A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You will rarely 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 should 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.)
You can't take back a vote that helps put fascists in charge
Once this process begins, it is hard to stop. At the present stage of the strongman fantasy, people imagine an exciting experiment. If they don't like strongman rule, they think, they can just elect someone else the next time. This misses the point. If you help a strongman come to power, you are eliminating democracy. You burn that bridge behind you. The strongman fantasy dissolves, and real dictatorship remains. Most likely you won’t be killed or be required to kill. But amid the dreariness of life under dictatorship is dark responsibility for others’ death. By the time the killing starts, you will know that it is not about unity, or the nation, or getting things done. The best Americans, betrayed by you when you cast your vote, will be murdered at the whim and for the wealth of a dictator. Your tragedy will be living long enough to understand this.
We may well be on the verge of putting a fascist into the White House. And one reason, as one of our foremost historians on tyranny explains, is that average citizens just can't – or refuse to – get their minds around the reality of what it means. Send Snyder's post to everyone you know, but especially the people who are planning to vote for Trump, or even thinking about it. Lives are at stake. So are souls.
In addition to repealing Obamacare, [Trump] is certain to try to ban abortion nationally, either through Congress or through judicial rule-by-decree, which would not only wound and kill thousands of women whose pregnancies go wrong, but also devastate basic gynecological care across the country. He will also attack vaccine requirements in schools and put the most crackbrained anti-vaccine lunatics in the country in charge of the federal public-health bureaucracy. The vaccine wall protecting the American people from formerly eradicated viruses would erode, with measles, polio, whooping cough, mumps, rubella, and God knows what else making a comeback. Thousands of people, mostly children, would die in agony. Kamala Harris, by contrast, wants to build on Obamacare by, among other things, extending insurance subsidies and price caps on prescription drugs, and adding a new home care benefit into Medicare. If she can, she will also sign a law legalizing abortion nationally. Just like with climate policy, the contrast couldn’t be starker.
When it comes to policy impact in this election, health care illuminates one of the most obvious, stark differences between Trump and Harris, and between Republican office holders and Democrats. I'd like to be a bigger fan of the Harris platform. It feels too incremental and not nearly bold enough. But compared to the devastation we'd face in the Trump regime, it's a progressive miracle.
It’s easy to look back at the Trump years and declare, “We survived!”—unless you’re one of the thousands of Americans whose death from COVID might have been avoided if not for Trump’s mismanagement, demagoguery, selfishness, penchant for conspiracy theories, and incompetence. There’s no guarantee that any of us, in the next crisis, will be lucky again.
Trump's malign handling of the pandemic started before covid emerged. His administration dismantled the agency that was designed to provide fast, effective handling of pandemics – and then he and his administration proceeded to botch almost everything once people started getting sick. I've long believed that the predictable effect, and quite probably the intent, of the Trump policy – once it was clear that minorities were dying at elevated rates – was to spread the virus, not contain it. The one praiseworthy thing the administration did was to push vaccine development. Now that Trump has vowed to give ridiculous amounts of health-related power to an antivaccine nutcase (RFKjr), don't look for any federal help if and when the next pandemic – bird flu would make covid look mild – hits humanity in its perpetual weak spot.
The aura of evil around the Nazis can make everything associated with them seem exotic and remote. It may be hard for us to imagine how respectable business leaders could enthusiastically support Hitler’s election campaign. But their motives were mundane and familiar: pragmatism with a dash of ideological conviction. Exactly the same mixture of motives drives many business leaders to give large sums to Donald Trump in 2024, with a potentially similar outcome.
This New Republic piece is a history lesson, and provides the kind of context we rarely see from news organizations. Read it, and you'll understand the amoral (or worse) activities of America's top business people. The vocal and financial Trump supporters – as well as the Harris supporters who remain silent – will bear an enormous responsibility if we end up with a Trump dictatorship. These rich and powerful people are indifferent to other impacts of their actions and inactions. They are a moral disgrace, which, sadly, is nothing new.
“It's super concerning that so many people like to paint Trump as a family man," Golden tells Teen Vogue. “And he and Vance have tried to create this image of the importance of the American family unit, and that's why they're trying to get rid of a lot of reproductive health care services and facilities, if God forbid, they win the election.”
It surprises many people that Teen Vogue has done some of the best and most relevant political journalism over the past few years. This article brings a bit of semi-recent history back to attention – and serves as a reminder that Trump's contempt for women goes back a long, long way.
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
Take your personal contact list, compare it to the national voter file, and find out which of your actual friends, family, co-workers and past acquaintances live in swing states and districts where a call or text from you could be hugely influential.
Please read Micah Sifry's advice – and heed it! You still have time to make a huge difference.
Please send your suggestions
I spend a lot of time looking for essential coverage, and hope you'll help me by letting me know about the good stuff you find. Let me know.
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Timothy Snyder
Ryan Cooper
Cathy Young
Benjamin Hett
Micah L. Sifry
