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 links to the 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. (Those outlets do, for the moment, offer solidly reported commentary.) My primary focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals) who have been doing the vital work. I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money.
Democrats have become defenders of the existing order. That was not the right place to be. People wanted change more than continuity. Add in all the racial animus and sexual resentment and religious sanctimony that the GOP runs on, plus a huge injection of mega-donations from America’s oligarchs and Elon Musk’s explicit conversion of a giant social network to partisan ends, and no wonder this election was close despite Trump’s manifest unfitness for the job. But all that said, I have to double-down on a core theme of this newsletter: The Democratic model for winning elections is fundamentally broken.
I've read a lot of instant postmortem analysis today, and this Connector post resonates most because it also looks at the future with the same clarity it examines how this election catastrophe occurred. It focuses on what happened in Pennsylvania, which was one of the "Blue Wall" states that collapsed under the Trump assault. The author wrote a Nation article, published just before the election, that amplified his misgivings. He was right.
The prospect of future climate legislation in Congress looks much darker following Tuesday’s election, when voters chose to send Donald Trump back to the White House and flipped control of the next Senate to his Republican Party. That change also leaves President Joe Biden’s signature climate law—the Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution—on newly uncertain ground.
Inside Climate News reminds us that the central issue of our future – fighting climate change – is now off the table in American politics. Even the weirdly named "Inflation Reduction Act" – a serious and excellent climate law – may be on the chopping block. Meanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party have made it completely clear that they a) choose to believe climate change is a hoax; and b) will promote fossil fuels until every molecule of carbon has been released into the atmosphere. Deadlier times were in the forecast no matter who won, but the likelihood of civilization-crippling disasters just got larger.
Resist. Do not go gently. Do not be cowed by the result. Resist. Agitate, agitate, agitate. The values you believe in, the ones that led you to despise Trumpism, are worth fighting for whether or not we are currently winning. Ignore the people who will, from indifference or complicity or cowardice, sneer at you for holding to those values. Speak out. Every time you act to defend your fellow people, even in small ways, you defy Trumpism. In the age of Trumpism, simple decency is revolutionary. Be revolutionaries.
Be sure to read this Popehat piece all the way through. The messages are clear, and stark, and in a vital way inspiring. God knows we all need some inspiration right now.
In sum, when a country deliberately rejects decency, truth, democratic values and good governance, the problem is not a candidate, a party, the media or a feckless attorney general. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires a virtuous people devoted to democratic ideals. Whether we can recover the habits of mind — what we used to call civic virtue — will be the challenge of the next four years and beyond.
Both of the above commentaries are slaps in the face. We needed that. When Rubin says the problem isn't "a candidate, a party, the media or a feckless attorney general," she also recognizes that they played central roles in our national disaster. On the fundamental point, she and Will Bunch are right, however: This is who we are as a country. Face up to that ugly reality, and then help change it.
Micah L. Sifry
Derek Harrison
Will Bunch
