Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I don’t know if you’ve heard about Elon Musk’s raging antisemitism but it’s causing Xitter to lose massive numbers of advertisers and even more people are leaving the platform because of it. Here’s the basic outline of what happened:

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Those were the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. In previous postings, Bowers explained the grievances that led him to commit mass murder. He shared meme after meme asserting that Jews were conspiring to flood the country with brown people in order to oppose and displace the white race. “Open you Eyes!” declared one. “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!”

On Wednesday night, the world’s wealthiest man affirmed this same conspiracy theory on X, formerly Twitter, the social-media site he owns. Like so many of Elon Musk’s acts of self-immolation, it happened in the space of a tweet. The incident began with a post from a conservative Jewish user who complained about anti-Semitic content on social media during the current Gaza conflict. “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right,’” he wrote. “You got something you want to say? Why dont you say it to our faces.” A small-time white-nationalist account soon responded by attributing this anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews:

Jewish commun[i]ties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

You want truth said to your face, there it is.

This exchange would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide with six words: “You have said the actual truth.”

That’s about as antisemitic as it gets and in a week in which the front runner for the GOP nomination for president calls his enemies vermin, that’s saying something. Elon Musk has 160 million followers on twitter.

But then it got weirder. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-defamation League posted this:

Evidently, objecting to “decolonization” is a heroic act but disseminating the grossest of conspiracy theories about the Jews is no big deal? What? Has everyone lost their minds?

Anyway, again, this is social media becoming an even worse sewer which was already awful. But the tensions that we’re all feeling over the crisis in Israel and Gaza are very real. That’s why I found this Ezra Klein interview with Rabbi Sharon Brous so edifying. She is a very wise woman.

Ezra’s introduction is excellent as well:

Everything I’m about to talk about is hard to talk about. It is hard to talk about because it’s personal to me. It’s hard to talk about because it’s happening in the midst of an active hellacious war. And it’s hard to talk about because even when there is not a war, this is just hard to talk about.

Maybe I’ll start here. I think something we’re seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. You have older Americans, say, Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.

They have a lived sense of Israel’s impossibility and its vulnerability and the dangers of the neighborhood in which it is in. Their views of Israel formed around the Israel of the Six-Day War in 1967, when its neighbors massed to try and strangle Israel when it was young, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when they surprise attacked Israel 50 years ago.

Then there is the next generation, my generation, I think. And I think of us as this straddle generation. We only ever knew a strong Israel, an Israel that was undoubtedly the strongest country in the region, a nuclear Israel, an Israel backed by America’s unwavering military and political support. That wasn’t always true, at least not to the extent now. In his great book, “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron David Miller points out that before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel ranked 24th in foreign aid from the US, 24th. Within a few years of that war, it ranked first, as it typically has since.

We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians, and I don’t want to be euphemistic about this, an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and their security and their freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized. We knew an Israel where the leaders were trying imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become in the eyes of the world what Israel was in its own eyes, a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one.

And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi described on the show recently, that peace movement collapsed. The why of this is no mystery. The Second Intifada, the endless suicide bombings were a trauma Israel still has not recovered from. And they posed a horrible question, to which the left, both in Israel and in America, had no real answer then or now. If your story of all this is simplistic, if it is just that Israel wanted this, it is wrong.

But what happened then is Israel moved right and further right and further right. Extremists once on the margin of Israeli politics and society became cabinet ministers and coalition members. The settlers in the West Bank ran wild, functionally annexing more and more territory, sometimes violently, territory that was meant to be returned to Palestinians, and doing so with the backing of the Israeli state, doing so in a way that made a two-state solution look less and less possible.

Israel withdrew from Gaza, and when Hamas took control, they blockaded Gaza, leaving Gazans to misery, to poverty. Israel stopped trying to become something other than an occupier nation. It became deeply illiberal. It settled into a strategy of security through subjugation. And many in its government openly desired expansion through expulsion. And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu’s Israel, Ben-Gvir’s Israel.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the panic in the Jewish community, about what gets short-handed as antisemitism on campus. And there is antisemitism on campus and on the left and on the right — always has been. But to read only the most anti-Semitic signs in a rally, to hear only the anti-Semitic chants, can also obscure what else is happening there. If it’s just antisemitism, then at least it is simple. They just hate the Jews. They hate us. They always have. They always will.

But a lot of what is happening at these rallies is not just antisemitism. A lot of it is a generation that has only known Israel as a strong nation oppressing a weak people. They never knew a weak Israel. They never knew an Israel whose leaders sought peace, showed up to negotiate deals, who wanted something better.

And I am not unsympathetic to the Israeli narrative here. I believe large parts of it. We have an episode coming soon on the many failures of the peace process. And the Israelis who say they did not have a partner, they are right. But that does not justify what Israel became, and there are consequences to what it has become.

There is this Pew survey in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69 percent of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel, but among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56 percent had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever.

And there are many of us who warned of this exact thing happening, who said, if you lose moral legitimacy, you will not have the world’s good will when you need it most, who said it is a problem for the Jewish state to not be seen, to not be a moral state. That it is a problem geopolitically, and it is a problem spiritually because for Jewish-Americans — and I am one — Israel isn’t simply a question of politics, it is the Jewish state. So what does what Israel is say about Judaism? What does Judaism say about it?

This has been an almost exquisitely uncomfortable space. To believe Israel had become something indefensible on 10/6. To know that it needed defenders on 10/7, to know that antisemitism is real and every century seems to have its era of butchering the Jews. To believe deeply that Jewishness is about how we treat the stranger, is defined by the lessons of exile, and to see the Jewish state inflicting exile on so many. To value all lives and see so many of our one-time allies devaluing our own.

Throughout these last few months, I’ve been extremely moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s IKAR synagogue. She has a book coming out called “The Amen Effect,” which you can and you should pre-order. I’ve read some of it.

But I got to know her through these sermons, which did something very few people have been able to do, at least for me, which is to find a prophetic voice rooted in the Jewish tradition that can hold this complexity, these questions of Israel, both in critique and defense, of Jewishness, of liberalism, of antisemitism, of identity. And so I asked her to come on the show to try to talk through topics. And to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable talking about it all. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

The interview is here. She is a truly remarkable person and I highly recommend you listen to the whole thing at the following:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts
• Pocket Casts
• Amazon Music
• Stitcher
• RSS feed

Or, you can read the transcript here (free gift link)

Kevin Drum wrote a post that reminded me that I need to avoid social media right now like the plague — and should probably ignore stories about social media too. His very wise post about a story I posted yesterday is much more reasoned than mine was.

Here’s the latest trend story from the New York Times. It’s about—God help us—”TikTok economics”:

This is the most tiresome thing ever. When are newspapers going to learn the obvious: social media doesn’t represent anything in the real world? I mean, how likely are you to post a TikTok about how your life is fine and everything is pretty good?

Not very. That’s just the nature of H. sapiens, who love to performatively gripe and complain a lot more than we like to performatively say that things are OK. The way to account for this bias is to actually ask people how they feel. Then you’ll get equal responses from everyone. Let’s try it:

Compared to 2019, young people have jobs at the same rate; they’re satisfied with their jobs at the same rate; they’re earning a little bit more; they rate their financial situation about the same; and they’re probably about as happy now that they’re recovering from their pandemic blues.

As Kevin says, it appears that nothing much has actually changed despite the propensity of people on Tik Tok and Twitter to whine constantly about everything.

I have to remind myself of that. Social media, whether twitter, Facebook, youtube, threads, Blue Sky whatever, is not reality. There is no reason to put much stock in anything you see on there that isn’t actual documentary evidence. I still appreciate the video threads that some people are generous enough to put together but beyond that it’s really not that useful anymore.

Just thought you should know. And plan accordingly.

The work is never finished

I am reminded.

Full quotation:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Michael Beschloss will be along presently.

The anniversary brings to mind something related to Gettysburg that I wrote for Dirty Hippies in 2011, “The Future They Feared”:

We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon  about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.

As I am standing in line to pay my tab, a African-American man in his forties slides into an occupied booth next to the register and sits opposite an older white man. They share a brief exchange about how his shift went. Two smiling, white waitresses come over to take his order and start a friendly argument over how he likes his toast. He is a regular.

“Toast, not grits?” remarks the older white man.

“It’s Filmore,” smiles one of the waitresses to the cook. “Burn it. He likes it burnt.”

“Dark, not burnt,” Filmore insists.

This is Virginia — the capitol of the Old South. Black man. Restaurant. Sharing a table with a white man. White women competing over who will wait on him.

It occurs to me that the prospect of the very everydayness of such a scene horrified many Virginians and others across America 50 years ago.

Some people need an “other” to fear or they don’t know who they they are themselves. It’s not just generational. It is a personality type. Many of the same types today fear poor people, gays, Muslims and Mexicans.

We are on our way to see the Gettysburg battlefield where two American armies slaughtered each other, where the Army of Northern Virginia lost its war over the right to deny rights to an entire class of “others,” and to hang onto a people’s irrational fear of the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.

Today add to the list of irrational fears transgender people, grooming, drag shows, and black history. In 50 years, should we survive the next few, no one will bat an eye.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Working on it. Hope you are. The work is never finished.

Late Update: Heather Cox Richardson has more on the events of the day.

“Parkinson’s disease sucks”

It’s heartening to see people who still believe in public service as a vocation. A neighbor spent his career in international development. My state representative served first in the Peace Corps. I recently met a couple who retired here after careers as Foreign Service officers.

Donald Trump calls Washington, D.C. a swamp and people eat it up in part because guys like George Santos and Bob Menendez give public service a bad name. (Even though there’s some “both sides” to that, political corruption and faithlessness does seem to have a right-wing bias.)

Yet some people still believe. They’re not the ones who become notorious in the press.

CBS this morning profiles Virginia congresswoman Jennifer Wexton (D). Wexton comes from a family of public servants. She’s afflicted with a rare disease, yet forgoes some speech and physical therapy to keep serving her consituents:

Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy, as Wexton said, has no cure. At this time, there is no treatment that will slow its progression, and it tends not to respond to medication, according to the National Institutes of Health. It often worsens rapidly, and most patients “develop severe disability within three to five years of symptom onset.” It affects movement — loss of balance is a common symptom — and causes slurred speech. Vision problems often develop as the disease progresses, too. 

Wexton described exhaustion, missed therapy appointments and lost sleep as the effects of the recent relentless House schedule. The narrowest of margins between the parties meant she needed to be present on Capitol Hill for the dozens of votes and debates.   

Her fatigue was so severe that she suspects it contributed to a painful fall at her home in Virginia four weeks ago. It was the fall that injured her neck and continues to cause her pain.

“It’s just so hard for me now,” Wexton told CBS News. Her voice and her ability to speak have been impaired by her medical condition, and her fatigue has grown.   

“Fatigue absolutely does have an impact,” she said during an extended interview. “The most important thing you can do is get sleep.”

She teared up several times as she echoed the message she sent to constituents in a written statement earlier this year: “I’m heartbroken to have to give up something I have loved after so many years of serving my community.”

“I’ve been worse since September. It’s been tiring. It’s been really hard being here for the ten weeks,” she said. “It’s awful.”

Wexton will leave the office she’s held since 2019 after sge defeated incumbent Republican Barbara Comstock.

“There is no ‘getting better’ with PSP,” Wexton told the press in September. She was dignosed in April. “People with progressive supranuclear palsy typically die six to nine years after their diagnosis,” reports the Cleveland Clinic. Plus, “People with PSP also have a higher risk of falls, which can result in bone fractures and head traumas. Falls that cause serious injuries are a common cause of death among people with PSP.”

We wish her well.

This man is demented — and the audience cheers

Back when he was running against Clinton he used to say she belonged in jail and she was crook and that she didn’t “have the strength and stamina” to be president. It wasn’tsubtle by any means. But this … this is beyond grotesque. And his audience loves it.

Meanwhile, speaking of stupid:

Fine. Everything is fine.

Don’t let them forget Trump or shirk who they’ve become

Following up on the post below, here’s a great piece by Brian Beutler from his excellent newsletter Off Message. He recaps the infuriatingly terrible media response to Trump’s “vermin” comments, proving just how inured they’ve become to his escalating extremism. He notes that the outcry from regular people finally jolted them out of their reflexive “that old Trumps says the darndest things” reaction. But what do we do?

But the question now—as days turn into weeks, and fresh stories vie for our attention—is whether this will be a passing kerfuffle, or one Republicans, as long as they support Trump, can never live down. 

Reporters have no shortage of Trump outrage porn to cover, and if Democrats can’t differentiate the vermin libel as something that transcends his more typical offenses, it will fade like most of the others. That’s the main source of my small misgivings over the couch-fainting, pearl-clutching way liberals have responded to it. “Ack, Hitler said that!” True enough, he did. But every reference to Hitler comes fraught not just with the repugnance of his words and deeds, but with danger and fear—of invasion, and war, and death camps. It grants Trump the air of menace he wants to cultivate. He and everyone in his orbit derive juvenile pleasure when good people flinch at their provocations. They are much less happy when they get caught taking things too far. That’s when the artifice falls away, and they clam up like bullies who realize they’ve antagonized someone who can kick their asses. That’s when they start turning on each other. 

So what could Democrats say or do to transform the vermin libel into a red line? Why is it that, seven years later, the word “deplorables” remains a galvanizing term for Republicans and an embarrassment for Democrats? Was it that Republicans recoiled in fear that Hillary Clinton might tie up the deplorables and send them down a river in a basket? Or was it that they used it to undermine her claim to want to be president for all Americans—and then kept saying that?

Clinton fairly but unwisely described Trump’s most bigoted supporters as “deplorables” on a Friday evening. That Monday, Trump responded, “She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her rule,” and insisted, in deep projection, that anyone with “contempt in your heart for the American voter” should not run for president. 

I think Democrats can exploit the vermin libel in much the same way. So that there’s no forgetting, even after Trump’s gone. But they have to want to.  

[…]

“Too many voters have forgotten that Trump is a deranged clown who isn’t up to the job,” wrote Pod Save America’s  Dan Pfeiffer. 

True, but: Why did that happen? Was it inevitable? If it wasn’t inevitable, shouldn’t Democrats have labored harder to keep memories fresh, since, unattended, they are short? And now that the forgetting is underway, how much damage has been done? Is it reversible? Can a professional campaign and a few well-produced ads jog memories that have faded over three years?

I’m actually staking a lot of hope on the answer to that last question being “yes.” The trauma and scars of the Trump presidency are real, which means mass forgetting should be slower, harder. When he’s tormenting us nonstop again, people will remember. Or at least I hope they will.

[…]

“Trump is more mentally fit for the presidency than Biden” is a false contagion of an idea, and it can only spread through a combination of lost knowledge (about Trump) and new impressions (about Biden).

Biden’s enemies have gone to great lengths to foster those impressions, and spread them. Democrats have done much less work to preserve our collective memory of the Trump years.

If the net effect of those decisions is to turn the question of fitness for the presidency on its head, why couldn’t it also upend our perception of other things? Those same Trump loyalists have gone to similarly great lengths to spread the idea that the Biden economy is tattered and miserable; most Democrats have shied away from directly refuting that assertion for fear of seeming insensitive to a struggling minority. Coincidentally, a strong public consensus has emerged in favor of the idea that the economy is bad when (broadly speaking, for most people) it is very strong. 

Coincidentally, or perhaps not. 

The consensus could just as easily reflect the effectiveness of propaganda—mostly on the right, but some on the left—over material reality, and the Democrats’ acquiescence to it.  

So what is to be done? If the tools required to make the vermin libel a lasting liability for Republicans include repetition, and the tools required to remind people that Trump is a crook and a lunatic include repetition, what’s the best way to introduce people to the idea that the economy is much stronger than public opinion suggests?

If Democrats interpret public opinion to mean they should be delicate about their economic messaging, that they should reinforce the primacy of people’s struggles, they will in essence feed the false perception, and compound the problem. Why do that work for the people who want to beat you?

But if the right move is to contest public opinion in the realm of ideas, it means politics is more about information warfare and less about governing excellence than we might like. I believe this because I’ve spent half of a life-long journalism career watching elections turn on bullshit. But I think even skeptics recognize it when it takes a toll, as it often does, in other countries. 

The notion that political popularity is a variable that’s highly dependent on the trajectory of material conditions is very reductive. Obviously it’s better to succeed than to fail, and it’s easier to husband public approval in prosperity than in recession. But what people expect of their political leaders is constructed socially, not an inherent property of the human mind. Russian public opinion does not appear to be tightly linked to material conditions. Public opinion in Mexico doesn’t seem to turn on conditions there either, and it makes sense as a theoretical matter that people in societies with incompetent governments will lose faith in the idea that politics is about improving material conditions, and start making their assessments of leaders based on other things. 

In the Republican nation of America, where government is and should be incompetent, perceptions of the economy have become a pure proxy for partisanship, good when the president is on team red; bad when on team blue.

We’re evolving into the propaganda society we imagined we were too advanced to become.

This may be an insoluble problem (though if any progressive billionaires want me to take a stab at solving it, my Venmo is easy to find). But even if it can be solved, Democrats will for now have to shape opinion through the system as it exists. They could attempt this by scampering to address every last economic indicator that isn’t pointed the right direction, and maybe they should. I’d never fault an officeholder for trying to make people’s lives better. But they’ll have more success moving the arrows of public opinion by transmitting opinion than they will by transmitting money. 

 

Here’s the advice:

I’d suggest: Say what you mean bluntly on the topics you want people to care about. Don’t outsmart yourself. Don’t let your paranoid suspicions about how your opponents will react or your fears about playing into their traps overcomplicate the task of conveying simple ideas.

If you think the vermin libel disqualifies Trump, say so. It’s a much simpler way to introduce the idea than comparing Trump to Hitler and hoping the masses a) agree with the comparison and b) decide it is disqualifying on their own. The economic message should be similarly blunt. “We’ve built the best American economy in 70 years, after Trump destroyed the last one.”

More than any particular poll or paper liability, I worry about the way the party strains to explain Donald Trump’s enduring strength as a candidate against Joe Biden. The kids call it cope, but whatever it tells us about the state of the Democratic psyche, it also suggests something much worse—that strategic weaknesses keep going unaddressed.   

For the weeks and months following Donald Trump’s campaign announcement, the whipping boy was inflation. When the government tamed inflation, it became an under-theorized “lag” in public sentiment about the economy. When polls suggest Biden’s age explains his poor polling, we’re told the point is moot because Donald Trump is also old. When Biden trailed Trump in the late summer, we were reminded that Barack Obama also trailed in head-to-head polling at the same point in 2011. Now that it’s November, we’re due for a new hypothesis.

Those who insist good policy is destiny will try to find it in economic data. For most of my career, they embraced the view that job and GDP growth were skeleton keys to political success. They continued making that argument under Biden until it ceased to be true, at which point they insisted it was inflation, then specifically gas prices, then a hangover effect from inflation, then housing prices. You can call it a curve fitting exercise, I think of it as Dems trying to tug carpeting into every corner of a room that’s too big. The missing piece is storytelling.

I can’t argue with any of this. Relentless repetition is key. Trump knows that and he’s right. It works/. Even when you think you’ll scream if you have to say it again, do it anyway. There is a cacophony of news and information in our culture and it’s the only way to break through. And he’s right: Keep It Simple Stupid.

I don’t know if Dems will get the message. They are still caught in the argument between “popularism” kitchen table issues and bold confrontational politics, using the wedge issues like abortion and democracy. I think it’s more than fine to tout accomplishments but in a country where people think the economy is in a great depression despite all evidence to the contrary, the latter is the better choice.

Not that some of us didn’t see it coming…

Over the past few years people have argued over whether or not Trump and his movement were fascist. (I came down on the side of yes, quite some time ago..) But others made the point that the word has a specific meaning and Trump didn’t necessarily fit it perfectly. Tom Nichols, Never Trump conservative, was one of those people.

He warned that the indiscriminate use of the word word could blind us to the time when it might actually become accurate. He says that time has come:

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream

It’s not just the vermin thing. It’s the threat to “drive out” the people he calls communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs, all of which he has used to describe the people who oppose him. That’s us, folks.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

[…]

It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.

More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Postthat “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

What?

Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Nichols thinks that people who were premature anti-fascist (where have we heard that before?) in response to Trump have caused a problem because now nobody will believe it since he’s now actually a fascist. I don’t think I agree with that. He was always a fascist, he’s just too ignorant to know what he is. Before he didn’t have enough people around him to bring a full program into fruition and the Republican Party was too confused to help him. (They still are to some degree, fortunately.)

He is naturally gifted at propaganda since he’s a pathological liar and he’s demonstrated amazing power with his Big Lie. Others have noticed and see the potential of using him for fascistic purposes. It’s here whether we call it by its name or not.

If she can do it there, she can do it anywhere

Greg Sargent on the latest accomplishments of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer:

Few Democrats would deny that the party must win back working people. Yet one of the party’s long-term conundrums is whether they can pursue ambitious efforts to combat climate change without threatening those very workers’ wages or jobs.

In coming days, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of bills that would transition the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The bills — which also include robust provisions for workers — are among the most ambitious efforts undertaken by any state to move toward a carbon-free future in a manner that is actively good for working people. Significantly, Democrats are testing this approach in a swing state in the heart of the industrial Midwest.

[…]

Climate action tends to expose cracks in the Democratic coalition precisely because it aggravates existing tensions between the goals and interests of environmentalists and workers. But in a surprise, after long negotiations between the governor, labor advocates and Democrats in the state legislature, the end product pleased most climate activists and labor officials.

“Michigan is leading the way in creating high-road labor standards that protect good-paying jobs while providing a pathway to a clean energy future,” Ryan Sebolt, director of government affairs for the state’s AFL-CIO, told me. As energy work evolves, Sebolt said, the bills will ensure that these remain quality jobs “long into the future.”

That’s strikingly positive talk given that organized labor has long been skeptical that such a balance can be achieved. And it comes with good news on another front: United Auto Workers members are close to ratifying their new contracts with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. These contracts will cover a large number of workers at electric-vehicle battery plants, another sign that the transition could translate into quality green-energy manufacturing jobs in the future.

All of this is very heartening stuff. If working people come to see that they have a stake in the green transition, it could help build durable political support for it over time.

“This is a multi-decade-long transition to remake the energy system,” said Jesse Jenkins, a climate expert at Princeton University. “The only way we’re going to accomplish that is if we sustain a political coalition to see that process through.”

Opponents of the green transition understand the fault lines in that coalition perfectly well. When former president Donald Trump traveled to Detroit to speak about the UAW strike, he railed that the transition to electric vehicles will ultimately destroy autoworkers’ livelihoods. Michigan, one of the three “blue wall” states that Trump won in 2016, is trending Democratic but will be heavily contested in 2024 with Trump making exactly that sort of appeal to the state’s industrial workers.

At the same time, Whitmer and Democrats are using the majorities they won in 2022 to pass a range of socially liberal measures — from new LGBTQ+ protections to repeal of an antiabortion statute — that are often said to be driving working-class voters from the party. But they are doing this while also appealing to workers’ material interests: Earlier this year, they repealed Michigan’s anti-union “right to work” bill, and now, they’re passing a climate bill that working people can learn to love.

If Michigan Democrats can win back working people by passing solid pro-labor legislation without abandoning the party’s deepest priorities on cultural issues — and defeat Trump in the industrial heartland — that would be a big step forward. But if they can also pull this off on climate, it could provide a model for more efforts to sell the green transition as a boon to workers in difficult political territory going forward.

And the stakes riding on getting that one right are impossible to overstate.