Blog on break for a few days

Some combination of system updates and overloads are giving the old laptop fits. Think I'll take a break here for a couple of days and try to restore order.

How long will they ride hide?

Welcome to our latest Gilded Age. The Trump regime implants its oligarchs. 

 

As of December 6, the plutocrats are being put in place. Does the wider society have the imagination and boldness to unseat them? 

The next installment of the American adventure ... A corrupt oligarchy is not stable; things could get worse or better. Here we go.

Saturday scenes

So the human went out for a walk. It's shotgun deer hunting season, so I'm wearing my bright colors and sticking to the road sides. So what do I see?

 

A little further down the road ...

 

Yet further ...

 

Here's the last ...

 

Burma Shave! for anyone old enough to remember that sort of highway advertising. I remember squealing with delight on car trips with my parents on encountering those ads. 

 

I have no idea what someone on the Vineyard has against chickens. Did someone attempt to make a chicken an indoor pet?

Friday cat blogging

Mio's a happy fellow -- and so is Allan!

Janeway watches from a table. Note the instrument of torture next to her. She needs frequent attention with those claw clippers. She is not entirely cooperative, but keeping claws trimmed is self-protection for her humans.

From South Korea to the home front

The Verge Editor Sarah Jeong just happened to be in Seoul, out drinking, when the president declared martial law in a coup attempt this week. This wasn't a reporting assignment, but how could a journalist miss the history that was unfolding?

She rushed to the protests, catching the flavor of an instinctive, momentarily successful, popular uprising, combining high tech youth in this super-modern country with old time progressive campaigners who remembered overthrowing a dictator to install democracy. It's fascinating ... here are some excerpts:

... the presence of political protests is not unusual in South Korea: this is a nation that lionizes the protesters who opposed the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and teaches young schoolchildren to revere the 1919 protests against the Japanese colonial occupation. But it’s not just rote opposition politics — even relatively conservative newspapers are criticizing Yoon, and his popularity is in the toilet. It’s against this backdrop that Yoon Suk Yeol made the late-night surprise announcement that the country was now under martial law, in order to stop “shameless pro-North anti-state forces that plunder the freedom and happiness of our people.” All political activities — including those of the National Assembly, the parliamentary body that can legally block his martial law order — were suspended.

[So she took a train to where the action was, outside the National Assembly.] ... The sudden vibe shift starts with a middle-aged auntie sitting on a platform bench waiting for the other train who shouts “Fighting!” at the crowd that packs the escalator and the stairs. Another woman in a motorized wheelchair yells political slogans as she zips ahead to the exit, fist in the air.

When I emerge into the freezing night air, the first thing I see is military uniforms. My heart races and I take out my phone, before realizing that the two young men in full-body tactical camo look frightened. The soldiers are surrounded by furious ahjussis pushing and shoving and cursing at them. [Ahjussis are older working and middle class men who may well remember their student protests that won Korean democracy, however stodgy they may now appear.]

... Before I can even really process it, I can no longer see soldiers on the street. There is still camouflage here and there, but these are a smattering of protesters wearing it head-to-toe, possibly vestiges of their own time doing mandatory military service. Hordes of riot police with shields and neon green vests are marching through the streets. The protesters are ignoring them.

An unidentified man gets on a microphone and begins narrating updates; he starts by asking the crowd to surround him and protect him from having the mic taken by the police. The protesters oblige in an orderly fashion. 

It’s freezing out, and people are mostly bundled up in puffer coats. I wonder if anyone else can tell how drunk I am; I wonder, also, how drunk other people are. On television, politicians who sprinted to the National Assembly to stop the fall of democracy are blinking slowly and slurring their words. They appear to have been enjoying their Tuesday night in very much the same fashion I had been. 

At 1:02AM, the man on the microphone announces that the Assembly has voted to block the declaration of martial law; a heartfelt cheer goes through the crowd. The loudspeakers begin to play some truly awful music, a tinny version of a cheesy protest song that sounds like it was recorded by literal children. The crowd sings along; the ahjussis seem to know all the words by heart. I look up the lyrics later; they roughly translate to: The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic. The power of the Republic of Korea stems from its people.

The chants switch to “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” and “The people are victorious!” The crowd presses against the fences that barricade them from the National Assembly building. Most of them are on their phones, following the events happening inside; some of the older men have their phones pressed against their ears, listening to news broadcasts. 

One kid with an open beer slurs, “Death to Yoon Suk Yeol!” and is ignored. People are standing on top of tall decorative planters, on top of walls, on top of piles of unassembled police barricades that have been abandoned. The people standing on the walls are a mix of young men and ahjussis; I am starting to see selfie sticks and GoPros and livestreamers enter the crowd. An ahjussi yells at great length about how much he loves his friends for coming out with him to protest.

... When I finally catch a cab, the gray-haired driver asks me if I was at the protests. When I answer in the affirmative, he thanks me. I am embarrassed; my Korean is not good enough to explain to him that I am a journalist, that I am an American, that I am supposed to be an impartial observer of history. The ahjussi goes on to tell me he’s always hated Yoon and complains about being called a commie for saying that Yoon was going to ruin the country. ...

I think about the GoPros and livestreamers; I think about the kids asking to have their picture taken, so they can tell their families that they were there on that important day. Politics is being intermediated so smoothly through technology that it has become almost unnoticeable, embedded into the fabric of life for the young and the old alike. ... 

Yoon tried to take power with soldiers, police, and helicopters — to take the country back to the 1980s. But these aren’t the 1980s. He should have seized cell service first.

Go read it all.

My friend  Christine Ahn is mobilizing for Korean democracy still. This event is in Honolulu.

Like many in my age cohort, young and active between 1965 and 1975, I can identify with those people in those crowds. I know what it is to surround a building while facing police, to make loud demands. We did that sort of thing a lot back in the day. (I kept doing it many years longer, but that's another story.) Looking forward to the Trump regime, I think many of my age group wonder whether we could do it again. 

The outpouring of young people to work and canvass for the election just past is reassuring. We didn't win, but it wasn't for lack of volunteers who cared. I don't think Trump's narrow victory will keep them from continuing to care and to turn out for their hopeful vision of the country if they have to.

•  •  •

Jay Kuo, multi-talented human rights lawyer and digital whiz, has some takes on what South Korean events might mean in our context.

Presidents like Yoon or Trump do not feel constrained by laws or even common sense or decency. To stop them from seizing complete power, it takes people willing to mobilize in the streets, press willing to defy censorship orders, unions willing to call for general strikes, legislators ready to risk their safety, and a military prepared to stand down in order to stop a determined takeover of the government by a dictator.

The chances are not negligible that Trump will attempt such a decree at some point during his tenure. After all, he has already said he wants to be a Day One dictator, and he has toyed in the past with invoking the Insurrection Act, thwarted only by cooler heads who will not be present this second time around.

... Nor does the U.S. Constitution or any federal law provide a clear mechanism for undoing martial law once decreed, other than to seek a court order to overturn it. But based on recent rulings, if the final decision rests with this Supreme Court, the fate of the Republic is shaky at best.

That means there likely is no quick way out of an unlawful or pretextual decree by Trump under the Insurrection Act, or some other kind of emergency powers declaration, under which he assumes full control of the government and can silence all dissent. In light of the South Korean example, civic leaders, union officials, legislators and ordinary citizens must begin to ask an important question: What will they actually do if Trump seeks to end our democracy by decree? How far would they go and how would they try to stop him?

This is no longer some abstract thought experiment. Through these events in South Korea, we have now been duly warned of the risks of autocratic takeover. The future of our democracy may very well depend on whether we can match the kind of response we just witnessed. We must take the South Koreans’ complete rejection of military dictatorship as an inspiring example and pledge to defend democracy with equal passion, resolve and action.

I'm inspired again and I'm with Kuo.

News to celebrate

The state of Wisconsin continues to demonstrate how organized Americans struggle to get their country back when the popular will is derailed by an authoritarian faction in power. Former Republican Governor Scott Walker thought he'd killed off the state's public service unions way back in 2011, a vital element of a gerrymandering and broadly repressive project that sought to move the closely divided state permanently into GOP control. And for some years, it looked as if he'd succeeded. 

But Wisconsin unions and Wisconsin Democrats never gave up.

From the Associated Press: 

Unions score major win in Wisconsin with court ruling restoring collective bargaining rights

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin public worker and teachers unions scored a major legal victory Monday with a ruling that restores collective bargaining rights they lost under a 2011 state law that sparked weeks of protests and made the state the center of the national battle over union rights.

That law, known as Act 10, effectively ended the ability of most public employees to bargain for wage increases and other issues, and forced them to pay more for health insurance and retirement benefits.

Under the ruling by Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power would have it restored to what was in place prior to 2011. They would be treated the same as the police, firefighter and other public safety unions that were exempted under the law.

Of course one court ruling doesn't mean the struggle is over. There will be an appeal to the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. But diligent grass roots organizing has won, at the ballot box, a court less friendly to Republican arguments. The justices have overturned the Republican gerrymander of the state legislature; over several electoral cycles, Democrats finally have a chance to make their policy preferences heard at the state house. 

Last year, Democrats elected a pro-choice justice to the state's highest court, changing the balance there. Another judicial election comes along on April 1. If the Dems can win that one, the unions will once again be able to work in a state that was synonymous with enlightened liberal government before the Koch brothers-funded Walker seized the reins. 

When we fight, we win. See WisDems for more. 

Photo is from a Bay Area solidarity rally in 2011.

Big trouble ahead

The presidential election just past was a very close contest. Oh sure, Trump wants to overwhelm us with his claim that he won by a landslide. That's just authoritarian bombast. Because he won all the projected swing states, his win looks huge, especially on a map. And across the country, he did actually dig out a one percent plus actual majority. But if only 115,000 voters distributed across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had gone the other way, we'd have a President Harris.

Since the election was so close, everyone gets to have their own plausible theory of what happened. I'm sticking with mine: COVID put us in a nasty mood and Trump was able to capitalize on this. (That's the only thing he knows how to do: turn venomous emotions into profit for himself.) I read the deluge of explanations for Harris' loss, but remain conscious that even vast quantities of data -- and there is more every day -- can't definitively account for the narrow outcome. Eventually many pundits and commentators will settle on some theory -- and then historians and political scientists will come up with their alternative takes. The 2024 election lends itself to interpretation and reinterpretation.

All that is introduction to sharing excerpts from the leftish economic historian Adam Tooze's take on our American predicament. Although I am not sure I buy it completely, I find his Olympian draft of contemporary history quite intriguing. 

... The essential fact about US politics in the current moment remains that the two party system anchored in the ancient constitution divides the country almost half and half. Those cleavages run through society including through the working-class and the business interest. ...

... If the class analytic of workers v. owners is not helpful in making sense of Trump’s victory, the idea of a revolt against the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) may be more so.

The PMC was a term coined in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The term designated the rising mass of college-educated white collar professional and managerial workers whose ambiguous role in modern Western politics the Ehrenreich’s were trying to explain.

In the 1960s and 1970s many professional and managerial people contributed to social movements that were clearly progressive. Furthermore, for the vast majority of folks who count themselves as progressive this alignment has a deep logic all the way down to the present day. 

As Gabe Winant, one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary scene, noted back in 2019 in N+1:

For all the cynicism and compromises that professional pretensions engender, professional labor  [i.e. the labor of the PMC, per Adam Tooze] does carry a utopian seed—in the impulse to create and disseminate knowledge, to care for the sick, or to defend the rights and dignity of the democratic subject.

And yet what is also undeniable is that in the late 1970s and 1980s large and powerful parts of the PMC broke with any association with classic, working-class. left-wing politics, rooted in the trade union movement. Instead, they provided their support to the agenda of neoliberalism. Despite its endless critiques of the state and its rhetoric about markets, actually existing neoliberalism was the latest iteration of PMC politics. Neoliberalism was a managerialism.

.. The outcome in electoral terms in the US from the 1990s onwards was an increasing alignment of the Democrats with College-educated voters, an alignment that was particularly strong for women and minorities. Figures like the Clintons and the Obamas personify this coalition.

By 2008 this corporate-PMC synthesis made a large and tempting target for populisms of the left and the right. These populisms pitted “the people” against an elite bloc that was more often than not personified, not by oligarchs or the owners of the means of production, but by members of the PMC. Perversely, the much remarked upon resentment of working-class voters, particularly men, triggered by new patterns of inequality and disadvantage, vented itself in the first instance on elementary school teachers and social workers, often women, who found themselves grouped with “beltway liberals” in the crosshairs of right-wing populist vitriol.

... Trump and Brexit in 2016 were early breakthroughs for the new anti-PMC politics.

The Trump shock of 2016 caused soul-searching in the Democratic party elite. The principal wager of the Biden administration was an effort to react to the first wave of anti-PMC revolt by widening the Democratic electoral coalition so as to attract trade unionists and working-class Americans back into the fold. In many ways this was ironic. The fact that the American working-class is increasingly feminized and diverse is no conceit of woke PMC ideology. Under Biden the party chased the image of the blue-collar production worker, almost as hard as they would eventually chase the respectable centrist Republican.

In 2020 when COVID demonstrated the harsh and dysfunctional reality of governance under Trump, the Democrats won back a majority. Though not for the anti-vaxxers, but for a majority of the population, COVID was a “PMC moment”. Nurses, doctors and lab scientists mattered, along with logistics experts and people who could get things moving again. It was not merely coincidental that COVID handed a PMC-dominated Democratic party a surprise victory. It was not for nothing that it was the Democratic majority in Congress that carried the US under Republican Presidents, both through the crisis of 2008 and that of 2020.

In 2024 with the electorate wanting a faster return to normality - resentments concentrated in the superheated discussion of “inflation” - what came back to the fore was the anti-PMC coalition that Trump rallies like no politician before him....

... What has become obvious with the Clinton-Trump-Biden-Harris-Trump sequence is that the Democratic formula is itself increasingly a driver of crisis. It is not capable of providing reliable electoral wins. And when it does have power, nostalgia for the bygone era of hegemony and the reflexes of US globalism - a quintessential product of the 20th-century PMC - tend to accelerate crisis in the form of aggressive claims to US leadership and a resurgent neoconservative revisionism. ...

In the first Trump administration, expressive gestures of rupture with the status quo were tempered by vested interests and the functional imperatives of the moment. The administration then inherited an economy with plenty of slack and a relatively calm geopolitical environment. Until 2020 few complex trade-offs were called for. When COVID hit, the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress rapidly decomposed. How the Trump administration will actually look remains to be seen, but the environment today is far more complex and will test the anti-PMC politics of the Trump administration far more seriously.

Looks like big trouble ahead, and that's aside from the Christian nationalist and cult-of-Trump fascist aspirations of the Orange Man's coalition.

Seasonal reflection

Seasons are a bit of a shock to coastal Californians. We are not accustomed to wide temperature swings.

But here we are this frosty morning.in Massachusetts. And the land is its beautiful self. This is the ten-day deer shooting season, so it is not a time to wander woodland trails. There are hunters out there.

Empty woods roads have their own beauty and seem safe enough for walking. Pretty much the only traffic is pickup trucks bearing construction workers, building and maintaining the summer homes off these roads. It's prime season for that work. 

Here in Chilmark, we're warm and toasty, thanks to the climate-sparing heat pump we installed during the last visits. Over Thanksgiving weekend, energetic relatives replaced the sprawling woodpile with a snug and practical shed. We'll be grateful as we stoke the wood stove.

I settle in to ponder and delight in this season of apocalyptic anticipation, this Advent in which hope and fear jostle each other, this year and every year.

Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.

Erudite Partner's postelection account of working in Nevada to elect Democrats channels the rage of so many women on the morning after ...

... all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.

In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised to “protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He’d claimed that handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, “Life after Roe.” No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.

Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.… There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something missing” was a penis. ... Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.

Several weeks on, I think we would do well to remember our rage, our burning awareness that women's humanity scarcely exists for so many, mostly men, that we live among and who delight in power over us. Read it all here.

Besides our rage, surviving the next iteration of American imperial and democratic decline will take smarts, building unlikely connections, determination, generosity and kindness. But let's not forget the rage ...

It's still COVID!

When an election turns on very small margins, everyone who thinks they know why a shift in voter preferences happened can plausibly make a case for their opinion. And Donald Trump's victory over the Harris-Walz ticket was small:

Trump’s margins — both in raw votes and in percentages — were small by historical standards, even for the past quarter century, when close elections have been the rule, including the 2000 Florida recount election and Trump’s previous two races in 2016 and 2020. ... PBS

Sure, there was some movement away from Dems everywhere -- but also Dem candidates, especially for the U.S. Senate, did well in even in battleground states and the lower House of Congress remains almost evenly split.

So observers are still largely in "pick your poison" mode for explanations.

And I'm sticking to mine: the experience of COVID and COVID polarization somehow tossed many Americans off-center and we're still addled by a lingering awareness that our trust in how the world works could be upended by a germ -- or something else unknown and unforeseen.

David Wallace-Wells has chronicled how COVID and COVID politics have shaped our memories of living through the pandemic. His account might surprise you:

The story is this. When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.

You may be laughing, but this is actually a pretty good description of what genuinely happened in the spring and summer of 2020, despite how you may remember those days now. Back then, the president was a lightning rod who seemed to polarize the country’s response all by himself, although he had rhetorical help from podcasters and radio hosts, governors and members of local school boards. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too. ...

Present divisions came along later, with the development of vaccines (delivered to arms, though not invented, during the Biden term) and the higher mortality, especially in red states, in the pandemic's second year.

And from there, we got to where we are now, with Donald Trump appointing health authorities whose prominence was raised by distress about COVID. Here's David Wallace-Wells again.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] owes his current selection to pandemic backlash and the intuition, in Trump world, that Covid contrarians should be drafted into a broad insurgency against the institutions of science. ... the others named for top public health posts, though not transparent cranks, are also Covid contrarians whose most important qualification for these positions are their crusades against the public health establishment during the pandemic period: Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, and Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary to run the Food and Drug Administration. Dave Weldon, Trump’s pick to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a vocal vaccine skeptic long before the pandemic.

... Democrats have grown increasingly invested in, and identified with, the management style and worldview of the credentialed elite — with the Republicans, once the party of the country’s establishment, growing a lot more unruly as a party and a coalition.

But there are a few things that are nevertheless strange about what Benjamin Mazer called “The COVID-Revenge Administration” and the way its are united primarily by a “lasting rage” about the initial handling of the pandemic.

The first is that the federal pandemic response was actually supervised by Trump and many of those whom he appointed, the first time around. Americans often tell the story of Covid now as though our pandemic response was run by safetyist liberals in an unreasonable panic. But while Trump was remarkably indifferent to Covid in 2020, he was also, for the entire period we now remember erroneously as “lockdown,” in charge. (Americans often remember that period as stretching for multiple years; in fact, all but one state withdrew its stay-at-home orders within three months.)

The second is that, nearly five years on from the first reported Covid case, it’s not clear to what extent the public as a whole really did hate the country’s initial response to Covid. America exited the pandemic emergency into a period of post-pandemic exhaustion and frustration, one that undoubtedly contributed to public irritation with those liberals many Americans understood to be in charge....

Click to enlarge.Via Kevin Drum

... And the third is that, early in the pandemic, many of the leading Covid contrarians, including some of those now at the top of Trump’s short list, were among the most inaccurate voices making claims about what were then probably the two simplest and most important questions facing anyone trying to right-size the pandemic response. Namely, how bad things could get and how long it might last.

... at the outset, many of the most outspoken contrarians — today claiming vindication, complaining about censorship even after building huge social-media followings during the pandemic, were telling us that the most important thing to know about the pandemic was that it was simply not a big deal.

Over the course of the pandemic, many continued to argue against restrictions, even as they’d lessened considerably, and even as the disease made a mockery of their predictions about its ultimate toll. In time, the American public has in some ways grown more sympathetic — forgetting the panic of the initial months, taking somewhat for granted that the death toll would land near where it did and assessing the wisdom of those mitigation measures as though they had no effect on mortality at all. (As it happens, some research suggests that those measures could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.)

But to suggest that mitigation was pointless because the measures were ineffective in preventing mass death is functionally the opposite of arguing that it was pointless because so few lives were at stake. ...

“The problem with pandemics is that people want to forget them,” Michael Lewis wrote last spring in the foreword to “We Want Them Infected.” Of course, many people do want to forget, and understandably. But others want to litigate and relitigate and relitigate, and in some ways the imbalance of motives may be a bigger problem than pandemic amnesia itself, allowing those with the sharper critiques to furnish the frameworks that the otherwise indifferent grasp for when trying to make sense of their own experience. ...

We're all a little nuts when it comes to the pandemic and, for the moment, the anti-expertise side of various arguments is getting a turn in the sun. Let's hope we don't come to grief during their ascendancy.

 Dr. Leana S. Wen responded to the questions raised by seeing RFK implanted on top of U.S. health policy in "Should I get my vaccines while I can? Your questions, answered." (gift article) She's not entirely alarmist, but she suggests you make sure your vaccines are up to date if possible by January 20.

Friday cat blogging

Cats report something is missing. I don't think it is us. 

They'll be fine. Allan is on the job. And we all know what, as far as Janeway and Mio are concerned, is the main job.

What seems right to say today

Enjoy the holiday of gratitude. Borrowed from a friend.