Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun

In his newsletter The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, introduces January’s cover story, another must-read from Barton Gellman:

Stating plainly that one of America’s two major parties, the party putatively devoted to advancing the ideas and ideals of conservatism, has now fallen into autocratic disrepute is unnerving for a magazine committed to being, in the words of our founding manifesto, “of no party or clique.” Criticism of the Republican Party does not suggest an axiomatic endorsement of the Democratic Party, its leaders and policies. Substantive, even caustic, critiques can of course be made up and down the Democratic line. But avoiding partisan entanglement does not mean that we must turn away from the obvious. The leaders of the Republican Party—the soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behavior—are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly.

The legacy of Fox News, which goes unmentioned, nonetheless infuses the piece. Gellman writes:

Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat…

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.

Gellman’s reporting in 2020 prophesied the looming attack on American democracy as well as anyone’s. (Excluding the likes of Bill Maher, who’d warned consistently about a “slow-moving coup” for more than four years, while politicians and pundits alike laughed off his concerns.) Will people in charge finally listen?

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“The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle”: A Warning From A Survivor Of The Bosnian War

Mirsada Burić ran her way out of a civil war. She was twenty-two years old and living in Sarajevo when, in 1992, she was chosen to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Summer Olympics, in Barcelona. It was an awkward time to be training for a three-thousand-meter race. The republics of the former Yugoslavia—among them Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—were breaking out into war. Bosnia and Herzegovina had voted for independence in March, and, on April 5th, ultra-nationalist Serb militias, with the support of Serbian president Slobodon Milošević, bent on carving out a Greater Serbia from neighboring Bosnia, began the Siege of Sarajevo, which would send the city into a state of terror for more than three years. Snipers, stationed on the hills overlooking Sarajevo, picked off civilians at random. Shells blew apart thousands of homes. On one of Burić’s runs, near the stadium that had been used for the 1984 Winter Olympics, she narrowly avoided being hit when a barrage of shells landed around her. On another occasion, while stretching in a park, she heard a sniper’s bullet slice the air over her head and hit a tree. “It sounded like a whip,” she said.

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The Conservatives of Conscience

In the tradition of leaders across history who stood up for truth amid the fog of tribalism—and who refused to be complicit in the face of evil—hundreds of prominent Republicans and conservatives are standing up for American democracy by endorsing Joe Biden. Please consider sharing their words with friends and family who may be reluctant to vote Democratic, but whose support America now needs

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Concerning Symptoms

Trump’s symptoms today are said to be “concerning.” I personally have been concerned for 1,936 days, ever since he descended that escalator and began attacking our democracy, our planet, and future generations with lies.

I have been especially concerned for 1,487 days, ever since, in September 2016, he called Vladimir Putin a better leader than Barack Obama. That was when it was clear that every American needed to vote against him. And I have been acutely concerned for 219 days, ever since the President reassured the nation the virus would disappear “like a miracle” even as he continued his campaign to gut the government of scientific expertise.

I hope he and all the infected members of his entourage, who broke the rules at the debate by not wearing masks, make a full recovery. I hope this is a teachable moment for science and mask-wearing—one that saves lives. And I hope, next month, the Republican Party gets shellacked and shattered, and left on the side of the road, so we can start afresh.

Antidotes to the Madness

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Like a children’s clown who proves to be a convicted pedophile, a news channel that turns out to be poisonous propaganda can leave anyone looking for answers. With this in mind, I’ve been collecting some articles for a relative who has been exposed to Fox News for years, and who has been eager, as Trump’s unfitness overwhelms us, to get a better sense of how we got here. These pieces—should you, too, be looking to encourage anyone in your life to stand on the right side of history—cut through the disinformation and lay out the stakes of the coming election.

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To Galvanize, Not Polarize

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2019 highlight: Pete Buttigieg greets supporters at a rally in Brooklyn on June 28th—fifty years to the day since the Stonewall Riots launched the modern gay-rights movement. The atmosphere was electric. The only time I’ve witnessed more civic joy was at Obama’s inauguration, when an eight-year pall of ideology and cynicism lifted alongside the departing president’s helicopter and America seemed to affirm that truth and science—and one’s character rather than color—mattered.

The excitement as Buttigieg spoke was tinged, of course, with the heartbreak one felt over the contrast between this dignified leader and the status quo—roughly the difference between broccoli and arsenic. Between a Bach cello suite and a hippopotamus crapping into your ear. There was a palpable anxiety, in a moment of grave national and planetary peril, about whether the country would wake to the promise of this campaign and recognize that Buttigieg just might be the one best suited to answer the call of history.

Six months later, taking slings from left and right—and holding fast to his campaign values of respect, belonging, truth, teamwork, boldness, responsibility, substance, discipline, excellence, and joy—he leads the Iowa polls.

Standing Up for What’s Right

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It is refreshing when relatives of people who have done immense damage to our world—undermining truth and science, spreading fear and division, delegitimizing the political opposition and eroding democracy, all in the nihilistic pursuit of power—step forward and demand better. Kathryn Murdoch, who is leaving her family’s media empire to fight climate change, is an inspiration.

Something similar is happening in countless families across America who were caught up in supporting a dangerous and altogether terrible man in 2016—justifying their misjudgment with the fear and hatred that they sincerely (if irrationally) felt toward politicians whom Murdoch media had cynically and relentlessly portrayed as an existential threat. People like Kathryn—no matter how rich or poor, no matter their political persuasion—are speaking out against this madness, pleading with loved ones to confront the truth about the man whom the likes of Vladimir Putin, for obvious reasons, wanted badly to see elected.

Early this week, that man strode into the United Nations and made clear that he would continue to ignore the most serious crisis humanity has ever faced, a cause for which millions of young protesters around the globe had marched three days earlier. Moreover, he mocked the demeanor and passion of the autistic 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who had inspired those protesters with her courage, and who is as close to a Martin Luther King Jr. as this world has, for her efforts to confront the dire peril we face. Her sole message is “listen to the science”—her only goal being to remind us that there is such a thing as truth, and that we’ve been willfully ignoring it. She knows that, if we only acknowledged what we know, we would never tolerate leaders whose inaction ensures that hundreds of millions will be uprooted or face mortal hardship, that a million species could go extinct, that civilization itself could teeter. She is urging us to reconnect with our conscience, to act like adults, and there is no more important message now. Trump’s mockery of her rips off the mask of the nihilism he represents. There is no longer any pretense that supporting him is justified for the sake of tax rates, that condoning his racism and corruption and abdication of leadership is in any way patriotic. Enough with the what-about-ism, the “What about Biden’s son and Ukraine?” Enough with the “I don’t love Trump, but I could never vote for a Democrat.” Enough. 

Matthew Dowd was the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. He is among the growing chorus of conservatives who understand that silence in the face of evil is inexcusable. Dowd responded to Trump’s mockery by writing to Greta: “You stand more for the ideals of America than nearly every member of this administration and nearly everyone at Fox News.” That is the voice of truth. That is what the better angels of our nature are telling us. 

Let’s hold onto our values, our identities, our faith, while being also on the right side of history. It is ok to admit wrong, to admit that perhaps George Will was right to have called for Trump’s defeat in all 50 states, or that John McCain’s 2008 campaign manager was onto something when he called recently for the electoral annihilation of the party to which he’d dedicated his life. It is ok to change your mind. Future generations will be grateful that we looked around, like Kathryn Murdoch, and couldn’t stand for what our silence would have abetted.

I Am a Carbon Abolitionist. Are You?

This excellent piece by economist Eric Beinhocker radiates moral clarity:

History tells us that mass social movements always have a moral argument at their core. The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people. The argument that won wasn’t over the economics of slavery, or whether slavery was in the self-interest of white people or not. The argument that mobilized the abolition movement, and eventually gave it political power, was that enslaving other human beings is evil and had to be stopped…

The climate change movement must become a Carbon Abolition movement. There will inevitably be a diversity of views on what a zero-carbon economy looks like and how to get there. But there must be absolute unity and clarity that the current carbon economy is immoral and must end, and that net-positive carbon emissions must be illegal in all countries by 2050…

Under slavery, white people benefitted economically and socially by harming people of African descent. Under the fossil economy, people alive today benefit economically and socially by harming, and perhaps even extinguishing, future generations. Pre-1970s we had an excuse, we didn’t know; and perhaps even as late as the 1990s some could argue that we didn’t know for sure. But now we do know. Carbon emissions are a moral wrong, they are destroying life on Earth, and must be abolished.

David Wallace-Wells, who writes about climate change for New York, has become an indispensable voice for these befuddled times. His latest essay lays out why alarmism is appropriate, even vital, for conveying the reality of what we’re facing:

By defining the boundaries of conceivability more accurately, catastrophic thinking makes it easier to see the threat of climate change clearly. 

…[P]erhaps the strongest argument for the wisdom of catastrophic thinking is that all of our mental reflexes run in the opposite direction, toward disbelief about the possibility of very bad outcomes. I know this from personal experience. I have spent the past three years buried in climate science and following the research as it expanded into ever darker territory. 

…I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now. That is how hard it is to shake complacency. We are all living in delusion, unable to really process the news from science that climate change amounts to an all-encompassing threat. Indeed, a threat the size of life itself.

How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless, and they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion. 

We build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that surely shapes our ability to comprehend genuinely existential threats to the species. We have a tendency to wait for others to act, rather than acting ourselves; a preference for the present situation; a disinclination to change things; and an excess of confidence that we can change things easily, should we need to, no matter the scale. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.

What is needed is collective action—which is why the Republican Party, in its current corrupt form, focused chiefly on the redistribution of wealth upwards and the interests of the fossil fuel industry—must be electorally annihilated.

I highly recommend the whole piece.

I was thrilled to learn this week that the Holocaust Museum Houston is adding my photo of Mevludin Orić to their collection, as part of their effort to educate the public about the Holocaust. (The photo appeared in my New Yorker article “The Legacy of Srebrenica, Twenty Years Later.”) Orić’s story is extreme—he dodged a bullet in front of a Serbian firing squad and played dead while thousands of Muslim men and teenage boys were gunned down around him—but the lessons from Bosnia’s war are timeless.

Nationalism is dangerous. People who inflame it, or condone those who do, are playing with fire. Today in the U.S., one of our two political parties is led by nationalist types who spread hatred and lies, while attacking the institutions of democracy. They are ripping apart our collective ability to agree on truth, without which we cannot hope to address challenges like climate change. It’s no hyperbole to say the fate of the planet may hinge on our ability to confront this madness.

I wish more Americans could meet Bosnians like Orić, whose society was ripped apart by nationalism, and whose relatives were raped or tortured or killed by men who’d been led to see them as the Other. I’m thinking especially of journalists and TV pundits who think of themselves as “centrists,” as above the fray of partisan politics. I imagine them lecturing Bosnians about how much they lament the region’s “divisiveness,” how “both sides” were to blame for the violence. How Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević might have been reckless, but was responding to the legitimate fears of average Serbs. I would like to witness the moment when the stare they received in response sent a chill down their spine.

All Clear at the Dermatologist

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I was perched on the doctor’s table this morning, wearing a paper gown that opens in the back and rips at the crotch when you sit. My dermatologist usually keeps me waiting before barging in and hurriedly scanning my moles for signs of cancer. We’d rarely spoken for more than a minute.

“How are things?” he said upon entering.

“Dermatological things, or life things?”

“What’s going on with you?”

I made a comment about the madness of having a president working to convince millions of Americans that journalists are the enemy. Twenty-five minutes later—other patients waiting with their own genitals exposed be damned—we’re still in the midst of a concerted discussion about voting rights and democratic erosion, and what the Supreme Court’s lurch to the right portends for the viability of the American experiment. There’s a degree of passion and concern that I’ve never before seen on his Botoxed face.

Cancer is scary. By the time you realize it has spread—through a body, through a country—it’s often too late.

Don’t miss this harrowing reflection from the historian Christopher Browning, on the parallels between 1930s Germany and the present: “If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.”

Also worth reading is the invaluable Adam Serwer on this week’s events:

Sometimes, when democracies die, they do so in grand gestures. But often there is no single event that heralds the end of the rule of law, but a slow, imperceptible erosion of the safeguards against political abuse of state power.

Any sense of civic obligation among Republicans is quickly fading: the idea that the opposition has rights, that judges and elected officials serve all of the American people and not simply their own party’s base, that the judiciary does not exist as a partisan fiefdom to further one side’s ideological agenda. In its place is a growing adherence to reflexive Trumpism. No objection the opposition could have is legitimate, because no opposition is legitimate. Those who support Trump are good, and those who oppose him are bad.

…As for Kavanaugh, every opinion he writes, every decision he joins, and every day he sits on the bench will be tainted with illegitimacy. As senators who represent a shrinking portion of the population prepare to confirm a justice more Americans oppose than support, who was nominated by a president for whom most of the electorate did not vote, the crisis of American democracy comes into sharp relief. Whatever their self-perception, Republican control of the three branches of government is countermajoritarian. With the guardrails of separated powers broken, the last remaining defense for American democracy and the rule of law is the electorate itself.

Finally, wash it all down with this comment from David Wallace-Wells, on the U.N.’s climate report. Amid the (un)American experiment in ethno-nationalism and would-be authoritarian rule, the most important story in the world remains neglected.

Don’t miss this incisive commentary from David Remnick, on a day when dozens of publications are speaking out against the anti-media rhetoric of the racist con-artist who now leads, and defines, the Republican Party: “This is not a matter of the press seeking to protect itself as an interest group. The interest group in question is the United States.”

Today’s effort was inspired by the Boston Globe, whose editorial is also worth reading.

I first saw Becca Stevens perform when she was fresh out of pampers, and in a folk band with her family. By the time I interviewed her for this article, she was fresh out of the recording studio with David Crosby.

Her latest album, “Regina,” throbs with the energy that’s alive in our country nowadays, as citizens of all political persuasions—but especially women—stand up to defend our democracy. Women who are fed up with having their pussies grabbed, and with their fellow citizens’ brains being grabbed by authoritarian pussies.

Further perspective, from Ezra Klein, on how the ongoing assault on our democracy is endangering our country and planet: “the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc doesn’t just reflect the outcomes of America’s undemocratic electoral rules; it is writing and, in some cases, rewriting them, to favor the Republican Party—making it easier to suppress votes, simpler for corporations and billionaires to buy elections, and legal for incumbents to gerrymander districts to protect and enhance their majorities. The Supreme Court has always been undemocratic. What it’s becoming is something more dangerous: anti-democratic.”

Also, don’t miss John Cassidy on how this anti-democratic power grab threatens us all. Ultimately, this is about how, through the erosion of democracy, we’re losing our essential representation—that is, losing our collective ability to address challenges like climate change:

As Kavanaugh prepares to make his way to the Capitol, and, most probably, to a lifetime appointment in the old courthouse behind it, we are witnessing the denouement of an outrageous power grab by a radicalized political party, its wealthy backers, and a rogue President. It is essential to remember this wider context… Democrats, Independents, and anybody else who cares about the functioning of American democracy have good reason to be sore. There is no majority of voters out there clamoring for a ban on abortion, restrictions on collective bargaining, roadblocks to legal claims against big companies, or the purging from the electoral rolls of voters who skip a couple of elections. These are the concerns of smaller groups, with strong ties to the Republican Party, whose interests will be disproportionately represented.

Voting remains absolutely vital for resisting this ongoing assault on our democracy—an assault that Fox News, Putin, and other corrupt actors will keep waging in ever more aggressive ways. But Americans need to understand that, in 2020 and 2022, they will be participating in an increasingly undemocratic system in which they’re not being fully represented. The bracing reality is that the fight to save our democracy will last for decades.

On this Fourth of July, here are two pieces by conservatives whose messages badly need to be heard:

“Abraham Lincoln’s Warning,” by Conor Friedersdorf

“I left the Republican Party. Now I want Democrats to take over,” by Max Boot

May more Republicans join the fight to save our democracy, and the values of prudence and patriotism that they profess to hold dear. The initial discomfort of ripping off the shackles of tribalism—which in the past may have helped us feel anchored to our identities as part of a political party, but which now lead too many of us to act with unreason, to condone things we’ve spent our lives warning others about the risks of condoning—will be replaced with the more meaningful assurance that one is on the right side of history.

 

Anthony Kennedy’s retirement is dour news for our democracy, with the Supreme Court now positioned to further undermine voting rights—the opposite of what this country and planet need. It is tragic that the G.O.P. has been rewarded for its power-grab in refusing to seat Obama’s centrist nominee, Merrick Garland; now, the unAmerican demagogue whom Vladimir Putin helped to elect—knowing full well that he would weaken our democracy and global influence—will likely entrench the Court’s reactionary extremism for decades. Look for the increasingly authoritarian G.O.P. to further rig itself into power, with potentially dire environmental consequences. Continue reading →

In a vital piece for The Atlantic, the conservative-leaning Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes make a point that cannot be emphasized enough:

We have both spent our professional careers strenuously avoiding partisanship in our writing and thinking… This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to… vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).

The challenge in defending our democracy from authoritarianism, and reversing the “truth decay” that has become a central component of the right’s ongoing war on empiricism and accountability, demands civic engagement from all of us, no matter our political persuasion. For some good background on the stakes before us, see Ezra Klein’s piece on the new book “How Democracies Die.” The key takeaway is that it’s not authoritarian demagogues who destroy democracy; it’s the political parties and actors who go along with it, calculating (erroneously) that it’s worth the cost for enacting their preferred policies. The Republican Party—as countless historians and political scientists and many conservatives have tried desperately to point out—has been making this tragic mistake.

The conservative Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s former chief speechwriter, puts it well: “the greatest source of cynicism is not the existence of corrupt people in politics; it is good people who lose their way.” He warns his fellow Republicans that supporting this administration is an act of epic cowardice that’s putting at risk everything for which they claim to stand. Brian Beutler, meanwhile, responds to Rauch and Wittes, in another article worth reading in full:

Defeating Republicans at the polls is, of course, a precondition for ending the country’s slide into right-wing authoritarianism. But Republicans have been defeated before without being chastened. To reverse this alarming antidemocratic trend, the modern-Republican Party’s style of politics must be made anathema. That won’t happen without a large-scale civic censure of political actors and institutions, like the GOP, that reject empiricism and equality, attack mediating arbiters of authority, and embrace propaganda and bad-faith argument as ordinary brickbats of political war.

…The Republican Party isn’t going to ‘right itself or implode’ unless that kind of unprincipled behavior is rendered toxic. It should be considered disreputable outside of movement conservatism to work for Fox News or for the same RNC that propped up Trump, and then backed Roy Moore in Alabama. If you conduct yourself the way Devin Nunes has conducted himself as Trump’s agent atop the House Intelligence Committee, you shouldn’t just have to worry about losing your seat, but about your name being dirt.

…After Trump, Democrats could adopt a more aggressive approach than they have in the past, on the fool-me-twice principle. They could abolish the filibuster, expedite legislation to widen the franchise and reform campaign finance laws, right Mitch McConnell’s theft of a Supreme Court seat, and conduct oversight of the institutions of government Trump corrupted. They could set up a commission to examine the role of propaganda in American media, and report out how and why, under Trump, the Republican Party entered a de facto partnership with hostile foreign intelligence to influence American politics.

…But to truly marginalize the GOP’s political style would require a level of cooperation from many conservatives that doesn’t exist, and a level of buy-in from generally non-partisan institutions—the media, the bureaucracy, corporate America, and civil society—which have proven ill-equipped to defend themselves from Republican efforts to coopt or discredit them.

Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 campaign manager, put it this way:

Fire is part of the natural life cycle of the forest. It destroys the forest but also purifies and renews it so that the cycle of life can begin again. So it must be for the Trump-Republican party. Only through repudiation and defeat can it be renewed.

The corrupted, rotten and complicit Republican majority that is abetting this President’s damage to our institutions, national security and domestic tranquility must face electoral annihilation. A massive coalition of Democrats, independents and appalled Republicans must come together to deliver a message to the world that the American people will defend our Republic and the inheritance bequeathed to us by previous generations.

The challenge before us should, and must, unite conservatives and liberals.

Jeff Flake, the Republican senator from Arizona, in a speech that may be taught to future high school students, assuming the cowardice of which he speaks hasn’t by then reduced us all to rubble: “It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.”

The transcript is worth reading in full.

Eliot Cohen, who served in the last Bush administration, seems to agree with Edmund Burke’s famous quote that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” His recent article in The Atlantic, “A Clarifying Moment in American History,” is well worth a read, and raises the question: How much longer will Republicans stay silent amid the desecration of American values?

A tide may be turning. Conservative writers such as Jennifer Rubin and David Brooks (who spent the past decade providing cover for an increasingly unhinged right) have started to speak out about the madness of tolerating the potential destruction of the Republic for the sake of deregulation and lowering marginal tax rates. But the silence among Republicans in power remains deafening.

Along these lines, David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, pens a long but essential article: “How to Build an Autocracy.” I highly recommend it.

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Eight years ago, my sister and I stood together on the National Mall and watched as a young senator walked out into the freezing cold and took the reins of a nation that had long veered off course. We felt relief beyond words to know that our country would be led by a man of integrity and decency, a man who believed in science and reason. A patriotic man who honored all of us, no matter our background.

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David Roberts knocks it out of the park with this election post-mortem. It’s so exhaustively researched that it makes me feel as though I’ve been lying on the couch and basking incontinently in a Snug Wow.

Also, don’t miss these short reflections from Jonathan Chait and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The latter makes multiple points that cannot be overstressed, including the need to fight against the pervasive tendency to engage in false equivalence between two fundamentally different political forces.

Ruth Marcus also pens a good column about our post-truth era, and the urgent purpose it demands from both journalism and citizenship.

I’ve lately found myself wondering if this is all a dream, so surreal is it to fathom what the G.O.P. has wrought. And what this may mean for the future of our country, of our planet, of millions of species at risk. Our republic is facing a clear and present danger, with authoritarianism and strains of fascism looking to make it exceedingly difficult to wrest democracy back. I worry that this reality is already being normalized in the media, is being accepted by too many people as simply the new state of affairs. Euphemism is extremely dangerous at such times. It’s not out of the question that children today will grow up in a country where, as in Russia, free and fair elections are a thing of the past, where we’ve effectively ceded our power as citizens, including our collective ability (which we’d finally begun to exert under Obama) to mitigate environmental catastrophe.

Along these lines, here are two worthwhile pieces that spell out the dangers before us. The first is from foreign policy analyst Stephen Walt: “10 Ways to Tell if Your President Is a Dictator.”

The second is from the historian Timothy Snyder, one of the world’s most respected experts on 20th-century Europe, and not someone given to hyperbole: “What you—yes, you—can do to save America from tyranny.”

Also notable are these pieces on how authoritarianism relies on a war on truth—a war that Fox News and Breitbart and the Wall St. Journal editorial page, among others, have waged with more success than we as a nation have come to terms with:

“Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy,” by Ned Resnikoff

“Trump’s Lies Destroy Logic As Well As Truth,” by Jeet Heer

“Who’s Really to Blame for Fake News,” by Neal Gabler

This haunting reflection by Masha Gessen on Jewish persecution during World War II, and on lessons for resisting fascism today, is also worth a read.

In this moment—the darkest and scariest of our lifetime, one that may have consequences for the country and planet beyond anything we’ve fathomed—we turn to those whose wisdom has proved prophetic over the years. Here are a few worth reading:

David Remnick

Andrew Sullivan

Jonathan Chait, plus this

Garrett Epps

Masha Gessen

Paul Krugman

Leon Wieseltier

Adam Gopnik

Ryan Lizza

Matthew Yglesias

It will be tempting, in the weeks and months ahead, to be lulled into complacency by periods of apparent normalcy. But nothing about this moment is normal; nothing about the election of an unstable, racist, woefully ignorant authoritarian demagogue (or the fact that Vladimir Putin, an enemy of the United States, helped engineer his victory) bodes well for the Republic. Civic engagement is going to have to take its rightful place as a central part of our lives, whether we’re liberal or conservative, rich or poor, white or part of any minority. This is the stark new reality. If there are no silver linings in Tuesday’s travesty—and for the overwhelming majority of earth’s population, there aren’t—we must forge one.

At the third debate, Hillary Clinton essentially mopped the floor with Trump’s bouffant, then coolly deposited his candidacy into the trash chute. The country seemed to have recognized, finally, that only one of these individuals should be let within 1,000 miles of the nuclear codes.

And yet the rot in our civic discourse, and the growing war on the legitimacy of our democratic institutions, are such that neo-fascism remains within reach of defeating democracy this Tuesday. It’s the most dangerous moment of our lifetime. So here are some endorsements to ponder and to share with anyone still on the fence in these final hours:

The New Yorker (to me, the best-written endorsement of the year)

The Atlantic, endorsing a candidate for only the third time in 159 years.

Foreign Policy, endorsing for the first time in its history.

David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, whose conservative case for Hillary should be read by everyone with a stake in the G.O.P.: “To vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe; cutting one’s throat to lower one’s blood pressure.”

The Economist, asserting that “The choice is not hard… His ideas on revenue and spending are an affront to statistics. We would sooner have endorsed Richard Nixon—even had we known how he would later come to grief.”

The Arizona Republic, which hadn’t endorsed a Democrat in its 126-year history.

Adam Gopnik

The Washington Post

Roger Angell, the 96-year-old New Yorker writer and World War II veteran, who warns that “My country faces a danger unmatched in our history since the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, or perhaps since 1943, when the Axis powers held most of Continental Europe…”

Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush: “The policies Trump endorses would destroy, not save, U.S. jobs. Simply put, a Trump presidency is unthinkable.”

Conor Friedersdorf, a conservative whose case, like David Frum’s, should be read by anyone on the fence.

Ken Burns, whose impassioned eloquence one can imagine being accompanied by the violin soundtrack for “The Civil War.”

Robert Kagan, the conservative author and thinker, plus this sledgehammer from last winter.

The New York Times 

USA Today, which had never issued a presidential endorsement.

Wired

The LA Times

Open letter from 145 technology leaders, of diverse ideological bent.

Open letter from dozens of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials, including former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, warning that Trump “would be the most reckless President in American history.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists, stating that “a Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history.”

The Dallas Morning News, which hadn’t endorsed a Democrat in 75 years.

Open letter from 380 economists, including eight Nobel laureates, writing that “Donald Trump is a dangerous, destructive choice for the country. He misinforms the electorate, degrades trust in public institutions with conspiracy theories, and promotes willful delusion over engagement with reality. If elected, he poses a unique danger to the functioning of democratic and economic institutions, and to the prosperity of the country.”

Open letter from 70 Nobel laureates, stating that “it is imperative that Hillary Clinton be elected as the next President of the United States.”

Open letter from Nobel laureates in economics, stating that “Hillary Clinton is by far the superior presidential candidate for our economy and our country.”

David Leonhardt: “Only an unambiguous rejection of Trump will banish Trumpism for 2020 and beyond. Only a lopsided loss, with millions of Republicans so repelled by him that they vote for someone they never imagined they would, sends the message that bigotry, lying and authoritarianism violate Republican values—your values.”

The Globe and Mail, a Canadian paper speaking for the global community: “Above all, Mr. Trump is an authoritarian. He’s not much interested in ideas or rules, and that includes the U.S. Constitution, the most cerebral of government documents. His values and impulses are not those of the America—the great America—the world knows and needs.”

Andrew Sullivan: “I have long had faith that some version of fascism cannot come to power in America… As always in history, you still needed the spark, the unique actor who could deploy demagogic talent to drag an advanced country into violence and barbarism. In Trump, America found one for the ages.”

Fareed Zakaria: “These then are the core views of Donald Trump…: racism, sexism, protectionism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. His views on taxes and regulations are irrelevant. Your view of Hillary Clinton is irrelevant. Donald Trump is not a normal candidate. He is a cancer on American democracy. And that is why I will vote against him next Tuesday.”

My own effort to account for the madness is here.

Today marks twenty years since the advent of Fox News, and for the occasion I thought it fitting to weigh in with something fair and balanced: “Twenty Years of Fox News”

It’s my best attempt to account for the madness befalling us, and to call attention to an urgent problem facing our democracy.

For many Americans, the G.O.P. convention was the most disquieting spectacle since Buffalo Bill lowered a bottle of lotion into a well in “The Silence of the Lambs.” This take from the political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann explains how we got here. (It also explains the inspiration for this site’s tagline; the two parties are vastly asymmetric in their extremism, and false equivalence, often by “centrist” pundits, has only abetted the insanity.)

The election fast approaching will be the first in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. Here’s my latest on this topic, from Scalawag—a new publication that takes its name from the slur used for Southerners opposed to white supremacy after the Civil War.

This summer, while the country was debating things like whether Trump was referring to Megyn Kelly’s nose, or whether he had in mind a less olfactorily-purposed orifice, a small group of Americans was hiking a thousand miles from Selma to D.C. to try to rescue our democracy.

Here’s my latest, from The New Yorker.

Song: “Decline”

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Here’s a song from my forthcoming album, “The Only of Whitaker.”

(It’ll be a very short album.)

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When I wrote this, I was living in a basement apartment in Gramercy with a small, polite, and rather muscular family of cockroaches. When I wasn’t busy killing one of them I was tweaking my recording gear and listening to Neil Young’s “Hey Hey My My,” which I always felt captured something essential about growing up that I couldn’t quite put into words.

Live From New York, It’s Flo Fox

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Flo Fox shot out of her apartment building and turned right. She was steering her motorized wheelchair with her left arm—the only limb she could move since multiple sclerosis set in at 30 and, over three ensuing decades, left her mostly paralyzed and scarcely able to see. Now, at 61, Fox was legally blind but inhaling the sunshine, navigating with what little vision remained, her purple hair flapping in the wind. Jack’s 99 Cent store, her favorite, was ten blocks away. Continue reading →

Peaches on a Friday Afternoon

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peaches-03Peaches lay dead in her coffin. Mourners were drifting into the church, in a poor neighborhood in Winston-Salem, and approaching the corpse to pay their final respects. An organ was playing softly. About two hundred people had taken their seats, all except three or four of them black. It was quite warm, and some were fanning themselves with funeral fliers.

Continue reading →

The Chicken Who Killed Colonel Sanders

On a bright morning in New York not long ago, outside the KFC on Sixth Avenue, pedestrians stopped dead in their tracks. Colonel Sanders—the kindly KFC mascot, the goateed guardian of the secret recipe for finger-lickin’ fried chicken—was hanging upside-down over the sidewalk, screaming. He was being tortured to death by a seven-foot-tall chicken, which hopped about waving large knives and slashing at his torso. Blood spewed onto the sidewalk.

A young boy holding the hand of his babysitter approached, his eyes like ping-pong balls. Spectators were starting to gather, and the chicken turned to them, taunting them with a series of kung-fu gestures. This was a seriously pissed chicken. Continue reading →

Quitting the Dish, Part II

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On a frigid afternoon in January 2014, I boarded a train in Penn Station to visit Washington, D.C. for the weekend. I was just getting settled when, to my astonishment, I saw that the man facing me was none other than the writer I’d been reading religiously the past decade. “This is going to be a little distracting,” I said. “I’ve forwarded probably 200 of your articles to my sister. I consider you part of my family.” Continue reading →

Quitting the Dish: A Reflection on Andrew Sullivan from a Bereaved Dish-Head

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The Nile  © John Whitaker

It’s hard to imagine life without Andrew Sullivan. He hasn’t died, but his decision to end his blog, the Dish, this month after 15 years has occasioned, in me and probably thousands of others, something akin to bereavement. To whom will we now go for a reliable, and reliably sane, perspective? Who’s going to bring us the latest from Cairo, Kiev, Tehran, or the most recent study on the alarming acidification of the ocean, while in the next breath apprising us of the bearded fellow modeling his ex-wife’s wedding dress on eBay?

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The miracle of the Dish was that it managed to be both playful and deeply serious. It was a kind of master-guide to the internet—perhaps the single best roundup of news and commentary on the web. The sources it drew from, and the topics it covered, spanned the globe. The voices were intellectually and politically diverse, religious, poetic, philosophical. Letters (and photos) arrived from all over, with illuminating anecdotes or expertise. Nothing was off limits. There was Sullivan’s personal experience as a gay man living with H.I.V., and his decades-long quest for marriage equality. (A struggle that, under President Obama, saw more success than he thought he’d see in his lifetime.) There was his initial cheerleading for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, and his public about-face as he grew disillusioned with a conservative movement that was becoming increasingly unhinged. He brought to bear his perspective as a conservative in the British Tory tradition, and that gave him a sharper knife with which to dissect the strains of fundamentalism and fear rampant in American life. When he was wrong, he not only admitted it, but struggled to understand why. And this intellectual honesty was what set him apart.

The Dish grappled incessantly with the problems this country faced. It took pains to air other perspectives rather than caricature them. Sullivan was one of the most consistent and important critics of contemporary conservatism; he saw the damage that ideological radicalism was doing to the G.O.P., how the right-wing media complex was preventing an honest reckoning with past mistakes and the challenges ahead. And this passion—having been on both sides of the crucial ideological divide—lent the Dish a fierce urgency. To miss Sullivan’s voice during the Bush and Obama eras would have been like following tennis without ever bothering to watch Rafael Nadal.

The Dish’s editors—seven were listed on the masthead—followed some 3,000 blogs. Each morning, after a mammoth amount of scouring and culling, they would produce a memo of links for Sullivan to consider posting. The result was a remarkably efficient machine. It provided a depth of coverage, and a sense of community, that made other websites feel two-dimensional by comparison.

“I almost always feel a little better after paying [the Dish] a visit, even when the news of the day is unusually depressing,” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote. “There ought to be a name for what the Dish is—’blog’ doesn’t capture it, somehow.”

The Dish had more than a million unique visitors each month, and some eight million page views. It had had previous homes, on the websites of Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, but Sullivan forged a path of independence the last two years, relying on reader subscriptions. (The Dish was advertisement-free, and refreshingly devoid of the “sponsored” content that has been blurring the line between journalism and advertising.) Thirty thousand opted to subscribe, for unlimited access. They were charged an annual fee of 20 dollars but were allowed to pay more if they desired. And a sizable percentage did. One subscriber contributed the highest amount that could fit into the payment box: $9,999.

The Dish stayed comfortably in the black, but the operation was taking a toll on Sullivan’s health. For 15 years he’d been “on”, like a comedian or actor must be onstage, with little break save for sleep or illness. His doctors told him if he kept it up it could be the end of him.

He took the occasional vacation. But the blog wasn’t the same without him. And there was always some new outrage, some new state of insanity that called for his attention. Twenty first graders gunned down in Newtown couldn’t budge the NRA’s chokehold on the Senate. (Even though the gun-control measures defeated there were minor and widely popular.) A near-depression called for more stimulus, but the country remained mired in a shortsighted and counter-productive deficit hysteria. Increasingly dire reports from the scientific community stood no chance against demagogues who assured their audience it was all a hoax. The reports warned that if we continued business as usual, half the earth’s species could be extinct within 100 years, but Obama’s efforts to do something about this made him a dictator.

There was a mountain of madness in the way of sanity.

But Sullivan was a bulldozer, pushing mightily against the intransigence that loomed over American life. He confronted the ideological fundamentalism head-on. He argued for the culture wars to be put behind us. He linked to the studies showing the psychological reasons behind the denial of man-made global warming, so that readers could get a full sense of the challenges ahead, for it was human nature itself that was so tricky—our tendency to think tribally, to engage in motivated reasoning, to discount threats in the distant future. He argued eloquently for temperance to our imperialistic hubris; passionately against torture and with a disgust for its apologists that was as hot as running lava; for the Catholic Church to confront its sins of covering up the rape of children and come back to the teachings of Christ. He pushed and pushed and brought to bear everything that was within him. And over time he moved the earth.