First, Kash Patel Came for the Justice Department Lawyers
Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to head the FBI, tells us where he stands on civil liberties:
First they came for the Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted the coup plotters.
But I was a Republican senator, not a prosecutor, and I had always been publicly vague about what happened in early 2020, so I did not worry.
Then they came for the journalists who told the truth about Trump.
But I was a Republican senator—and I have always been very careful never, ever to tell the truth about Trump—so I did not worry.
Then I made a casual remark about Trump, and I cast a single, solitary vote that Trump did not like, and they came after me.
And there was no one left to stand up for me.
Norms
On December 2, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark wrote,
Like Biden, I’m a sucker for norms. You know that. But I think we need to be more realistic about them.
(1) They’re not “norms” anymore. They’re preferences. Unless a practice is recognized as normal and essential by the entire political system, it’s merely a stylistic preference. Like choosing pistachio over chocolate.
(2) Adhering to a stylistic practice does not increase the chance of restoring it as a “norm.” People often say that we need to uphold a broken norm now so that it will be re-adopted in the future. There is not a lot of evidence to suggest that these B follows A. Will Republican presidential candidates release their tax returns in 2024 because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris released their tax returns in 2024? I doubt it.
If you want to adhere to a norm, you should not do so under the misapprehension that you are reestablishing it. The immediate benefits—whatever they may be—must suffice.
(3) A “norm” is not a suicide pact. Pretend—just for a moment—that Kash Patel is confirmed as FBI director and he begins his 10-year term in February of 2025.
Now pretend that, in 2028 some Democrat is elected president.
Should “norms” prevent that incoming Democrat from summarily firing Director Patel?⁶
But firing Patel without cause would make this Democratic POTUS just as bad as Trump! Wouldn’t Democrats be honor-bound to allow Patel to continue his tenure?
All of which is to say that our thinking about norms should be more hard-headed. This is not to say that you must fight fire with fire, or an eye for an eye.
It is very much notto say that, “If Trump does Bad Thing X then the forces of liberalism must do Bad Thing X in return.” In general, you should strive to live your values.
But we shouldn’t cling to memories of an age which has already passed if doing so means perpetuating an illiberalism.
Jennifer Rubin on Messaging to Low Information Voters
On November 29, the indispensable Jennifer Rubin wrote an outstanding op-ed—one that was even more indispensable than usual—headlined Democrats need ‘shortcuts’ to reach low-information voters. If you have access to the Washington Post, you really should take a look at the whole thing. But … to hit the high spots here:
In the first ten paragraphs or so, Ms. Rubin enlarges on the themes that there are vast numbers of low information voters, that voter ignorance seems to be on the rise, that Trump’s margin of victory was based on his appeal to low information voters, and that people who follow politics often show an astonishing failure to understand how low information voters think.
OK. And how to low information voters think? Ms. Rubin writes,
There is a vast range of literature about how voters who know little about the issues develop “shortcuts” to identify candidates. They take clues such as the politicians’ profession (e.g., business mogul), party image (Democrats defend voting rights) and viral moments (Ronald Reagan, “I am paying for this microphone!”) to decide who they prefer.
Democrats might pine for a country of high-information voters fostered by civics education and responsible social media platforms that elevate truthful policy statements. However, they shouldn’t hold their breath. Even if those efforts might make a difference at the margins (more likely improving the acuity of already-informed voters), the mass of low-information voters will remain happily oblivious to policy and political details.
Still, Democrats can do a much better job of reaching less politically engaged voters. For starters, they need to reduce and simplify the values that define the party (e.g., protecting the little guy, letting you choose your own life) and pound away at them for years, using every medium available (podcasts, nonpolitical TV shows, social media, etc.).
Second, Democrats would be wise to frame Trump and Republicans in direct, clear terms, which they can emphasize daily (e.g., the culture of corruption, the party of fat cats, reckless with your health and security). Each time Trump and his Republican acolytes do something that fits into one of these categories, Democrats must highlight their behavior and amplify it (requiring more facility with online influencing and new media). …
And finally, Democrats must be scrupulous in tying Republicans to the consequences of their policies. Controlling the White House and both houses means Republicans will not have the luxury of blaming others (although they will try). If voters do not understand how bad policy choices are impacting their lives, they will have no reason to hold Republicans accountable.
In sum, Democrats certainly need to keep coming up with good policy ideas and selling them to voters who care about such things. But they also need spend more time and effort improving communication with everyone else. Shaping shortcuts to help voters understand the fundamental differences between candidates should be a priority.
Feliz Navidad—Police Took My Mom, My Abuelita Gets to Tag Along
I Resolve …
2025 is almost here, and, along with it, the second Trump inauguration. As we face hard and troubling times, I have decided to make some resolutions.
I resolve to acknowledge my shock, my grief, and my nausea at the outcome of the 2024 election, but I also resolve not to let those emotions overcome me.
In lieu of uncontrollable anger at my fellow Americans who voted for Trump, I will permit myself a little Schadenfreude.
I resolve to remain politically engaged.
Although Trump’s second term will pose a clear and present danger to our civil liberties, I resolve to speak out—and act on—the assumption that those civil liberties remain in full force and effect.
I resolve to put, first and foremost, the protection of the rule of law.
Although the rule of law has suffered great setbacks, and although it is likely to face grave challenges in the near term, I resolve to remain firm in my resolve that the rule of law will ultimately prevail.
To that end, I resolve to support the rule of law not only by speaking out but also by providing financial support for those trying to save our constitutional republic.
I resolve not to be a summer solder or a sunshine patriot.
I resolve not to give way to fear—or to exhaustion.
To the extent humanly possible, I resolve to overcome my cognitive biases and to observe our present political environment with eyes wide open.
I resolve to process all the facts—the facts I like, plus the facts I don’t like, plus the facts that seem so strange that I can hardly believe them.
I resolve always to keep in mind the distinction between a known fact and a reasonable working hypothesis.
I resolve always to keep in mind the distinction between a reasonable working hypothesis and a mere plausible speculation.
I resolve to remember that my name is not Nostradamus: I can plausibly speculate about the future based on the known facts, but, beyond that, I cannot actually predict the future.
I resolve to remember that my name is not The Amazing Kreskin: I can plausibly speculate about what you are thinking, based on how you act and on what you say, but, at the end of the day, I cannot actually read your mind.
I resolve to remember that my name is not Rosy Scenario. I resolve not to just assume that a happy outcome will occur.
I resolve to remember that my name is not Debby Downer. I resolve to remember that a happy outcome is still possible.
I resolve, in the words of the hymn, to “wake now compassion” and “give heed to the cry” of the “voices of suffering” that “fill the wide sky.”
I resolve, in the words of the hymn, to “wake now my reason” and “reach out to the new.”
I resolve, in the words of the hymn, to “take not for granted a privileged place.”
I resolve to work toward a new Democratic coalition of the working class and the educated professional class, and I resolve to do my part in relentlessly promoting a strategy and a set of tactics that will lead to that goal.
A Known Fact vs. a Working Hypothesis vs. a Reasonable Speculation vs. Bullshit
I don’t know about you, but I was blindsided by the 2024 election results. Now, several weeks after the calamity, as the talking heads talk and as the pundits pontificate, I am impressed both by the insights I am getting from some and by the bullshit I am hearing from others.
Please let me suggest to you, respectfully, that, on the political journey that awaits us, the first and foremost mental tools we need are unflinching commitment to situational awareness, shrewd evaluation of the evolving political situation, and creative thought about what coalitions are needed to create a new, rational majority.
In that vein, let me suggest that we learn some utterly vital wisdom from Sunzi, from Confucius, and from Rabbi Jesus.
Know Your Side, Know Your Adversary
Sunzi (Sun Tzu, Master Sun), the ancient Chinese military strategist, said “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Translation: if you are in a war, and if you actually want to win the war, then you had better know all the facts, and you had better put aside your cognitive biases.
And What Exactly Does it Mean to “Know” the Facts?
From Confucius (Kongzi, Master Kong) we gain this vital insight about what it means to “know” something: “To know what you know and to know what you do not know—that is true knowledge.”
Translation: while you’re being about knowing your side and knowing your adversary, be damn sure that what you think you know is really true.
Because remember Sunzi’s last point: if you’re acting on false “knowledge” about your side and about your adversary, then you’re going to lose every single battle.
Implication: As you try to be situationally aware—as you describe the current political crisis to others—be very, very conscious of the difference between a good working hypothesis, as distinguished from an established fact.
And be very, very conscious of the difference between a good working hypothesis and a mere plausible speculation.
Because if you mistake a hypothesis or a plausible speculation for an established fact, then you are probably going to screw up big time.
How Metaphorical Sheep Deal with Metaphorical Wolves
To these hard sayings from Master Sun and from Master Kong, Rabbi Jesus adds this vital instruction, in the form of a startlingly mixed simile: “Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
Translation: as you face danger, use clever strategy and tactics to defeat the bad actors, all the while maintaining your moral innocence.
Why are People Mad at the Democrats?
If we really want to get our country back, an essential first step is to face up to why so many people are so mad at the Democratic Party in general, and at the Biden-Harris administration in particular.
And, even as we acknowledge that some of these perceived grievances are legitimate, let’s also remember that none of them would justify choosing someone of Trump’s low character as president. We can grieve, we can be nauseous, we can be amazed at the credulity of a plurality of the American voters.
But we must face up to facts. Anger against Democrats arises from a smorgasbord of factors that various Trump voters (and Democrats who skipped voting in 2024) were concerned about:
- Their live in miserable economic circumstances, and Democratic elites don’t even recognize or understand their pain, let alone feel it. Anecdotal and survey evidence indicates the widespread concern over high inflation—a concern that transcends identity groups
- They live in an information environment dominated by lies, propaganda, and misdirected anger, and Democrats have ceded that information space to fascists and plutocrats—in consequence of which many are losing the capacity to tell the truth from a lie, to grasp the link between actions and consequences, to choose right over wrong, and to favor science over witchcraft as a problem solving tool
- It makes them angry that Democrats have no coherent, politically workable policy on who should be allowed to immigrate to the United States
- It makes them angry that Democrats have no coherent, politically workable policy on how to address the 11 million plus undocumented people living among us
- It makes them angry when Democrats demand their support on identity grounds, disregarding their actual views and their perceived interests
- It makes them angry that Democrats, like Republicans, have embraced neoliberalism and globalism
- Some favor Christianist nationalism over freedom of religion
- Some have extreme anti-abortion views
- Some are stone cold racists, who remain butt hurt that the South lost the Civil War
- Some boisterously embrace their toxic masculinity
- Some are addicted to conspiracy theories
- Some fault Democrats for denying that forest fires are caused by Jewish lasers from outer space
- Some are plutocrats gleefully exploiting all of the above
Democrats and Working Class Voters: Facing Reality, Biting the Bullet
Milbank lays it on the line. He writes,
Working people no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to those voters, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem — but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly half a century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of the workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” wrote University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the past 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s-edge elections,” Podhorzer [the former political director of the AFL-CIO] told me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted voters once again punish the incumbent party. President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t have much of a popular mandate: The latest figures show he got below 50 percent of the popular vote, Harris lost by about 1.6 percentage points, and Democrats may have actually gained a seat or two in the House. And he’s already overreaching with outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada, Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake — for the party and, more important, for the country. We are, in some ways, back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Working Class People are Hurting, Working Class People were Red Pilled—and the Democratic Politicians Really Screwed Up
If you actually want to know what just happened in the election, then take the time to watch this video.
OK … lots to digest here.
But may I just say this about that?
The biggest issue for you is high inflation? So you vote for Trump, whose signature policies—rounding up the undocumented, high tariffs and trade wars, and lowering taxes—will (if they are actually implemented) increase inflation and sink your economic prospects even further?
What were you thinking?
What the hell were you thinking?
Facing MAGA 