Most serious people understand Biden needs to end his campaign. Here’s a little thread on why I think Harris and not [your fav via open convention] should be the nominee, which is something serious people disagree about. I want to explain what “legitimacy” means in this context. A lot of people approach this topic as if we just fell out of a coconut tree. There are many qualified candidates and they all have pros and cons. I am not here to contend that Harris’s pros and cons work out better than anyone else’s, in a vacuum. Very likely they don’t.

Here's where I'm at: first of all, Biden has to resign. There is no coming back from that debate. It's not about "losing a debate," it's about how the media and many leading Democrats aren't going to cooperate in pretending he's up to this anymore. Can't be undone. I don't believe an open convention is a very plausible idea, as fun as it sounds in theory. I think the only way forward besides sticking with Biden and watching the media destroy him is for him to do the honorable thing, resign, and instantly make Harris president.

Just visited my first encampment, at Penn since I happen to be in town. Gonna do a little thread of my impressions. First, as you can see, ordinary campus life carries on around it undisturbed. I took these two pics and then asked some protesters if I could enter. They said absolutely, and requested I not photograph anyone’s face. They were polite and happy to show me around and did not ask me, a 40-year-old Jewish man, who I was or what I think about anything.

The key driver of this war that no one ever outright names is the Israeli public’s desire for vengeance. (This is also what enabled the Iraq War after 9/11.) 20,000+ Palestinians are dead bc it would be politically untenable for Israel not to slaughter Palestinians after 10/7. Much of Netanyahu’s coalition has genocidal intentions, but all of his opposition rivals are committed to this war too, as is the vast majority of the public. Strategically, the ostensible goal of eliminating Hamas is absurd and mass civilian casualties are guaranteed.

You'd think it'd be possible to argue

-NATO expansion has been disastrous provocation
-US must pursue diplomacy, avoid escalation
-Russia has legit security concerns re Ukraine

without claiming that Ukraine isn't a real country and/or is populated exclusively by Nazis. And yet Relatedly, it would be nice if we could understand "sphere of influence" to mean a cold, de facto reality and not something that morally or legally exists (or, OTOH, doesn't exist at all). Ukraine is in Russia's SOI bc Russia can exercise its will there, not bc that's good.

As a frequent TNR contributor, and as a friend to, and admirer of, the incredibly talented staff Chris Lehmann has put together over the past few years, I find this news deeply unsettling. The team deserves better; so do TNR readers. defector.com/incoming-tnr-e… There's something egregious about how they're approaching this. By all means, open a DC bureau; move primary editorial operations there, sure. Cover Congress more. But to throw away a great team with a smart and humane editorial vision is an awful, totally unforced error.

A persistent trope on the right, dating back at least to Norman Podhoretz's "Making It," is that there's an honorable way to be rich (being openly selfish, posing as a hard-working striver) and a dishonorable way (having a social conscience, acknowledging your own privilege). Right-wing populism means pretending to hold the rich in contempt while actually holding rich liberals in contempt, considering it impolite to bring up the wealth and elite educations of anyone on the right, and rejecting the treatment of wealth inequality as a systemic problem

It’s unforgivable that we didn’t just suspend rents, commercial as well as residential, for the duration of this. It did and continues to do irreparable damage to communities and livelihoods when we could have just printed money to bail out the landlords. nytimes.com/2021/03/10/nyr… I’ve been going to Jing Fong since 2005 or so, and I genuinely believed it would always be there. It would have been, absent this pandemic and the greedy, short-sighted, utterly heartless policy response to it.

Schumer's leftward drift ahead of his reelection campaign is a trend I've registered for a year or so now. It's a powerful vindication of the Bernie campaigns, of the many successful progressive local challenges in NY since 2018, and of Markey's win. nytimes.com/2021/02/07/us/… I know it's fashionable in some quarters to sneer at the idea of "pulling the Democrats left," but it's actually working and we should keep doing what we've been doing.

It's really gross to blame people who don't support your gimmicky political stunt for deaths that supporting your gimmicky political stunt would do absolutely nothing to prevent. If I decline to hire someone to skywrite "M4A" over the National Mall, I don't have the blood of the uninsured on my hands, and it's demented to suggest otherwise.

The last 5 years saw Bernie's 2 credible runs for president and the parallel, closely tied rise of a left media ecosystem. AOC is ideally positioned to be Bernie's heir, the leader of the left electoral project. But parts of the left media ecosystem are now rejecting that project I have not, to be clear, though I understand the despair. But that's what's really going on with this Dore/M4A debate (the specifics of which are ludicrous). This is about two very different sides of Bernie's legacy coming into clearer focus.

I got bored of this eventually but suffice to say Osita mops the floor with Yascha, which is funny considering Yascha’s side is ostensibly the one that demands open debate and free exchange of ideas.

https://twitter.com/ositanwanevu/status/1284268349753561088

I can’t really speak to the kids on campus today but anecdotally, most of the public intellectuals I see now on the left side of this debate have clearly read widely and carefully studied the ideas they reject, while the other side often seems proudly ignorant.

Hamilton was written to flatter the monarch (Barack Obama) in his court, the same basic genesis as a lot of Shakespearean tragedies and histories. Ideologically, that’s what it does: it’s designed to reinforce Obama’s worldview.

Irrespective of that, I think it’s very good. Like Shakespearean plays, it appeals to people across the social spectrum in the vernacular of their time, and it compellingly captures human drama in a way that transcends its ideological leanings, which are more interesting to scholars than most audiences.

This is opportunistic bullshit. Bernie isn't trashing his supporters and Bernie has devoted a lifetime to the cause. There's a lot those of us with many years ahead can learn from his unwavering commitment over decades when socialism seemed like a lost cause.

https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1250204187922702341

I can already see a looming split in the pro-Bernie left between a faction that is fully nihilistic about electoral politics and a faction that wants to figure out how to build on this movement and win power electorally in the future. Suffice to say I will be in the latter camp.

The big takeaway of the primaries is that the Dem establishment is way more powerful and unified than anyone gave it credit for. Dem leaders don't want to say that out loud because it would implicitly admit that Biden won big in spite of running a terrible campaign by any metric. Compared to Bernie (but also compared to several candidates who dropped out and endorsed Biden), Biden raised less money from fewer people, had much smaller rallies, got crushed in first 3 states, and is awful on TV. None of that mattered. The party really did decide.

Been thinking about the logic of US neoliberalism, what it considers tolerable and what it doesn't. Pre-corona, we knew it considered tens of thousands of medical bankruptcies and deaths from lack of insurance to be tolerable; we knew it considered big banks failing intolerable. It's rapidly becoming clear that the total immiseration of a critical mass of Americans would be intolerable to the system (we are putting aside all human or moral considerations for these purposes). Most people need to have some baseline spending power or the system collapses.