This Is Your Grandpa's Democratic Party(?)

"Democrats abandoned ordinary Americans."

It's not true. But it's stuck, like a craw in the mouth of the American voter (and the American pundit). And the big question amongst Democratic strategists is how to dislodge it.

My latest idea, in my ongoing quest to become the Democratic Party's Francis Coppola, is to explicitly run with a narrative that says "yes, this is your Grandfather's Democratic Party" -- directly tying oneself to JFK and the New Deal and the civil rights era and that whole period where (supposedly) the Democratic Party was the party of ordinary Americans. Cut to lines about:

• Defending labor unions.
• Bringing back honest, well-paying jobs that can support your family.
• Taking on the billionaires robbing our democracy.
• Protecting civil rights.
• Restoring a women's right to choose.

All intercut with images of modern workers interspersed with older imagery (the March on Selma, men on girders building skyscrapers, etc.) that evokes the good old days.

What's the point of the ad? Basically, it's to create a permission structure for people who have -- for whatever reason -- internalized the narrative of "the party left me" to tell themselves things have changed again. They're not voting for the modern Democratic Party that Fox News has created for them in their minds over the past few years (latte-sipping coastal elites blah blah blah), they're voting for the mythologized Democratic Party of yesteryear that the Fox News caricature is tacitly juxtaposed against -- the party of the New Deal and of JFK, the party that was a working-class party, the party that built things and fought for everyday Americans.

"Mythologized" is important. Obviously, in reality the Democratic Party of that era (or any era) was not some clarion beacon of the worker's voice; nor was it some uncomplicated bastion of civil rights and women's rights advocacy. I know that, you know that. I also know that "ordinary Americans" is a loaded term, that the past wasn't actually that great for a whole lot of people, and so on.

But we're not writing a history paper here, we're dealing with a mood, and that mood is not especially connected to historical reality. How many times have you heard someone say that the current Democratic Party "just keeps moving to the right" (when it is beyond obvious that the Biden administration is the most progressive Democratic administration in my lifetime)? Objectively, it is impossible to defend the notion that the Democratic Party leadership is more conservative now than it was during the Clinton administration. In reality, making a show of affirming people who think "well, back then Democrats were fighting for me" is worth playing a bit of make-believe. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and just the gesture of "this is a change in a direction that makes you feel fuzzy" can have an outsized impact. The past wasn't actually that great, and modern changes are good actually. But if you can make people feel as if the things we're pulling for now are simply a restoration of the hazy memories they have when things were inchoately "better" (or "less complicated" or "less divided" or whatever), you're in a very good position.

I'm not saying the idea is perfect. In particular, even as a subversion of the "not your grandpa's ..." frame, the tagline still is a rough one at a time when many people are aggrieved at the "gerontocracy" in American politics. So workshop the hell out of this. I'm not prideful about it. But I think there's something here. The great insight of the contemporary conservative movement is in how they manage to fuse their present-day reactionary values as if there were simply a restoration of the greatness of the founders (I read one constitutional commentator describe originalism as "ventriloquizing the present through the past"). Democrats can do it too -- and as the Republican Party falls deeper and deeper into the grip of billionaire oligarchs and weird paranoid extremists, there's an opening here we can and should exploit.

Learning the Right Wrong Lessons, Part II

The major pivot point in Joe Biden's term in office did not stem from inflation or the war in Gaza. It came following his withdrawal from Afghanistan. That decision was marked by a few key characteristics:

1. It was the right call: we weren't accomplishing anything in Afghanistan, and nobody had a better plan to turn things around other than "stay for six more months, and then six more months after that."
2. It was always going to be bumpy, leaving ample attack avenues open for political opponents (and the media) to exploit; and
3. It was vocally demanded by the American left.

Three of Biden's predecessors over a twenty year period had stayed in Afghanistan, perhaps not believing the first point, perhaps fearing the second. Biden was the one who actually followed through and did the right thing, hoping that the progressive actors who enlivened the third point would rise to his defense to counteract the second.

It didn't happen. Biden withdrew, got absolutely pilloried for it in the press, received essentially no credit for it from the left, and to be honest his presidential tenure never recovered. As I and many others observed, any rational political observer knew what lesson to draw from the ordeal, and it's not a good one.

I think we're going through the same scenario with Biden's recent commutation wave targeting persons who were already moved into home confinement during COVID. After the Hunter Biden pardon, there were absolutely valid questions about how the clemency power was being used, and one narrative many progressives rapidly coalesced on was that if Biden is going to pardon his own son, he better use it to the benefit of ordinary, non-connected inmates in the clutches of prison system. Much like the Afghanistan withdrawal, this was a vocal demand of the left, and much like the Afghanistan withdrawal it was essentially assured that any large-scale deployment of the clemency power would yield something that political opponents could exploit. Contrary to the idyll fantasies in certain quarter, most people in prison have indeed done something wrong, and any political action to benefit the likes of "them" is a ripe avenue for political attack. This is one reason why criminal justice reform is hard.

Anyway, Biden issues a commutation order for roughly 1500 people, the largest one-day usage of the clemency power in American history. One of the beneficiaries was the notorious "kids for cash" judge in Pennsylvania, Michael Conahan. People -- including liberals who a moment earlier were demanding expansive use of the clemency power -- went ballistic. And Biden got essentially got no credit.

It goes without saying that the Conahan committed an absolutely heinous crime. But it is a testament to how bad the media culture is around this issue that when I first heard about Biden's decision I was misled twice. First I thought it was the case that Biden pardoned Conahan; he didn't, the sentence was commuted. Then I got the impression that the commutation meant that the judge would serve a negligible time in jail (time is meaningless to me right now, I had absolutely no sense of when the judge committed his crimes or was convicted and sentenced). Wrong again: Conahan was sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and this commutation occurred after he served fourteen.

Could one say that the Biden administration could have reviewed the commutations more closely to make sure a guy like this wasn't included? Perhaps -- but I'd level two notes of caution. First, if it wasn't him, odds are it'd be someone else. Again, most people in federal prison did something to hurt someone. If you support using clemency on a wide scale, you have to be willing to take that hit. Second, there is an inherent incompatibility between doing clemency at scale and adding a bunch of extra layers of individualized review. If we're talking a dozen or so people or so, it's probably possible to conduct a timely review of each of their records in depth that will assure oneself that there's nothing there that will trigger major political blowback. When we're talking about thousands of people at once, that sort of review isn't feasible without gumming up the works indefinitely. So if you think the problems in our carceral system are not just a few idiosyncratic cases of unusually sympathetic people who were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but is systemic, then you need to allow for reform mechanisms that are systemic in nature, and that necessarily means they're not going to be perfectly attentive to the particularities of every inmate's case.

Here, the reason that Conahan received a commutation wasn't because someone looked at his particular case file and said "this person is especially worthy of executive grace." There was rather a broad metric the Biden administration was using -- people who had already served most of their sentences, were medically vulnerable in prison, had not been convicted of violent or sexual offenses, and who had already been transferred into home confinement -- and this man was one of 1500 or so who met the criteria. That's a reasonable metric, and if you're telling me that it's essential to add more bureaucratic barriers to the clemency process -- and, in essence, make it much, much harder to issue clemency at scale -- in order to ensure that Michale Conahan serves seventeen years in prison instead of fourteen, then I say your priorities are out of order.

But the reality is that, like with Afghanistan, any observer will see what Joe Biden did here, see the reaction, see the anemic defense he received even from many of those who demanded action just like this, and learn the only rational lesson there is to learn: stay away from criminal justice reform. Be stingy with the clemency power. Keep more people in prison for longer. That's the lesson, and I'm sure every savvy Democratic politico is internalizing it.

Racist Idiots Continue To Be Mad That Caitlin Clark Is Not Racist

It's an exaggeration to say that conservatives only care about women's sports when it gives them an excuse to be transphobic. Sometimes they care about women's sports in order to be racist too.

For example, every once in a while, idiots try to conscript Caitlin Clark into racism and then get really mad that she doesn't participate.

In college, I remember a blowup some people had over Angel Reese doing some trash talking against Clark when LSU beat Iowa in the national championship. Clark, of course, is no stranger to trash talk herself, and people rightfully understood the pearl-clutching on her behalf as highly racialized in character. But the "controversy" was entirely on the outside; Clark gave absolutely no indication that she couldn't take what she dished out. Her view was always that trash talk and the like is part of the game, whether she's on the giving or the receiving end. Racists wanted to be racist on Clark's behalf, Clark did not bite, and it was pretty clear that the folks who rushed to "defend" her resented her for not obliging.

The other day we witnessed another iteration of this, after Time Magazine mentioned ongoing frustration by some Black WNBA players (h/t: Kevin Drum) who think they're persistently overlooked because of race (and that, in turn, Clark's popularity stems in part from the "great white savior" narrative). Clark was asked about the issue, and gave a perfectly reasonable answer about the importance of celebrating and uplifting the many Black players who have contributed immeasurably to the league's success:

“I want to say I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege,” says Clark. “A lot of those players in the league that have been really good have been Black players. This league has kind of been built on them. The more we can appreciate that, highlight that, talk about that, and then continue to have brands and companies invest in those players that have made this league incredible, I think it’s very important. I have to continue to try to change that. The more we can elevate Black women, that’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

A good answer, and predictably, some people went ballistic over it:

Well, it happened. Caitlin Clark finally bent the knee to the insufferable, gaslighting, disgusting, race-baiting woke mob.... Anyway, Clark got her roses, and then proceeded to bend the knee to the mob.... Caitlin Clark bends the knee to an invisible mob.... Why did the best player in the WNBA — by a laughably wide margin — crumble like a cheap tent?

Now we can concentrate on how pathetic this whine is. But I want to flag something specific, as someone who actually did follow the WNBA season this year: Caitlin Clark is not, in fact, the best player in the WNBA. The best player in the WNBA, by a laughably wide margin, is A'ja Wilson. This is no knock on Clark, who is an outstanding player and was well-deserving of rookie of the year. But let's look at the stat lines this season (all stats on a per game basis):

• Wilson: 26.9 points, .518 FG%,11.9 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 1.8 steals, 2.6 blocks, 1.3 turnovers
• Clark: 19.2 points, .417 FG%, 5.7 rebounds, 8.4 assists, 1.3 steals, 0.7 blocks, 5.6 turnovers

With all respect to Clark, this is a blowout. Wilson averaged a double-double on the season. She led the league in blocks; she set an all-time league record in points per game. She led Clark in every statistical category but assists (unsurprising, since Clark is a guard and Wilson is a center). That's why Wilson won the MVP by a unanimous vote -- only the second time that's occurred in WNBA history.

Again, this is not at all to dismiss Clark as anything other than an all-star. She had a great rookie season. She did a fantastic job leading the hitherto sad sack Indiana Fever to the playoffs, overcoming a dismal season start (where we saw Clark's own adjustment pains getting used to playing at the highest level of the sport). Her own rookie of the year honors, and fourth place finish in MVP voting, were also very well-deserved. And she plays a exciting style of basketball that's a ton of fun to watch -- I know full well that  a Caitlin Clark game is must-see TV.

Obviously, at one level this only validates the complaint by Wilson and others regarding how they're overlooked for clearly racist reasons. But I also raise this because the sort of racist morons out here demanding Caitlin Clark be racist also, very clearly, pay absolutely zero attention to the WNBA -- Caitlin Clark included -- for any reason other than looking for an excuse to be racist. They know nothing about the game other than that it might provide a vector for various racist and transphobic projections. So it's no surprise that when the game and the players don't indulge them in their bigotry, they throw a tantrum. It's literally the only reason they care about women's sports.

With Great Blocking Power ....

As everyone knows, one of the main differences between Bluesky and even "old Twitter" is the blocking culture. One of my favorite stories from when I first joined Bluesky came in the wake of a series of negative interactions with a semi-prominent journalist figure. I considered blocking her but then I thought "no -- while this wasn't pleasant, there was nothing abusive here, so I'm going to be better than that." The next morning I woke up and discovered ... she had blocked me! Moral of the story: block first. At least that way you get the satisfaction.

The block-happy culture of Bluesky has led to a lot of chatter about Bluesky turning into an "echo chamber" -- an accusation which, ironically enough, is one of the fastest ways to get yourself blocked on Bluesky. For my part, I think the echo chamber complaint is overblown (in part because very often what we tell ourselves is "exposure to diverse views" actually is a way to reaffirm "wow, those people are maniacs"). But I do think that it is important to start thinking about best blocking practices in a informational system where "block early, block often" is normal and not frowned upon.

Take block lists, for example. These can be valuable tools to ramp up blocking of entire suites of bad actors quickly. But they're also easily abused. I've seen reports of trolls and other bad actors setting up block lists seeded with an assortment of the "usual suspect" controversial accounts and then, once people adopt them, adding in (say) trans rights activists. If you're not paying attention to who is curating the lists, it is easy to get taken in by that sort of move. That doesn't mean "don't use block lists", it just means be mindful when and how you use them. The mantra of "block early, block often" shouldn't be used to disavow one's own responsibility over the choices you make -- rather, it should accentuate it.

A similar concern attaches to "secondary" block lists -- that is, those populated not by the primary bad actors, but by people who follow those bad accounts. Again, it's not that I can't see the use case for these, but they're fraught with danger. Most obviously, people who research, say, antisemitism (to use a random example) may follow all sorts of unlovely accounts for research and monitoring purposes. Follows do not equal endorsement. And the broader version of that insight is that who people follow is their business.  People make follow/unfollow decisions for an infinite number of reasons. We have absolute autonomy over what shows up on our feed, but we shouldn't start claiming authority over other people's feeds. If they start being unpleasant in their own voice, block them, but the moralization over who one follows strikes me as problematic. Tend to one's own garden.

Maybe you have quarrels with either of the above examples. But the bigger picture point I'm trying to make is this: a social media culture in which blocking is normal also has to be one where we take responsibility for the choices we make when blocking. A social media culture where blocking is rare can get away with people being less mindful about it, because they're only going to be acting in the most clear-cut cases -- one doesn't need to do a lot of deep reflecting to justify blocking RandoNazi1488. It's when we move beyond those cases that thought and consideration becomes important. And precisely because there are not and cannot be rules about blocking -- it is, ultimately, a matter of personal discretion -- it is especially important to cultivate a suite of good virtues around blocking. Block people who are abusive, but not people who just disagree. Block people for what they write, not for what the people they follow write. I don't think these are especially onerous, and I think most people are trying to follow them to one degree or another. But it can be easy to conflate Bluesky's quite healthy "block early, block often" mantra into an unhealthy belief that the actual ethos of the community is "I shouldn't have to think at all about my blocking choices." That isn't our ethos, and it shouldn't be our ethos.

A willingness to block often is not the same thing as being cavalier about blocking. Ideally, a healthy blocking culture will entail thinking carefully about how to balance hearing from a range of views and avoiding epistemic silencing with having a pleasant experience and not being inundated with worthless troll blather. I do think most people are capable of striking that balance in a reasonable way, but it isn't something one can do thoughtlessly. With great blocking power comes great blocking responsibility, and that's something we should embrace.

Saturation Ad Air War

One aspect of political culture I very strongly believe in is that most voters' knowledge of political affairs is primarily one of ambiance. They don't know much in the way of facts (what is the inflation rate, has crime gone up or down). They know a "mood". They feel that things are getting better, or worse. They hear a lot that America basically has open borders, or they hear a lot that abortion rights are going away. The connection to reality is pretty well unimportant (we definitely don't have open borders; abortion rights really are under threat). It's the sensation, the steady drumbeat of narrative, that moves them.

To that end, I've long thought that a good progressive billionaire project would be to continually air issue ads that are not tied to a given political race or even an election, but are just part of the backdrop every time one turns on the news or watches Monday Night Football. The goal of these ads should be to make certain hopes, fears, and moods simply part of our backdrop -- something "we heard somewhere." It should not cast itself as expressly political -- an effort to elect this or that politician. In fact, "issue ads" is probably the wrong moniker. It shouldn't present itself as political at all. It should be simply a story, told over and over again, until it seeps into the national subconscious.

What sorts of ads do I have in mind? I pitched one about abortion a few years ago. I had another idea for one about trans and gender non-binary issues:

A family is at home in classic suburbia: mom, dad, and a gender non-conforming adolescent kid. The scene is utterly mundane and ordinary, but with a touch of danger lurking in the background. Mom is cooking, but beside her one can see a newspaper headline announcing the latest right-wing attack on trans kids. Dad is telling a dad joke to the kid (who rolls their eyes), the TV news on mute in the background but the subtitles have a talking head calling families who provided gender-affirming care to their children sexual predators who should be thrown in jail.

Interspersed with each shot, we have a quick cut of heavily armed police massing outside the house. Right as everyone is getting ready for dinner, the door is battered open and the scene goes black. All we hear is the police demanding everyone on the ground, then demanding the child come with them as the family screams frantically. The last we hear is the kid pleading to their parents "don't let them take me!" 

What's the point of the ad? To put people (and particularly suburban parents -- political hell hath no fury like a suburban schoolparent scorned) in a mindset where families are in danger. Maybe their family. Maybe their neighbor's family. There's no lie here -- these are the stakes, and families are in danger. But the point is to prime them with that sensation in advance, so that it's what they immediately think of whenever the Trump administration announces policies that will be all about threatening families.

The ad is just an idea (and nobody wants my advertising ideas). And not all the ads need to be negative, necessarily (though as the opposition party, that's probably going to be the bulk of it). But the broader point is that liberals need to do everything they can to just saturate their narratives into the American bloodstream, not as part of a discrete political campaign, but simply as a background feature of what the world is right now. We can't wait for election season, and we certainly can't wait for an increasingly infirm legacy media to the job for us. These stories should be mainlined into every American home, by any and every medium available, and should start right now.

The Making of a Murder-Cheerer

Last week, I spent some time at the eye doctor to address periodic swelling, irritation, and pain in my left eye. This happens periodically, but it got especially bad during my trip to Florida (to the point where airline attendants asked if I needed paramedics to meet me once we landed). The doctor was quite nice but suggested that incidents like this are a symptom of my keratoconus worsening and there probably wasn't much to be done at this point other than hope it doesn't happen too often and ride it out when it does.

I say "at this point" because at an earlier point there was something to be done -- a surgical proceeding called corneal cross-linking. Cross-linking surgery doesn't "fix" keratoconus, it just stops further deterioration, but since keratoconus is a degenerative condition that's no small thing. I was slated to get cross-linking surgery while at Berkeley, but at the last moment my insurer denied coverage as not medically necessary since I could still see with contact lenses. Again, remember that what cross-linking does is stop degeneration -- that is, the surgery would preserve the status quo where I could see with contact lenses -- so the fact that I currently could see with contact lenses is exactly why the surgery was being recommended to me. Nonetheless, even though the surgery had been scheduled for months, the insurer issued its denial just a day or two before, giving me essentially no time to appeal or gather additional medical information to support why the surgery was, in fact, necessary.

Several years later (now in Portland), I was able to get the surgery -- but only in my right eye. My left eye had, in the intervening years, deteriorated to the point where it was no longer a candidate for the procedure. And that deterioration is likely permanent, and (given the periodic swelling etc.) possibly still ongoing. My doctor said that if things continue to get worse in that eye, the only real treatment option available is a full-blown corneal transplant -- quite a bit more intense (and expensive) than cross-linking would have been, and not something I'm especially excited to pursue. There's not even the karmic satisfaction of the insurer having to pay more, because I'm on different insurance now compared to when the surgery was initially denied!

My experience is, of course, not uncommon. We've all been swapping stories on this subject prompted by the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. My case is not to the degree of being denied life-saving care, but permanent vision loss in an eye is not exactly frivolous either. Like many Americans, I have persistent ambient anxiety about what would happen if I faced a major medical crisis, and that anxiety is less about the crisis itself and more wondering in what ways will my insurer try to screw me over in my most vulnerable moment in order to financially ruin me.

There are very, very good reasons for Americans to loathe their health insurance companies. But even still, it is alarming how many people are outright thrilled to have witnessed a street murder. The cause of this excitement is, no doubt, in significant part justifiable fury at the injustices health insurers wreak on regular people. But that more systemic explanation I think has to be cut with acknowledgment that a significant portion of people seem to be excited at the prospect of being justified in cheering a murder. They are luxuriating in this feeling of justified schadenfreude, and are encouraging others to feel similarly, and are hoping to feel it again and again.

No matter how one identifies the cause, such a situation is not a sign of a healthy society. For me, there were eerie echoes of the days after October 7, where we also saw too many people be not just thrilled at seeing Israelis murdered, but thrilled at their mutual, collectively reinforcing justifications at why they were right to be thrilled. Certainly, Thompson was far more directly complicit in injustice than a group of teenaged concertgoers, whose "complicity" was basically being Israelis full stop. But to the celebrators, this is a difference of degree and not kind -- they labored hard to establish why being Israeli was a form of culpable complicity for which the proper punishment was death and the proper affect was a hearty cheer. And that effort to stretch so one can properly enjoy the murder is powerful evidence that the desire to enjoy murders is the actual driving motivation, with the political or strategic apologias just epiphenomenal window dressing. How far down the pecking order at UHC is it warranted to be excited at extermination? To the adjusters? To the HR professionals? To the janitors? We all know the Tumblr accounts who would rush to point out we should cheer not just the death of the Himmlers but every German Nazi, top to bottom -- so why not apply that logic to UHC? Or to Israel? Or to any other institution complicit in systemic injustice -- a category which can include without too much in the way of struggle every institution? (This was one of the lessons of The Good Place -- while everyone has an obligation to try to do the right thing, overindulgence in "complicity" arguments makes everyone guilty and places everyone in hell).

The terrible realization many of us had, and are having again, is that for many the orientation towards Israel/Palestine or the American healthcare system isn't "let's create a just political structure for all" but rather "I want to see the right people be hurt," and the thirst for the latter is what drives the nominal political commitments rather than vice versa. Even where one can sympathize with the causes, this sort of outlook never leads anywhere good; more often than not, it's just people coming up with stories for why they should be permitted to revel in the misery of others. As a species, we should know well that our problem is not that we are too skittish about justifying brutality and violence, and so we should be hesitant about any political momentum which takes the form of accentuating and accelerating a popular desire to enjoy murder.

It is no answer to point out the many, many more people whose lives have been ruined by unjust insurance denials (UHC has the highest denial rate in the country, denying a full third of all filed claims). For one, anyone who reads a story about one of these denials and lets out a whoop and high fives would be a bad person too. More fundamentally, I also return to one of the most outstanding articles I've ever read, Robin West's "Sex, Law, and Consent," which does a superb job explaining how direct interpersonal injustices are qualitatively different than "systemic" ones even when the latter cause greater tangible loss than the former. We experience being robbed or burgled differently from being on the receiving end of wage theft, even if the latter might actually take more dollars from our pocket; West extends this analysis to how we think of rape vis-a-vis the broader suite of patriarchal norms which regularly generate "consent" to sexual activities that are not truly or enthusiastically desired. Again, this doesn't mean that UHC's conduct in the healthcare system isn't an example of serious injustice -- it is, just like wage theft is and just like structural sexism is -- but the point is that we're not simply delusional in viewing street murder as qualitatively different notwithstanding the fact that it is but one dead body.

I say all this because there is not, or should not be, a tension between "the murder of Brian Thompson is bad" and "we are obligated to create a more just and humane healthcare system that is not liable to the exploitations and predations of entities like UnitedHealthCare." Anxiety about insurer-driven financial ruin notwithstanding, and direct experience with insurer manipulation causing permanent medical injury notwithstanding, I never wanted Brian Thompson to die, and I cannot relate to thousands of internet strangers who did want him to die. What I want is for our health care system to work for us and to take care of us. That's all. My first response to Thompson's murder was to write:

The murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO is outrageous. We as a society must do everything in our power to ensure that a tragedy like this never occurs again. If that means implementing national universal healthcare so that anger over a failing private system isn't displaced onto violence, so be it.

And while yes, that was intentionally snarky, I also meant it with total earnestness. We should hate murder. And we should commit ourselves to creating a just healthcare system that doesn't generate justified seething hatred amongst ordinary Americans.

Yet here we see another element of our despairing time, which is that the proof is in the pudding in terms of what drives social change. Just like it may be sadly true that manipulative echo chambers are a more effective political strategy that earnest and honest engagement with people of diverse political views, it may be sadly true that violence and social disruption are able to drive necessary political change where persuasion and law fail. It is a bad precedent when we let terroristic violence drive even salutary social change, and the lesson to draw from that is to make salutary social changes without being prompted to do so by terroristic violence. And if we can't learn that lesson, then I'm at a loss except to say that it inherently puts us in a very grim place, and nobody should be excited to live there.

I have no answers here. But I again cannot help but feel that it is fundamentally unhealthy when people feel, and are encouraged to feel, excitement over murder. For too many people, the murder of Brian Thompson isn't about murder or even about generating justice in the healthcare space. It rather is an opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of a murder, and feel righteous in doing so. That instinct is one we should be very wary about letting flower unchecked, in ourselves or in others.

We Who Are About To Die

The Romans loved their gladiator games.

I actually have no idea if that's true. Most of what I know about gladiators comes from how they're portrayed in Ridley Scott movies. For all I know, Romans did not actually enjoy seeing innocent people torn apart in the arena by wild animals or what have you.

But, to quote Philip J. Fry, "it's a widely-believed fact!", so we'll run with it.

It seems clear that a huge part of the second Trump administration will be vindictive political prosecution of his "enemies". This was a recurrent campaign theme of his, from proposing "military tribunals" for the likes of Liz Cheney to alleging "COVID crimes" by Anthony Fauci. Willingness -- implicit or explicit -- to engage in such thuggery has been a theme of his early announced appointees, from Kash Patel to Brendan Carr to Pete Hegseth. Concern over such tactics was expressly raised by Joe Biden in his pardon announcement for his son, Hunter. How deep down the list will he go? Unclear, though normalcy will not save you. The hammerfist coming to smash American rule of law is something unprecedented in my lifetime.

These prosecutions will be lawless along every possible dimension. The people driving them won't care about the law. The venues will be selected based on political convenience (I bet one will be amazed at how many of the "crimes" in question will center on the Western District of Texas). The "crimes" themselves either will be frivolous or nakedly selective. It will be undisguised authoritarian thuggery: the apparatus of law enforcement entirely perverted to immunize the president's allies while harassing his enemies (the almost-assured pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists is also part of this story).

I won't here venture a prediction as to how the judiciary will respond to these endeavors. It's possible they'll hold the line, as they largely did in 2020. But it's also the case that in 2024 the conservative legal movement has embraced and assimilated into full-blown MAGAism to a far greater degree than in 2020; even if they don't actively embrace the conspiracism (which they might), one can very easily imagine them hiding behind rules of deference to enable Trump to run wild.

The open question I want to consider, though, is how the public will respond to all of this. Of course, Trump's base will love it -- they've been baying for blood since 2016. And equally obviously, people like me will hate it. But I have a bad feeling -- maybe doom-mongering, maybe not -- that these spectacles of prosecution will go over better than one would think with low-information independents.

The reason isn't because they necessarily have strong opinions that Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or various military generals actually are criminals. Rather, it is a more inchoate desire to see "the powerful" get their comeuppance. It almost doesn't matter whether they're guilty or not; the mere practice of seeing people one is accustomed to thinking of as "above you" laid low, ripped apart by the animals in the arena, is desired in of itself.

Consider what is for me one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump's victory: that he will not be held accountable for his many, many blatant crimes. No sentencing for the New York felony convictions, no consequences for the attempted 2020 insurrection, no pursuit of the document theft case, no nothing. It is maddening, to see such naked abuses of power result in nothing simply because Trump is powerful enough to evade responsibility for anything. If you take that indignant sensation and shear it from any substantive political knowledge, you're just left with the boiling resentment that a vague "they" keep "getting away with it". And the mere performance of going after a "they" can appeal to those resentments -- a fascist essence where the struggle is valuable in of itself, to show oneself to be the tribune of the people.

This suggests that Democrats could have leveraged this same atavistic desire to get at a powerful "them" by, for example, a fast Garland or prosecuting big bankers for the financial crisis or going after Elon Musk. And much like with echo chambers, I'm of two minds on this: torn between thinking that (for better or for worse) this is the strategy that works, versus thinking that it is a bad thing to encourage this sort of political climate (to be clear: I have no quarrel with "going after" big bankers or whoever when they commit crimes, but performatively going after an "enemy" class -- no matter who it is -- untethered by normal rule of law constraints strikes me as bad both morally and also conducive to a political environment that ultimately helps the right).

So once again, I'm at a bit of a loss here. But if we're relying on a natural popular revulsion to politicized sham prosecutions by the Trump administration, I'm not sure we're going to get it. We are going to be entering a very, very dark time.

Did Bluesky Win or Did X Lose?

"She only won because I lost. That's not a winner."

"Network effects" refer to situations where a product becomes more valuable to individual users the more total users there are. It's commonly applied to social media platforms -- one wants to be on, for example, Facebook because that's where the people are; a Facebook that had a small user base wouldn't be a lot of fun even if its features and product functionality were vastly superior. On a darker level, network effects are often cited as a reason why it's so difficult to leave even bad or malfunctioning social media platforms -- we're "stuck" there, even if there's widespread agreement that another platform would be better, because of the collective action problem of coordinating a mass decamping to an alternative.

For a long time, Twitter was held out as the epitome of a network effect in action -- because everyone was there, everyone had to be there; leaving Twitter for a competing platform was the equivalent of leaving a bustling party and deciding to shout into a boundless void. This sense of Twitter as a de facto monopoly gave at least some measure of credence at efforts to regulate it as a "common carrier" or "public square" -- the idea being that if Twitter "censored" (banned, throttled, or deprioritized) certain people or views, it was tantamount to blocking them from the premier domain of public conversation.

Now, of course, we are seeing Bluesky ascend as a truly viable alternative to Twitter X. For my part, I've been exclusively on Bluesky for several months (I joined in July 2023, but like many for a long time I straddled both platforms). By now, I'm close to my peak follower account on Twitter, and my engagement on Bluesky is at least as robust (if not better) than it was on Twitter. And while Bluesky isn't wholly immune to some of the worst elements of "old" Twitter, it is generally in my experience a nicer and more humane place (arguably compared to the Twitter of yore, certainly compared to the cesspool its devolved into as of late).

From my vantage point, seeing Bluesky challenge and, in certain domains, topple Twitter is unprecedented territory. The closest analogue I can think of is Facebook dislodging Myspace, but I don't know (genuinely, I don't) if Myspace was as ubiquitous and dominant in its domain as Twitter was. Outside of that, it's hard to think of a titan that's fallen as far, from as high, as Twitter did. How did this happen? How did Bluesky overcome the network effect hurdle to emerge as a viable alternative? 

I have two stories, and I'm genuinely unsure which is more persuasive.

Story #1 is that Bluesky's emergence shows that the network effect, while certainly real, isn't as big of a hurdle to change as people thought. We're not actually stuck with incumbent social media providers come hell or high water. There's inertia militating against change, but it's not insurmountable. Bluesky is winning because it is fundamentally better than X is right now, as well as better than the other X competitors (Threads, Mastodon, Post) that emerged over the last few years. It's making better choices about the use (or not) of algorithms, it's making better choices about doing content moderation, it made better choices about growing responsibly, and it's reaping the fruits of making those better choices that appeal to more people.

Overall, the moral of this story is that the concerns about Twitter as a functional monopoly that could singlehandedly manipulate the public square without any possibility of public recourse or accountability have been falsified. And that, of course, has implications for the rest of the social media space -- many of our worries about undislodgeable tech monopolies maybe seem overblown. What a relief!

Story #2, which is probably less hopeful but might generate more primal glee inside of me, is that the basic narrative of network effects creating entrenched monopolies is still true, but Elon Musk so epically and catastrophically mismanaged Twitter that he managed to destroy it anyway. Keeping in mind that Musk didn't actually want to buy Twitter in the first place (he made his offer as a troll, only to be forced into a sale when Twitter's leadership realized this was their best chance to cashout at inflated prices), every choice he's made since assuming ownership has been a disaster borne out of his own infinite depth of arrogance and boundless need for public affirmation. 

He had a company with universal brand recognition; he renamed it for no reason. He complained about Twitter allegedly censoring speech to put its thumb on the political scales; he converted X into an explicit megaphone for Donald Trump and far-right MAGA politics. He whined about bots taking over the platform; bots are even more ubiquitous than they were before. Ad sales are down because advertisers don't like their brands being associated with neo-Nazis, to the point where Musk is suing on the theory that it's illegal for people not to give him money. Neutering the utility of the block function served mostly to make harassment and brigading easier. Changing "verified" accounts into paid promotional material nuked the ability of Twitter to serve as a trusted outlet for anyone. 

It's been an utter, unmitigated, arguably unparalleled trainwreck -- and that's why Bluesky was able to overcome the network effect headwinds and establish itself as a competitor. It's not so much "popular discontent can overcome anything," and more "even the biggest ship can sink if its drunken captain insists on ramming it into an iceberg". I don't want to say that's never going to be replicable, but we won't always be so "lucky" as to have someone this incompetent at the helm of our big tech outfits. To take one example, there is plenty of negative things to be said on how Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook as of late, but as bad as his choices have been and as aggravating as Facebook often is as a platform, nothing Facebook has done has come anywhere close to the abyss of incompetence that characterized how Elon Musk ran Twitter into the ground -- and for that reason, we haven't seen a true competitor emerge to Facebook in a manner akin to Bluesky.

So which story is right? I don't know (and of course, it's more of a spectrum than a binary). I do think Bluesky made some smart choices that it deserves credit for -- there's a reason it is the main competitor (and not Threads or Mastodon). But there's little doubt it got a huge assist from the dizzying array of unfathomably boneheaded choices Elon Musk has made at the helm of X -- a unicorn event that to my eyes stands out even amongst a sea of overconfident, underperforming tech bros.

Fictional Character Ideological Turing Test

If you're a Democrat, which fictional television character do you think most "embodies" contemporary Republicans? And if you're a Republican, which television character do you think Democrats would pick to answer the above question?

(Then do it vice versa -- what character do Republicans think embodies Democrats, and what character do Democrats think Republicans would pick to embody Democrats?).

I'm weirdly obsessed with thinking about this thought exercise. Unfortunately, I think it isn't really doable, if for no other reason than it presupposes a shared media culture that doesn't really exist, and in particular in my head it involves everyone sharing my particular Peak TV cast of potential characters, which definitely doesn't exist.

But nonetheless, the concept is interesting to me. Under conditions of negative polarization, I think we can assume that the selected character would be one who embodies the perceived vices of the "other side". And so one thing we'd be measuring is to what degree people have a handle on what the "other side" perceives as their most salient and emblematic vice.

For example, I've written that for me the character that most embodies the contemporary MAGA right is Jerry from Rick & Morty. But I doubt that most Republicans would guess that Jerry would be my pick. I'd guess that they'd guess I'd choose someone like Homer Simpson ("they think we're oafish idiots"), or Boss Hogg ("they think we're racists"). I don't think they think that I think (boy, that's a mouthful) that their emblematic vice is whiny entitlement and crippling beta male insecurity, which is crystallized into the character of Jerry Smith.

Who do I think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats? I'm thinking one of the characters from Lena Dunham's "Girls" (again, bracketing the fact that most Republicans have never seen that show -- and in fact, I haven't seen it either -- the point is to identify an archetype). I think they think of us as self-obsessed and self-absorbed, performatively "woke" (but massively hypocritical about it), and generally unproductive leeches who wouldn't know a "real job" if it chafed our uncalloused, manicured hands. But maybe I'm wrong, and their emblematic Democrat is epitomized by a completely different set of vices! And again, it would be interesting to learn the mismatch.

Anyway, as I said, it's an exercise that -- even just as a thought experiment -- I've always found fun to ponder. And I'm curious at people's thought processes here -- so feel free to play in the comments (i.e., if you're a Democrat say which character most embodies Republicans, and also give guesses as to which character you think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats as well as which character you imagine Republicans would guess Democrats think embodies Republicans)!

What If Echo Chambers Work?

A few days after the election, I remember seeing a Washington Post column that said something like "You can't win an election if you're going to shun or denigrate half the electorate." And I remember wishing I could ask the author, in all earnestness: Why not?

After all, hadn't we just seen someone win an election while shunning and denigrating half the electorate? Clearly it's possible! The Post's hypothesis had been decisively falsified less than a week before!

This came up again today with the ongoing "echo chamber" discourse about BlueSky, paired against the fact that Republicans did in fact manage to win an election while generating an almost entirely cloistered epistemic bubble for themselves. The belief that echo chambers are antipathic to good electoral strategy is a comforting belief for people of a certain political persuasion (myself included!), but it just seems not to be true.

So the real question, and I think harder question, for Democrats is -- what if echo chambers work? What if one can win an election by constructing an epistemic fortress and just mainlining as many conspiracy theories and wild accusations about the other sides as humanly (or AI-ing-ly) possible?

It's a harder question because, at least for someone like me, this would be a very sad reality to come to grips with. I very fervently don't think democracy should be about scratching your way to the thinnest possible plurality and then steamrolling the other side. If you asked me what I would hope to happen to MAGA Republicans in rural Idaho or whatever after a Kamala Harris win, I'd have answered "I hope they get good healthcare, decent jobs, and well-funded schools." I have no desire to unleash recriminations upon "enemies", and I hate the idea of politics as a lawless bloodsport where all is fair if it wins you an election.

But maybe people like me are naive, and the lesson that has to be learned from 2024 (and 2016) is that brutal, no quarter, snarling attacks are an electorally winning play, and that for Democrats to win they need to harness their inner demonization machine and find some people to vilify. Of course, one could respond to this by saying that even if such a strategy is electorally superior at the margins, it's just plain wrong. That's always a valid response, and one might notice that it's the same response given to arguments that Democrats need to throw trans persons under the bus for electoral wins. There, of course, the retort is "well, enjoy feeling morally pure as you lose the Senate for the next decade" -- it's of course fascinating that the Post would never apply a similar retort to those who demand foreswearing scorched-earth electoral tactics against the GOP ("have fun patting yourselves on the back for your moral purity!"). It goes to show which moral commitments are truly seen as sacrosanct by the mainstream media, and which aren't.

But if we leave the moral objection aside, there remains one circle I cannot quite square. I've never been one to think, contra some narratives, that Democrats have just preemptively surrendered at every turn (e.g., as far as I know I'm the only person who thinks Chuck Schumer has done a pretty good job keeping a very thin majority dependent on some very unreliable actors relatively unified over the course of his tenure). Nonetheless, I am, with great reluctance, coming to believe that Democrats cannot win elections solely by taking the high road and demonstrating sober commitment to good governance and rule of law, when pitted against the emotional fever-dream populist pitch that characterizes the modern GOP. Again -- this is not a conclusion I'm happy to accede to. There probably are some people whose every instinct is to destroy the opposition at all costs and have to be persuaded to stay within the lines; but as noted above that's not me. My sensibilities are extremely wedded towards sober technocracy and good governance, and I reflexively recoil at the sort of hardball, "crush the enemy" tactics we're talking about here.

But here's my problem: if over the short term I think Democrats need to compete with the GOP on the level of back-alley brawl politics, over the long term I think that a politics that takes that form is inherently slanted towards the right. We will never be able to out-hate the GOP. We'll never be better than them at conjuring up some shadowy enemy to put people into a frenzy. There are absolutely ways to pitch distrust towards established institutions and a belief that "They" are out to get "Us" in a left-ish manner, but ultimately those narratives are going to benefit the right more (and we're already seeing how that pipeline flows from left-to-right in the form of folks like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard). So even if I may believe that my fighting faith of good governance liberalism just isn't winning elections, I'm also very concerned that the punchier left-wing populist alternatives will generate a political environment that is even more systematically slanted towards the right. Conspiratorial populism is home turf advantage for the right -- if that's the field we're playing on, we're always going to be starting from behind.

As I said, I don't have a way to square this circle. I'm not a political strategist, and I'm trying to avoid the temptation of "just agree with me and of course we'll win elections." But it's something I'm feeling very glum about.

The Media is (Really!) Not Part of the Liberal Family

When I think of what I, as a liberal, want the media to do, it's really quite simple: just tell me what's happening -- without varnish, horserace hypothesizing, or "sanewashing". I don't need them to lie to me. I don't need them to confirm my priors. I don't need to have "bad" news hidden from me. I don't need or want a liberal version of Fox News. Just tell me what's going on! 

For example, immediately after the election and Trump's victory, the stock market went way up. It seems the market was happy with Trump's victory (alongside, I'm guessing, general happiness that the outcome was decisive). As a Democrat, that's not pleasant to see -- but still, I didn't need anyone to hide that fact. I didn't need to construct some Potemkin coverage where it didn't happen. I didn't even need some side-eye slant about how it turns out "the elites" seem rather elated at Trump's triumph (I can make that inference on my own). Just tell me the truth. It will suffice.

Now, I fully admit that this "simple" request isn't so simple. Nonetheless, even accounting for its easier-said-than-done character, there's little doubt that the media has been abjectly terrible at this. And while the reasons behind it are myriad, one answer I keep returning to is an argument I made back in 2018: namely, that the media thinks of itself as part of the liberal "family".

It may be counterintuitive why that leads to conservative media bias. But the idea is that, to the extent journalists fundamentally see themselves as liberals talking to liberals, then there isn't much need to report on various dangers and predations of conservatives. "We" already know that. There's nothing new here. If anything, the job of a journalist is to disturb "our" preexisting narratives. And since the "we" and the "our" are all imagined to be liberals, we get an endless stream of apologetics, explainers, and sanewashing of conservative extremism.oooo

But I said in 2018 and I'll say it now: regardless of the personal politics of any particular editor or journalist, the media is not part of the liberal family. They should not presume their only audience is liberals, they should not assume that their job is to give liberals "the other side of the story", because they should view conservatives (or liberals) as "the other side" to begin with. This is related to something Jamelle Bouie wrote recently: the political media has a bad habit of thinking its job is to play amateur political strategist for Democrats, instead of just trying to accurately report on what's happening in the world. When we're talking about Biden's alleged mental decline or Trump's rambling political speeches, we don't need hypothesizing about how this is playing out in swing states. Just -- tell us what's happening. Report Trump's speech. Report Biden's speech. The audience can decide for itself whether this reality is "good news" or not for Democrats or Republicans.

I admit, there is a small part of me that harbors hope that the surrenderist policy taken by many journalistic "elites" towards Trump -- exemplified by the owners of the Washington Post and LA Times craven non-endorsement decisions -- might disabuse some other members of the legacy journalist community of the naive notion that "everyone" (who counts) already knows how dangerous Trump and his cronies are. The increasingly evident truth that this assessment is not universally-held (obviously it's not!) should, in an ideal world, dissipate the notion that straightforward, accurate recounting of what's going on in Trumpland is in some way preaching to the choir or superfluous repetition of obvious truths. And likewise, it should be obvious right now that the main "bias" the media needs to combat within itself is not a propensity to overtell liberal narratives, it's an instinct to self-censor truths inconvenient to conservatives because it's viewed as gilding the lily.

On this score, the early returns are not good -- the media is already racing to sanewash RFK Jr.'s anti-vaxx positions on the apparent premise that "we all" know why vaccines are healthful, and need to understand the argument for why they're dangerous. The reality, though, is that we don't all know that vaccines are healthful, and lots of people need to be educated on why avoiding or tamping down on vaccines is what's dangerous.

This, ultimately, is what it actually means to speak to an audience of conservatives and liberals alike. It's not about being evermore coddling and accommodating of conservative conspiracism -- that's never going to work. Ultimately, it means remembering that not "everyone" knows and accepts truths inconvenient for contemporary conservatism, and when reality poses facts troublesome to a conservative reader, it is the media's job to report those facts without varnish or sugarcoating. To borrow from Harry Truman: you're not giving your conservative readers hell -- you just telling them the truth, and they're calling it hell.

Will Matt Gaetz Finally Cause the Senate GOP To Stand Up To Trump? My Money's On No!

I really thought I'd laid the bar on the floor, but somehow Donald Trump has already burrowed under it by announcing (former*) Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general. I had the pleasure of sharing this news with several of my law school colleagues, where it literally provoked a laugh-out-loud howl of incredulity.

It wasn't just my people though. Senate Republicans also seem rather blindsided by the pick:

The selection of Mr. Gaetz blindsided many of Mr. Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill. The announcement was met with immediate and unvarnished skepticism by Republicans in the Senate who will vote on his nomination. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she was “shocked” by the pick — and predicted a difficult confirmation process.

[....]

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, when asked about Mr. Gaetz’s selection, said, “I don’t know the man other than his public persona.”

Mr. Cornyn said he could not comment on the chances that Mr. Gaetz, or Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, would be confirmed: “I don’t know — we’ll find out.”

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said as other senators dodged questions from reporters.

Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, told reporters that many members of the G.O.P. conference were shocked at the choice of Mr. Gaetz for attorney general, but mostly thrilled at the prospect that he might no longer be a member of the chamber.

The House, Mr. Miller added, would be a more functional place without Mr. Gaetz.

He predicted a bruising confirmation fight, adding that if the process revealed evidence to corroborate the allegations of sex trafficking against Mr. Gaetz, he would not be surprised if the House moved to expel him, as it did with Representative George Santos. Mr. Santos lost his seat after the Ethics Committee documented violations of the chamber’s rules and evidence of extensive campaign fraud.  

But things aren't all bad. You'll never guessed who raced ahead of the pack to greet Trump's failson pick with open arms:

One of the few lawmakers to offer a positive assessment was a staunch Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who called Mr. Gaetz “smart” and “clever” but predicted tough confirmation hearings.

So, how long will it take for the Senate GOP caucus to fall in line? I'm guessing it'll happen before the first confirmation hearing. (That is, if we have confirmation hearings).

Oh, and speaking of organizations that have put their dignity in a lockbox, we did finally learn what bridge is too far for the ADL, which blistered the Gaetz selection because of his "long history of trafficking in antisemitism," including "defending the Great Replacement Theory." How he's distinguished from the ADL's glowingly-praised Elise Stefanik, who also promoted Great Replacement Theory, was left unsaid.

* Gaetz hastily resigned his seat following the announcement, also getting ahead of a planned House Ethics Committee report that was set to issue findings on Gaetz's myriad, er, "controversies" -- including allegations of sex trafficking minors. Score one for QAnon!

The Shrapnel Marked "Occupant"

There's an old saying passed around by soldiers, that goes something like: "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it. Worry about the piece of shrapnel marked 'occupant'."

The point of the story is to impress the fundamental impersonality of war. Who lives, who dies -- there's nothing special about it. The bullet or bomb or rocket doesn't care about you; the person firing it doesn't care about you either. In 99.9% of cases, it has nothing to do with you in any meaningful sense. We have for ourselves a thick understanding of our own choices and values and importance, but none of that really plays any role in who gets hurt. The bullet that comes for us almost certainly will not have our "name on it".

At one level, this outlook is a corrective to main character syndrome, where we all imagine ourselves to be very special indeed, and so the reasons good or bad things happen to us relate to our specialness and our special choices. The bullet is inscribed with my name because I made distinctive choices which made someone take notice of me and decide to specifically take me out. 

But at another level, this saying is also about undermining a sense of security based around our own ordinariness. In many respects, most of us I think don't imagine ourselves as "special". We don't stand out, we don't see ourselves as making some sort of radical or impactful choice that would cause someone else to go to the trouble of crafting a bullet specially for us. I'm just a regular guy, doing ordinary things. There's nothing special about me, so why would anyone bother to target me, of all the people in the world? And the answer is that maybe they wouldn't -- but the shrapnel marked "occupant" is distinguished precisely because it doesn't bother to target at all. Your mundanity will not save you.

I've been thinking about all of this in relation to my own coping mechanisms as I envision what the future might hold over the next four years. One mode of "reassurance" is to tell oneself that Trump and Trumpists aren't really going to go after me; they are targeting other, more distinctive communities (such an immigrants, or trans individuals). Of course, this cope might not even be right on its own terms (it's entirely plausible he will target, e.g., Jewish college professors). And to the extent it is right, even thinking this way wracks me with guilt -- "I feel better knowing it's others who will be hurt".

But there's a more fundamental problem at work here. Finding reassurance in terms of who is likely to be "targeted" tries to find security in normalcy and ordinariness. It's that notion of "I'm just a regular guy, I'm doing nothing special or out of the ordinary -- why would anyone bother to come after me?" And again, I think that self-conception is incredibly common. Some of you might have seen interviews with undocumented immigrants who claimed that, if they could vote, they would have backed Trump. This feels inconceivable -- how could they do that, when Trump says he wants to enforce their deportation en masse? The answer they give is basically: "he's not talking about me." Why would he be? I'm just trying to work hard and build a better life for my family. He must be talking about the criminals and the rapists and the predators. I'm just a normal guy, doing normal things. There's no reason why someone would go through so much trouble just to hurt me.

This in-depth story from a few months ago, about a trans girl in Florida who was on her middle school's volleyball team. The reassurance her mother tried to draw on was entirely centered around her daughter's ordinary mundaneness -- she's just a regular tween, going through normal adolescent experiences, who wants to play a sport. She's not even an especially good volleyball player! Who could be bothered to care about something so fundamentally normal?

Of course, it doesn't work. Her normalcy doesn't save her. Now certainly, in the Florida case one could say that this kid absolutely was personally targeted (the article suggests there were only two trans female athletes in the entire state at the time). The school board, the police, and so on -- they very much went after her when they found out she was trans and participating in public school athletics. But in a truer sense, I don't think it's accurate to say that what happened had anything to do with "her" at all. She is better described as the victim of the GOP's saturation bombing directed at the trans community, broadly; a campaign that self-consciously does not care about any of its victims as individuals. It's not about her. She's simply the occupant.

If one wants to catastrophize further, I sometimes think about what would happen if our newly-elected overlords got us into a global hot war (Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense is a Fox News personality who openly promoted the idea of a first strike attack on North Korea). It feels, and some sense is, cosmically unfair that such a war would effect me. What do I have to do with anything? I didn't vote for this! I think this whole thing is stupid! But what's true for soldiers is even more true for civilians caught in war zones -- we're all just regular people, and our regularity simply does not matter (this insight applies to other civilians who are actually, and not just hypothetically, stuck in actual war zones right now). If the rockets start raining down on Portland, it will do me no good to call out to them and say "I had nothing to do with us -- go over there!" They in no way will have my name on them, and they will  nonetheless be implacably indifferent to me.

Perhaps the moral of the story, then, is to not be afraid to stand up. Your normalcy, your ordinariness won't save you. Maybe it should, but it won't. It may or may not surprise you to know that this conclusion is very hard for me to grasp onto. I actually don't have any desire to stand out, I'm not looking to present a visage one cannot look away from. I'm fine doing "ordinary" politics and writing and participation, but I have no desire to be special beyond that. My fondest wish is that the world leave me alone and I leave it alone in turn.

But that probably isn't going to be an option. Someone like me may or may not be directly targeted for abuse and oppression -- as a Jew, as an academic, or as a Democrat. But targeted or no, there's always the chance that some shrapnel will find me as an "occupant". I don't think of myself as particularly special or distinct, I have no illusions that I represent some critical node in the Resistance to Trumpist oppression. I'm just a regular, normal guy. But normalcy will not keep me safe.

Yet More Trumpist Humiliation of the ADL

I really don't intend for my post-election coverage to be so ADL-centric. But I can't help but be struck at the degree to which Trump's Jewish and Israel-related decision-making might as well be solely based on how to personally humiliate the ADL, and prompt them into embarrassing and degrading acts of submission and hypocrisy, to the greatest extent possible.

For example, Trump's announced pick for UN Ambassador is New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. One of my basic rules of 2024 political observation was that "one does not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Elise Stefanik," who defined the term bad-faith grandstanding when it came to her supposed objections to campus antisemitism even as she was directly promoting dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theories on her own. 

But alas, the ADL eagerly jumped in with praise for the selection, allowing us to juxtapose this:

next to this:

Like I said -- just abject, humiliating supplication. It couldn't be more pathetic.

Or consider the position of United States Ambassador to Israel. If ever past was prologue, this is it. The first time Donald Trump was elected, he appointed an ambassador to Israel who referred to liberal Jews as "kapos". The ADL maintained a studious silence, a choice which I maintained "sold out" a substantial swath of the Jewish community that it purportedly was tasked to protect.

This time around, the nominee is going to be former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has an even more illustrative history with the ADL. You see, back in 2011, the following sequence occurred:

1. Huckabee made spurious and offensive analogies to the Holocaust (comparing it to, of all things, the national debt).
2. The ADL publicly took exception.
3. Huckabee threatened the ADL.
4. The ADL scampered backwards and issued a groveling apology.

So here, at least, the ADL already got ahead of schedule, and I look forward to some embarrassingly effusive praise directed towards Huckabee to emerge forthwith.

What we saw in 2016, is only going to be worse in 2024. That's true on many levels, but for the ADL in particular it is evidently apparent -- they will sell us out. They will take vulnerable American Jews, who are rightfully terrified about emergent Christian nationalism and White supremacy and violent extremism and, yes, left-wing campus antisemitism too*, and they will leave us to twist. They will do it regularly, and repeatedly, and without hesitation, and for an embarrassingly cheap payoff.

* I include this because, by cuddling up to the far-right powers that be, the ADL will necessarily kneecap any ability to effectively fight campus antisemitism, though they certainly will retain the capacity to yell about it. The sorts of tactics which actually might tamp down on and respond to campus antisemitism, versus the sorts of tactics which yield good Fox News ragebait and can justify blowing up the Department of Education, are not compatible with one another, and the ADL is going to lash itself to the latter at the expense of the former. While there still may be utility in what the ADL can do for someone like me on the local level, in terms of a cohesive, national strategy I do not have any more confidence in the ADL's ability to effectively protect me from campus antisemitism than I have confidence in its ability to protect me from conservative antisemitism.

Another, (Mostly) Unrelated Way Life Sucks Now

A few days ago, I was chatting with my mom (who's retired down in Florida). After our usual pleasantries about the doomed world we live in, she told me about a weird thing that happened at her house while she was out (she has a Ring doorbell and so saw the recording).

Basically, two people, a woman and a man, came up and knocked on her door for awhile. Since nobody was home, obviously no one answered (though my mom said that if she was home alone, she'd be disinclined to talk to strangers banging on her door anyway). Eventually, the woman left a card and then they drove off. The card identified the woman as a U.S. Marshal, with a name, telephone, and email; on the back she wrote a note asking to please contact her ASAP about a "subpoena".

My mom thought, and I agreed, that this seemed pretty suspicious. My parents are law-abiding folk and aren't otherwise involved in any litigation; mom couldn't think of any reason that federal marshals would be delivering a subpoena. The note wasn't addressed to anyone in particular (it didn't have either of my parents' names, for instance). She was already on edge from the election, and living in DeSantis-land added to her fears that there might be some sort of political thuggery or intimidation at work. I googled the name on the card, which didn't reveal anything; on the other hand the phone number did match that of the local United States Courthouse. I asked my mom if she and dad had a lawyer and stressed that they should not let anyone pressure them into signing or paying or doing anything. Fortunately, my dad is a retired attorney and we know many people in the legal world, so they had plenty of resources to figure out if things were legitimate or not.

Anyway, the next day rolls around and it turns out that the card and the note and everything ... was entirely legitimate. An old case of my dad's from before he retired, that he thought had long fizzled out, had burbled back to life without warning (the reasons why this resulted in a federal subpoena are frankly too stupid to go into, but that's not my story to tell anyway). It'll be a quick bit of work for an old client in a few weeks, but everything was basically above board. No one was trying to steal their kidneys after all.

I told this story to a colleague of mine at work, and he relayed a similar situation he had been in a few months ago: he got a call from a man identifying himself as a police officer who claimed to have found a check under my colleague's name. The number from the call was a personal cell number; it was not that of the local police department. So my colleague called the department directly to ask if the man who called was really one of theirs, and the answer was ... yes. Apparently, some of his checks had been stolen out of the mail and recovered, and they really were calling to inform him of the situation. Again, everything was exactly as it was stated to be. No scam here.

In both cases, growing experience with spam and scams and hoaxes made people (quite reasonably) suspicious of genuine, legitimate interactions with authority figures. And hearing the outcome of these two stories, I thought back on something that happened to me a few weeks earlier, when I got a call from a man identifying himself as a county sheriff who asked me "why I missed my grand jury summons." I hadn't received any such summons and this is a scam I'm familiar with, so I told him something along the lines of "I'm pretty sure you're a scammer, otherwise contact my attorney" and hung up on him. Of course now, since the above two cases both turned out to be legitimate, I'm wondering if I just told an actual county sheriff to go fuck himself.

I haven't heard anything about this since, and again the "you missed your jury duty" bit is a common scam, so I'm pretty sure my instincts were right the first time. But again, it goes to a broader toxification in our informational ecosystem -- all these scams and hoaxes mean nobody knows who to trust at all: we risk falling for the fake, and we also risk ignoring what's real, and it's increasingly difficult to know how to ameliorate either of those risks. It is an exhausting and anxiety-laden way to live life, and it sucks.

And while I said this this particular suck is mostly unrelated to the main way life is terrible right now, there is a connection. Authoritarianism, Arendt teaches us, doesn't demand that people believe fictions. It flourishes best when people either do not care about, or lose confidence in their ability to distinguish, fact and fiction. 

One way this occurs is by a faux-worldly cynicism, where one congratulates oneself for recognizing that all politicians lie, are scoundrels, are in the bag for "the elites", etc., and so there are no differences worth sussing out. But another mechanism, that can afflict the more diligent and virtuous, is where institutions of authority and trust become so degraded or jumbled that it just becomes impossible to sort anything out. This is the risk of, for example, deep fakes -- one can entirely recognize that not everybody is lying while being helplessly unable to distinguish between an actual video of a political event and a manipulated or concocted one. 

Trusted institutions with reputations for vetting can help alleviate this problem. But as public confidence in those institutions fade -- or they simply become easier to spoof -- we're left with an endless sea of slop content, none of which can even in concept contain any markers of reliability or trustworthiness. And one thing we're seeing in 2024 is that this sort of toxified informational ecosystem is apocalyptically dangerous to a functioning democracy. It is not an accident that high on Trump's target list is leveraging government power to sabotage any effort -- public or private -- at combatting "misinformation". A world in which nobody can trust anything, where lies and truth become a single indistinguishable mass, is a world favorable to his brand of fascism.

One thing that I think "acab" sort of misses is that, even if it is correct to say things like "never trust the police", it is in fact bad to not be able to trust the police or other authority figures. Wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just Nigerian scammers, and wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just looking to harass you for lining up against the dominant governing faction, are two sides of the same coin. If I get subpoenaed, I want to know that without dialing up my entire legal network to figure out if it's a hoax! If I did accidentally miss a jury summons, I want someone to tell me so I can work things out!  More alarmingly, if an authority figure knocks on my door and says "there's a dangerous fugitive on the loose, have you seen anything," I want to be able to help out without wondering if the fugitive is a woman who had an abortion or an immigrant avoiding the deportation camps. When that trust fractures, it is a terrible way to live. The atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that it cultivates, even -- maybe especially -- when it is well-warranted, is toxic to a free society. But in so many ways, this is the direction we're moving.