The Weekly Sift

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.

Two big themes dominated last week: Biden got things done, and punishments were handed out to wrong-doers.

Yesterday, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which may pale in comparison to the Build Back Better plan the President originally proposed, but is a big deal all the same. The House is expected to follow suit, and so finally Congress is doing something to fight climate change. The drama is no longer centered on executive orders and whether the Supreme Court will sustain them. The third branch of government is weighing in.

This would not be happening if Biden had not won in 2020, or if Georgia hadn’t sent two Democrats to the Senate in 2021. So if you’re tempted not to vote in the fall because elections never make any real difference, think again.

In addition, Republicans relented and let the PACT Act pass, so veterans affected by toxic fumes from burn pits will get their health care paid for. And this is on top of the CHIPS Act that passed last week, not to mention the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed earlier in Biden’s presidency.

It hasn’t been easy and it hasn’t been everything we wanted or the country needed, but the steamship of American government is finally pointed in the right direction and beginning to chug. We need to vote in November so that it doesn’t stall again.

The week’s other theme was punishment. A jury told Alex Jones to pay nearly $50 million to two parents of a Sandy Hook victim, and an NFL arbitrator handed Deshaun Watson a six-game suspension. I found the Jones verdict satisfying (assuming it gets enforced) and the Watson ruling frustrating. That raised some interesting issues about punishment, which I’ll discuss in this week’s featured post “What’s the Point of Punishing Trump?”. That should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will discuss legislation, the stunning victory for abortion rights in Kansas, the weirdness of the late-pandemic economy, and a few other things, before closing by celebrating a voice that could make a grocery list sound interesting. I’ll try to get that out a little after noon.