The Weekly Sift

The Democratic National Convention seemed to blot out all other news this week. A handful of weeks ago it was inconceivable how united, energetic, and celebratory the DNC would turn out to be. It demonstrated a lot of good showmanship, fine oratory, and crisp logistics, but there was also something intellectually and politically significant going on: The Democrats were stealing many of the themes Republicans have owned for decades, like family, freedom, patriotism, and even masculinity.

What is significant is not just that they tried. Anybody can say, “No, we’re the patriotic party” just as Trump has occasionally claimed to represent democracy and even to be “great for women and their reproductive rights“. The significant thing is that across the board they made a good case. They redefined and reframed the themes in such a way that the Democratic claim to them now seems more authentic than the Republican claim. (Do you want to raise your sons in the masculinity of Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan, or the masculinity of Tim Walz and Mark Kelly?)

That’s what I’ll examine in the featured post “The Convention that Ate Republicans’ Lunch”, which should appear between 10 and 11.

The weekly summary should be short this week, and come out around noon.

The momentum for Harris continued this week, as the Trump campaign struggled to come up with a counter-message. On Wednesday, Trump was interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, and reverted to his Birther political roots: He challenged Harris’ racial identity, professing not to understand how she could be both Indian and Black.

The first featured post will examine what he could possibly have been thinking and what audience his remarks were aimed at. Because his position is so hard to take seriously, I’ll include a certain amount of humor, and I’ll point you to an endearing Harris video from 2019 that Trump thinks proves his point. (I hope you’ll watch it. At a minimum you’ll learn a good onion-dicing technique.) “The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans” should post around 9 or so EDT.

For weeks I’ve been hoping to write a series of issue-oriented articles, but events keep outrunning my ability to cover them. I particularly want to examine the issues where the Trump campaign claims an advantage: inflation and immigration. This week I’ll finally get my inflation article out. “Where Did Inflation Come From?” should appear by 11.

Even with two featured posts, the weekly summary has a lot to cover: the prisoner swap with Russia, the rising tensions between Israel and Iran, Venezuela’s post-election crisis, J.D. Vance’s continuing problems, the Trump/Egypt investigation, Harris catching Trump in the polls, and a few more things. I’ll aim to get that out by noon.

I don’t usually put a cartoon in the Teaser, but this Garth German drawing was too spot-on. Last week, the Trump shooting was still so fresh that not much was known about it. Then J. D. Vance was announced as Trump’s VP and the whole circus of the convention started, culminating in Trump’s record-long 90-minute acceptance speech, which had the laundry-list quality of a bad State of the Union.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s support among elected Democrats continued to slip, with a new defection or two almost every day. Then Sunday, he announced he’s leaving the race and endorsing Kamala Harris. Now all eyes are on her, and the TV talking heads barely have time to mention Trump, who suddenly looks very old.

It’s a lot to cover, but I have one advantage over CNN and MSNBC: I try to stick to what I know, and nobody knows much at this point. So I’ll edit out all the maybe-this-maybe-that and see what’s left.

Here’s what I have planned: For my sins, I watched the full 90 minutes of Trump, and I think the mainstream media completely missed his point. They saw two speeches: the call for national unity that they predicted and wanted to see, followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric. I saw one speech: It was all about unity, but not the kind of unity the media had imagined. Throughout, Trump was calling for his enemies to surrender to his domination. Then we can be one unified nation, he promised, and stop wasting our energies fighting each other.

The Germans have a word for that kind of unity: gleichschaltung, which is pretty much untranslatable. It’s an old engineering term, but they coined its political usage in the 1930s, for some reason.

So the featured post “The Two Kinds of Unity” will flesh out that interpretation of Trump’s speech. Everything else will wind up in the weekly summary. The featured post should appear between 9 and 10 EDT, and the summary before noon.

I’m writing a lot today. There were two really big stories this week, each of which deserves a featured post: the Supreme Court’s immunity decision and the Biden situation. But as I wrote about Biden, the story split into two pieces: There’s the substantive matter of what we can know about Biden’s capabilities and what Democrats should do with that knowledge, and then there’s the major-media stampede to push Biden out of the race. (When I fired up my NYT app one day this week, the six articles at the top of the page were all addressing some aspect of the push-Biden-out campaign.) So the media is getting its own article this week.

That’s three featured posts, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before.

Here’s how I see my day playing out: The Supreme Court article is almost ready to go, so it should be out before 9 EDT. The substantive Biden article is barely started, because I wanted to wait to see what top Democrats might say over the weekend, so it might not be out until 11. The media article is mostly done, but I want it to come out after the substantive article, so that substantive comments about Biden will wind up attached to the right article. (I’m going to try to make the media article agnostic about Biden’s capabilities or whether he should drop out.) So that should happen around noon or so.

Then there’s the weekly summary, which has trivial things to cover like the government-changing elections in the UK and France. (And yes, I’ll explain how the two rounds of French parliamentary elections work.) Let’s aim for 1 on that.

It’s June, so I continue to write about the Supreme Court. This week I’m focusing on the Rahimi case, which hasn’t gotten a lot of press, largely because it came to a common-sense conclusion that doesn’t make good clickbait: The Second Amendment doesn’t give domestic abusers an unfettered right to have guns.

It was an 8-1 decision with only corrupt Clarence Thomas taking the side of domestic abusers. Nobody really expects Thomas to make sense, so the mainstream press didn’t see a lot to write about.

I found the case fascinating from another point of view: What’s going to happen to originalism? The late Justice Scalia developed originalism when he was in the minority, and it gave him a theoretical framework for criticizing more liberal ideas about interpreting the Constitution. Only recently, though, has the Court had a clear originalist majority, which faces the challenge of turning Scalia’s critical theory into a governing theory.

The Rahimi case follows from the Bruen case decided two years ago on originalist grounds: Any current law has to be in accordance with “the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”. But the Founding era didn’t consider domestic abuse to be a problem — wives are just women, after all — so there is no “historical tradition” of disarming abusers. The obvious originalist conclusion, which the conservative Fifth Circuit came to, is to give Rahimi’s guns back and wait to see whether he kills the estranged mother of his child.

But five of the Court’s six conservative justices decided to step back from that abyss. Four of them felt a need to write their own opinions justifying that move. I’d been meaning to write an abstract piece about originalism anyway, so this gave me a lot to work with. The result is “The Limits of Originalism”, which I’ll try to get out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the cases still to be decided in the next week or so, the upcoming Biden/Trump debate, Biden’s slight momentum in the polls, Louisiana’s law to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Reggie Jackson’s moving and disturbing account of the racism he faced in the minor leagues, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but I seem to be moving slowly this morning.