The Weekly Sift

Lots of news this week, but I don’t believe I have any special insight into most of it, so there won’t be a featured post. Instead, I’ll collect other people’s takes in the weekly summary and make short comments.

The big event is the fall of Afghanistan. Nobody is surprised that the Afghan government couldn’t hold the country against the Taliban without our help, but the speed of the collapse has been stunning. Kabul fell yesterday. A broad consensus of Americans wanted this war to end, and understood that the Afghanis would suffer after we left. But it’s hard to watch all the same.

Against my predictions, Republicans in the Senate voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Charlie Brown really did kick the football this time! I’ll outline what’s in this bill, what’s expected to be in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, and what’s likely to happen next.

The IPCC put out a new climate report, which is hard to evaluate if you’re not an expert, so I’ll link to some experts. The 2020 census found surprisingly few white people in the US, or at least it looks that way. Despite predictions, Trump was not reinstated on Friday. Barack Obama had the audacity and nouveau-riche bad taste to celebrate his 60th birthday. (I mean, who does that? And why didn’t Beyoncé come to my 60th birthday party?) Haiti had an earthquake. And the closing video proves that elephants can play basketball. They don’t dribble well, but they’re unstoppable on the alley-oop.

I’ll predict that the weekly summary comes out a little after 10 EDT.

This is a tough week to cover, because so much of what happened requires an explanation. The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection kicked off its hearings with moving accounts from four police officers, and there are also tea leaves to read in Liz Cheney’s behavior and the Republican response to the police testimony. (Hint: Blue lives don’t matter any more.) The Delta variant looks even scarier than we had thought, and mask mandates may be coming back. A chain of screw-ups has made millions of American renters vulnerable to eviction. The long-awaited bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill actually has a text now, and could be voted on soon. Georgia’s Republican legislature is laying the groundwork to take authority over elections in the state’s most Democratic county. The Simone Biles controversy erupted. (What are “the twisties” anyway?)

None of that is stuff where I feel comfortable just saying “this happened” and providing a link.

But I also want to take a longer view than just this week. I recently read Ben Rhodes new book After the Fall, which raises a provocative question: What happened to America, and to democracy in general, these last 30 years? After the Soviet Union fell, the United States seemed all-powerful, and progress towards democracy around the world seemed inevitable. How did we screw that up?

So one featured post will be my commentary on After the Fall. That should be out around 10 EDT. I may or may not split off my Simone Biles commentary as its own post a bit later. If not, it will be part of the weekly summary that should show up around 1.

Many stories competed for attention this week. Democrats from the Texas legislature dramatically arrived in DC, simultaneously denying a quorum to Republicans pushing a new voter-suppression law, and drawing attention to federal legislation protecting voting rights. It’s attention-grabbing, but will it work?

Also in Congress this week, negotiations continued on two tracks of infrastructure bills: a bipartisan bill that might pass through the regular process, and a much larger bill that Democrats hope to pass through the reconciliation process.

Or maybe the important thing that happened this week was that a fourth surge of the coronavirus was confirmed by a turnaround in the daily death statistics. Or maybe we should be focused on the revelations in the new last-days-of-the-Trump-administration books. Or on the climate-related fires in the Northwest and floods in Europe.

I decided to focus on the federal judge in Texas who blocked new applications for DACA protection. Not because the order was so significant in itself: It’s going to be appealed, so the ultimate result of the case is uncertain and probably still a year or more away. But that story is a hook on which to hang the larger and more amorphous story of the dysfunction of American democracy.

Think about it: It’s been nine years since President Obama created DACA as a “temporary stopgap” to let Dreamers stay in the country until Congress came up with a more permanent solution. Almost nobody wants the Dreamers deported, and yet that more permanent solution is still nowhere on the horizon. It’s yet another issue like universal background checks on gun purchases, or maintaining America’s roads and bridges, or closing loopholes that allow billionaires to dodge taxes. The American people want it to happen, but their elected representatives can’t get it done.

The spotlight is always on the tug-of-war between the executive and judicial branches, but those battles keep being fought because the dysfunction of Congress creates a void where a power center should be. The real story isn’t what’s happening, it’s what’s not happening.

Anyway, that article should be out around 10 or so EDT. The weekly summary should follow between noon and 1.

So I’m back from the Berkshires, where people were complaining because the temperature got into the 90s. Meanwhile, it was 116 in Portland.

And that’s where the first featured post starts. I think we’re entering a new phase in the national conversation about climate change. For a long time, climate change was either some invisible thing scientists teased out of the statistics, or horrifying projections made by mysterious computer models. Then we got into a debatable period, where you could point to anomalous weather events like Superstorm Sandy as signs of climate change, or you could just say that weird things happen from time to time.

But 116 in Portland, at the same time that the hurricane season is setting records in the Atlantic — it’s too much to explain away. People are feeling in their guts now that something’s not right.

So the first featured post this week is the kind of argument I think we need to be making. Not “Hey you idiots, we were right and you were wrong.” But something more like “I get why you haven’t wanted to believe this, but things are different now.” We need to invite people to switch sides, not herd them into reeducation camps.

Anyway, that’s the point of “Climate Change is Here”, which should be out shortly. I intend it to be the kind of thing you can send to your skeptical cousin. (Let me know if it works.)

The second post covers the Trump Organization indictment that came out Thursday. You’ve probably heard a lot of the details already, so I’ll talk mainly about what I think it means more broadly. Personally, I was surprised by how simple and obvious — and downright stupid — the tax-evasion scheme was. I thought I was immune to the Trump-the-great-businessman myth, but I had expected something much more clever than this. It makes me wonder how honest, or at least semi-honest, business owners are taking this. Maybe you fudge the numbers a little on how much personal use you get out of your company’s car, but your wife’s car? your kid’s apartment? your grandchildren’s tuition? It probably never occurred to you to claim them as business expenses, but the Trump Organization did. And they got caught.

Let’s say that post gets out before 11 EDT.

What does that leave for the weekly summary? The January 6 committee, Covid case numbers turning up again, the June jobs report, some Supreme Court decisions, and a few other things. And then we’ll end with what happens when a female singing duo takes a conservative boyfriend’s advice on songwriting. I’ll predict that for maybe 1.

Joe Manchin finally laid out what he wants in a voting-rights bill. It’s a significant compromise, but it’s not bad. Sadly, it’s not going to get Republican support either. So what happens next? Is the point just to frame an issue for 2022, or is something actually going to get done?

President Biden’s meeting with Putin was blessedly uneventful. Juneteenth became a national holiday. The Supreme Court refused for the third time to end ObamaCare. The heat wave has the West worried about the looming wildfire season.

That stuff, and a few other things, will get covered in the weekly summary. This week’s featured post focuses on George Packer’s framing of the four narratives of American politics: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. I think he’s done a good job of listening to the rhetoric of the current moment, and I believe we’ll be hearing about his four narratives for years to come. That post should appear between 10 and 11, EDT. I’ll try to get the summary out by noon.