It’s time for the Yearly Sift, when I go back and take the longer view of what I’ve been doing week-by-week in 2012. The Story of the Year, of course, was the election, and I’m going to claim that the Sift did a reasonably good job helping its readers pay attention to the right things and not freak out over every outlying poll or surge by the Republican candidate-of-the-week.
The Theme of the Year was privilege. It was all summed up by September’s “The Distress of the Privileged“, the Weekly Sift’s most popular post ever. But those ideas came together because they had been brewing all year long. And there were a few lesser themes, like religion and economics.
I’ll also list the 21 books the Sift either reviewed or recommended this year, with links to what I said about them. And I’ve collected all those pithy little quotes that have led off each week.
Like the week, the Sift will be dominated by talk about guns and murders. Sorry if you’re already sick of it; that’s just what’s up. I promise not to rehash the details of this week’s two shootings or speculate on things that are still unknown about the shooters, like their motives and their general psychological conditions. There’s already way too much of that.
Instead, I’ll make a few one-step-back points about our overall reaction to gun violence and the unhealthy state of our political discourse. Most of that is the weekly summary (titled “Enough?”), but one point demanded to be a separate post: “Don’t politicize tragedy is itself partisan rhetoric.”
In addition, this week has two holiday-themed articles: “Books to Ask Santa For” and “Questions Your Conservative Cousin Might Ask”.
Unless some unexpected inspiration strikes and refuses to be aside, I’m taking Christmas Eve off. So (probably) no Sift next week. In two weeks, I’ll do my traditional Yearly Sift.
The Sift will come out slowly today. I spent a bunch of this week turning the themes of “The Distress of the Privileged” into a sermon for the First Unitarian Church of Athol, Massachusetts, which I presented yesterday. (The text will eventually show up on my religious blog Free and Responsible Search.) So I arrive at Monday morning with a lot less of the Sift done than I usually have.
Speaking of “Distress of the Privileged”, it was discovered by a new group of people this week and picked another 20,000 hits, running its total over 160K. (For comparison, “A Short History of Racism in the Two-Party System” did well by ordinary Weekly Sift standards, getting just under 1,500 hits in its first week.) I have fallen way behind in responding to comments on “Distress”, and I apologize.
Today’s main article (I’m still fiddling with the title) will be called something like “Repainting the Bubble”. This week I saw a lot of talk from the conservative pundit class about how the Republican Party is reforming itself and putting forward new faces and new ideas. Meanwhile, in the real world, a campaign to rally grass-roots paranoia stampeded 38 Republican senators into blocking ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. The arguments against the CRPD treaty were entirely of the death-panels variety, so it’s clear that the inmates are still running the asylum in the GOP.
What was everybody talking about this week? The fiscal cliff, as always, but since any real action in the negotiations is secret, pundits are stretching for anything worthwhile to say about it. And Jim DeMint leaving the Senate with four years on his term, for none of the usual reasons. Plus, you can expect a better-than-normal collection of short notes, with some book recommendations.
Everybody I know is coming out of the great new movie Lincoln with cognitive dissonance: In 1864 the Democrats are the party of slavery and the Republicans the party of emancipation and racial justice. So how do we get from there to the parties we know today?
The answer will be in today’s article “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System”. Short version: Like any evolution, it takes a long time, with a period of punctuated equilibrium from LBJ to Reagan.
What was everybody talking about this week? Mostly the same stuff as last week: fiscal cliff, aftermath of the election, and Republicans trying to manufacture a scandal out of Benghazi. Also: a conservative live-blog of election night produces a fascinating record of life inside the bubble, and maybe we’ll even manage to reform the filibuster a little.
“Short History” is the kind of article I can futz with endlessly before pushing the button, so it’s hard to predict exactly when it will appear. Today. Definitely today.
This week I took some of the time off that I’ve been promising myself since the election campaign. So while there will be a Weekly Summary, all the articles it links to will be written by other people. Topics: a surprising number of the people I read reacted to the recent Gaza hostilities with disgust or sadness, rather than taking a side; for all the articles being written about the fiscal cliff and all the speculation about how a deal might look, we’re getting almost no useful information; and while we’re all focused on the mostly imaginary dangers of the U.S. debt, the march towards a global-warming catastrophe continues.
Since I don’t have any articles to finish writing, the Weekly Summary should come out by 10 or so.
BTW, I have to crow a little: In Foreign Policy magazine’s list of “100 Top Global Thinkers“, Thinker #91 (dana boyd) mentions me and says that “The Distress of the Privileged” gave her an “aha moment”.
Because I want the Weekly Sift to be a counterweight to the mainstream media, I try not to pile on to stories that are already getting way too much attention. So last week, I just acknowledged the Petraeus scandal without saying anything about it. This week, it’s still making headlines and I still don’t care who slept with who.
Then I saw the Onion’s Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal and realized that while Petraeus’ sex life still isn’t news (by my lights), it does provide a good hook to start talking about some important or interesting things. So the main article this week, “Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal”, will look at how easy it is for the FBI to invade an American’s privacy, the non-sexual moral issues Petraeus’ career raises, how Petraeus got such a larger-than-life image to begin with, and the “spiritual fitness” program that channels so much of the Pentagon’s money into Christian evangelism.
Last week I gave a one-word explanation of how the Republicans could hold the House of Representatives while getting fewer votes than the Democrats: gerrymandering. This week I look at how that works in theory, and then how it worked in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, both of which returned Republican majorities to Congress while voting Democratic.
Finally, I review ESPN’s brilliant documentary “Ghosts of Ole Miss”, which follows the 1962 University of Mississippi football team through an undefeated season that is remembered mainly for James Meredith, the lethal riot against integration, and the 82nd Airborne’s invasion of campus. The narrator, a white Mississippi native, artfully traces the boundary between nostalgia and shame.
The articles should start coming out soon, and I’ll have everything up well before noon.
No surprise, this week’s Sift focuses on the election aftermath, and in particular where the Republicans go now.
They’ve lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential election now, and seem to have alienated Hispanics as a voting bloc. (Asians too — which gets much less attention and points to a larger problem than just immigration policy.) White identity politics motivates the base, but the price may be too high. Evangelicals demand purity on gay rights and abortion, but those positions push away young voters.
So this week’s main article “W(h)ither the Republicans?” examines their reactions to a sweeping loss and gives my own suggestion: Keep a small-government, private-sector approach to problems, but come back to reality. Start proposing solutions to real problems like climate change, rather than imaginary ones like voter fraud or Sharia law. And recognize that conservatives are only 1/3 of the electorate, so you need to compromise.
The second article “Why Didn’t Money Talk?” discusses why the doomsday predictions many of us made after Citizens United didn’t pan out. The money showed up, but the results didn’t. Why not?
I’m trying to get both out before noon.
What else is there to talk about? There’s an election tomorrow and people disagree about how it’s going to come out.
Until now, I’ve been trying not to cover the election as a horserace and instead focus on the real-world consequences of giving power to one party or the other. I figured you were already getting way too much horserace coverage on TV and in newspapers. But Election Day is like Christmas. You can denounce materialism 364 days a year, but on Christmas Eve you can’t help staring at the packages and wondering what Santa brought you.
Unfortunately, Election Santa likes to bring lumps of coal. (Or maybe we’ve just been naughtier as citizens than we’ve been in our personal lives.) We unwrapped a lot of coal in 2010. In my state of New Hampshire, we’re hoping to dispose of a lot of that coal tomorrow. (Gotta be careful with this metaphor. If I were a Republican talking about the coal the country got in 2008, that would be a racial dog whistle.)
Anyway, I’m going to go out on a limb once again and predict hour-by-hour how the election will unfold. My predictions did really well in 2008, but that was a very different election.
The theme of this week’s Sift is “Don’t Panic”. Yes, I know that the outcome of the election is still uncertain and could herald The End of Democracy as We Know It. And the FrankenStorm is just off the coast, sweeping inexorably towards New York like the villain of a Marvel Comics crossover or Godzilla on his way to Tokyo. But things often don’t turn out quite as badly as we fear. Your odds of survival are excellent.
Anxiety is a symptom of pent-up energy, and the best use of that energy is to channel it towards averting the disaster that called it up. People who are doing something — donating to a blood bank, volunteering for the Red Cross, making phone calls or canvassing for their chosen candidates — tend to be less anxious than people who nervously watch minute-by-minute news coverage while doing nothing.
If you can’t come up with something constructive to do, at least don’t make things worse by whipping yourself into a frenzy. Don’t panic, and try to stay mostly harmless.
So this week I’m going to minimize the amount of who’s-going-to-win coverage in the Sift (that’s next week’s election-eve topic) and instead focus on two things: What closing arguments you should know if you’re going to have any last-minute conversations with persuadable voters, (Parallel advice to “Don’t Panic” is “try to avoid conversations with unpersuadable voters”), and what’s really annoying about those Richard Mourdock comments on abortion.
Plus, you really have to see two endorsement videos: Lena Dunham for Obama and Joss Whedon for Romney.
This week’s main article will be a little long, but I think it’s important. “Take a Left at the Market: Liberal praise of capitalism doesn’t have to ring hollow” says we don’t have to talk about capitalism in either Marxist terms (like exploitation) or Libertarian ones (like freedom).
A liberal view of capitalism should revolve around access: How can we create a market economy that everyone can get into? When access is your focus, liberal economic policies make sense, and aren’t just a hodge-podge of taxes and regulations.
In the weekly summary, everybody has been talking about binders full of women. (You knew that already, right?) But we shouldn’t let Romney’s unintentional humor distract us from just how awful his answer really was. Also: the polls are contradicting each other and may be overlooking two important factors.
And George McGovern died. He lost one of the most lopsided elections ever, but history has been kind to him.
The Weekly Sift 