The Weekly Sift

Not much happened this week: The FBI caught the guy who leaked all those documents (and Trump supporters rallied around him). The abortion-pill injunction rose through the judicial system, but is still unresolved. The Fox News trial is about to start. Clarence Thomas is even more corrupt than we realized last week. The Justins made a triumphant return to the Tennessee legislature. Idaho outlawed “abortion trafficking”, while the Missouri House tried to defund all the state’s libraries. Alan Bragg sued Jim Jordan in an attempt to stop his interference in the Trump prosecution. Something something something Bud Light. Oh, and we had another mass shooting of teen-agers.

Hardly anything, in other words.

But I decided to take a step back and look at something longer term: Why is all this happening? Yes, it almost all revolves around the Republican Party’s continuing descent into fascism. But why is that happening? Why now? What global trend opened up opportunities for the likes of Trump, Modi, Orban, Netanyahu, et al?

I found two recent essays that look at this question from different directions, but coalesce around this framing: Fascism is an eternal temptation of modern politics. The mystery isn’t why we have to deal with it now, but why we didn’t have to deal with it for so many years after World War II. How did those lessons get lost?

That post still needs work, so it probably won’t show up until 10 or 11 EDT. (I’ve made it back as far as the central time zone, but I’m trying to run on my usual east-coast schedule today.) The weekly summary will cover the other stuff, and appear by about 1 or so.

There are two things to know about this week’s Sift.

• It’s not all about Trump.
• It’s going to run a little later than usual.

I’m not going to talk a lot about the Trump indictment, because there’s not much to know yet. Reportedly, Trump will be arraigned tomorrow, and then the indictment will be unsealed. Until then, nobody really knows what the charges are or why DA Alvin Bragg thinks he can convince a jury to convict. He might have everything nailed down tight, or the case might be shaky. I could speculate, but tomorrow we’ll know. So my inclination is to wait. I’ll analyze the indictment next week.

My head is still stuck in the Nashville school shooting a week ago. And in particular, I’ve been struck by the public anger that is beginning to swell against the pro-NRA politicians who see these massacres and just shrug, like Rep. Tim Burchett from Tennessee, who went viral saying “We’re not going to fix it”, as if mass shootings were a plague from God that defies human intervention.

A few years ago, a mass shooting produced horror and sadness, but also some hope. “Maybe now everyone will see that we need to do something about guns.” But shootings keep happening, so often you’ve probably missed a bunch of them, and we now know that some people will never see. And that has produced a kind of anger I didn’t used to feel in myself or see in others.

So the featured post will be “I’m radicalizing against guns”. It will close with this point: If it really is true that the Second Amendment won’t let us do anything about our gun problem, then the Second Amendment has to be repealed.

That may seem like an impossible dream at this point. But if it’s the only way, then it will eventually happen. I don’t believe America will watch its children be massacred forever.

Anyway, that post will come out late, probably not until nearly noon EDT. The reason is that I’m in Arizona, which is on Mountain Standard Time, which matches Pacific Daylight.

Easterners may not see the weekly summary (which will mention the Trump indictment and chastise people who are taking radical positions based on almost no knowledge) until around 2.

As I write this, a banking crisis might be forming. Silicon Valley Bank went under Friday, and Signature Bank over the weekend. Last night, Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC announced their plan to deal with the two banks. Maybe it will be enough, and maybe it won’t. We should know in the next few days.

The question to be answered is how unique the problems at the two banks are. And the answer is: sort of unique. Each had individual problems that made them vulnerable, but they couldn’t recover due to problems that exist in just about all banks right now. I’ll talk that through in the featured post, which should come out around 10 EST.

The weekly summary covers Tucker Carlson’s attempt to whitewash January 6, Biden’s budget proposal and the lack of any coherent Republican response, the political crisis in Israel, debates about how Covid started and whether masks slowed it down, and the latest reasons to think Donald Trump might be indicted soon. That should be out before 1.

The big topics to cover from the last two weeks are: the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine war, what lessons to learn from the East Palestine derailment, and what the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit has revealed about Fox News, plus a bunch of culture-war issues like Scott Adams arranging his own cancellation, the Right’s ability to manipulate the allegedly liberal media, Tennessee’s ban on drag performances, and the publisher’s editing of Roald Dahl books.

But I spent my week off preparing and delivering a sermon about democracy, which closed with the idea that those of us who want to save democracy need to keep reaching out to folks on the other side of the partisan divide. (Sadly, the other side doesn’t need to reach out. Polarization serves the authoritarian cause well.)

That was Sunday, a week ago yesterday. The next day, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted her now-famous call for a “national divorce”, and then followed that up with a more detailed walk-back that calls for an Articles-of-Confederation-style government with a weak and tiny national government and fifty sovereign states.

Now, I don’t usually respond to MTG, because I think she’s another Trump-style grifter. When she says something, I have no idea whether she’s serious, she’s conning her marks, or she’s just trying to troll people like me. But whether she’s making her proposal in good faith or not — and I suspect not — I think a lot of Americans read her tweetstorm and honestly thought that her vision sounded pretty good.

So if I’m going to practice what I’ve (quite literally) been preaching, I need to offer those people a response. That’s this week’s featured post. It should be out between 9 and 10 EST. The other stuff will be in the weekly summary, which should appear noonish.

In the same way that a short note sometimes turns into a long post, this week’s plan for a featured post has turned into the first of a series. Or actually the second: Now that I see the series, I recognize “The Debt Ceiling: a (p)review” as the first.

My motive is that I’m tired and depressed by the low quality of public discussion about deficits and the debt. We throw back and forth talking points about “maxxing out the national credit card” and “refusing to pay our bills” without ever thinking deeply about why we owe $32 trillion, whether a (still growing) debt that size will eventually cause any problems, and (if we decide that it is a problem) what options we have for doing something about it.

I suspect that (pending research I haven’t done yet), I’m not far from where Joe Biden is: He wants to come to some long-term agreement about fiscal policy, rather than keep governing through a series of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills. But he knows he can’t have that conversation while Kevin McCarthy’s finger hovers over the economy’s self-destruct button.

Anyway, today’s featured post was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs about how we accumulated this debt. But the history of the national debt turns out to be an interesting topic in its own right, providing insight into how fiscal policy has intersected with the rest of American history. (I’ll bet you didn’t know the role the San Francisco Earthquake played in the creation of the Federal Reserve.) “How did we get $32 trillion in debt?” still needs some work, so I’ll predict it shows up about 11 EST.

The weekly summary includes a discussion of police reform following Tyre Nichols’ murder (that also threatened to turn into a featured post), the House vote to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee, the ridiculous panic over the Chinese spy balloon, January’s surprisingly strong jobs report, and a few other things. It should show up a little after noon.