Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to provoking commentary. Some annotated by me. Lots of guns, GOPer malfeasance, and too little good cheer, but here goes ...

Ryan Grim: The horrifying massacre at Uvalde, then, is a graphic illustration of two of America’s worst problems: our epidemic of gun violence, and our plague of lawless, incompetent police departments. There really is a murder problem in many American cities, yet the police in most of them let the culprits get away with it half or more of the time. We’ve got far too many guns that are too easy to get, and we’ve got a sick police culture that needs to be torn out by the roots. San Francisco cops make an arrest in only 8.1 percent of reported crimes -- and naturally residents are not rushing to report. Why bother?

Sportscolumnist John Feinstein: If the NCAA had any moral standards, it would move the Men’s and Women’s Final Fours — one scheduled for Houston, one slated for Dallas — out of Texas next year. It would move all of its other championships from the state, too. And it would vow not to return until Texas reforms its gun laws. That might have an impact.

Food writer Soleil Ho: As a people, the amount of grief we’ve been asked to carry for the comfort of the gun lobby has rapidly exceeded our capacity to process it, and we need to acknowledge that. We can’t continue being their comfort food.

Senior journalist and media commentator James Fallows: Reporters like politics. Most readers care about governance—for which they wouldn’t use that term, but would instead think about schools, taxes, health care, jobs. Most reporters are interested in conflict and drama. Most readers and citizens would rather know that things are undramatically getting done. Reporters do thrive on the stories of who is up and who is down -- politics as sport. But too often, stories of governance only break through when the narrative exposes failures. It's hard to get heard about what's working.

Philip Bump: ... Defending the media is not easy. It’s uncomfortable, in part because it’s vexing to think that objectivity needs a defense.

Historian Serhii Plokhy: Poisoned legacy: why the future of power can’t be nuclear ... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates’s TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors “accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics” must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack. There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations. This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Russia's scorched earth attack on Ukraine should end debate over "safe" nuclear power. Invading troops crashed on into Chernobyl, one of the best understood and marked off nuclear hazards on the planet. As a species, we are not capable of handling nuke waste safely in perpetuity, so it is grossly irresponsible to generate it.

Speaking of messes we've made, this one might be somewhat remediable. Sociologist Tressie McMillam Cottom: The time for debating student debt’s political messaging is over. Anything less than across-the-board forgiveness extends the life of the mess we made. Student loan debt is an albatross around the Democrats’ neck. Kicking the can down the road is throwing good political capital after bad.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa describe what they felt while reporting on the life of George Floyd: Before reporting this book, I considered systemic racism to be an unmoving, dark cloud that hung over us. As I watched life unfurl for these families, I understood that the residue of America’s original sin was something more terrifying. Racism is a pervasive, insidious force threatening to corrupt the spirit of every American if it is not acknowledged and confronted. I realized why so many of the families felt they had little choice but to fight racial injustice. You could not simply run away. George Floyd's murder taught both white and Black people what it can mean to be Black.

Karen Attiah: ... when it comes to white supremacy, White liberals have long held on to dangerously naive replacement theories of their own — that increasing populations of nonwhites will automatically dent anti-Blackness, for instance, and that younger generations are automatically less racist than their forebears. If President Biden’s reactions are anything to go by, the temptation is to believe that the salve for America’s racist spasms is a good ol’ dose of national unity. This liberal complacency puts us all at risk. The article describes the attractions for U.S. Black people of moving to Ghana.

Brennan Center Fellow Theodore R. Johnson: ... in 2016, I conducted a study to examine how the black vote might become less lopsided in presidential elections. ... The results were mostly unsurprising: For black Americans, as with the general population, the political party cues were so strong that they far outweighed every other consideration. There was, however, one rather unexpected insight. The political issue that most influenced black voters’ choice was abortion. Supporting a pro-choice presidential candidate was more important to black voters than the unemployment rate, obtaining new civil rights legislation, a candidate’s race, and every other presented factor except party. ... For black America, the revocation of a woman’s constitutionally protected right to choose to have an abortion raises questions about what other rights might be suddenly found revocable. Johnson's Black respondents didn't necessarily approve of abortion. But when the Man comes for rights ... who is next?

Speaking of rights, Stanford law professor Elizabeth A. Reese, Yunpoví (Willow Flower): The reemergence of tribal governments in the United States over the last fifty years has been nothing short of a renaissance of resilience. 

Organizer Scot Nakagawa: This morning I was the subject of an interview on KBOO, Portland’s listener-supported community radio station. ... During the interview, a caller made a comment about the left arming up, citing it as necessary in the face of an armed rightwing insurgency. ... If we break with strategic non-violence, we may find ourselves not too unlike the person who fights back against second-hand smoke by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke right back. They may, in fact, damage the health of those pesky smokers with second-hand smoke, but only while doing much more damage to themselves while the tobacco companies make out like bandits. Those folks in the Pacific Northwest have experience with right wing militias that many others can learn from.

Paul Krugman: Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate. ... And history tells us that this tactic often works.  

In The Atlantic, David A Graham: Come November, the wackadoodles shall inherit the Republican Party. It's satisfying to mock them, but vicious know-nothings with power are no laughing matter.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.: The Republican Party isn’t fit to lead, and most voters know it — that’s why Joe Biden won the presidency. But all those 2020 Biden voters shouldn’t be expected to turn out for two more years of Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) blocking most legislation in the Senate ... The Democrats must stop trying to duck the so-called culture wars and instead fight hard to win them. There is no middle ground between White male Christian hegemony and multiracial, multicultural social democracy — and the Democrats shouldn’t be shy about using their power to impose the latter, since it’s what a clear majority of Americans want. 

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson: Oddly for a secular age, our country might be waiting on a theologian equal to the moment. Previous generations of generally liberal politicians, like Barack Obama, looked to Reinhold Niebuhr. This is a more passionate moment that aches for compassion and empathy. Perhaps Nadia Bolz-Weber might suit us better?

Economist and provocateur Noah Smith: We were not born into this world to fight over scraps until we die. We were born into this world to remake it so that we don't have to fight over scraps.