Wheels within Wheels
Quote of the Day
”The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
- Flannery O’Connor
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Vaughan Williams | How cold the wind doth blow | Ellen Leslie, soprano
Long Read of the Day
Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are
This remarkable essay by Carlos Ozada appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. It captures the central, unpalatable message of the Trump victory, which is that the America the readers of the NYT live in is not the real America. The piece is behind the Times paywall but the link is a gift one, so it should work for most readers. If it doesn’t, you can find the text on Robert Reich’s Substack.
It’s a perceptive piece, worth reading in full. But here’s the nub of it:
The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.
It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.
Books, etc.
After Trump won in 2016 this book was the most interesting thing I read. It’s a searing critique of the Democratic Party in which Frank argues that, in failing to curb growing economic inequality, the left in America had abandoned its roots to pursue a new class of supporter — college-educated elite professionals.
That lesson failed to land. But people had noticed that the people Obama — a Democratic president — reached for in 2008 to rescue the banks were the self-same elite professionals who had caused the crisis. And maybe then they started to wonder whose side the Democrats were on.
My commonplace booklet
What happens if Americans claim asylum from a Trump regime?
A sobering post by Chris Bertram on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog.
Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and on the territory of a state signatory of the Convention. Some of those states will also be allies of the US through NATO and other treaties and will have extradition treaties with the US. In which case what might happen?
Bertram then outlines four possibilities for Americans fleeing persecution or prosecution by Trump’s agencies.
The basic pattern, he says, is clear:
Liberal democratic states allied to the US would face a choice between their state interests as allies of the US on the one hand and upholding the right to asylum and defending liberal democratic values on the other. Nobody can be confident about what would happen in practice. If I were a US dissident, I would choose my place of asylum carefully.
Although it’s not a parallel, the case of Julian Assange comes immediately to mind.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Booster In Air An astonishing video of a SpaceX booster rocket returning to its nest. (The ‘boosting’ in this case is providing propulsion of a rocket into space, not boosting Musk into the Trump administration.)
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