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.

Don't ask me

Someone left this offering in a sheltered spot alongside the trail. There's more than a bit of magic in the Vineyard woods at this season. 

I'll be back here after the holiday.

Christian nationalism in churches

I don't usually write here about books which I found grossly unsatisfying. Books with which I disagree? Often. Problematical? Sure. But badly constructed, argued without historical context, and poorly thought out? Very seldom.

These last thoughts were my reactions to Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism by Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister, and Beau Underwood, a Disciples of Christ pastor, who run something called Words and Way.  

As anyone who reads here knows, the history and practices through which we express our encounters with whatever we take as God or Ultimate Concern is one of my themes there. Because we are human, these are all within, and manifestations of, our cultures and societies. Therefore, our religious practices and institutions reflect our cultures; it would never occur to me to assume that they sprung full-formed like the goddess Athena from the head of a Zeus nor from the tablets of the law brought from the mountain by Moses. We make what we can with what we've received and do our best to treat it as sacred.

Kaylor and Underwood write with good intent. They seem to believe they are exposing novelties. But so many others, only glancingly acknowledged here, have mined this territory, often more deeply: scanning my own wanderings in this literature on this blog, I found such names of Robert P. Jones, Katherine Stewart, Randall Balmer, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Sarah Posner, Daniel Schultz, David A. Hollinger, Jemar Tisby, Esau McCaulley, Eddie Glaude, Kevin M. Kruse ...

Okay, this book wasn't written for me. I simply had read too many of its sources. Here's some of the blurb for Baptizing America:

How can Mainline Protestants spot [Christian nationalist] practices in their own activities? ... Christian Nationalism ... exists in sanctuaries where an American flag has been displayed for decades, when we pledge allegiance to one nation “Under God,” or when the U.S. is called a Christian nation. Baptizing America critiques the concept of civil religion, arguing that such expressions are far more dangerous than we realize. Mainline Protestant congregations will likely recognize themselves in the overlooked expressions of Christian Nationalism that pop up in the activities of both church and state.

And little as I like this book, the reaction of my church book reflection group to it taught me a lesson. Everyone doesn't notice that the words "under God" in the national pledge of allegiance, flags in the sanctuary, and patriotic hymns are not intrinsically Christian. Some were taken aback to see the secular nationalism of church customs called out. This book helped them to see habitual practices a little differently. That helps all of us focus more on whatever the message of Jesus' life and death might mean. 

To me the Christian nationalist trappings of American Protestantism are simply the cultural detritus of the middle of the last century within mainline churches, a relic of when American empire was riding high. That time is long gone.

• • •

Donald Trump's first presidential inauguration in 2017 evoked a solid protest against Christian nationalism from the Rev. Gary Hall, the retired dean of what Episcopalians deem "the National Cathedral" which as been accustomed to figure in the festivities.

For more than a century, the cathedral has tried to stand in two worlds at once, attempting to be both a practicing Christian church and a gathering place for American civic expression. As the cathedral’s former dean, I believe that fidelity to the former role now requires rejecting the latter.

For much of its life, the cathedral experienced the tension inherent in playing two roles as creative but not potentially destructive.

But much has changed in American religious life over the past 110 years, and the cathedral has found it increasingly difficult to have it both ways.

After World War II, Christians began seriously to reflect on their relations with the prevailing culture. How could our religion square its validation of oppressive regimes (Protestants and Catholics in Nazi Germany, mainline Christians supporting segregation in the American South) with the principles of love and justice exemplified and articulated by Jesus.

Over the course of the past 75 years, it became impossible to see the church’s mission as compatible with its traditional role of endorsing the status quo. We began to see ourselves less as “Christendom” and more like the early church that stood up to Rome.

... I believe Trump’s election has proved that the cathedral’s attempt to continue this religious/civic balancing act is no longer tenable.

In his words and actions, Trump has shown himself to be outside the bounds of all mainstream norms of Christian faith and practice. His often-expressed xenophobia and misogyny, not to mention his mocking of the disabled and admission of abusive behavior, place him well outside the values of compassion and respect for human dignity that mark historic Christianity at its best. It is simply inappropriate to use a precious institution such as Washington National Cathedral to suggest that the church bestows its blessing on a leader so obviously beyond the pale of Christian thought.

The cathedral’s dilemma exemplifies this watershed moment in the Christian church’s role in American public life. The community that claims to follow Jesus must choose between its role as what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement” and its long-standing practice as the validator of the status quo. With Trump’s election we cannot, with any integrity, be both.

If the church is going to be faithful to Jesus, we must (as he did) stand as a force of resistance to unjust and oppressive civil authority. We cannot use the words, symbols and images of our faith to provide a religious gloss to an autocrat. ... I simply do not believe that the most visible symbol of compassionate faith in America should lend itself to endorsing or espousing their shrunken, fearful vision of our national life.

That was then. How much more so now. I doubt Trump will want to take his circus to that historic church this time, but who knows? A cursory search does not reveal plans.

Greetings from rural Massachusetts

Martha's Vineyard Island, to be precise. We're visiting the family retreat for the next several weeks of rest and reflection.

Ganesh overlooks the boule court as always. He does not seem to be growing moss.

For all the beauty of the setting, this is the country. We're waiting for AAA to turn up out here to change/fix the flat on the family house car which is how we get around. That's how it goes. Life in the country is slower.

Looking for a residue of good sense

When I was a young teen, I remember reading widely out of my parent's book cases. Whenever I'd run through whatever I'd gotten out for myself from the library, I'd poke around in their shelves. 

One volume I remember encountering was Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat. The early '60s of the last century was an optimistic time in this country. We worried about The Bomb (as we should have) but basically were still coasting on America's self-satisfaction over winning what we called World War II. Bloch's musings seemed obscure -- proof, if of anything, that France was a strange country.

John Ganz at Unpopular Front has returned to discuss Bloch in our Trumpian moment, prompted by France's current president: 

On Saturday, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that the historian Marc Bloch would be inducted into the Pathéon. Bloch, a veteran of both World Wars, was one of the founders of the Annales school of historiography, which brought a deep social and economic perspective to historical studies. A Jew of Alsatian origin, he joined the Resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, tortured, and ultimately executed. His book Strange Defeat, written after his demobilization in 1940 and published posthumuously in 1946, is perhaps the “postmortem” of all postmortems: a reflection on the collapse of a proud military tradition and a great democracy. For Bloch, the ruling élite of France failed: its generals, the press, the politicians, and its educators “were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war.” [From Bloch's little book.:]

It was not only in the field that intellectual causes lay at the root of our defeat. As a nation we had been content with in­complete knowledge and imperfectly thought-out ideas. Such an attitude is not a good preparation for military success.

Our system of government demands the participation of the masses. The destiny of the People is in their own hands, and I see no reason for believing that they are not perfectly capable of choos­ing rightly. But what effort had been made to supply them with that minimum of clear and definite information without which no rational conduct is possible? To that question the answer is ‘None’. In no way did our so-called democratic system so signally fail.

That particular dereliction of duty constituted the most heinous crime of our self-styled democrats. The matter would be less serious if what we had to deplore were merely the lies and half-truths inspired by party loyalties openly avowed. Wicked these may be, but, on the whole, they can be fairly easily discounted. Far graver is the fact that our national Press, claiming to provide an impartial news-service, was sailing under false colours. Many newspapers, even those which openly wore the livery of party beliefs, were secretly enslaved to unavowed and, often, squalid interests. Some of them were controlled by foreign influences.

I do not deny that the common sense of the ordinary reader did, to some extent, counterbalance this, but only at the cost of developing an attitude of scepticism to all propaganda, printed and broadcast alike.

It would be a great mistake to think that the elector always votes as ‘his’ [accustomed] paper tells him to. I have known more than one humble citizen who votes almost automatically against the views expressed by his chosen rag, and it may be that this refusal to be stampeded by printed insincerities is among the more consoling elements of our con­temporary national life. It does, at least, offer some hope for the future. Still, it must be admitted that such an attitude pro­vides a poor intellectual training for those who are called upon to understand what is at stake in a vast world struggle, to judge rightly of the coming storm, and to arm themselves adequately against its violence.

Quite deliberately—as one can see by reading Mein Kampf or the records of Rauschning’s conversations— Hitler kept the truth from his servile masses. Instead of intel­lectual persuasion he gave them emotional suggestion.

For us there is but one set of alternatives. Either, like the Germans, we must turn our people into a keyboard on which a few leaders can play at will (but who are those leaders? The playing of those at present on the stage is curiously lacking in resonance); or we can so train them that they may be able to collaborate to the full with the representatives in whose hands they have placed the reins of government.

At the present stage of civilization this dilemma admits of no middle term. . . . The masses no longer obey. They follow either because they have been hypnotized or because they know.

The paragraph breaks in this quotation are mine. I think they made it easier to read and I trust they do not distort the original.

I do think there is truth in Bloch's concern: is there a residue of good sense in the people of this land which, alongside leadership yet to emerge, can turn back the onrushing tide of fascist shit? I suspect yes, but the next few years will be ugly. In controversy, we need to learn to be kind with those, somehow on our own side, with whom we have disagreements. That's hard, because we are frightened. But courage is required.

Empire over

 Once upon a time, before we reverted to lusting after monarchism, we were part of this. No kings!

Q. What's the most common holiday in the world? A. Independence from the British Empire day. There is one somewhere in the world on average every 6 days.

[image or embed]

— Bothy Cat (@bothycat53.bsky.social) November 23, 2024 at 5:30 AM

No offense to the Brits. Today they struggle with their own travails. Imperial decline is the pits, but the destiny of empires.

Friday cat blogging

 

Janeway and Mio keep watch on their perches. Fortunately, he doesn't attempt to sit on the window hammock. I am sure it would not support his bulk.

Bonus Cuban cat via Peripatetic House Partner; she's been getting around again:

Nice cat, nice tile floor.

American Jewish life: not acquiesence, nor complicity, nor renunciation

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer is a comprehensive, brave, and thoughtful attempt to describe the history and evolution of his communal home -- and to raise uncomfortable questions.

I was a little hesitant to write about this book -- this is not my tribe after all. I belong to a different and frequently hostile Abrahamic lineage. But I often write ethnographically about my own kind, for example about white supremacy in American Protestantism or Christian nationalism. So I was interested in Leifer's take on his own problematic community. 

His story is full of pointed questions and not a few Jeremiads, well-aimed denunciations of aspects of American Jewish evolution. I will quote here at length from what I think is the fulcrum of his story:

... We are on the cusp of a new -- and in Jewish history, unprecedented -- demographic reality.

By many accounts, Israel has already surpassed the United States as home to the largest single population of Jews in the world. ... By the year 2050, Israel is projected to be home to the majority of the world's Jews. According to a 2015 Pew survey, by mid-century Israel's population "is expected to be significantly larger than the U.S. Jewish population." ...

In raw numerical terms, the eclipse of American Jewry by its Israeli counterpart marked the end of the American Jewish century. From 1945 until the early 2000s, the long postwar period during which the American Jewish identity as we know it took shape, the United States claimed the majority of the world's Jews. No longer...

The Holocaust destroyed European Jewry, and with it the world European Jews had made. In the aftermath, the United States emerged as the demographic center of global Jewish life, while the new state of Israel claimed to be the Jewish people's spiritual core and its national and physical future. ...

For ordinary American Jews, however, Israel mainly made being Jewish easier by allowing them to jettison the pesky rituals and obligations or religious observance for political nationalism. With assimilation imagined by American Jewish leaders as the only alternative, Zionism's replacement of religion seemed a reasonable means of sustaining Jewish identity in a secular age, and the dual-centered model thus appeared as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most Israeli leaders, however, imagined this situation as merely an interim one. As they saw it, the day Israel surpassed America as the global center of Jewish life -- when the diaspora would finally be negated -- was only a matter of time.

The emergence of Israel as the homeland of the majority of the world's Jews will mark more than a simple demographic shift -- it will constitute a revolution in the most basic conditions of Jewish existence. Diaspora defined Jewish life from 70 CE onward. Centuries of exile constituted Judaism and gave rise to the rabbinic tradition ... By 2050, for the first time in two millennia, most Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state. It is not just the American Jewish century that will have ended, but an entire era of Jewish history.

American Jews today live in the slipstream of this epochal transformation. The turbulence and incoherence of Jewish life in 2024 owes much to the interregnum in which we find ourselves, the time-space between two paradigms of Jewish existence, increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of Jewish collective fate.

It is a reality to which few have adequately managed to respond. Neither the American Jewish establishment nor the anti-Zionist left offers sufficient avenues for navigating the diasporic double bind. While the former carries on as if nothing has changed, ignorant or inured to the suffering in Israel/Palestine, some on the left hope to escape their condition by fantasizing of Israel's destruction. But neither complicity nor renunciation will work. ...

Leifer sees four main paths forward for American Jewish identity now that the community's century of primacy within the world Jewish community is over: the "Dying Establishment" (think AIPAC, the Israel Lobby), "Prophetic Protest" (think Jewish Voice for Peace), "Neo-Reform" liberal religiosity, and Separatist Orthodoxy. None fully attract him.

The book was completed just days before the October 7 2023 Hamas massacre and Israel's unconstrained devastation of Palestinian Gaza, both the people and the territory. He cannot see his way forward: 

As a Jew and a progressive, I often feel closed in on from both sides, pinched between great shame and great fear. I am infuriated by the crimes of the state that acts in my name, and more worried than I have ever been by the rising acceptability of conspiratorial thinking and demonization of Jews. It often feels like an impossible place.

But it is the place we must hold. ... To change our people, we must be with them. That is our responsibility.

That sentiment should be familiar to any American (which is what Leifer is after all, in addition to being a Jew) who has lived the last 70 years of an ascendent and declining American empire, mucking about the world to the detriment of too many. That too is an impossible place to be. But here we all are.

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.