This image was chopped down to make it fit the usual picture space. You’ll definitely want to get the full image from Compound Interest to wake your nose with facts about what it should be smelling right about now.
I’ve been becoming more and more free about dropping the f-bomb, even though people keep telling me I shouldn’t. It’s not a word I used regularly until recently—not a word I thought I’d be uttering in polite company, much less sitting down on a page seen by thousands. But prepare yourself. It’s going to come up this morning.
Peter Baker on Don Trump and the other fascist movements growing around the world.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States. More strident opponents have likened Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
… the discussion comes as questions are surfacing around the globe about a revival of fascism, generally defined as a governmental system that asserts complete power and emphasizes aggressive nationalism and often racism. In places like Russia and Turkey, leaders like Vladimir V. Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan employ strongman tactics. In Austria, a nationalist candidate came within three-tenths of a percentage point of becoming the first far-right head of state elected in Europe since World War II.
The immediate cause for the sudden rise in racist, nationalist, anti-immigrant, protectionist, militaristic cults centered on a single bullying strong-man leader (which is what we all mean when we say fascism, so please, no more of the “but Trump didn’t check box 14 on my list of fascist requirements!”) is simple enough to pin down now, just as it was in the 1930s.
“The crash of 2008 showed how globalization creates losers as well as winners,” said Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In many countries, middle-class wages are stagnant and politics has become a battle over a shrinking pie. Populists have replaced contests between left and right with a struggle between cosmopolitan elites and angry nativists.”
But the bigger picture is that we’ve spent forty years slowly making our way from an industrial age in which there was a broad need for workers with a wide variety of training, education and skills, into an information age where we’re gradually eliminating the need for any of them. Not the line workers, not the managers, not even the tech geeks holding out against the tide. The market didn’t just crash. The market was revealed as a sham. A fraud. A ghost of something that used to be real. And what happened in the market is happening in other segments of the economy. We’re a society stumbling forward on momentum, without a goal, or even a sense that a goal is possible. People are willing to accept someone offering them a twisted vision of the past, because no one is giving them a view of the future which looks any less than vile.
Americans are used to the idea that other countries may be vulnerable to such movements, but while figures like Father Charles Coughlin, the demagogic radio broadcaster, enjoyed wide followings in the 1930s, neither major party has ever nominated anyone quite like Mr. Trump.
And it’s entirely possible that I’m going to say more related to this subject (not the f-word, but the “what about the future” subject) at… say, 1:40PM Eastern, 2:40 Central. Set your alarms.
Then come on in. There are pundits to visit.
The New York Times on the refuge crisis.
The world is witnessing the largest exodus of refugees in generations, spawned by armed conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. But “witnessing” is perhaps the wrong word. Many world leaders, including those who run most of the richest countries, are choosing to look the other way. They are more interested in barricading their nations from the fallout of conflict than in investing in peacekeeping and stability.
This willful neglect was on display last week at the inaugural World Humanitarian Summit, convened to face the needs of the world’s most vulnerable people. Most heads of state from the richest nations — including the United States — didn’t bother to show up, drawing a rebuke from the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
How do you know when you’re slipping toward fascism? When even good leaders are afraid to show compassion. When empathy is derided as weakness. When the stranger at the door is turned away.
Ross Douthat is being allowed off probation this morning. Let’s see how that goes.
Some of us imagined that the 2016 campaign might feature a substantive debate about domestic policy. Some of us thought the Republican nominee might offer a detailed right-of-center agenda to counter Hillary Clinton’s liberal laundry list.
Some of us were delusional.
But why should we be trapped by the fetters of unfortunate reality? Donald Trump is many things — man’s man, ladies’ man, strength-worshiping Poujadist. Why not imagine that he has a wonkish side as well?
Thought you’d stump me with “Poujadist,” eh, Douthat? Trump is no Poujadist. You might make an argument that the Tea Party protesters started out with the same anti-tax fervor as Poujad, but there’s one yuuuge difference. Poujard fought against the Nazis.
But really, Douthat spends the rest of his article in that cheapest of cheap ways to fill column inches: the fake debate scene. The most horrible thing is, I know he won’t be the last. I’m telling you know, I would rather sit through a month of George Will poetry (in the original Vogonese) rather than read another fantasy-debate scene in which the writer sticks his own ego up the backs of both candidates and spills his messy id all over the page.
The New York Times on why Oklahoma is doing anything other than fine.
As they sliced and diced state programs this month to close a budget deficit, Republicans controlling the Oklahoma Legislature cruelly targeted some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens — the working poor — by cutting an average $147 a year from the income of 200,000 households.
This may seem negligible to the state’s wealthy and middle class, but not to a poor family with a breadwinner struggling at the margins. The method chosen is deplorable — cutting the state share of the earned-income tax credit for low-income workers, a federal program widely praised as an effective lift from poverty. “It’s one of the most valuable antipoverty programs on the books today,” Carl Davis, research director for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told The Tulsa World.
It’s an anti-poverty program that works? Well now you know exactly why Republicans went after it. The biggest bugaboo in the whole land of scary things under Republican beds is effective government that actually helps people. Shiver.
Susie Cagle looks at the big problem with the story of Peter Thiel’s secret day in court and how the 0.1% are redefining the rules.
Last week Mr. Thiel revealed that he had funneled “in the ballpark” of $10 million to legal support for plaintiffs suing Gawker Media, most notably Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, who recently won a $140 million judgment against the company for defamation. Mr. Thiel made no secret of his grudge against Gawker, since the company’s Valleywag blog revealed his homosexuality in a 2007 post that lampooned the straight male culture of Silicon Valley more than Mr. Thiel himself. (Mr. Thiel is, notably, an investor in the tech site Pando, a media property that regularly insults him in more direct terms.) ...
Portraying a $10 million investment in crushing one’s enemy as a charitable act of justice that will make the world a better place is galling. But students of history can hardly be shocked. Tech’s elite, lauded for their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial predecessors did more than 100 years ago.
I hate Gawker. We all hate Gawker. What Gawker did was gross, disgusting, and truly sickening. But what Thiel did—and is still doing—is frightening.
Karen Brown on what it’s like to try and recover from a wrongful conviction.
It’s hard to imagine worse luck than getting locked up for a crime you did not commit. And yet for people who have been convicted and later cleared — almost 1,800 in the United States since the late 1980s — the unlucky streak may continue. It turns out that where you spent your prison years determines how much help you get starting over, if you get any at all.
Take Mark Schand, who spent 27 years in the Massachusetts prison system for the 1986 murder of Victoria Seymour, a 25-year-old killed by a stray bullet outside a nightclub in Springfield. … In 2013, a judge granted a motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, and he freed Mr. Schand. The local district attorney later dismissed the charges.
Schand then left the system and recieved… nothing. Not even the meager services offered to prisoners on parole. That’s not true everywhere, but it shouldn’t be true anywhere.
Ruth Marcus on how Hillary reacts to attack by trying to build greater walls around her privacy—and fails.
The resulting damage, self-inflicted and staff-enabled, is incalculable. It is a political wound that refuses to heal, mostly because Clinton’s enemies are all too happy to pick at it, incessantly, but also because Clinton has been so compulsively resistant to confessing error.
She dutifully acknowledges that the decision to rely on a private email account was, in retrospect, a “mistake” that she would not repeat — duh! — but seems constantly compelled to relitigate the conduct.
What Marcus says about both Clinton’s tendency to react to attack by keeping even more of their private life private, is interesting. The next few paragraphs about the email… not so much. We may have, at some point in history, had a “scandal” concerning something more petty, picayune, and pointless than how someone set up their email. But if we did, I certainly don’t remember it.
Dana Milbank is playing the same tune as Marcus.
The report’s revelations weren’t particularly revelatory: Clinton violated department policies and went further than predecessors in her use of private email, but she wasn’t the first to take this path. Beyond that, as my colleagues Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported, officials say the FBI has “found little evidence that Clinton maliciously flouted classification rules.”
But what’s damning in the new report is her obsessive and counterproductive secrecy:
And again: petty, picayune, and pointless.
We had a presidential administration that blatantly lied and twisted facts to take the nation into a war that is still roiling the Middle East. We have a candidate for this election that’s encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons and promising at least six unconstitutional acts before breakfast. But we’re all supposed to stand around and act as if email policy is something we should be upset about. In the words of George H. W. Bush (or at least, Dana Carvey). Ain't gonna do it.
Barton Swaim on the fall of the “moral majority.”
A recent report on NPR began by noting that the arguments of many “conservative Christians” are “being challenged by changing views in society.”… Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, remarked to the reporter: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.” In Mohler’s view, the report went on, “Christians must adapt to the changed cultural circumstances by finding a way ‘to live faithfully in a world in which we’re going to be a moral exception.’ ”
Hold on. A high-profile Southern Baptist just conceded that his side lost the culture war. … he’s openly conceding that the cultural changes he laments won’t be reversed by some fictional silent majority.
Unfortunately, Swaim falls into a series of citations without providing much content on what this means. Plus it’s hard to take seriously any essay that includes the phrase “the fierce eloquence of Sen. Ted Cruz.”
Kathleen Parker on how Obama isn’t to blame for not carrying us to post-racial nirvana.
At a recent commencement address at historically black Howard University, Obama noted that his election did not, in fact, create a post-racial society. “I don’t know who was propagating that notion. That was not mine,” he said. ...
In retrospect, it was mine, yours, ours. White people, especially in the media, created this narrative because we loved and needed it. Psychologists call it projection. We made Obama into the image of the right sort of fellow. He was, as Shelby Steele wrote in 2008, a “bargainer,” who promised white people to “never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me.”
Obama wasn’t so much the agent of change as he was the embodiment of a post-racial America as whites imagined it.
It’s a fantastic start. Only Parker follows it up by delving into Douthat territory, creating an imaginary Obama in an imaginary land overwhelmed by racial harmony and then imagining how President Imagobama would have basked in the glow. Parker also fails to note that the resurgence of racism in America wasn’t coincidental: it was a deliberate strategy by Republicans who encouraged racial tension as a means of discrediting the first black president. Police killings didn’t start the problem. AM radio and politicians politicians puffing dog whistles so hard every canine in America was howling created the circumstances in which the police killings happened.
Sebastian Mallaby makes the unfair case for Trump. Sort of.
Sit through any tech conference these days, and the gap between scientific optimism and our current political pessimism is extraordinary to behold. There are speeches on gene silencing, which promises breakthroughs in the treatment of dementia; on plant-based beef substitutes, which could reduce the bovine boost to global warming; on computers that will screen your skin for cancer and your refrigerator for dwindling milk. But voters across the Western world aren’t celebrating these excitements. To the contrary, they are furious.
Some theories of Trumpism — or of Austria’s Hoferism or Britain’s Brexitism — emphasize voters’ misfortunes: conventionally measured, middle-class incomes are stagnant. But this theory of populism’s rise is not fully convincing.
Mallaby argues that rather than the numbers, it’s a sense of unfairness driving the rise of Trump and the others. You know what strikes me as unfair? Using “populist” as synonym for right wing militant, movements centered around the cult of a strong leader. There’s a better word for that. Plus, Huey Long would be really upset about what you’re doing with populism.
Leonard Pitts remembers when Roots came to television the first time.
Everything was different, the day after.
If you are a child of the millennium, if you’ve never known a world without 500 networks, it may be difficult for you to get this. You might find it hard to appreciate how it was when there were only three networks and no DVR — or even VCR — so that one major TV program sometimes became a communal event, a thing experienced by everybody everywhere at the same time.
So it was on a Sunday night, the 23rd of January, in 1977. I was a senior at the University of Southern California, working part time at the campus bookstore. When I went to work the next day, you could feel that something had shifted. Your black friends simmered like a pot left too long on the stove. Your white friends tiptoed past you like an unexploded bomb.
I remember that first airing of Roots very clearly. Even in a small Kentucky town, even among a group of mostly-white teenage boys, it was the main topic of conversation. If there’s anything I miss about those times, it’s exactly that: how one program could stimulate discussion and act as a shared experience.
I had a friend, a white guy named Dave Weitzel. Ordinarily, we spent much of our shift goofing on each other the way you do when you’re 19 or so and nothing is all that serious. But on that day after, the space between us was filled with an awkward silence.
Finally, Dave approached me. “I’m sorry,” he said, simply. “I didn’t know.”
You may think that seems silly now. How can we not know? We didn’t know, because no one made a point of telling us. My high school history book didn’t mention a thing about the slave trade. Not. One. Word. You could read it and get the impression that slaves somehow slipped into America after the Revolution (because they were never mentioned in discussions of that war, or in any of the Columbus-Jamestown-Plymouth Rock stuff that came before), but before the Civil War. Like, maybe they all came about 1830. On a raft.
Kunta Kinte wasn’t just a character in a show. He was a heartbreaking, shocking, history lesson for much of America at the time.
The history Roots represents embarrasses our national mythology. As a result, it has never been taught with any consistency. Even when we ostensibly spotlight black history in February, we concentrate on the achievements of black strivers — never the American hell they strove against. So you hear all about the dozens of uses George Washington Carver found for a peanut, but nothing about Mary Turner’s newborn, stomped to death by a white man in a lynch mob.
I hope that for this generation, watching Kunta Kinte’s story won’t be such a revelation. But I hope it’s no less shocking. And I hope you watch.