The Weekly Sift

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a week where so many bright, shiny objects obscured the really important things that were happening.

We had the GOP’s Trumpapalooza midterm convention on Wednesday and Thursday, which was as near a non-event as it could possibly have been. Few people attended, few people watched, and the big headline afterward — $5000 for everybody if Republicans keep both houses of Congress! — is obviously never going to happen, as even the most ardent Trump cultist probably knows.

Then a couple AI researchers went public with their worry that AI might kill us all. There are real issues with AI, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a government where people understood that? There could be an international conference that included China and the EU. Some kind of standards could be written, and we could avoid needing the Butlerian Jihad they had in the Dune universe. But how likely is that with the know-nothing expertise-despising regime we live under now?

I don’t know how to start the kind of thoughtful, nuanced public discussion we need. But going around panicked about AI killing us all is probably not the right approach.

So what should you have been paying attention to this week? Well, for one thing, Iran’s Houthi allies took control of the strait at the south end of the Red Sea, potentially cutting off the Saudis’ main way of avoiding Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. I’m not sure what happens next, but it sure looks like Iran has outflanked us in the current war.

And then two things should have drawn your attention to the threat of Trump stealing the midterms. First, the dispute over Missouri’s congressional maps demonstrated MAGA’s dangerous willingness to play chicken with the courts. The courts won this time. But it’s easy to imagine the line not holding next time. And then conservative Judge Michael Luttig, appointed by Bush the First to an appellate judgeship that he retired from in 2006, described how a constitutional crisis might unfold in January, if the current House leadership simply refused to seat the newly-elected Democrats.

And finally, there’s what we can learn from last week’s biggest news: the victory of the neo-Nazi AfD party in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. Germany is both similar to and different from the US, making it an interesting case study in how not to control the extreme Right. Worryingly, what we can learn from the Germans undermines both the progressive and centrist Democrats’ strategies.

The featured post will be about what we can learn from the Germans. It should appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will handle the rest, and I hope to get it out by noon.

Next weekend is Labor Day, which is the traditional let’s-get-serious moment in American election campaigns. Ad wars heat up, and people who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics begin to wonder what offices are up for grabs this time and who they might want to fill them.

The conventional wisdom says this is the time to stop trying to rally your base and start talking to the swing voters, who occupy some theoretical “center” of the political spectrum. It’s time to drop your edgier positions and focus on so-called “kitchen table issues” like the price of gas. That’s the question I address in this week’s featured post “Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center”. In that post, I try to give move-to-the-center its due as a logical path forward, while examining what this kind of thinking leaves out.

The question I come down to is: When you get down to the nuts-and-bolts of exactly which positions you would need to change or de-emphasize, who would you be abandoning? I’ll try to get that out by 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll continue the practice I started last week of separating substantive developments from the ones that just boil your blood, for example separating Lake America from the larger trade war with Canada. Among those substantive issues are the apparent deal to control Venezuela’s oil, the heat build-up in the oceans, the fall elections, and the continuing effort to control the worst excesses of the Trump regime through the courts. And I’ll close with a farewell to Dolly Parton.

Usually I take the news one week at a time, but today’s featured post takes a step back to examine a much wider time span: I’m looking at the technological developments that led to the first Gilded Age in the late 19th century, and trying to draw a parallel to the current internet/social-media/AI technologies that have landed us in a new Gilded Age. We may be in for a reprise of the fascism/communism/democracy struggle that dominated the 20th century. Lately it’s been easy to focus on the dystopian possibilities of the tech revolution, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the utopian possibilities as well.

As in the 20th century, it’s all going to hang on who manages the new society, and for who’s benefit. Right now this Second Gilded Age is being managed by tech oligarchs for their own benefit, just as the First Gilded Age was managed for the benefit of the Rockefellers and Morgans. But that changed, and our own situation could change as well.

That post is tentatively titled “Revolutions too big to see”, though I still hope to come up with something better. It should be out before 10 EDT. If you like it, I hope you’ll promote it to other people who might like it. I feel like this is more important than my usual blog posts, and I hope it can get a wider readership.

The week didn’t have a truly dominant news story, in my opinion. The weekly summary will divide its attention among primary elections, the USS Abraham Lincoln fiasco, Trump in the catering truck, and a variety of ignorance-based executive orders like the new recommendations for vaccines. Expect to see that around noon.

Polls for the fall election are looking good. Trump is unpopular and Democrats have a sizeable lead in the generic congressional ballot. At the moment, they’re even winning Senate races in states where they shouldn’t, like Texas. It’s now easy to imagine a Democratic House majority next year, and maybe even a Senate majority too. Replacing Trump with a Democrat in 2028 seems more and more likely. The bullet of authoritarianism may only graze us this time.

But this week I paid attention to articles wondering about next time. We thought we had dodged the bullet when we beat Trump in 2020, but somehow that victory didn’t stick. Will this one (if we achieve it) stick? Or will we be right back with a new fascist threat in 2032 or even sooner? Why do Republicans bounce back from defeat faster than Democrats? And why does each rebranding move further out, rather than returning to the center?

The answer is that the conservative movement has an institutional infrastructure powered by patient money. Those institutions will still be in place after Trump is gone, and the money that powers them will be even more motivated. Advocates of democracy need to understand this and prepare to deal with it. That’s the subject of the featured post “Power is more than just votes”, which I hope to get out around 10:30 EDT.

The weekly summary will talk about the war, Todd Blanche’s nomination, this summer’s climate-related wildfires, tomorrow’s Senate primary in Michigan, the demise of the reflecting-pool-vandalism case, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out between noon and 1.

This week’s featured post is a review of Cory Doctorow’s 2025 book Enshittification. Doctorow coined that term a few years ago, and the American Dialect Society crowned it the Word of the Year in 2023. Last fall he wrote a book-length treatment of the topic that included an analysis of causes and solutions.

My review should be out around 10 or 10:30 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the latest ICE killings, plus links to long features detailing the horrifying conditions at the immigrant detention camps. Also the Senate confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general and Jay Clayton’s nomination to be Director of National Intelligence. (Spoiler: They dodged all the good questions.) I’ll give a rave review of The Odyssey. Trump’s prime-time speech supposedly about election security was a yawner that produced barely a ripple of attention. And I’ll close with a creative use of solar panels.

I’ll try to get that out between noon and 1.