This is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money.
Being the party of institutions in an age of distrust is an inherent challenge. It’s at the heart of why Democrats often think and talk in ways that don’t connect, break through to big chunks of the electorate. Democrats aren’t going to stop being the party of institutions because they want the rule of law; they want elections where votes are counted; they want real medicine over quacks.
Trump – and his hatchet men Musk and Ramaswamy – are not setting out to create evidence-based policy. They are pursuing policy-based evidence, firing everyone capable of telling them how to turn the values espouse (prosperity and safety for all Americans) into policy. They dress this up in the language of democracy, but the destruction of the expert agencies that turn the political will of our representatives into our daily lives is anything but democratic. It's a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos, where you never know what's coming out of your faucet.
The posts above struck me as complementary, and I hope you'll read them both. As Josh notes, the Democrats face a conundrum in which they are relegated (I know, weird word here) to being the party of institutions, while Republicans have claimed the mantle of change. As Cory explains so neatly, current right-wing policy searches for "evidence" to support it, rather than using evidence to help generate policy. A huge problem for all of us is that every institution we once broadly trusted has harbored bad actors who've betrayed that trust. Demagogues and their press stenographers treat anecdotes as emblematic of entire sectors. That's easier when the people in the best position to stop abuses tend to protect the abusers (e.g. "bad apple" police officers who, protected by other cops and especially corrupt police unions, almost never face punishment for malfeasance). Look we have to trust someone in dealing with life's complexities. The extremists want you to trust only them. That's why the top officials in the U.S. government's agencies devoted to public health are about to be the most dangerous threat to public health in generations. Democrats could do something with that, but they have to be willing to take on the bad or incompetent institutions (Josh names the press, correctly, as one of them) they reflexively support. I don't see any sign of that happening.
Whatever else the [International Criminal Court] has done, it has rejected the viability of turning a blind eye to U.S.-backed war crimes. And whatever the material realities of imperial decline—and I tend to think these realities usually reveal themselves in hindsight—entities like the ICC that were born in an era of U.S. hegemony would not take such a step if they considered the Rules-Based International Order unchallengeable. Decisions like the Israel warrants are downstream of decline. And so those who rally under the banner of the Rules-Based International Order must either fight to regain such dominance or accept the loss of this immaterial territory.
I should emphasize at the outset that I don't agree with every point in this Forever Wars take on the ICC's indictment of Israel's prime minister. I recommend it to you nonetheless because it brings into focus the we-must-have-it-both-ways nature of America's international stance in a world where there are institutions – which we helped create – that are designed to challenge abuses. I share some misgivings here, because the ICC hasn't been as consistent as it could have been in its pursuits. I vehemently support the right of Israel to exist. I loathe Hamas. But I cannot avoid the conclusion that Israel is abandoning every pretense of being a democracy that respects human rights, other than those of Israelis – and that its leaders' policies have led to war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu won't be hauled before the judges (except possibly in Israel, where he's been charged with corruption). And the Trump crew, like Biden and his, has sneered at the ICC charges. But this is a meaningful development, and it can lead only one of two ways: a beggar-everyone world where power and only power matters, or a global civilization where other things matter, too.
[T]his parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?”...simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
This Harper's Magazine piece (alternative link here) was published in the summer of 1941. Dorothy Thompson, one of the great journalists of her era, knew from direct experience what Nazis were like. She had contempt for Hitler and his crew, and nearly as much for his supporters and appeasers. Her withering commentaries, based on deep reporting, set a standard that modern American journalism's most important news organizations have failed to equal. Many of the party guests would hold different titles and posts today from the ones in her Harper's essay, but we can recognize them by type, because there's sadly too little evidence to suggest that that human beings have changed much. What kind of people are we, and the ones we see at work and at parties? We are about to find out, in some very granular ways.
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Josh Marshall
Cory Doctorow
Spencer Ackerman
Dorothy Thompson
