A daily compendium of helpful reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links, with brief commentary, to work that I believe advances the conversation we must be having about America's – and the world's – future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
What's at stake
Vance's extremism
“In a way,” [Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of National Review] said, “it’s like Trump chose Steve Bannon to be his running mate.”
The Times has done more to normalize extremism than any other major traditional journalism organization, and in some ways this ever-so-polite story adds to the normalization. But it also makes clear – even though the reporter and editors never say it directly – that Vance (at least this version of Vance) is pushing for untrammeled right-wing authority over modern life. The power he wants for Trump, and at some point for himself, is dictatorship, not democracy. The Republicans want this to be America's last free election.
Today, academic freedom is under assault once more. Some states, like Florida, seek to ban scholarship touching upon structural racism. Elected officials seek to undermine scientific consensus on climate change and public health by impugning experts. As we’ve seen through our own work at the University of Washington, the study of misinformation has become the newest political target of the right.
Researchers looking into online misinformation have come under vicious attack from the extreme right, including several key members of Congress whose bad-faith "investigations" have had predictable results: scaring universities away from this vital research. Joe McCarthy is cheering from his grave.
State actions to suppress protests foreclose a central way we communicate collectively about what we want our world to look like, how we want our planet to be treated, and our societies governed. Silencing protests means that critical voices cannot be heard on fundamental issues that affect us, such as reproductive rights, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, the climate crisis, and more.
Teen Vogue is doing some of the best political journalism around, and this article is a great example. In state after state, lawmakers are punishing dissent with prosecutions, fines, and prison sentences. This is how banana republics operate – and Republicans are particularly eager to deploy these tactics widely.
Central to our country’s success has been a stable legal system based on constitutional principles and the rule of law. Yet, as with other institutions, recent decisions by the Supreme Court are undermining that success. Instead, the Court has recently become a witting or unwitting facilitator of Project 2025’s dystopian agenda for the future.
Marc Elias' Democracy Docket should be among your must-follow sites/newsletters. (I have contributed financially.) He and his team have been warning us – consistently and urgently – about the way the Republicans and their extremist supporters have whacked away at the legal guardrails. In this piece he explains how our corrupt, right-wing Supreme Court majority has made dictatorship much easier (at least for Republicans).
Project 2025 and the radical far-right policies it has inspired are a threat to all Americans and would disrupt nearly every aspect of American lives—from health care and education access to taxes and retirement security. These fact sheets provide insight into how this agenda would affect people in states across the country.
This is a useful breakdown of how Project 2025's extremist proposals would affect individual states. The bigger the state, the worse the impact – and a lot of this plan for dictatorial rule is aimed at blue states.
Marc Elias
Author
