we should make it easier for families to be together, then make sure that after your child’s born, that you can spend a little time with them. That’d be a great thing.
K: Great way of also seeing who in politics is actually pro-family and who just likes to talk about it.
“Right now, Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Walz said last year. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”
Reading that quote, I immediately thought of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society; there’s a great podcast series about it hosted by Melody Barnes.
At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.
In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.
The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement.
And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.
The freedom not just to get by but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care, where no one is above the law.
I think a lot about this 2018 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Buttigieg (when he was still mayor of South Bend, Indiana) in which he offers his thoughts on recasting “concepts that conservatives have traditionally ‘owned’ β like freedom, family, and patriotism β in more progressive terms”.
You’ll hear me talk all the time about freedom. Because I think there is a failure on our side if we allow conservatives to monopolize the idea of freedom - especially now that they’ve produced an authoritarian president. But what actually gives people freedom in their lives? The most profound freedoms of my everyday existence have been safeguarded by progressive policies, mostly. The freedom to marry who I choose, for one, but also the freedom that comes with paved roads and stop lights. Freedom from some obscure regulation is so much more abstract. But that’s the freedom that conservatism has now come down to.
Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge β but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them.
I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.
Clean drinking water is freedom. Good public education is freedom. Universal healthcare is freedom. Fair wages are freedom. Policing by consent is freedom. Gun control is freedom. Fighting climate change is freedom. A non-punitive criminal justice system is freedom. Affirmative action is freedom. Decriminalizing poverty is freedom. Easy & secure voting is freedom. This is an idea of freedom I can get behind.
There is the freedom to control β to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit β to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor β to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace β to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
The Declaration of Independence stated our fledgling nation’s assertion that people are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. It’s pretty clear which of the two parties’ interpretations of freedom hews closer to that assertion.
Shadow Network is the best book I’ve read that explains the Republicans’ strategy over the last 50 years. You will come to hate Paul Weyrich, and rightfully so.
Anthea Butler is the chair of religion at University of Pennsylvania. [White Evangelical Racism] ties together the connection among Rs, evangelicals and the racism it tries to hide.
And her top documentary pick:
[Bad Faith] is *the* best documentary on the topic and if you don’t do anything else, watch this. It’s free on Tubi and 99 cents on other outlets.
Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide β the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention β draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.
For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.
Again, this stuff is all right out in the open β no reading between the lines required.
In 1934, Dorothy Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany for writing critically & unfavorably about the regime and its leader, Adolf Hitler:
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.
Back in America as one of the most famous journalists and women of her time, she spent the rest of the 30s and early 40s trying to warn the nation of fascism both here and abroad. In 1941, she wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine called Who Goes Nazi?, in which she muses about which guests at a party would become Nazis.
The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him β or his wife β to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him β he despises, for instance, Mr. B β because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language β though they have never met him.
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal β a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him β intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
I can’t decide which of the plans in these three excerpts is most terrifying:
Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.
The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”
Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
You don’t even need to be a scholar of authoritarianism to recognize where this is going β it’s not like they are being secretiveabout it.
I’ve been waiting, sitting at my desk with hands tented, for historian Heather Cox Richardson to write about Project 2025 and just now I found out that she did so back in March, because of course.
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means making “family authority, formation, and cohesion” a top priority and using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.
The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”
Dismantling the administrative state in this document starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce-about 2 million people work for the U.S. government-and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
On Friday, journalist Daniel Miller noted that purging the civil service is a hallmark of dictators, whose loyalists then take over media, education, courts, and the military. In a powerful essay today, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that with the government firmly in the hands of a dictator’s loyalists, “things like water or schools or Social Security checks” depend on your declaration of loyalty, and there is no recourse. “You cannot escape to the bar or the bowling alley, since everything you say is monitored,” and “[e]ven courageous people restrain themselves to protect their children.”
It’s worth reading in full. I wish Richardson did better at citing her sources than an unordered list of links at the end of each article (and also, I wish she weren’t on Substack), so here’s the Daniel Miller note from the excerpt above:
You know who else purged the civil service: OrbΓ‘n, ErdoΔan, ChΓ‘vez, Milosevic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Pinochet… There was also this guy in Germany in 1933 who purged the civil service months after taking power.
The new bureaucrats will have no sense of accountability. Basic government functions will break down. Citizens who want access will learn to pay bribes. Bureaucrats in office thanks to patronage will be corrupt, and citizens will be desperate. Quickly the corruption becomes normal, even unquestioned.
As the fantasy of strongman rule fades into everyday dictatorship, people realize that they need things like water or schools or Social Security checks. Insofar as such goods are available under a dictatorship, they come with a moral as well as a financial price. When you go to a government office, you will be expected to declare your personal loyalty to the strongman.
If you have a complaint about these practices, too bad. Americans are litigious people, and many of us assume that we can go to the police or sue. But when you vote a strong man in, you vote out the rule of law. In court, only loyalism and wealth will matter. Americans who do not fear the police will learn to do so. Those who wear the uniform must either resign or become the enforcers of the whims of one man.
Since Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016, I’ve experienced countless people claiming to now “understand” where I come from and what Appalachian people are like. But they don’t think of my childhood watching my dad lose himself while arranging music on his piano or my grandfather tenderly nurturing plants in his ridiculously large garden. Instead, they imagine the stereotypes of J.D. Vance’s version of Appalachia, where the entire region is made up of poor rural white people consumed with violence who have no one to blame but themselves for their life circumstances.
Winchester goes on to recommend fifteen books about Appalachia that will provide a clearer view of the region and the people who live there. They include:
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte. “If you’re still wondering why Hillbilly Elegy is so problematic, I’d suggest starting with What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia.”
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks. “In this poetry collection, she laments how Black Appalachians are all too often left out of narratives about Appalachia.”
Any Other Place by Michael Croley. “Croley’s perspective as a Korean American informs his writing as his stories deal with many topics around race, identity, and belonging.”
When These Mountains Burn by David Joy. “When These Mountains Burn features two men deeply impacted by the opioid crisis in Appalachia.”
Project 2025 is conservatives’ vision for an American society that’s a result of gutting all the gains made by the civil rights, abortion rights, LGBTIA+ rights, voting rights and environmental rights movements in order to establish an authoritarian government run by loyalists committed to serving a white, Christian nationalist agenda.
What I like about that description is that the authors of the plan wouldn’t really disagree with it. The plan’s uncomplicated & proud sincerity in wanting to roll back all the rights fought for in this country since the 1950s is what makes it so alarming.
One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump β a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.
Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.
Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations β including the terms “sexual orientation”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, and “reproductive rights”.
Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are precisely what Trump has called for on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a “hoax”. Project 2025 calls for expanding oil drilling in the United States, shrinking the geographic footprint of national monuments, terminating clean energy incentives, and ending fossil fuel regulations.
Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.
The 900-page document was prepared by Heritage Foundation, whose president stated recently on a right-wing podcast that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. (This is the same logic used by abusers: “Why did you make me do that to you?”)
This all sounds sort of alarmist until you actually read what’s written in the document, like this passage on abortions:
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.
It’s like that old bit of advice: “When people show you who they are, believe them”. Conservatives are literally telling us their plans for exacting a fascist regime under Trump…we should believe them.
The consequences of Schedule F could be catastrophic for the government. As Jacqueline Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, put it: “There will be a massive exodus of competence.”
“When you fire everyone who knows what they’re doing and only hire people who will say yes to the rich guy in charge, that’s not a recipe for good government,” Oliver added. “It’s a recipe for the Titan submersible.”
With a civil service full of loyalty appointees, Trump wouldn’t need Congress to pass a national ban on abortion drugs, for example, when his head of the Food and Drug Administration could just rule them “unsafe” β a plan specifically outlined in Project 2025.
Education Week simply states one of Project 2025’s goals: “The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers more visibility into what policy agenda a future Trump administration might pursue. It says policies that support LGBTQ+ rights, subsidize “single-motherhood” and penalize marriage should be repealed because subjective notions of “gender identity” threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”
It also proposes increasing surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting in the states, compelling the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of “chemical abortion drugs” and protecting “religious and moral” objections for employers who decline contraception coverage for employees. One of the groups that partners with Project 2025, Turning Point USA, is among conservative influencers that health professionals have criticized for targeting young women with misleading health concerns about hormonal birth control. Another priority is defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides reproductive health care to low-income women.
Purveyors of pornography, Roberts writes, “are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
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