News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Turning universities into right-wing propaganda factories
The authoritarian parallels
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.)
George Washington's democratic vision, Trump's fascism
Today, America stands at such a moment. A vengeful and emotionally unstable former president—a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, an admirer of foreign dictators, a racist and a misogynist—desires to return to office as an autocrat. Trump has left no doubt about his intentions; he practically shouts them every chance he gets. His deepest motives are to salve his ego, punish his enemies, and place himself above the law. Should he regain the Oval Office, he may well bring with him the experience and the means to complete the authoritarian project that he began in his first term.
If you read nothing else from this newsletter today, please make the time for Tom Nichols' cover story in the new Atlantic magazine (here's a different link if you hit a paywall). It puts Trump's increasingly overt fascism – note his fascist vow today to use the military against citizens who anger him – in context with George Washington's approach to the office he held, and especially how Washington left it. This year, it all comes down to turnout, everywhere, but most of all in the "swing states" where the last two presidential elections been decided by just a few tens of thousands of votes. Trump's cult would crawl across broken glass to help him. So even in the solid blue states, it's vital to run up the count to give Harris a sweeping popular vote victory. If you don't want a fascist and his cult running our government – and ultimately your life – you have a solemn obligation to vote.
Someone should tell the political reporters about this
In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results and are trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or help him overturn an election loss.
This New York Times editorial is excellent – as far as it goes. The paragraph I've quoted is a summary of the Republican Party's voter suppression campaign. The links go to two New York Times stories, one from 18 months ago and the other from six months ago, plus an NPR story from June and, most recent of all, a 60 Minutes report a week old. Think about that. The Times editorial page researchers apparently couldn't find anything from their own news organization in two of the voter suppression methods, and nothing more recent than half a year ago in the items the Times did publish. Now think about this: The editorial describes a direct, virulent, current threat to democracy. But the "news" pages – no differently, really, than the coverage in every other Big Journalism outlet – have made it clear that this is just another relatively minor topic of coverage, not anything especially urgent. If I ran a news organization, we would make a direct, nationwide attack on democracy a major topic of coverage. In the heroes department, our major media are definitely not represented, because they're deliberately AWOL.
Kamala Harris’s near-dozen media appearances this past week may not make her president. But they have given voters a much clearer sense of who she is, what she values, how she thinks, how she expresses herself, and what it would be like to have her in charge than a million shouted questions at a “press gaggle” or several dozen sober “why have you changed your mind on [issue xxx]?” interrogations on a Sunday show.
Jim Fallows' newsletter post (at least up to the point where you have to pay to read the rest*) is the best summary – as he says, with excellent help from the Nation's Joan Walsh – of Harris' umpteen media appearances last week. (I highlighted one of them, which Fallows calls the most substantive, her appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast.) Drawing from a career that includes presidential speechwriter, longtime journalist/author, and keen observer of the press, he explains how Harris used the right media opportunities at the right time, and made a mockery of the Washington press corps' entitled belief that it, and only it, should be asking the questions. He links to Walsh's article, and you should read that, too.
*I would instantly pay for a subscription to the Jim Fallows newsletter if he published anywhere but Substack. His isn't the only newsletter there I'd gladly pay for somewhere else. But Substack welcomes extremists and got major financing from a venture capital firm run by some of the worst of the right-wing tech bros.
The problem isn’t so much that half of America has chosen to live inside a hermetically sealed bubble of unreality but that — as history has shown us, when the Nazi fantasies about the Jewish people led to the 6 million deaths of the Holocaust — fake beliefs can and will lead to real-world nightmares. Trump is barnstorming America telling us exactly what he is going to do: create an American gulag archipelago of mass detention camps by abusing sweeping presidential powers already on the books and involving the U.S. military, and which will likely to expand to include not just undocumented migrants but his growing enemies list. And yet the other half of the nation is also delusional — in thinking it’s a slam dunk that voters will reject this dystopia on Nov. 5.
It does sometimes seem like we're living in a bad-dream simulation. But as Will Bunch warns in his Philadelphia Inquirer column, this is real. As noted above, you simply have to vote. Please tell your family, friends, colleagues – whoever will listen – that the American experiment could end next year under a fascist named Donald Trump. Please get everyone you know out to the polls, in early voting wherever possible. This isn't a drill.
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.
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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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Tom Nichols
James Fallows
Will Bunch
