The Weekly Sift

This week resistance to illegal Trump/Musk actions began to surface: Judges issued orders to halt a number of unconstitutional practices, while Republican-leaning groups noticed that federal funding freezes hurt them as well — and they heard Musk lie about their own activities, not just those of distant liberals. A few Republican senators began to stand up for their affected constituents, while still not connecting the dots about how the Trump/Musk actions are hurting Americans in general.

I’ll cover that in the weekly summary. The featured post is a look back into a poorly understood episode of American history: the Populist movement of the late 1800s. In general, I’m trying to understand how America got from the Gilded Age and the robber barons to antitrust laws and the New Deal. It wasn’t just the Depression, it involved a larger change in what David Graeber called “political common sense”. How did that happen? Late-1800s Populism is a piece of that puzzle, and it tells us something not just about what we need to do next, but illuminates how the MAGA movement became what it is.

That post should come out between 10 and 11 EST. I’ll try to get the summary done by noon.

I know most of you are sick of reading about Trump and his various plans, plots, and threats. Unfortunately, that’s really what the news has been during his administration’s first week, so that’s what I’m writing about.

That said, I’ll be trying to maintain a different attitude than a lot of the media, even the liberal media. My focus will be on what you need to pay attention to and what kind of attention you should pay. I’ll try to avoid both normalizing and the hand-wringing, isn’t-that-awful coverage we see so much of.

This week’s featured post is “Week One”, covering the inaugural address and some of the early executive orders. I’ll be pointing you to good sources of information and recommending some Substack blogs to follow. I wish I could do an exhaustive classification of all the orders, but there are just too many of them.

Sadly, the weekly summary will also center on Trump. Or, more precisely, people reacting to Trump: Greenland’s prime minister, Bishop Budde, and a few others. I’ll also discuss Elon’s Nazi salute, but from the point of view of how we should think about and/or respond to this kind of trolling.

I just started a cold last night, so I don’t know what to predict about my energy. Posts will appear when they appear, and be as close to complete as I can manage.

This week’s featured post expresses my frustration with having heard way too many arguments that go like this:

Trump supporter: Make American great again!
Trump resister: America was never great.

I think we liberals shoot ourselves in the foot when we accept the Yes/No frame on American greatness and take the No side.

Of course there’s a jingoistic flavor of patriotism that we want to oppose. But there’s also a healthy kind of patriotism that we want to promote, the kind that sees historical American ideals like “inalienable rights” and “liberty and justice for all” as aspirations we want to achieve someday rather than as cynical propaganda. And as the world faces threats like climate change, we need to believe in an America that can take on big challenges and do great things.

And that’s the key framing change: doing as opposed to being. Rather than argue about whether America is great, or was great at some point in the past, we should be affirming the idea that America has at times done great things and could do great things in the future. We’ve also done terrible things, of course, like enslaving millions of Africans and all but wiping out the Native Americans. There’s no need to sugarcoat that.

But so much of MAGA is based on pessimism and weakness: We can’t take care of all our sick and old people (even if most of Europe can). We can’t kick our fossil fuel habit. We can’t overcome racism, sexism, and all the other traditional bigotries. But the Obama landslide of 2008 centered on the slogan “Yes we can”. Believing in our potential to do great things is as essential to liberals and progressives as it is to the Trumpists.

So “A Meditation on American Greatness” should post around 10 EST.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: the new Congress electing (barely) a speaker, the two New Years terrorist attacks, the January 6 anniversary, Trump’s upcoming sentencing in New York, the WaPo cartoonist incident, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that posted by noon.

Due to scheduling conflicts among the people I typically spend the holidays with, this last weekend was my Christmas. The festivities didn’t lend themselves to extensive news-sifting, so there won’t be a featured post this week. I’m constructing a weekly summary, which I hope to post between 10 and 11 EST.

The big thing to cover this week is something that didn’t happen: the government shutdown that was due to start Saturday morning. Trump tried his usual one-more-demand negotiating style. That was enough to scuttle a deal otherwise ready to go, but the slim GOP House majority couldn’t hold together to give him anything beyond what it had already negotiated. Sensible people then prevailed, and the deal that passed is very close to the original one.

This was a preview of what I think we’ll soon see: An even-smaller GOP House majority in the new Congress will need to stay united to pass anything, and that will be a tall order. Democrats won’t come to the rescue unless they get something in return, which Trump will hate.

Anyway, I’ll interpret what I think this portends, while noting a few other things: As predicted, Trumpists have already started talking about a third Trump term, in spite of the clear language of the 22nd Amendment. They’re also preparing to challenge birthright citizenship, in spite of the clear language of th 14th Amendment. During the next four years, the Supreme Court will be challenged again and again about whether the Constitution actually means anything in the new fascist era. We should also see pretty quickly whether press freedom survives an era in which the major news outlets are controlled by conglomerates that can be bribed or intimidated by government influence over their non-news business interests.

The worst news this week is personal: My wife Deb died unexpectedly during the night between Thursday and Friday. She had survived three different cancers over the past 28 years, but they were all undetectable at this point, and her death seems to have had little to do with any of them. For a few days she had complained of intestinal discomfort, but none of her symptoms seemed out of the ordinary or hinted at being life-threatening, so she was taking a wait-and-see approach before involving her doctor. Friday morning I decided to let her sleep in, and when I finally went to wake her, I couldn’t.

I can anticipate the thought in most of your minds: “Why are you putting out a Sift this week at all?” It’s a really good question. My only answer is that it feels right; sometimes keeping going is easier than stopping. I want to assure you that I am paying attention to my emotions, and that a group of loyal friends are watching me like hawks. I am being well taken care of, and if I need a break in the future, I’ll take one.

If you have a personal connection to me or Deb and are reading the news here for the first time, I apologize for not reaching out to you in some less public way. There’s nothing that you need to be attending this week. I expect to hold an event to celebrate her life sometime after the holidays.

Meanwhile, the world has kept on turning. The weekly summary will discuss the fall of the Assad regime, the murder of a health-insurance CEO, martial law in South Korea, reactions to the Hunter Biden pardon, Pete Hegseth’s promise that he will stop drinking if we give him one of the world’s highest-stress jobs, and a few other things. As usual, I’m going to try to get that out around noon EST.

The featured post is another in my series of meditations on what went wrong in the 2024 election. This time I’m looking at pre-existing narratives in the public mind, and how they can protect misinformation against debunking. After reading even the most thorough debunking, too many voters are left with the impression that while this particular event may not have happened, this kind of thing happens all the time (even if it doesn’t). It’s hard to guess when I’ll get that posted, but probably not before 10.