A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't 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.
Big money's takeover of everything, including democracy
Everywhere you turn, there's a breathtaking amount of corruption happening right out there in plain sight. How did this happen? How did we go backwards? Over the next several episodes, you're going to find out. Spoiler, it wasn't an accident. There's been a decades-long Master Plan in the works to legalize political corruption and make America into the kind of place that works only for the rich, the connected, and the powerful. This story starts in the 1970s, but it continues today in everything from legislation to court rulings to Republicans' newest policy agenda dropped right into the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
"Master Plan" is a brilliant investigative podcast series, as good as this kind of reporting gets. The driver of the series is David Sirota, who founded The Lever, an online news outlet that is consistently producing hard-hitting, important journalism. (I am a paid subscriber and hope you will join me.) What he and his colleagues unravel here should be a major topic in our news media. "And yet," the Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch writes in his column praising Master Plan, "while the corrupting influence of Big Money is a disease that affects both parties, and the current 2024 election is on track to shatter all records with more than $10 billion in campaign spending, few people besides Sirota and his Lever reporters are talking about the problem."
The reason why there's so little interest from journalism organizations should be obvious from that quote: An appreciable amount of that drunken-sailor campaign spending goes into the pockets of the media organizations – ranging from the biggest national media operations, not least Facebook and Google as well as network broadcasters and news channels, to the local radio and TV stations that have always scored a disproportionately large piece of the windfall. Asking journalists to to blow the whistle on a scandal from which they profit is merely asking them to do their jobs. I suspect the journalists would like to do their jobs in this case, but they work for media bosses and shareholders who have, shall we say, different priorities.
[A] close examination of her 12 years as an elected prosecutor, including interviews with more than 30 people who worked with her, shows a coherent record that is for the most part consistent. Ms. Harris seemed particularly focused on protecting the most vulnerable victims by cracking down on violent offenders while seeking alternatives to incarceration for less serious criminals. Her priorities as a prosecutor became especially clear once she was given the authority by voters to establish them, after more than a decade spent working for other district attorneys. Those efforts were not always successful or politically advantageous, yet she undertook them anyway.
This look into Harris' law enforcement record has something of major value: nuance. And a fair reading of it suggests that she was using her public offices in ways that progressives should (mostly) respect. The right wing was never going to respect anything she did. I voted for her when she ran for California Attorney General, and I thought she (mostly) did a good job.
But on several issues that I consider vital, including online liberties, I was completely appalled by her stances and actions. In particular, she grossly abused her powers – and, in cases whose implications were ignored by most journalists, did serious damage to freedom of expression – when she went on a relentless campaign against the Backpage classified ads site and its founders. Her attacks were also attacks on freedom of speech, and they made life vastly worse for many of the people she claimed to be protecting.
In the end, Walz emerged from the 2021 special legislative session with a compromise bill on police reform that seemingly satisfied no one. For some Democrats, it didn’t go far enough. Many called the bill a disappointment. Some Republicans felt it went too far. The next year, facing reelection, Walz received no major law enforcement endorsements. “He is not a radical,” said Michelle Phelps, a University of Minnesota sociology professor and author of “The Minneapolis Reckoning.” “He is, I think, a sort of a vanguard of what a more progressive, but still centrist, liberal Democratic wing of the party could look like.”
This is a fascinating dive, reported and published by two news organizations, into how Tim Walz works and thinks about the role of government in general, and policing in particular. Keep in mind that while he's been governor, the Minnesota legislature has been almost evenly divided, with Democrats holding a narrow margin. Walz has had no option, in a matter so tied to raw politics and emotions, but to compromise with people he doesn't agree with – but the article reminds us that law enforcement doesn't compromise, period. In city after city, the police do exactly what they want, with little or no accountability except in the most egregious cases. I came away from this article with greater understanding of the pressures and dilemmas the governor faced, and greater respect for Walz.
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Journalism watchers will notice an interesting dynamic in how this article came to life, via:
thousands of internal emails from the Walz administration obtained by ProPublica and the Minnesota Reformer. The emails were requested that summer by independent journalist Tony Webster, but the administration only recently finished turning them over. Webster shared them with the news organizations.
Two thoughts: Open-records laws continue to be one of the most important levers for journalism that matters. And collaborations between news organizations are becoming one of the most important ways to bring information to the public.
The economic causes may lie in growing disparities in life chances between young men and women as the men fall behind women their age in education and college completion. (A college degree is now generally associated with more liberal views.) A variety of other measures—employment, earnings, mental health, “deaths of despair”—tell a story of rising distress among young men. The acceleration of these problems has occurred in an era when the word “masculinity” has been continually paired with “toxic” among liberals and progressives, and young men could easily get the impression that Democrats see them as nothing but trouble. Politically, the result could be the reverse of the optimistic theory that only older men, stuck in their ways, were moving to the right in response to greater gender equality. If younger men follow that path too, the political implications would be enormous.
The gender gap in voting gets wider and wider, but few had expected it to show up with such strength as it has among young adults. What's happening is potentially grim for progressive policy. Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, Pulitzer winner, and author of many books, offers valuable advice to a political party that has all but written off large segments of the population during the past several decades. The "rising distress" is much more persuasive as a cause than the labeling of a small number of young men as toxic. Whatever is causing this, the Democrats need to pay a lot more attention.
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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Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica, and Michelle Griffith, Madison McVan and Deena Winter, Minnesota Reformer
Paul Starr
