The Weekly Sift

This week is my annual wrap-up, the Yearly Sift. In preparation, this week I re-read all of 2018’s Monday Morning Teasers. I was struck by how repetitive they were: Invariably, I complained that too much happened this week. Stuff that had seemed earth-shaking on Tuesday was old news by the time Monday rolled around, because the Earth had shaken several more times since.

I think I just have to get over that. Yes, the amount of drama and the number of outrageous events is much higher during the Trump Era than at any time in my experience. But this is where we live now, and we’re scheduled to be here for two more years. And even if the Trump Era ends sooner, that ending will provide its own rush of drama. Sifting developments of real substance out of the general clatter and hype is more important now than ever.

With that in mind, I decided to avoid the kind of wrap-up that lists the top ten stories of the year, and instead focus on just one: How did American democracy do in 2018? And the answer, I believe, is “Pretty well, considering the challenges we face.” If the voters had endorsed and ratified the kind of governance we’ve seen these last two years, I think the road to a Putin-style autocracy would be wide open. As it came out, though, we still have a chance to get off that track.

So the featured post this week will be “The Story that Really Mattered This Year”. It should be posted before much longer.

The yearly wrap-up will include an abbreviated weekly summary, a year-end State of the Sift piece, and links to some of the years’ articles that I am particularly pleased with. That should be out by noon (EST) or so.

The portion of your time and energy that you have to devote to news and the larger world can easily get consumed by the day-to-day details of the Trump investigations. Every day, it seems, something has happened, or is about to happen, or might happen in the near future. There are legal experts to interview about what it means, or could mean, or could start to mean soon if some additional thing happens. Sometimes they argue with each other.

On this blog, I’ve been taking the attitude that this isn’t a good use of your time. It’s not the the investigations aren’t important — they definitely are. (My personal belief is that this is the most corrupt administration in living memory, and that most — but probably not all — of the investigations will turn up some serious wrongdoing.) But a chunk of time every day (or even every week), focused on whatever new thing came out that day or on speculation about what might happen soon, is just not an efficient way to follow the story. It’s better, I think, to maintain a loose day-to-day awareness of what’s happening, and then occasionally do a deeper dive: What’s been happening over the last month or two? Where have we gotten to in the process of figuring out what happened and what should be done about it?

Doing that, I think, allows you to maintain a sense of scale. Some days, the new thing that is being breathlessly discussed on MSNBC just isn’t that significant. Other days it is. You don’t want to get uniformly agitated about everything.

So anyway, this is my week to focus on the investigations. The featured post today will be “The Trials of Individual-1: a scorecard”. The “scorecard” aspect comes from the old baseball adage “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” Because there isn’t just one investigation any more; there are at least half a dozen more-or-less separate areas of concern, being pursued by at least three separate groups of investigators. Some are already sending people to jail. Others are just getting started, pursuing something that looks suspicious, but might not turn into much. Some have been going on for a while behind closed doors; there might be something back there, but whatever it is isn’t public knowledge yet. Maybe several of them will eventually coalesce into one big picture, or maybe they won’t.

I’ll try to get that out by 9 EST. In the weekly summary I plan to catch up on something else I’ve been paying too little attention to: other countries. Britain, France, Yemen, Brazil, Germany … important stuff has been happening in all those places while American attention has been absorbed in our own news. I plan to resist the temptation to pretend to understand more than I do, and instead find links to real experts who can catch you up.

In addition to that, there’s the court ruling that ObamaCare is unconstitutional (which doesn’t take effect soon and probably will be overruled before it does). The Democratic Congress is getting ready to take over after New Years. The Interior Secretary resigned under a cloud of scandals that would have been the top story almost any time during the Obama years. And, oh yeah, the government — or at least a quarter of it — is scheduled to shut down on Saturday.

The summary should come out by noon or so.

Last week I wrote about Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, which discusses the mythic needs that fascism satisfies, and describes how propaganda patterns that start in Putin’s Russia have propagated to Europe and the United States. This week I want to look at what made the US political system particularly vulnerable to this kind of disruption.

So this week’s book is Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. The authors did a massive analysis of millions of new articles over two years and how they propagated across social media. And they come to an interesting conclusion: American news media is bifurcated, but not polarized. Right and Left are not equivalent.

In other words, there are two news ecosystems in the US: a right-wing one anchored by Fox News and Breitbart, and a more varied one that spans from the center-right to the far left. The two systems deal with partisan propaganda differently: Left-wing propaganda fairly quickly drifts to the center and center-right, where it gets debunked and dies. But right-wing propaganda stays in an echo chamber where it gets reflected and reinforced.

This week’s featured post will flesh that out. It should appear around 11 EST. The weekly summary will cover Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent immigration law, and how that is being blocked by the courts. (Trump wants to make that a personalities issue, but it’s really about the law.) Also the decision to ignore the Khashoggi murder and stand by Saudi Arabia, further analysis of the midterm election results, what’s going on in the Justice Department, and the new climate report. It will close with gross-but-fascinating facts about wombat poop and whale earwax. It should be out a little after noon.

Republicans will gain in the Senate, but in the House the Blue Wave came, leaving Democrats in control. What to do with this new power? Investigate the administration, obviously, but what about legislating? The House can’t pass laws by itself, but it can show the country what a new agenda would look like. I’ll discuss my suggestions in “A Legislative Agenda for House Democrats”. That should be out by 10 EST.

I had expected the weekly summary mainly to sum up the election results, but that plan didn’t account for the Trump-era news cycle. Already, Jeff Sessions has been replaced with a loyalist hack, we had yet another mass shooting, Trump has begun purging the White House press corps, and he embarrassed our nation in France. It never stops. (I long for a 2020 candidate who will pledge to Make Government Boring Again.)

I’ll cover all that, discuss developments in European fascism, and see if I can figure out where Tuesday’s election results point the Democrats as we look to 2020. That should appear by noon.

During the Trump administration, news goes by too fast for most of us to deal with it. Again and again during the last two years, something happens that makes me say: “This is too much. This cannot stand.” But then, days or weeks later, some new outrage knocks the previous ones out of the public consciousness, and even out of my consciousness. (Last week, for example, Trump’s parroting of Saudi talking points reminded me of the way he parroted Russian talking points in Helsinki. When I looked up the references, I was shocked to realize that Helsinki was just three months ago. It seemed like I was dredging up ancient history.)

So I decided to go back through the last two years and collect the outrageous actions that should never be forgotten into a piece called “12 Things to Remember Before You Vote”. Putting it together, I was amazed at how much I had forgotten. Again and again, I thought, “Oh yeah. That happened.”

There’s still a bunch of work to do on that, so it probably doesn’t post until around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has to cover a week full of right-wing political violence: the MAGA bomber, the racial shooting outside a Kroger’s in Kentucky, the massacre of worshipping Jews in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, right-wingers were trying to make a crisis out of a caravan of asylum-seekers coming up from Central America, and inventing outrageous lies about it. That should be out between noon and one.

We’ve got a week left to get everybody out to vote.