Thank you @Mike_Podhorzer for writing this so that I feel slightly less insane. The US is on the verge of real, bona fide, violent fascism of the sort we gawk at in history books and, to a first approximation, our civic leaders don't seem that worried.
weekendreading.net/p/sleepwalking… We are, in other words, sleepwalking our way into fascism *exactly the same way previous countries have sleepwalked their way into fascism*. Exactly. All the same beats, the same dynamics, the same rhetoric. We have learned NOTHING from history. It's just fucking amazing.

This quote from Trump captures the beating heart of reactionary authoritarianism better than anything I've ever seen: "I think it is a threat. I think everything is a threat. There is nothing that is not a threat."

That is not a conclusion drawn from evidence, it is ... ... reflective of deep psychological, even neurological, structures. For whatever reason -- genetics, early childhood development, whatever -- Trump has been left with hyperactive "sensitivity to threat," as they call it. Everything else issues from that.

Kudos to @Noahpinion for refusing this absurd assignment. And the @washingtonpost should be ashamed of itself for still, at this late date, failing to understand Trump & his movement. noahpinion.blog/p/against-stee… As @whstancil has articulated so well, the whole appeal of fascism is that it releases you from any obligation to be decent or intellectually curious or coherent in your beliefs. It is a permission structure to wallow in your basest instincts, which is why it attracts assholes.

I'm feeling pretty humorless these days but even I have to admit that protesting @mattyglesias is funny as shit. I'm getting lots of weird private responses to this & they are irritating the shit out of me & I'm already in a bad mood, so I'm just gonna yell about this for a minute. Feel free to tune out.

One of my pet theories -- supported here by Science! -- is that decent, good-spirited people vastly outnumber angry reactionary dickheads (ARDs), but ARDs are uniquely *loud*, which causes everyone (including pols & policymakers) to dramatically overestimate their numbers.

https://twitter.com/jayvanbavel/status/1843378995452092830

This is supported by a bunch of studies showing that politicians drastically overestimate the conservatism of their constituents. It's because the ARDs make the most noise! They are more relentless, more fired up, more ubiquitous in discourse. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Democrats gave the US its best economy in decades, yet they are currently locked in a 50/50 race against deranged fascists.

So, we can say with confidence that "deliverism" didn't work, right? The theory has been decisively refuted. Can we agree on that?
noahpinion.blog/p/let-us-pause… "Deliverism," for those unfamiliar, was the idea, popular at the outset of Biden's 2020 term, that improving the material circumstances of voters would cut through -- outweigh, matter more than -- the fog of negative media. I was fond of the idea myself! But ... it didn't.

Consider: there was an enormous, horrific natural disaster, and the lies about it began *immediately*. Leftists lied about it. Conservatives lied about it. Trump lied about it. All kinds of social media randos lied about it, created weird AI images about it. Meanwhile ... ... the actual, boring, mainstream truth -- that aggressive gov't efforts were underway & working -- was effectively *nowhere*. What would once have been the main signal, the story that all the liars & charlatans defined themselves against, was effectively too quiet to hear.

So @ezraklein & @PeteButtigieg are two of the smartest dudes around, and I love listening to them talk, but this pod illustrates, yet again, a baffling blind spot among Dem elites. (You can probably guess what I'm gonna say, cause I'm always saying it.)
nytimes.com/2024/09/24/opi… There are several points in the interview where the absence is glaring, but maybe the most glaring is when Klein asks Buttegieg about the precipitous loss of trust, especially among rural Americans, over the last several decades. There are many causes, fine, but SURELY ...

I don't think anyone -- *especially* not anyone on the right -- has truly reckoned with how hollow, cowardly, & pathetic the Republican Party turned out to be, as violently exposed by Trump. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… The thing that was called the Republican Party for most of my political adulthood -- the very serious, suit-wearing, chin-stroking types that appeared on Sunday shows -- was ephemera. An illusion. GOP was always a collection of lickspittle proto-fascists waiting for a strongman.

It is effectively impossible to communicate how bad this is to ordinary Americans because no one has done the steady work, across the years, of communicating the importance of the large, stable US bureaucracy. You can't just parachute in at the last minute waving red flags.

https://twitter.com/greenhousenyt/status/1838951574514622918

I've run into this thought again & again over the last 10 years, as MAGA reactionaries try to dismantle the US system: we really should have spent more time conveying the value of that system, not just every four years, but as part of an ongoing communications effort.

This is such a key insight into reactionary psychology. Their atavistic fears & instincts are primary, the unmoved mover, the foundation. Evidence -- what this world actually tells us through observation -- can & sometimes is used to support the instincts, but it's not necessary.

https://twitter.com/jh_swanson/status/1835327270719725888

You can see echos of this all over the place. They want to pass repressive voter restrictions. Why? There's no evidence of any substantial voter fraud!

Yeah, but they *feel like there is*, and that's enough, so they must be satisfied.

Hey, want to hear a funny story? (It's not that funny.)

Yesterday was my birthday. Guess what I got?

An emergency appendectomy! 🎂🎉🥳

I'm sitting, bored, in a hospital bed, so I'll tell the tale. About 20 minutes before Mrs. Volts & I landed in Paris on Wed., I started getting stomach pains ... cold sweats ... kind of felt like I needed to diarrhea & puke at the same time ... not great. I thought it was food poisoning.

I don't really disagree with this Chait piece -- if repudiating some Biden stances will help Harris, she should do it -- but I do find this passage maddening:

nymag.com/intelligencer/…
This is so revealing. A certain kind of center-left pundit has decided that critiques of political media are something silly leftists do. So they're left with no explanation at all about why a president who ended our forever war & rescued a tanking economy is unpopular.

One is never sure, On Here, whether a respondent is actually addressing one or whether they are just recruiting one as a stand-in for some bogey man they want to bash, but on the off chance it's the former here, let me clarify what I meant.

https://twitter.com/SamAdlerBell/status/1830228149696860458

I want the public to be better informed about Harris -- who she is, her approach to governing, her plans, etc. That's good for democracy. It would also (happily in my judgment) be good for her electorally, but that's not the main point. The public should get more/better info.

There are different ways to think about an interview in a presidential race. One way is to think of it as an opportunity to inform voters of the stakes of the election & the kinds of things someone might do if elected. That's what *voters* want -- see any town hall event. OR ... ... you could think of an interview as a kind of performance event, like the obstacle course on that American Ninja Warrior show, in which a candidate endures "difficult questions" (ie, talking points from their opponents) & attempts to complete without gaffes.

🧵 Let me, in the spirit of bipartisanship, make a genuinely bipartisan point: most politicians, even politicians who are excellent at other parts of the job, are bad at giving big speeches. Most *people* are bad at it & politicians are just people. What's weird about it to me is that it's similar to PowerPoint presentations, in that everyone makes the same mistakes. The mistakes have been documented & discussed at *immense* length, and yet everyone keeps making them! Something about the mistakes is "sticky."

I come out somewhere between @Sulliview and @jeffjarvis on this one. A short 🧵.

Let's distinguish between two reasons Harris might need to speak specifically with the US political press corps.

The first reason is: to inform the public what she's about.

https://twitter.com/Sulliview/status/1823321593688240267

On that I'd say two things. First, political reporters hate hearing this, but the public doesn't actually care that much about policy specifics. They want vibes. If she wants to *win*, she'll stay focused on vibes.

But second, if the goal is genuinely to *inform* ...

The "cars = freedom" discourse seems to have kicked up again. It makes me think about the first time I visited Paris (on my honeymoon). I remember we walked out of our hotel & were discussing what to do & it sort of just hit me: we don't really need to plan. We can just go! We didn't need to think about how to get a car from A to B, or how to park, or whether there was overnight parking at the hotel, etc. Anywhere you go, there's transit fairly accessible. Go wherever you want, whenever you want! It's always right there. Just go.

So, there are these "tipping points" -- points at which natural systems can, after a period of slow incremental change, suddenly "flip" to a new state. Scientists have identified a range, from coral bleaching to the collapse of various ice sheets. What they have in common ... ... is that crossing them would be *devastating* for humanity. Sci-fi apocalypse stuff, far beyond the damages projected from "normal" climate change (which are already cumulatively devastating).

Now, scientists have long cautioned against confident predictions ...

It might seem like kind of a trivial thing, but I think you can tell a *ton* about a person from how they interact with children. When you see Harris (and before her, Obama) interact with children or young people, you see a lot of what psychologists call "mirroring." Mirroring is a fundamental part of child-rearing. The kid widens their eyes; you widen your eyes. The kid laughs; you laugh. What this teaches kids is that they are agents in the world. They can communicate their mental state & others will recognize & respond. Basic stuff!

OK, one last 🧵on the Walz pick. To me, the question of why Harris chose Walz isn't that mysterious. He offered her something that none of the other candidates could offer. (This Politico story gets closest to it.) politico.com/news/2024/08/0… All the other candidates are up-and-comers. They're plotting for their political futures. They would spend the campaign, and the presidency, *at least in part* trying to build their own independent power bases, prepping for when they step into the main spotlight.