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.)
What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs? Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock? What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?
Everyone needs to read this commentary in the American Prospect, because it goes to the heart of what is coming if Trump and his Republican puppets regain control of the federal government. Perhaps you will never need to make a stark decision about whether to comply with fascism when the demand is made. But you should be prepared – and you should understand, deep in your soul, that if the worst happens politically this fall you will, like it or not, need to decide: Will you be a quisling – a collaborator in fascism? Or will you be part of the resistance. I hope none of us is forced to answer. But I fear that a huge number of Americans would choose to side with humanity's worst. Vote if you haven't already voted, and help others vote. A lot of lives, including yours, may depend on it.
Trump and his people really don’t think they have to win. They think they can stop certification of states they lose long enough to let Mike Johnson shut the door on democracy. This is where I’m supposed to say “the only way we can stop this is if we vote” and, sure, yes, please do vote. Referencing the “secret plan” in public is likely a way for Trump to try to depress Democratic turnout while inspiring Republicans, because, remember, another way for Trump to win is if he actually wins. But the whole point of the plan is to make people’s votes not matter.
Maybe the Democrats and their lawyers do have a plan to stop the Republicans from stealing the White House. But this article by a legal expert is only the latest warning that Trump, his apparatchiks, and his office-holding cultists are ready and more than willing to do whatever it takes to stop Harris from being president, no matter what the real outcome of the election. To refer back to a post higher up, what will you do if they pull this off? Because if they do, and if their manipulation stands, the American experiment will be over.
To be clear, we now live in a political system built by the Roberts Court, in which the richest Americans dominate political spending, where rewarding them for their backing is legal, and where insurrectionists are shielded from criminal prosecution by the very judges they appointed to the Supreme Court. And all the while, the billionaire and corporate media have looked the other way.
Podhorzer has been making the case in his newsletter that the oligarch-driven politics and economics of our times – slowed but not reversed by the progressive policies of the Biden administration – is close to claiming complete power. And if it happens, the people who appointed and confirmed today's Supreme Court – by far the most radical and corrupt in two centuries – will have made it happen. "We are just a week away from a knife’s-edge election that could seal the pluto-theocrats' victory," he writes – and our media have done almost nothing to tell the American people. Guess why.
All of these billionaire cowards are really just trying to protect themselves and the reputations they know hang on a tissue-thin foundation, by placing what you might call a Pascal’s wager on politics. They know that Kamala Harris will do the responsible thing and act as an agent of the people if elected, regardless of who supported her or who did not. She will not award contracts based on patronage. Conversely, they know that Trump will be vindictive to those who opposed him, if he succeeds. So they have nothing to lose by betting on Trump and everything to gain for the people they truly care about: themselves. This is not about what’s best for their workers or for the future of America; it’s about what ensures their own entrenched positions within their institutions and future wealth and power.
Not many years ago, a congressional aide came up with an aphorism that, at the time, I considered absurdly simplistic: "Every billionaire is a policy failure." But the predatory ways of the billionaire class have forced me to reconsider. There are more of them every year, because they've bought policies that help them systematically extract wealth from the people who are not part of the elite. They are immensely cynical, as this New Republic commentary shows. They use their wealth, via the corporate cartels they control, to harm humanity and get their legions of PR people to persuade the public of the opposite. They are buying the government outright, and many of the richest are backing a fascist who wants to end democracy. The relatively few "good billionaires" in the mix can't (or don't) do much to counteract all the bad stuff. We need policies – including a strict inheritance tax with a super-high marginal rate at the top – and we need them soon.
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.
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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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Rick Perlstein
Elie Mystal
Michael Podhorzer
Ross Rosenfeld
Micah L. Sifry
