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Two Threads

And some quick weekend reading

Sunrise seen over the Atlantic Ocean through cirrus clouds on the Jersey Shore at Spring Lake, New Jersey, U.S. Photo by Nick Harris, (CC BY 2.5)

As we lick our wounds and brace for what’s coming, two threads are worth your time.

New Jersey Senator-elect Andy Kim (D) read transcripts of listening sessions. Voters, he says, have a deep disgust with politics. I’d argue that that disgust has deliberately been cultivated. Whatever.

“There were other issues that they raised but the main point I wanted to convey is that the hinge was on what it means to be ‘different.’ Not about being just different from Trump, but different from the same old same old entrenched politics that people are wholly angry at.”

Norm Ornstein tweets, “Plenty more understood who Trump is, and what he represents, but still voted for him, in a much broader willingness to blow up the status quo &roll the dice. I have little doubt that most of them will deeply regret this. They will have blown up their own well-being along the way.”

Ornstein agrees there is a “broader rejection of ruling elites.” It’s not that it’s not deserved, I’d add, but that too has deliberately been cultivated to serve the purposes of ruling elites. They don’twant to govern. They want to rule.

Jason Statler takes up that theme and offers observations:

I had three epiphanies that may offer some keys to understanding of how we fight back.

  1. The bias against women is built into American culture, and we can only ever hope to overcome it once we free women from being our social safety net.
    My mind has been irreparably “pilled,” for lack of a more current word, by the work of Jessica Calaraco. Her book HOLDING IT TOGETHER explains how you cannot separate misogyny from America’s broken approach to caring for those in need. And if you want to understand how Trump won, listening to Jessica will clarify a lot.
  2. The media prefers fascism.
    Marcy Wheeler sensed early in this race that the media was failing or succeeding, depending on your POV, by refusing to clarify what Trump and his candidacy meant. Blame consolidation, the billionaires, and the collapse of local media. It’s all the same thing. We can only do our best to replace journalism in the short term. That’s why we made Ball of Thread. Not because we thought it could replace a broken media but just because we had to do something. I believe Marcy has offered a history of 2016-2020 that DOES NOT EXIST anywhere else, and it provides the most straightforward explanation of what’s coming next as Trump obsessively seeks revenge. I promise you that’s what’s next.
  3. Propaganda works. Strategic racism works. And we’ve tried everything we can to defeat it, except directly confronting it.
    Ian Haney López should be the most famous academic in America. His work explains the rise of the right and the appeal of fascism better than anyone. And my conversation with him in October clarified how as good as the Harris/Walz campaign was—and it was so good in so many ways—they were not confronting Trump’s most effective weapon. And I point that out not because I want to look back or re-lose this election forever but because he has dire warnings about how the rise of AI will only make the situation worse.

Best of luck to us all.

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