The Weekly Sift

Ordinarily, on the Monday before a Tuesday election, I write a viewing guide for people who are planning to watch the returns come in. Here’s when polls close in various states. Here are the bellwether races that might be decided early and tell you which way the night is going. Stuff like that.

I’m not doing that this time, for a reason that I hate to admit: I’m probably not going to watch the returns come in. I just can’t picture that experience being good for me. I haven’t given up on the idea that Democrats might do better than the polls suggest, but I’ve gotten so annoyed with this whole cycle that I can’t imagine any plausible outcome that really feels satisfying.

I mean, let’s just take the Georgia senate race as an example. (It’s one of those bellwether races whose early returns might tell you how the night is going.) What if Raphael Warnock outperforms Nate Silver’s expectations and pulls out a 51%-49% win? That will mean that 49% of Georgians want Herschel Walker to represent them in the Senate. Seriously? I’m still disgusted, even with the victory. (And if Warnock loses, I keep remembering the words of the 20th-century chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch, who famously lamented, “Why must I lose to this idiot?” We’ve all been there, Aron.)

I don’t think this is a healthy state of mind to be in. But here I am, so I can’t picture a returns-watching evening being good for me. If it’s not going to be good for you either, don’t watch. That’s my advice. Read the headlines Wednesday morning. Maybe you’ll get a pleasant surprise.

So what am I writing about this week? Well, a little over a week ago Bret Stephens (who lives in the NYT’s conservative-columnist ghetto) wrote a piece about his trip to Greenland and what he learned about the climate. The essay bucks and kicks like a wild bronco, but eventually settles down to the conclusion that climate change is real and conservatives need to have a plan to fight it.

How should we read that? Cynically, expecting that what Stephens can support is yet another baby step that will waste time the planet doesn’t have? Or hopefully, recognizing that climate-change activism still needs converts, so we need to welcome anybody who looks like he might be thinking about coming in the door? With some trepidation, I’m going to take the second path in this week’s featured post, which should appear maybe 10 EST or so.

The weekly summary, of course, has to say something about tomorrow’s elections. I’ll describe the current state of the polling, and the various reasons to think it might be wrong in either direction. Then there’s the Paul Pelosi attack, and what the Republican response says about their willingness to tolerate (or even encourage) violence. In other news, Elon Musk made his first moves as Twitter’s “chief twit”, Netanyahu is returning to power in Israel, and Masha Gessen thinks we need to take Putin’s nuclear threats seriously. (It really wasn’t a good two weeks.)

Oh, but there is one bright light: Bolsonaro lost in Brazil, and it looks like he’s really going to leave office. Fascists can be beaten.

Anyway, I’ll aim to get that out by noon.

Take care of yourself tomorrow.

Lately I’ve felt surrounded by pessimism. Partly it’s the upcoming elections — not just the belief that the Republicans will reclaim the House, but that all the other close elections will go their way as well: Georgia will elect a man who has no business anywhere near the Senate, Wisconsin will re-elect one of the worst MAGA senators, Jon Fetterman will lose to a literal snake-oil salesman because his stroke recovery isn’t going fast enough, and so on.

Polls say all those elections are in doubt, but in the minds of many of the people I talk to they’re already chalked up as losses.

But not just the elections. This week someone disgustedly told me (as if it were already a fact) that Trump is going to get away with it all. Others say that inflation can’t be tamed, a recession is inevitable, and the stock market will never turn back up. And who can predict what mischief the Supreme Court will get up to this year?

In foreign countries, Putin is going to use nuclear weapons and we’ll have to back down to him to avoid armageddon. Bolsonaro may lose his run-off, but it won’t matter because he’ll launch a coup. Xi is strengthening his hold on China. And so on.

I’ve started to wonder if maybe we’re being a little irrational about all this. Maybe there’s more reason to be hopeful than we think.

With that in mind, this week’s featured post is “American Democracy has been in trouble before”. I’m relying on two sources to look at two periods of American history: Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra” podcasts about the fascist plots of the 1940s, and Jon Grinspan’s new book The Age of Acrimony about the corrupt and violent politics of the Gilded Age.

We tend to tell American history as a story of continuous progress. That’s not only false, it serves us badly in times like these, when we really need to know that previous generations have faced similar challenges and survived them.

So that post will be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the latest January 6 hearing, developments in the election campaigns, some thoughts about nuclear power, the latest in the Ukraine War, and a few other things. It should post a little after noon.

A lot is going on in the world right now, but none of it jumped out as something to write a featured post about. So this week’s Sift is an extra-long weekly summary, which should come out around 11 EDT.

Many of this week’s most important events happened outside the US: Putin annexed four Ukrainian regions that his forces don’t even fully control, and saber-rattled about using nuclear weapons to defend them against Ukraine’s still-advancing army. Brazil held the first round of a presidential election, setting up a run-off that will probably either unseat President Jair Bolsonairo or see him hang onto power by violence. (He’s called “the Trump of the Tropics” for a reason.) Italy has installed a political heir of Mussolini as its new prime minister. (Make Rome Great Again.)

Domestically, Hurricane Ian’s devastation of Florida’s gulf coast (and its lesser assault on South Carolina) dominated the news. The mainstream media covers such things pretty extensively, so I’ll mainly focus on second-level responses (like Biden refusing to play politics with disaster relief, how quickly everyone forgot about Puerto Rico, and the silence of the preachers who claimed Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans was God’s punishment of a “wicked city”).

The Supreme Court started a new term, leaving the nation to wonder what surprises its ruling junta has in store for us this time around.

And finally, I’ll close with something I know you’ve all been yearning for: some expert advice on how to take over the world.

Usually when I take a week off, all hell breaks loose. This time, though, it looks like the only thing that happened was that some English woman died. I didn’t catch the details, but you probably already heard. I hope her family is OK.

Actually, though, there were a few developments: Ukraine suddenly started recapturing territory from the Russians, producing hard-to-evaluate speculation that the Russian army might be collapsing. The new omicron-targeting vaccine was released, and I already got the shot. (You should too.) Republicans keep digging themselves a deeper hole for the fall elections by nominating extreme MAGA candidates and by doubling down on their unpopular ban-abortion strategy. And DeSantis flew a bunch of Venezuelan refugees up to Martha’s Vineyard, for reasons that only make sense inside the nativist echo chamber.

But I’m going to focus on something else: the failure of two big Trump-vindication vehicles — his sprawling lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and anybody who he ever imagined wronged him, and the much-trumpeted Durham investigation. The lawsuit was dismissed (with considerable flair) and Durham’s grand jury has expired without producing any of the high-profile indictments Trump promised. (No “crime of the century” or “high treason”.)

To me, the interesting thing about these two failures is how little they matter to the MAGA faithful. Once, they were going to provide the ultimate comeuppance to Trump’s enemies and critics. But now … oh, never mind. In retrospect, the point was never to accomplish their stated goals, it was to keep the contributions coming in from Trump’s cultists. In that world, it’s important that victory always be imminent, not that any particular battle ever comes out the way it was supposed to.

That grifting pattern struck a chord in my memory: Jesus’ second coming. Specific predictions keep failing, but it’s always just about to happen — so you should send in more money. I think Trump keeps getting away with this because he’s mostly exploiting the same people. That’s the subject of “How the Trump Grift Works”, which should be out before 10 EDT.

The weekly summary — with zero British monarchy coverage — might be delayed a little bit, but should be out before 1.

This week continued the contrast between the parties that I wrote about last week. You could focus on President Biden fulfilling one of his campaign promises by cancelling a portion of the outstanding student debt, or you could watch Republicans struggle to defend the increasingly indefensible legal position Donald Trump finds himself in.

I’m making a choice to stay positive and focused on reality rather than what-ifs: Biden’s debt forgiveness program is an actual piece of governance. Trump’s legal jeopardy is a bright shiny object that it’s easy to obsess over. Every day produces a few new details that feed new rounds of speculation, but the legal gears are turning now and they will grind out something without our constant attention.

I don’t mean you should ignore Trump and the wild gyrations of his defenders, but watch it from a distance. Check in once or twice a week, not several times a day.

So anyway, this week’s featured post puts a context around the Republican attempt to raise outrage against Biden and the beneficiaries of his student-debt policy: Plutocracy survives by pitting working people against each other. But young adults have been put in a difficult position by government policies, and a little debt cancellation is the least we can do. “The Return of the Bitter Politics of Envy” should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will catch you up on the Mar-a-Lago search controversy, which (as I said) I recommend viewing from a distance rather than analyzing each new detail. Also, a memo from the Barr Justice Department sheds some light on why Trump was never indicted for obstruction.

In other news, NASA is testing out a rocket that could send people back to the Moon. The Ukraine War is six months old, and we still don’t know where it’s going. A dark-money group gets $1.6 billion from one donor. And a few other things. The summary should be out noonish, EDT.