Must Read
- Alex Pareene, What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
Joe Biden supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. I know this because I follow political news for a living, but also because he said so, on television, in one of his two nationally televised debates with President Donald Trump. In fact, the two men argued about it, making it clear that one person on that stage wished to raise the minimum wage and the other didn’t.
In Florida, on Tuesday, 60 percent of voters overwhelmingly voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. And on the same day, in Florida, Joe Biden won around 48 percent of the vote and lost decisively to Donald Trump.
It was a long and often brutal slog to get Democrats on board with a $15 minimum wage… but tireless organizing finally convinced Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, to support the proposal. It was not a centerpiece of his platform, but it was something he talked about and campaigned on. Joe Biden was the candidate of a $15 minimum wage. And it simply didn’t matter… When a ballot measure that is ostensibly a central part of a candidate’s economic agenda runs 12 points ahead of the candidate, something is screwy in the electoral process.
- Clare Malone, How Trump Changed America
Seeking to understand rather than be understood requires a suppression of ego that takes practice. Lots of us are out of practice. And this election has given us more information that we still need to process and understand.
Once we get rolling, it’s relatively simple to reveal the ugly truths of the world — and to develop anger around them. It can be painful to realize your brother is a chauvinist, your cousin is bigoted toward religious people, or your mother is a racist. And that pain can drive us into the harbors of the like-minded.
It’s harder to grapple with how to convince people to change the way they think about things, or to just go on letting them think what they think, not allowing their humanity to be defined by their worst beliefs. That’s a radical act of acceptance, and some might say a radical act of love. It’s not an easy thing. It might actually be the hardest thing.
So what is America after Trump? A nation figuring out how — and whether — to engage and whom to love: the stranger or the self? I know the cynic’s prediction of which we’ll choose, but pure cynicism is boring. I’m rooting for a change but planning for a stasis.”
- Ezra Klein interview with Stacey Abrams, Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy:
Klein: I had George Will on this show a while back because he wrote a book called The Conservative Sensibility. In it, he places James Madison’s “catechism of popular government” at the core of the conservative project. And he writes, “What is the worst result of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority.”
This is the sort of argument a lot of Republican thinkers make: that democracy is a trampling of the rights of minorities by the majority. In response to a piece I wrote on democracy, Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, responded, “So you want majorities to violate the rights of minorities (and individuals)? Because that’s what pure democracy is.”
What’s your response to the idea that the anti-democratic impulse is motivated by the protection of minority rights?
Abrams: There’s a dual reaction. It’s so unabashedly … I’d use the word facile because this is an attempt to twist something that is not just anti-democratic, but anti-civil rights, and to form it into something that seems noble, which it is not.
But the second reaction is it’s a cry of loss. It’s this recognition that their ideological underpinnings no longer have salience — that they can no longer lean on this majority they created because that majority is now quickly becoming a minority. And embedded in this argument is a fear that what they have visited on others through the trampling of civil rights, through the trampling of human rights, through the exclusion of so many communities will now be visited upon the Republican Party and upon conservative thinkers.
But before getting to that, I think there is this very basic misapplication because what democracy has garnered for the last 243 years, when it has been appropriately applied, has been the expansion of rights for minorities. The expansion of inclusion. Their argument is that inclusion has become too effective. And in order to preserve their ideological constructs, that inclusion must be thwarted.
They are trying to use James Madison and his arguments to undermine the entire experiment because the outcome of the experiment no longer caters to their ideological belief systems.
Worth Reading
Trump is a crude and inept wannabe autocrat. There are smarter, more competent, more outwardly-respectable wannabes out there. The first two pieces on my ‘worth reading’ list this week address ideas aspiring autocrats might rally around and the people who are providing the language and intellectual underpinnings for those ideas. Both the ideas and their proponents are low profile now but who knows what they might become. A decade ago, suggesting Trump would become president would have sounded crazy. We need to watch our backs for threats like these.
- Timothy Troutner, The New Integralists:
The most disturbing aspect of the story Integralism tells involves the fate of those who are essentially written out of its narrative: non-Catholics, women, and all those who don’t fit the patriarchal family model. Crean and Fimister openly state that Jews, atheists, and all non-Catholics will be denied citizenship and voting rights. They will be forbidden to proselytize, while polytheistic religions will be banned (along with, the manual insinuates, Islam). Protestant ministers will not be tolerated, and heretics can be put to death. Women, unless they are heads of households, will not be allowed to vote and may work outside the home only with the permission of their husbands, by whom they are governed and to whom they must offer sex whenever requested. Sexual minorities fare no better. Cohabiting couples and those born out of wedlock can be disenfranchised, and a footnote implies (with a reference to an obscure Latin text) that the execution of some LGBTQ people may promote the salvation of souls. It should not be totally surprising, then, that the manual also insists that permanent and even hereditary slavery can be “a potentially valid legal relationship” in certain circumstances.
- James Chappel, Nudging Towards Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism:
The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch. This kind of true opposition to liberalism has a long history in our country, most prominently among apostles of legal segregation. And in our own strange times, it is mounting a comeback… One of the most serious and dangerous critics of liberalism today is a Harvard Law professor… named Adrian Vermeule.
Also worth reading
- Kim Phillips-Fein, What’s Left of Generation X
The idea of Generation X can still tell us something: it frames a particular way of approaching politics. To be Gen X was to be disaffected from the consumer norms of the 1980s, but to be pessimistic about any chance for social transformation. It was to be ironic, skeptical, deflating of pretension and authority, detached from social movements and political parties alike. Implicit within this pose were the seeds of a quiet radicalism, a distance from the world as it is that could, under the right conditions, blossom into an open challenge, as in the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. But more often, this stance was interpreted as anomie, a withdrawal from political life.
- Twilight Greenaway, No-Till Farmers’ Push for Healthy Soils Ignites a Movement in the Plains
No-till farming started as a way to keep costs down for conventional farmers in danger of losing their land. Now it has become a subculture and a way of life for outsider farmers all over rural America.
Ending on a positive note
