The Weekly Sift

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.

I’m still deciding which of the weekly summary notes will get spun off into their own posts. There will definitely be at least one featured post, “Trump’s Next Coup”, which looks at the Trumpist chatter about him being “reinstated” in August. Trump incited the January 6 riot by encouraging his followers to believe the election could be reversed on that day, and then giving them the assignment to go do it. He never specifically told them to do anything illegal, but there was no legal method to do what he wanted. The same thing is happening now: There is no legal way to reinstate Trump in August, but he’s raising that expectation.

The other notes that are straining for more space concern Manchin’s announcement that he won’t support the For the People Act, and the implication — which I believe but he doesn’t — that there will be no federal defense of voting rights at all. Also, Biden’s Tulsa speech, and the general significance of recognizing how White violence has been erased from the history taught in schools, as well as the impact of such violence on the Black community’s ability to generate and sustain wealth.

With that much in flux, it’s hard to make predictions about what will appear when. The coup article should appear between 10 and 11 EST. Beyond that, I can’t say.

One thing I appreciate about the Biden administration is that the rate of news has slowed a little. That gives me time to think about longer-term issues once in a while rather than constantly react to the most recent threat to democracy.

This week I take advantage of that freedom to reflect on Bitcoin, which crashed 30% against the dollar on Wednesday. I can’t guess what the market will do day-to-day or even month-to-month, but long-term, I’m bearish on Bitcoin. In order to catch on as a currency for everyday use, it’s going to need a aura of coolness; using it should impress your friends. But the environmental disaster of Bitcoin mining is anything but cool. I’ll develop that point — and make some rude observations about the paradoxes of money in general — the in the featured post “The Problem with Bitcoin”. That should be out shortly.

The weekly summary does have stuff to cover: Congress’ looming failure to authorize a bipartisan commission to investigate the Trump Insurrection, the Israel/Palestine ceasefire, the usual run of Republican scandals, and a few other articles that are taking advantage of breathing space in the news to reflect on the possibility of global population decline, or the reasons life expectancy doubled in the 20th century.

Let’s predict that to come out around noon EST.

This week’s big story was President Biden’s don’t-call-it-State-of-the-Union address to a joint session of Congress. No particular announcement in the speech was surprising, but his proposals for $4 trillion in new spending seemed to bookend Bill Clinton’s 1996 statement that “The era of big government is over.” Republicans were unable to mount a coherent critique, and there was no sign of the grass-roots uprising that Obama’s much smaller spending program had inspired in 2009.

My interpretation of this is that “The Reagan Era is Finally Over”. Ronald Reagan laid out a set of themes that dominated Republican politics (and even intimidated Democratic politicians) until 2016. But Trump laid waste to any principled Republican thinking, and replaced it with a cult of personality. The result is that when Biden proposes a liberal policy agenda, Republicans really have no basis for arguing against it.

Trump could do that because by 2015 supply-side economic orthodoxy had already reached the stage of Soviet Communism in the Brezhnev Era: Even the people repeating its slogans didn’t really believe in them any more. As president, Trump cut rich people’s taxes because he was rich and he wanted to pay less tax. McConnell and the rest of the Republicans got in line because their donors were rich and wanted to pay less tax. They might mouth platitudes about growth and an economic boom that would create jobs and wipe out the lost revenue, but everybody knew what the game was.

So when Biden announced Wednesday “Trickle-down economics has never worked”, there was no answering chorus of “Yes it has. Yes it does.” Of course it doesn’t. We all knew that.

Anyway, that post requires a history lesson that I’m still writing, so it probably won’t post until around 11 EST.

The weekly summary discusses some other issues in Biden’s speech and Tim Scott’s response, including what I see as a senseless debate over whether the US is a “racist country”, whatever that means. There’s also the FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, and what it might mean for Rudy’s legal jeopardy, and Trump’s. It was a good news/bad news week for the fight against Covid: Daily case numbers keep improving in the US, but getting worse worldwide. And we’re getting close to having vaccinated all the people who were eager to be vaccinated, but we’re still not at a herd immunity level. Florida continues to make a mockery of GOP rhetoric about “liberty”. This week they’re trying to dictate the policies of private companies like Facebook and Google. And we’ll close with a winged Cupid breaking out of a Rubens painting in the Brussels airport.

Let’s say that gets out between noon and 1.