The Weekly Sift

The aftermath of an election is a good time to step back from tactics and the day-to-day news cycle. So this week I’ll discuss what I learned from reading Timothy Snyder’s recent book The Road to Unfreedom. It provides the broadest vision I’ve seen so far of the global swing towards right-wing populism. That article should be out around 11 EST.

The weekly summary will summarize what is known about the mid-term election results, which are still not completely decided. As the final mail-in ballots from California get tabulated, the Democrats’ margin in the national popular vote continues to grow. It’s now well beyond the Republicans’ margin in the 2010 wave.

I’ll also cover the rebellion against Nancy Pelosi, the now-forgotten migrant caravan, the similarly forgotten middle-class tax cut, California wildfires, the Brexit mess, and a string of deaths of significant pop-culture figures, including Stan Lee. The closing is an amazing out-of-genre guitar solo from one of the recently departed, country-music star Roy Clark. That should be out a little after noon.

This week I’ll also be trying out a new approach to covering Trump. The challenge Trump poses is that you end up talking about whatever ridiculous thing he just said or tweeted, and the underlying issue gets lost in the Trump-said-a-bad-thing furor. And yet, like most other commentators, I feel like I can’t just let him say this stuff without some kind of pushback. So this week, while discussing underlying issues, I will also mention in passing that Trump had something stupid or offensive to say about this. I’ll provide a link for those who think they need to know what it was, but I won’t repeat it.

So the midterm elections are tomorrow. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that this week’s Sift is going to focus on them.

It starts with what I’m going to do personally: “Why I’m Voting Straight Democratic” will be out before 9 EST. The short version: What the Republican Party stands for has become so toxic that if you’re comfortable running as a Republican, I can’t vote for you.

Next will come two posts that I hope you’ll find useful tomorrow night, assuming you decide to watch the election returns. The first is “How the Midterm Elections Look With One Day to Go”. It goes through the polling, what Democrats need to accomplish to get either a House or Senate majority, some of the important governor’s races, and a few of the more interesting ballot questions. That should be out before 11.

The second is “An hour-by-hour Guide to the Midterm Elections”. I’ll go through Tuesday night hour-by-hour with an eye to what polls close when and which races to focus on to see how the evening is going. Think of it as the program for your Tuesday night return-watching party. I’m hoping to get that out by noon.

The weekly summary will be short this week. It should be out by 1.

It’s not hard to pick out the biggest story this week: Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and the continuing Saudi cover-up. What’s harder is getting past the reaction of “What do you expect? It’s Saudi Arabia.” The Saudis still behead people, the ruling family is famously corrupt, and it’s considered major progress that women can drive now. Human rights, especially freedom of speech and freedom of the press, are not their strong suit. In the face of everything else that’s going on in the world, why should you care that the Saudis murdered a journalist, even if he has been living in Virginia this past year and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post?

What hit me about the story, though, was that it led to a second Helsinki moment: All week, the President of the United States kept repeating the talking points of some other country, as if he worked for them and not for us.

In Helsinki — only three months ago, can you believe that? — Trump left Americans to wonder exactly what he owed Vladimir Putin, or what kompromot Putin was holding over his head. This week, though, we knew the reason for Trump’s unpresidential behavior, because he had told us himself: The Saudis buy a lot of stuff from the Trump Organization. Trump was reacting to the Khashoggi scandal primarily as a private businessman, not as a public servant.

So this week’s featured article is “This is why the Founders banned emoluments”. It should post between 10 and 11 EDT. The weekly summary will discuss Khashoggi, but also voter suppression, Elizabeth Warren, Mitch McConnell’s predictable plan to deal with the deficit he caused, some treaties Trump wants to pull out of (including one that goes back to the Grant administration), and a few other things, before closing with the James Korden/ Alanis Morissette update of “Ironic”. It should be out around noon.

So Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court now. You probably heard. Some of the people I know are angry about that, some are depressed, and some are energized to work harder than ever on the midterm campaigns. If we could choose our emotional responses, probably most of us would choose to be energized. But sadly, that seems not to be how it works. You are where you are and you feel what you feel.

Can we at least agree, no matter how we feel most of the time, to muster the energy to vote? If they beat us down that far, to the point where we’re too depressed to vote against them, then they really have won.

George Orwell wrote: “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” But the forces that put Trump in the White House and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court are not invincible. They represent a minority of the country, and it took a series of flukish events to put them in this position: division and apathy on our side (does anyone still believe today that Hillary would have been “just as bad”?), Russian interference, bad campaign strategy, Comey’s last-minute announcements, and a small number of votes in key states breaking exactly the wrong way, nullifying a popular-vote victory.

Their power is based on a number of injustices that are widely unpopular, if they can be brought to voters’ attention: gerrymandering, dark money, and the disenfranchisement of a significant slice of the non-white citizenry. Victims of those injustices can no longer expect to get a fair hearing at the Supreme Court, but there is still hope from ballot initiatives like the ones in Michigan and Florida.

The Supreme Court will be a bastion of injustice for the next 10-15 years. But the country has weathered that before; for most of American history, I would say, the Court has been a defender of the privileged classes. The path back to sanity is still well marked: Retake the House this year, and get the Senate and the Presidency in 2020.

But that only happens if we vote and we get the majority that agrees with us to vote. Take care of yourself, but also look for ways you can contribute energy to that project.

So what’s in the Sift this week? The main article is about the reversal of victimhood that we’ve seen in the defense of Kavanaugh: Not just Kavanaugh himself, but all men are victims now, because we might be accused of something. The women who have actually been assaulted have been shoved out of the picture. I’m still working on a title for that article, but I hope to have it out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will include a broader array of observations about the Kavanaugh process, The New York Times’ exposure of the real source of Trump’s wealth, trade deals, the murder conviction of a Chicago cop, and a few other things. But I also want to call your attention to something really important that I, at least, hadn’t been aware of: A cyber attack might be the spark that sets off nuclear war. Nuclear retaliation for a cyber attack is a  rarely discussed piece of American defense policy. I’ll try to have the summary out by noon.

The late-breaking news is all about the Kavanaugh nomination: The woman who accused him of sexual assault (when he was 17 and she was 15) has come forward, so it’s not an anonymous accusation any more. Two Republican senators, including one on the Judiciary Committee, say the committee shouldn’t vote on the nomination until they investigate this charge.

As I’ve often said, the Weekly Sift doesn’t do breaking news; I’m not going to try to compete with CNN. Sometime in the next day or two we should find out whether or not the Judiciary Committee is going to try to ram a vote through on Thursday, as originally planned. Watch your usual breaking-news sources.

Instead, my featured article this week summarizes a few of the more insightful ten-years-after articles about the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, which sparked the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. If you just look at the nationwide statistics, that financial crisis seems to be comfortably in the rear-view mirror: It was bad, but it’s over, and things are better than ever now.

But the reality is more complicated. The pre-collapse economy didn’t recover, exactly. It changed, and in many ways became even more unequal than it was before. The soaring stock market and low unemployment form one part of the story, but soaring student debt and the increasingly untenable situation of the working poor are another part. “10 Years After: the Post-Recovery Economy” should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has the Kavanaugh nomination to cover, plus Hurricane Florence (and the echoes of last year’s Maria), Paul Manafort flipping, and a few other things. It should be out between noon and 1.