Serious matters

The New York Times seems to think there's something entertaining, certainly unserious, about Republican South Carolina Congresscritter Nancy Mace trying to bar her new colleague Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride from the House bathrooms. As you might know, McBride is trans.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

Nancy Mace is a a bigoted attention-seeking pig. Full stop. And should be confined to remedial kindergarten. 

Congresswoman Crockett knows what really matters -- as she usually does.

The NYT finds a Democratic Congresswoman who sticks up for McBride (there were others):

“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”

So the reporter gives the last word to a male Republican: 

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day. “I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.

Very cute, the whole story. Except to the woman who has to live inside it. 

Presumably McBride has seen it all before. You don't win a statewide race for Congress without well-honed toughness. But the sheer lack of courtesy and willed ignorance from the Republicans reminds, as if we needed reminding, that these people aren't mature enough to be in government.

• • •

By far the most insightful effort to unpack the issues around transwomen participating in youth and adult womens' sports I've ever encountered comes from Parker Malloy. This is a terrific instance of READ THE WHOLE THING.

Since we're, once again, focused on the fraught matter of bathrooms, here's a section of this article I found particularly lucid: 

What laws around things like restrooms and restrictions on updating identifying documents do is to create a world in which trans people are obligated to out themselves as trans to people all day, every day. 

Should a trans woman have to announce to bouncers and bartenders that she’s trans before getting a drink? 

Should a trans man have to decide whether to break the law by using a men’s restroom or loudly signal to everyone in a restaurant that his birth certificate says “female” by walking into a women’s restroom?  

Because that’s what these bills are advocating for: a world where trans people have to essentially wear a big neon sign disclosing their medical history to everyone around them. That sort of extremely private information is not the type of thing strangers two tables over have any inherent right to know. If someone isn’t your doctor or romantic partner, there’s no legitimate argument for why that person has any right to know what kind of genitals you were born with. That’s just the truth.

When you create a legal system in which trans people are forced to repeatedly out themselves, you’re creating a system designed to never fully accept them as people.

In 2016, a Wisconsin school reportedly forced a trans boy to wear a bright green wristband to ensure that school security guards (who had been instructed to be on the lookout for “students who appear to be going into the ‘wrong’ restroom”) could catch him if he used the boys’ restroom. This is about surveillance and social exclusion.

As someone, not trans myself, who routinely gets yelled at by blue-haired ladies in public bathrooms -- accused of being in the wrong one for my apparent gender -- I feel this to my core. And, nowadays, at 77, in still-civilized California, I snap back at my accusers, politely if they seem merely confused, furiously if they are aiming to erase me. It's always been my schtick that "this is what a woman looks like -- get used to it." If I'm feeling accommodating, I'll cede that "this is one way a woman looks." There seem to be a close to infinite supply of these women with a bathroom problem. Now that is serious.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.

Muscle memory kicks in; "we already know how to do this"

On Bluesky, Rebecca Traister, journalist and chronicler of women's persisting demands for our freedom and full humanity observes: 

New generations waking up to fury and grief is how we move forward and extend centuries worth of (often circular, often maddening, often unsuccessful) work to make this country a more just and equitable place for more of the people who live in it. (Re Naomi Beinart's oped in the New York Times - gift.)

Traister's reflections for New York Magazine on the Trump election win are deep; I don't know how to share as a gift article so here are some instructive fragments:

The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?

The women who set out to bury Donald Trump are doing things differently now. ...

... derision of the merchandized detritus of first-stage resistance organizing often worked to obscure the seriousness of what was happening among many Americans who had never before been politically active and who had been both appalled and galvanized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The first big public gathering, the Women’s March [of 2017], wasn’t just an Instagrammable party. It was spiky and contentious, bringing together Hillary heads and Berners, leftists and moderates, hard-core activists and wide-eyed newbies, as well as the grifters and profiteers who adhere to any mass movement. ...

... From there, women broke in a dizzying array of organizing directions. Some helped drive the wildcat teachers’ strikes that spread in 2018 across Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. Others disrupted Republican-lawmaker town halls, helping to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal in Trump’s first year in office, and harried administration officials responsible for the family-separation policy.

The shared fury of women led to the Me Too movement, which resulted in powerful and abusive figures losing positions of institutional authority, and to sexual-harassment walkouts at companies including McDonald’s and Google. A historic number of women ran for office, flooding candidate-training groups like Emerge and Higher Heights. Others got to work organizing on their behalf in municipal and local races, creating Democratic infrastructure in places that the party had left unattended for generations. 

This organizing produced material results all over the country. This iteration of the resistance was the force that flipped the House to Democratic control in 2018, staved off a red wave in 2022, and won majorities in Michigan and Minnesota, where laws were subsequently passed to protect abortion access and LGBTQ rights and ensure free school lunches. It helped secure State Supreme Court seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and a streak of ballot referenda on abortion rights post-Dobbs, including in blood-red Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas — ensuring that, for a while at least, tens of millions more Americans have had access to health care they would otherwise not have had. ...

... The urge to demonize and dismiss these women, despite their impact, is strong from both party and press, neither of which has ever been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women, unless they are of the right-wing Moms for Liberty variety.

There has been little acknowledgment that the almost entirely volunteer efforts of regular-degular women in communities around the country — not just the recent exertions of previously disengaged white women but the electoral labor performed unrelentingly by Black women for generations — has done more to preserve and repair the broken Democratic Party at state and local levels than the efforts of the well-paid, expensively dressed, smooth-brained Democratic consultant class or the political press, both of which tend to obsess over the shiny highest offices, forget local- and state-power building, fly quadrennially into local communities about which they know nothing, and advise candidates against embracing issues that turn out to be more popular with voters than the candidates who listen to consultants’ advice.

... Leah Greenberg [from Indivisible] said that she doesn’t mind watching the resistance being written off as dead, at least for now: “It is a very funny instance of overwhelmingly D.C./male pundits and reporters rushing to declare that things they aren’t personally paying attention to are not happening, while the actual work happens in a thousand homes across the country.” She acknowledged that there are real questions about strategy moving forward. “But our folks ... They don’t give up.”

The legacy of the past eight years is not simply a gutting presidential loss. There are tools and mechanisms in place: shield laws and sanctuary states. People new to engagement now have had practice at losing and getting back up again; that is crucial. 

“The muscle memory has kicked back in as the grief and shock has worn off,” Amanda Litman [from Run for Something which processed 7000 inquiries after Trump triumphed two weeks ago] told me. “It feels more clear-eyed about how hard this will be. But there is also a history of winning against him.”

The Resistance has now experienced both the overturn of Roe and the electoral victories that followed in its wake; they have learned about abortion funds, read Project 2025, and have some idea of what might be coming next. Nothing has to be the same this time because we are not the same.

“I think the 2016 resistance is dead and that’s a good thing,” said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party. “That style of resistance was an on-ramp for a lot of people, and a lot of people took it. Now, it is more like, Let’s get to work.... There’s an advocacy infrastructure that’s grown, an electoral infrastructure, a legal infrastructure.”

Or as Litman put it, “This time we can all jump right in without building the plane while we fly it.”

And it's not only activated women that already know how to stand up and stand together against the budding autocracy. 

When Erudite Partner went off to Nevada to work to hold that battleground state for the Dems, I stayed home, knowing I was physically too limited to work in the center of the campaign, though I could and did work the UniteHERE union phonebank. I could be confident that this would be what I call a "hot-and-cold-running-volunteers" election, drawing from the multiple activist bases that people built in the Trump years. It was; the E.P. trained 1400 canvassing volunteers in that tiny corner of the national effort. The Harris-Walz campaign did not lack for people; it lacked for a way to overcome the generalized discontent and distrust of a population thrown off center by the pandemic and the failure -- over a couple of decades -- of governments to deliver.

These activist volunteers come out of the vast infrastructure that, often, began with the 2017 #resistance and has matured into para-campaigns like Seed the Vote, the rare effective Democratic Party like Ben Wikler's WisDems, some NGOs -- and of course the more effectual parts of organized labor like UniteHERE and the United Auto Workers. 

How much of this will survive the current authoritarian challenge we don't know. But what comes now is almost certainly more widespread, more hardened, more inventive, and more durable than oblivious pundits can imagine.

"New occasions teach new duties ..."

The headline refers to James Russell Lowell's essay The Present Crisis and hymn lyrics from the America of the 1840s. That crisis was the nation's enthrallment to human bondage, to organizing itself around holding millions of humans in chattel slavery. Lowell saw clearly that this crisis would not be resolved without disruptions and death -- as the slave system was death in life.

Yesterday a small crowd gathered at Manny's in the Mission to hear and meet Marshall Ganz, practitioner and theorist of organizing of the latter part of the last century. (Like me, but teaching at Harvard.) Marshall has a new book.

I love what the man has done and built and inspired. He was vital to Cesar Chavez in the best days of the United Farm Workers Union and movement in the 1960s/70s. He's taught many organizers. 

But I couldn't help feeling he was out of touch with too much that is contemporary in the best of current organizing ... mostly led by women, almost always prominently Black women. 

The terrible Trump regime ahead is a new occasion and the fight back will be new. That's what I know these days.

On keeping the dimmer switches turned up as far as possible

During the previous Trump horror show, I paid considerable attention to what Ben Wittes of the Washington Brookings Institution think tank was churning out -- the legal insights and later his delightful escapades such as projecting the Ukrainian flag on the Russian embassy in DC in April 2022.

With Trump's election. it's time to come back to Wittes' serious legal insights, found in posts headlined The Situation at Lawfare alongside many other contributors. He's not sanguine about the prospects for the existing constitutional system of ostensible "checks and balances" weathering the Trump storm well.

... political courage is precisely what the framers cannot bequeath us. 

... Put simply, we will work to cut through the noise and help guide people as to what issues are genuinely of concern and how to understand those issues on a granular level.

Somehow, I don't think his pious incantations of non-partisanship and legal expertise are likely to be enough to keep a Matt Gaetz-led Justice Department from coming after Brookings, but these folks do have a lot of friends in DC places. 

Anyway, here's Wittes's opening salvo on the role he envisions for lawyers trying to protect the rule of law: 

What are we to do about the lawful democratic assaults? There is no simple answer to this question—only the vaguest of guideposts. But I will offer a few of those guideposts. 

First, litigation is an important instrument. Justice delayed is justice denied, goes the old saying, and the same is true of injustice. Tying things up in court doesn’t always make them stop. But it often ameliorates them, and the delays themselves can be salutary. ...

Second, litigation is an insufficient instrument and is emphatically not a substitute for politics. In the end, the fundamental problem here is that more than half of American voters asked for what they are now going to get. Somehow, those of us who see this decision as a profound blow to a democratic system need to persuade others of that. ...

Third, every one of these lawful predations is different and will require a different strategy. A bad nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security [subsequently this became Kristi Noem, no qualifications governor of North Dakota best known for shooting her dog] is not the same as a corrupt pardon. An executive order implementing Schedule F is not the same as an investigation of a political opponent motivated by animus. And none of these are the same as a tax break to wealthy people passed through a Congress whose Republican majority loves to pass tax breaks for wealthy people and would do it with any Republican president. ...

One final note: There is no single marker of success here. There’s no simple test I can articulate that will tell us we have succeeded. Democracy and the rule of law are not binaries, light switches that get turned on or off. They are more like dimmer switches, which can be turned up or down. The goal here is not to let the dimmer be turned down too low, to not let the light go out, to fight for every lumen, and to do it honestly and with a constant awareness that not all democratic values run in the same direction.

My emphasis.

Friday cat blogging

The local cats get a week off this Friday. But I think someone has taken a hint from them.

I wonder, which would be the candidate, which the publicist? Mio is loud about food. Janeway makes herself annoying around meal times. We are slightly restrictive for fear that the big fellow would balloon if he got all he could eat. Yet I often observe his little friend actually eats most of what we offer. What I won't do is try to referee this ...

We needed some good news ...

Today we learn that The Onion has acquired the defunct hate site Infowars, formerly the property of conspiracy monger Alex Jones. Jones was forced into a court ordered fire sale after Sandy Hook parents won a massive judgement for his lies about their murdered children. 

The sale and acquisition led the San Francisco Chronicle to highlight that the new owner is Jeff Lawson. He's the kind of successful entrepreneur who used to make the city an interesting place before many members of the current generation of tech-bros burned out on ketamine and rightwing fantasies, seeking to use their power to play at politics.

The Onion, and now Infowars, are primarily owned by San Francisco tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson, who is known locally for donating to efforts to fight homelessness and publicly defending the city.

While many of San Francisco’s tech leaders have fled the city in recent years or criticized its troubling street conditions, Lawson has been a notable exception.

The Twilio founder has garnered attention for philanthropic donations to fight homelessness and provide assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April his high-flying tech career took an unexpected turn, as he led a group that bought the fabled Onion website for an undisclosed price, pledging to invest in its growth.

... In 2018, as San Francisco residents debated a business tax to fight homelessness, Lawson publicly supported the  effort, and announced that Twilio was donating $1 million to local homelessness programs. 

A year later, the Lawsons signed the “Giving Pledge,” the initiative backed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage wealthy businessmen and women to donate their fortunes to charity.

That same year, he and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff donated to an effort to bring a homeless shelter to the Embarcadero. 

Two years later, he publicly defended the city as tech entrepreneurs who were fleeing to other cities heaped abuse on it.

“This is the time when we should be thinking about, 'How do we give back? How do we help take care of our communities and the people around us who may not be faring as well? '” he told the Chronicle.

As we drift into Trump's kleptocratic revival of the late 19th century Gilded Age, it's nice to learn that, now as then, some of our robber barons attempt to make themselves somewhat useful to the City.

Musing on a couple of maps

Seven states voted for reproductive freedom -- that's significant. It's particularly good to see Missouri among the places where abortion rights won; at every level, the state is blood red Republican, but women still had their say.

The losses in South Dakota look to have been about strategic/tactical misfires. The Florida loss, where abortion freedom got 57 percent of the vote, came from the state's unusual 60 percent requirement to pass a measure. Look for more GOP states to try to implant that.

But all in all, this was more demonstration that women, of all political inclinations, don't want the state telling us what we may do with our bodies. 

All these initiatives don't make legal abortion safe though. With the Republicans in power across the federal level, it's a sure thing that many of them will come after reproductive health care... To be continued. ...

• • •

Meanwhile, here's a picture of the fact that elections mostly don't end in split verdicts any more. The states in yellow each have one US Senator from each party. The others are solid Blue or Red.

... only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.

Yet there's still some mixing at the presidential level. Michigan, Georgia and Arizona went for the the Reps this time, but they send two Dem Senators to Washington. 

We know why Maine is a mixed bag -- Susan Collins refuses to go away. She's safe until she retires. In 2026, Dem Senators in Georgia and Michigan will be up for re-election. Can Dems put any other states in play? Possibly North Carolina, but winning back the Senate will be a stretch.

Hell yes, grassroots campaigning still counts!

In campaign postmortems, there's the usual angst-filled punditry out there that says nothing the Dems did, and especially nothing the grassroots did, mattered at all. 

Bull-bleep. As the season geared up, I described what we were going to see as a "hot and cold running volunteer" election and I stand by that. Vast numbers of people turned out to do the difficult job of direct voter contact in various forms. That's what happens when people really care and/or feel truly threatened.

And their efforts show up in the results. Where there wasn't much of a Harris-Walz campaign -- in the reliable blue states which saw only national ads and online media -- the shift toward Trump from 2020 was in the 6 percent range. Lots of Dems and Dem leaners didn't vote. But in the battleground states where money was invested and activism thrived, the shift was closer to 3 percent. Still too much obviously, but quite different. Yes, there was a red tide coming in, but some places Democratic (and small "d" democratic) activism came much closer to stemming that tide.

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, sent out an informative message which aims to describe what party efforts, including at the grassroots, meant in his state. Some of what he saw:

... The shift here was just one quarter the size [of the national deficit]: a 1.5% swing from 2020. Not because Trump was weaker here than elsewhere, but because we were stronger.

Thanks to tens of thousands of heroes—our candidates, the campaign, party infrastructure, allies, and volunteers—we persuaded and turned out even more voters for Harris than we did for Biden in 2020. We lost Wisconsin by just 0.9%—the smallest margin of any state in America.

2024 was a high turnout year, second only to 2020 nationwide. But in most states, turnout went down slightly. In Wisconsin, overall turnout went up—by 1.3%, the most in the country. 

He describes the configuration of forces, groups, and miscellaneous people who made up the Wisconsin campaign: 

... Roughly 100,000 volunteers this year took part in the fight in Wisconsin.

The presidential campaign in Wisconsin and the WisDems core team worked together, hand in glove, on a constant basis. That integration was the product of years of work, relationships, and strategy. It was also made possible by the powerhouse Coordinated Campaign. ...

Every one of the 100,000 people who volunteered, including tens of thousands who knocked on doors and made phone calls in Wisconsin this year, helped Tammy Baldwin win Wisconsin, helped make huge gains downballot, and helped ensure that Harris came closer to winning here than any other battleground state.

The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. ... Enormous thanks to all the groups involved in mounting an absolutely blockbuster field and communications operation in Wisconsin. 

Elections rely on a three-legged stool: the candidate campaigns, the party and volunteers—and allied groups. ...

Wikler's picture of the three-legged stool may be particular to Wisconsin. He heads one of the most effective Democratic parties in the country. In much of the country, especially bluer states, the three legged stool of progressive campaigning probably looks more like 1) candidates and party infrastructure of varying quality; 2) union workers where such exist; and 3) para-campaign and civil society groups like Seed the Vote, the ACLU, and enviros who've internalized that they have to play in elections to survive. 

But whatever organizational form that the wider democracy campaign assumes in the future, it will demand what Wikler enjoins:

... we organize in every corner and every community in Wisconsin, year-round.

Under-recognized is that the experiences and connections made when literally millions of people are activated in a campaign changes many of the people who participate. As legendary California organizer Fred Ross asserted: 

No good organizing is ever lost.

The period ahead may seem bleak, but there are a hell of a lot of us, we've seen each other, and we can get organized and feisty.

Ukraine thrown to Putin's mercies

Unlike many of my friends on the generally progressive side of things, I've long believed that US support for the flawed, but democratically legitimate, Ukrainian state was a right action. This is the first US intervention I've supported in a lifetime of rejection of US imperialism, yet support for Ukraine feels the natural continuation of a long trajectory. Russia's war is an imperial war, seeking to subjugate and absorb a people who want the freedom to define their own way. Yes, I'm something of a quasi-pacifist -- but Russia's crimes against an occupied population are heinous and should not be minimized.

The election of Donald Trump presumably means that Ukrainians are to be thrown to Putin's mercies. Europe is unprepared to step up and replace us. This is a crime much akin to western democracies' abandonment in the 1930s of the Second Spanish Republic to Hitler and Mussolini's pet local strongman, Francisco Franco. That betrayal did not slake the appetite of that era's fascists -- this abandonment won't today either. And we in the United States are even less prepared or even able to recover from our folly than we were then. Bad times indeed. 

• • •

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army. He writes a substack of military analysis.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?: The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

... when the combined wealth of NATO’s five biggest members (U.S. Germany, UK, France and Canada) is twenty times that of Russia, and their military outstrips Russia in technology, size and capability, is a searing indictment about the strategic thinking, execution and will in what is currently known as ‘the west’.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

There is an old Chinese saying: strangle the chicken and frighten the monkey. It is a saying that a PLA General used with a friend of mine one time. In essence, if you wish to shape the behavior of a big competitor, attack and destroy a small ally of the competitor.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO ‘strategy’ for Ukraine over the past three years, as well as their strategic impatience and inclination to enter into negotiations with a Russia that has the strategic initiative, means that the West instead has ‘fed the chicken and encouraged the monkey’.

We will regret this. And so, eventually, will our citizens.

• • •

In 2015, the British journalist Tim Judah, veteran observer of too many wars including the agony in the Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s, published In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. This is a little book of vignettes from the early stages of the war between Ukrainians engaged in forming their European national identity and others who supported the continuation of life within the Russian imperial sphere. Long before the Russian invasion of 2022, Judah shed light on the creativity and resilience of so many in this benighted part of the world.

Despite being such a big country, Ukraine, for most of us who live the western part of the continent, is, or was, somewhere not very important. ...The aim of this book is not to record a blow-by-blow account of the events that led to the Maidan revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, or the war that followed. ...

What I thought was that between journalism and academic books there was not much that explained Ukraine, that made it a vibrant place full of people who have something to say and tell us. Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy people were to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think. Often when they started to talk, you could hardly stop them. If we listen to people who can understand why they think what they do, and act the way they do.

In Ukraine ... people have been taken for granted for so long, as voters or taxpayers or bribe payers, that when finally the rotten ship of state springs leaks and begins to list, everyone is shocked. But they should not have been. ... This book is about what I saw, what people told me and also those parts of history that we need to know in order to understand what is happening in Ukraine ...

Judah might not find the same openness to conversation today, two years into a devastating, existential war. Or perhaps he might. Ukraine has long surprised us. We do not know yet how the next chapter plays out.

"I never knew how much they hated us."

That was the conclusion of a brave and brilliant young woman who worked with Erudite Partner on the campaign just concluded.

This was an election which confirmed the existence of a wide gender gap. And for the youngest voting group, this wounds and can morph into righteous rage.

Jessica Valenti, who writes Abortion Every Day, communicates this aspect of our recent catastrophe:

The Fury Gap
Young women were radicalized overnight

If you thought the gender divide was bad before, you haven’t seen anything yet. Donald Trump’s win this week, bolstered by online shitposters and billionaire misogynists, has shifted something fundamental in young women. And while we’ll see plenty of ink spilled in election post-mortems about the online radicalization of young white men—as there should be—it would be a mistake to miss the story of how this election is doing something similar to their female counterparts.

Over the last two days, I’ve watched as young women’s TikToks and social media posts went from inconsolable shock to pure, hot rage. I saw in real time as those in their teens and 20s—some of whom voted for the first time—realized the depths of their country’s disdain for them. 

For those of us in middle age or older, there wasn’t anything revelatory about the election; we’ve lived that betrayal for years. But to understand for the first time that America would rather elect a rapist than a woman is soul-crushing. Even worse: Realizing just how many men voted for Trump not in spite of his sexual predation—but because of it.

As difficult as that epiphany is to bear, it did not take long for this younger generation of women to respond with a resounding fuck that and fuck you. ...

... This is a generation of young women who grew up online, steeped in a world of social media misogyny and trolls who comment on their bodies and demand they “make me a sandwich.” And that’s on top of getting the same lessons that women my age did—told to watch what you wear, when you walk, and who you trust.

So I have to imagine that after a lifetime of being expected to eat shit, waking up on Wednesday morning knowing that the men in your lives voted away your humanity made the decision to leave them behind pretty easy.

Especially considering how many took the mask off immediately after the election was called: Since Tuesday, young men have flooded women’s mentions with “your body, my choice”—a phrase that some even started shouting at little girls at school just a day later.

It’s that Republican-enabled impunity that will keep young women furious. Why put up with even a minute of it? ...

Let's those of us who thought we'd grown beyond having to scrabble to be recognized as fully adult and human in a man's world, figure out how to be there for these young ones who newly feel the pain we hoped we'd put behind us.

It's the COVID, stupid!

Of course not entirely. And the virus has plenty of enablers and accelerators. But the horrid result of the Presidential election convinces me that pandemic effects are still working through society. 

Mostly we're too close to the election to be very discerning. I took a broad view yesterday in the comments on David Rothkopf's substack effort to understand what the voters have done:

[David] tossed this remark in as a throwaway: "We still do not fully understand or appreciate what a game changer COVID was for our society." I will not be surprised if future historians with more distance suggest this was the central phenomenon in our politics.

COVID proved to us that government could not protect us -- or that it's response was cruel and useless --or somebody was trying to put something over on us. And many more things, all disillusioning.

I have seen surveys somewhere that internal resilience to the COVID shocks was highest among old people, even though we were objectively the most vulnerable. Very young people were worst thrown off-center. The in-betweens, in-between. [Found the study here. Does seem to say what I remembered.]

In the conditions of 2020-2025 America, our political order just wasn't up to a worldwide plague. Much follows from that, much of it more ultimately damaging than the plague itself ...

Before the vote, Patrick Healy ran focus groups for the New York Times:

The worst of the pandemic may feel far away now, but as we look at the Harris versus Trump contest on Tuesday, Covid is the essential prism through which to understand the trajectory of the last three years in America. The pandemic felled Mr. Trump in 2020, bringing out the true autocrat for all to see on Jan. 6, 2021, and fueled his hunger for the second term he felt he was owed. Covid shaped the economy that Mr. Biden tried to revive through policies that proved inflationary. The shocks and aftershocks of the lockdowns and closures set many of our focus group participants on harder paths in life, from schoolchildren to college students to workers to the elderly.

Covid changed and scarred America. Desperation set in for people who thought of themselves as financially stable or middle class. The frustration we heard in our early focus groups in 2022 metastasized into anxiety in 2023 and intensified into anger in 2024. Listening to them, I stopped seeing anxiety and anger as two distinct emotions. They were one and the same by the time the presidential general election began this year.

So many people talked about their lives before and after Covid that it influenced how I saw Mr. Trump’s chances and Mr. Biden’s challenges in this election (and how those challenges, inevitably, shifted onto Ms. Harris). ...

Nowhere in the world following the pandemic where elections genuinely matter have incumbent parties sustained their power as before. Sometimes the deep societal disruption has had results democratically oriented people can applaud. Voters bounced the Tories in Britain resoundingly and replaced the authoritarian party in Poland more narrowly. Even Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party which runs not entirely free elections saw its margins decreased. 

Meanwhile, far right parties threw the previous bums out in Italy and Argentina, installing the more and less responsible far right.

Our societies have proved far more fragile than they look. We're enduring animals; we'll right ourselves, more or less. 

But the cost will be great. And there'll be novel challenges.

Friday cat blogging

 

The cats seem happy to have Erudite Partner back from the Reno campaign. She has resumed one domestic habit -- snapping pictures of the beasts. They seem to figure there's someone else who opens cans.

It's ugly. We carry on.

So we have done it. We have chosen disorder and disunity, criminality and cruelty, a cowardly attempt to turn back the clock in preference to choosing courage to search out a way forward. We, collectively, have revealed our shallowness and our foolishness.

Would that that this were a momentary detour. But I don't think it is. 

The riches of this land, both material and spatial, have given the motley collection of striving humans who live and jostle here a good 250 year run. (After we'd forcibly extirpated the previous inhabitants.) But we seem to have run out our string. 

The challenges of this moment in time are enormous: a climate that is becoming more and more hostile to life as we've known it, a world in which very different people and cultures are tossed up next to and often at odds with each other, exploding understandings of the malleability of genders, gender roles, and family structures. Not to mention, as in all eras, of plenty of aspiring crooks and petty tyrants who are only out for themselves and feel no responsibility to the collective "we." 

It's hard under the best of circumstances for large groups of humans to organize ourselves humanely. The mostly European-origin, mostly male-headed fraction of us has enjoyed something like the best of circumstances in this U S of A for a couple of centuries, but we're clearly coming back to the human norm while the natural balance around us collapses.

What to do? The answer is the same as always:

• Be kind to one another.

• Where people suffer, have their backs and lift up the weak..

• Don't get in their way when they lift themselves.

• Know that all people are both capable of horrors and infinitely valuable.

• Build the most humane institutions we can envision and create.

• Live without knowing when and where hope might break through -- and be bravely ready to notice when it happens. This last is harder than it should to be. That's who we are.

 I may need to give the blog a rest for a bit. Or not ...

Kamala's closing message

Today, we the people get to decide ...

From her closing speech in Philadelphia last night:

“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that. We are exhausted with it. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.

“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom, including the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said. And she pledged always to put “country over party and self and to be a president for all Americans.”

“Tonight…we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to face our future and that we can confront any challenges we face when we do it together.”

“We still have work to do,” she said. “We like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake: We will win.”

Now back to the phones to call those harried voters in Philly one more time! 

Here's yesterday's canvassing launch in Reno; these folks are coming to turn out your vote -- with joy!

While we fixate on Trump ... MAGA mess below creates opportunities

The Downballot reports that Democrats are contesting far more state legislative seats all over the country than Republicans.

Across the 85 legislative chambers holding regularly scheduled elections in 44 states this year, Republicans are defending 3,169 seats while Democrats are protecting 2,616. But Republicans have failed to field a candidate in 1,066 Democratic seats, while Democrats have left 1,127 GOP seats uncontested.

While the Democratic figure for uncontested seats is slightly higher in raw numbers, on a percentage basis, they're playing more offense: Democrats are challenging Republicans in 64% of GOP-held seats, while Republicans, conversely, are contesting 59% of Democratic seats.

The totals reflect strong Democratic recruitment in many states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and even Idaho. In total, Democrats are running 2,042 challengers compared to 1,550 for the GOP. When accounting for open seats (which are also tallied in our new data set), Democrats are fielding 2,485 non-incumbents, versus 2,224 for Republicans.

The disparity also arises from the current dysfunction in the GOP. Lots of veteran legislators retired or were dumped by MAGA voters in primaries.

Altogether, 124 GOP legislators who wanted another term were denied renomination by voters, often for allegedly failing to adhere to far-right orthodoxy. Just 28 Democratic lawmakers, by contrast, lost primaries this year.

This is no way to build a political party. Perhaps a mob ... 

Assuming we live to fight another day, there's lots to build on here.

Women making it happen

As any number of commentators are reminding us today, polls don't win elections. Still, the election commentary world is thrown off by this bombshell:

Can it be true? Seems mighty unlikely given all recent past history in the Hawkeye state. Iowa used to be a swing state, but since voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 has turned solidly Republican. Still, the Des Moines Register-Selzer poll reported out here is thought to be one of the best in the business and now says Harris has climbed into a four point lead.

Jess Piper is a rural Democratic organizer in neighboring Missouri, who lives only three miles from southern Iowa. She's a popular visiting speaker to embattled rural Democrats in both states. And she reports the lay of the land. The DM poll doesn't surprise her.

... I spoke in Davis County, Iowa almost two years ago. We met at the fairgrounds in the building next to the Swine Pavilion. I was asked to come and speak on state politics including Kim Reynold’s school voucher scheme and the Iowa abortion ban. I sat down to another potluck with midwestern sushi — a pickle slathered with cream cheese and rolled up in a piece of ham, sliced into little sushi rolls. I washed it down with lemonade and made sure to snag a Scotcharoo before I spoke.

The abortion ban was the topic of conversation with the women in this group, and I have news for those politicians going around thinking that abortion bans are only relevant to women of child-bearing age…they are wrong.

Women know that abortion bans impact every part of our lives. We know bans drive OBGYNs out of our states making any gynecological care difficult. We are losing women’s healthcare in states with bans. Rural women are hit particularly hard with an abortion ban.

... Here’s the thing that a lot of pollsters have been getting wrong: they don’t think abortion will be the reason that older women choose to vote for a Democrat. And I know that isn’t true. I have talked to hundreds of folks on the ground in places like Iowa. I’ve spoken to so many women.

Abortion may be seen as a political strategy to some, but it is life or death for women and girls.

... I know that the women are making it happen. Boys, look away while I tell a funny story. Recently, I was at an event with [rural podcaster] Fred Wellman…he doesn’t speak at small rural events as often as I do. He said of this particular event: “This is running so well. We are on time and there is a schedule of events and food too.”

I told him. “You know why, right? Women organized the event.” He laughed and then realized how truthful I was. I then told him about the one event I have attended in the last two years that was organized by a man. I knew it as soon as I arrived because there was no water, no coffee, and no sweet treats.

True story.

Women are taking the lead in this election and it’s because we have everything to lose. Our lives are on the line. Our children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences of a Trump win.

Women will organize events and knock doors and make calls and participate as election judges and create GOTV events and we will also feed you. We will give you information and warm your belly. Women are driving this election and it’s being done in a particularly feminine fashion.

This is the year of the woman. The stars have aligned. I am optimistic but a little scared. Excited but pragmatic....

Piper is working to pass the initiative to make abortion legal in her home state. Criss-crossing her own state, she's cautiously hopeful about that proposition too.

All Saints, All Souls, Dia De Los Muertos 2024

Remembering this year, two who've gone before:

Cliff Lichter was a friend from my years as part of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City and San Francisco. 

Cliff wandered the country for decades as an itinerant pilgrim, without fixed home or property, as the Spirit took him. He turned up with little warning at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, monasteries and various intentional communities. He always helped out with whatever menial work needed doing. He was almost ostentatiously humble, but as you got to know him, you realized his intense piety was not for show; the guy really lived within a mystical universe that somehow sustained his unlikely existence. 

His Catholic Worker friend Brian Terrell wrote of Cliff and provided an epitaph:

Our dear friend and brother Cliff Lichter died on July 11, to continue his pilgrimage on another plane. Cliff had been a soldier and a Jesuit brother and a hospital orderly before finding his vocation as a wanderer. 

... He carried with him a note of introduction from Dorothy Day, dated Sept. 1, ’71, calling Cliff a “dear friend.” “I hope that he finds Catholic Worker friends and receives hospitality wherever he goes.”

In recent years, some of those good Catholic Worker friends in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw that he was well taken care of.  ...

This was Cliff.

“By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.” The Way of the Pilgrim, 19th century Russia

• • •

In 2000, doing his thing at some conference

Unexpectedly, Hunter Cutting died in September from pulmonary hypertension. He had trained legions of justice organizers and climate campaigners in the Bay and beyond on how to interact with media. He was my neighbor in the Mission; he was working down the block from the homeless encampment where the SFPD shot Luis Gongoro Pat in 2016. I would see him at vigils where Luis's family demanded justice from the city. Hunter leaves a shocked family; he left us all too soon.

Halloween on the phone bank

The dialer got into the spirit of the day on the UniteHERE phonebank yesterday.

 

While waiting for someone to pick up in Philly, it displayed screens like this with the phone icon jiggling.

 

Gotta keep the phone crew amused. We'll be on through the election, chasing down voters for Harris-Walz and supporting a couple of thousand canvassers in the battleground states.

Women finding a way; it's traditional

The MAGAs don't like women. In fact, we scare them. We might just think for ourselves.

Note from a public women's bathroom

So contends feminist journalist Jill Filipovic. 

There is ... conservative rage and panic over the prospect of their wives voting for Kamala Harris and simply not telling them. Harris supporters have launched a strategy of telling women that their votes are private, and no one has to know who you cast your ballot for — including your Trump-supporting husband. Fox News’s Jesse Waters griped that a woman voting for Harris and not telling her husband is “the same thing as having an affair... that violates the sanctity of our marriage.” That, he said, “would be D Day.” (Waters, it’s worth noting, divorced after he had an affair and is now married to his former affair partner).

Donald Trump, for his part, has doubled down on his Big Daddy pitch to women: “I want to protect the women of our country,” Trump said at a rally. “They said sir I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say… I said well I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not.”

Which doesn’t sound so far from “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

This is the misogyny election. It’s the election of abortion bans. It’s the election of conservative husbands who are enraged at the very thought of their wives having minds of their own. It’s the election of a man who boasts about sexual assault and demeans women who challenge him in the crudest of terms. ...

Here's hoping women can bring this contest home. The polls show an enormous gender gap between the voting intentions of men and women. It's girls against the boys. And the boys may get all hot up -- but do they vote? In general, women cast a considerable majority of ballots in presidential elections.

• • •

None of this is entirely new. I've written here before about learning how to work elections from my Republican committee-woman mother and her diligently maintained turnout lists. She patrolled her precincts and woe to the Republican voter who didn't show up. "Too busy; went fishing" said one indignant note on a voting record.

Yet in the 1964 presidential contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, I was always sure she secretly pulled the lever for the Texan. She had dragged me to the kick-off for Goldwater's running mate, the local forgettable Congressman from nearby Lockport, William Miller. He was a small-minded, abrasive McCarthyite. She distributed the Goldwater lit. But Goldwater scared her. She couldn't vote for a man she thought both rigid and dangerous. So I am pretty sure she didn't.

My father dutifully turned out for Barry. But none of this stuff engaged him.

My mother remained a Republican until she died in 1999. I wonder whether she'd still be a Republican today? Upper middle class white women with college degrees in cities, like her, have mostly "evolved," now voting as Dems whether they trumpet it or not.

If Harris wins, a lot of women will have found their own way.

Political action for efficacy: uncoordinated and very well coordinated

Political scientist Lester Spence, who describes himself as an Afro-realist, has observations about the 250,000 people who've canceled the Washington Post in outrage at Jeff Bezos' decision to kill the paper's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.

Political scientists who study comparative politics came up with a term to describe a certain type shift from democratic states to non-democratic ones. "Democratic backsliding." They came up with that term to describe transitions that didn't happen immediately, through a military coup, or something like it, but slowly. And they've recently begun using the term to describe the US. Free press tampering is often something that comes with backsliding--either politicians or oligarchs gradually or abruptly reduce the ability of journalists to report.

What happened to the Post and the  [LA] Times is a sign backsliding is taking a turn for the worse. The Post IS NO LONGER FREE IN THE WAY IT WAS LAST WEEK. Once he makes this move, what prevents him from coming after the news next? Take a look again at the quote above. What prevents HIM from coming after those things now that he's done this?

THIS is what people responded to. And people chose this, WHILE UNCOORDINATED, because this was the best signal to send. Far better than canceling Amazon Prime (although that could be next) because an amazon prime cancellation can be read in a dozen different ways.

Now on that response. You're suggesting that mass cancellation can only hurt. But compared to what? What other action would've been better? If there's an action that could've been better...why didn't Post staffers coordinate it? why didn't you coordinate it? I'm pretty sure a draft of the endorsement exists. Why didn't the board send it out? Anonymously even?

I suggest that we're already down a dangerous path. Instead of telling people "STOP" in the absence of ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE...the answer should be to tell people "GO." And use that energy to develop the internal institutional strength to contest the changes in the paper. ...

Like Spence, much as I doubt the efficacy of uncoordinated political actions, I am thrilled by the volume of the uncomplicated response to what feels a moral political offense.

We have a few more days to prove that Jeff Bezos bet on the wrong horse. Let's keep working.

• • •

And since I'm sharing from Spence, here are some fragments from the Johns Hopkins University professor's own first experience canvassing Philly for Harris-Walz.

I didn’t know what I’d expect to see because I’d never done door to door canvassing before. But there were about 150 or more of us, and of this group I imagine maybe four or five were paid by the campaign (not the Harris Walz campaign but by the group we were working with). The rest of us were volunteers. The youngest I met were in undergrad. The oldest I met were in their sixties and early seventies. It was a multiracial group, and, tellingly, international.

(Foreign nationals cannot donate money or participate in decision making in any domestic political committee but can volunteer their time in other ways.)

... Although the vast majority of these door knocks went unanswered, maybe about 20 percent of the time someone answered the door. The bulk of these folk were fervent Harris supporters—again this last push is about getting people we already know are likely to vote for Harris to do so. There were a few exceptions.

The white brother who answered the first door our crew knocked on spent twenty minutes telling us how scared he was of the Democratic Party, in part because of their response to the George Floyd Protests, and when January 6 was brought up, he said “that was four years ago.” ...

... Perhaps the best story of the two days happened on Saturday. Near the end of our run one of the crew ran into an elderly voter who wasn’t able to get to the polls because she wasn’t mobile, and she was concerned that her mail ballot wouldn’t get to her in time. I went to talk to the sister myself and collected her information so I could help her. My plan was to talk to people at the top of the food chain because technically there was only so much we could do. Maybe we could get a ballot and bring it back to her.

I ended up running into an election judge around the block from her. She wasn’t on our list—I think she stepped outside and saw us door knocking, and I told her what we were doing. She then told us who she was, what she did. So I took the opportunity to ask her how we could help her neighbor. She gave us permission to go back to the neighbor with her information. We told her the neighbor’s name but she didn’t recognize it.

When we went back to the neighbor, the neighbor laughed. “Oh. I know her. I taught her son!”...

 

That's how elections like this one are won -- one vote scratched out at a time, finding our people. 

This afternoon I go back to this work, calling into Pennsylvania with the UniteHERE national phonebank.

Voting together

The east coast branch of the UniteHERE national phonebank took a short turn through North Carolina last week to help on-the-ground organizers turn out voters to this Power to the Polls festival in a Charlotte park and their march to vote. Looks like they had a good time.

It's great to see our work is succeeding.

This effort, like many across the nation, aims to restore some sense of community to the election process though which we make our national and local democratic decisions.

Not long ago, there was only Election Day voting unless you submitted an excuse to vote by absentee ballot. But states in the Pacific Northwest experimented with mail-in voting and discovered this increased turnout (sometimes). Some states added early in-person voting options. The COVID year further encouraged many states to implement various systems of mail, drop box, and other options which reduced crowding and responded to some people's fears of being around others.

So, really, we no longer have Election Day as so much as Election Month. This year almost all states use some version of voting options distributed over time. 

A friend describes what living through the transition felt like:

When we lived in Colorado, we were some of the very early voters in line to cast our votes on Election Day, and at first I really didn't like that we couldn't have that moment duplicated here in Washington State. But now I have grown to prefer it this way, because we can be assured that our votes will definitely be counted and not manipulated in any way.

Early in the transition to early voting options, I was uncomfortable. An election is the most collective experience we participate in as citizens of a huge, wildly diverse, country. As Karl Kurtz wrote way back in 2007:

[Early voting] eliminates the notion of a national civic convocation of the American people on election day...

We've made voting a solitary action for many of us. Is this good? Certainly it is good for campaigners; we push early voting with gusto and profit by it because it reduces the number of people we have to reach on Election Day. (And early voting relieves voters in contested areas of that relentless flood of calls and texts.)

But I'm glad to see more and more groups creating public events like Charlotte's Power to the Polls march to remind people they are in this big thing together.

After all, voting is a chance to join in a celebration of the best aspirations of this country, even in these terrible times!

We even have election parties in San Francisco.

Going to be a rough season for democracy and rule of law

So why did Donald Trump hold a modern day Nazi hate rally in New York City, imitating the German-American Bund's 1939 pro-Hitler shindig?

Because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

Let me repeat that:

Trump held his hate rally because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

If Trump were working on the assumption he'd win the vote, he'd be barnstorming the states where the election is contested. He wouldn't be putting on a show in New York City, a place that not only despises him, but even worse, ignores him.

For the Trumpists, Election Day is just the beginning. We can expect violent disruptions where they can pull them off -- possibly to prevent (some people from) voting, almost certainly during the counting. MAGA folks will do outlandish things we haven't thought of yet, and it won't be good.

But in all the battleground states except Georgia and Nevada, Democrats hold executive power; in the other two, government has been responsibly run. Meanwhile Joe Biden is still in the White House. It will be hard for MAGA to overthrow a free election using the power of the state.

We'll certainly go on to a litigation stage. Will corrupt courts try to turn a free and fair election that goes for Kamala Harris into a Trump victory? Probably not -- though we have plenty of evidence suggesting  not to trust John Roberts and the Supremes. Might they decide that the divine right of presidential appointees trumps the electorate? Roberts likes a bit of monarchy as he showed us in the immunity decision. Still, it would probably have to be very close to let them pull that off.

The current MAGA majority in the House of Representatives will come up with quasi-legal stunts to put a losing Trump in office; it's going to take legal grit to hold that off.

Supposing Harris is still on track to be inaugurated, will there be violence then? I think Merrick Garland's overcautious Justice Department may have done us a solid on this: people are still going to jail for the last time they stormed the capital, reducing the number of hardcore crazies who are willing to take the risk of another go at a half-assed insurrection. And this time, the forces of order will be ready.

And that's only what I can see and imagine from my distant perch on the Left Coast. 

• • •

I can't believe that I am saying this, but what lies ahead makes me glad that our candidate is a prosecutor who has seen degenerates like Trump and his sycophants before. We give her a chance by giving her as large an electoral win as possible. That's up to the people of these disunited States.

• • •

And then we push her to cut oligarchs like Musk and Bezos down to size. That, too, will not be easy.

Dying in Darkness

I had to do it. Jeff Bezos' cowardly veto of his newspaper's endorsement of Harris-Walz was too much. How could I have any confidence in an institution devoted to covering Washington after seeing its leadership  run for cover (ineptly) at the approach of an aspiring fascist?

Historical experience suggests this won't shield Bezos unless he is more directly willing to lick Trump's ample ass; oligarchs lose under fascism. See also Mikhail Khodorkovsky who played footsie with Vladimir Putin to protect his oil wealth but lost it all and ended up in a gulag.

As media observer Nancy Gibbs writes: 

[The Post's] “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. ...

F$%#*@! Philly.

As anyone who knows me probably knows, one of the worst things about our election seasons is that they interrupt my focus on football.

 

I can't resist immediately sharing this delicious campaign ad that speaks to my obsessions. And I'm not even an Eagles fan ...