Canon on independent local voting: "You vote not for the party but for the candidate you know; your friend, your neighbor, your friend’s neighbor, someone you went to elementary school with."

Some fine points by Dan Canon, who lives among us right here in Nawbany.

National Politics Taint Local Races And Lay Waste To Societal Norms, by Dan Canon (LEO Weekly)

... In years past, there was not a lot of daylight between Republican and Democratic candidates at the state and municipal levels in Indiana and Kentucky; you often still can’t distinguish one from the other if they don’t tell you. It is not uncommon for a local politician to switch parties depending on who is likely to get more votes at the top of the ticket. So, to a degree, national-level politics have long influenced what goes on in small towns.

The degree has gradually increased over the last few decades, as federal wedge issues have been made the focal point of every political contest in America, from the Clarksville dogcatcher to the Rabbit Hash dogmayor. This shift has not happened by accident; the GOP was shrewd enough to localize national issues in order to dominate state legislatures and redraw the federal map, a strategy that has proved stunningly successful ...

Allow me to skip to the conclusion.

... The real question is: Given that these are the devils we know, what does a (Matt) Bevin victory or a (Bob) Hall victory say about the degree to which people have adopted the national lens as the one through which all politics should be viewed? Dissembling, insulting teachers, bulldozing family homes or outright insane behavior — do these still matter to heartland voters on Election Day? Or, has our collective attention span been whittled away to the nubs of abortion and immigration, with no room for anything else?

If the former, then I think there’s real hope for our fragile republic and for the Midwest in particular. Nearly a hundred years ago, an editor of the Terre Haute Tribune said of iconic socialist Eugene Debs: “Ninety-five percent of the people [in Terre Haute] don’t like his ideas, but they worship the man.” For now, it is still acceptable — even desirable — to cast yourself as an independent voter in small-town Indiana. You vote not for the party but for the candidate you know; your friend, your neighbor, your friend’s neighbor, someone you went to elementary school with. You couldn’t imagine them doing anything too nefarious. As long as this is still true, there is a chance, however slim, that progressives who’ve laid roots in their communities can win municipal offices and state legislatures. In red states, the image of left-wing populists has needed rehabilitation at least since the McCarthy era, and mainstays of small towns are just the people to do it. Alas, it seems this cycle will be more about expelling the worst devils we know and meeting some new ones. Let’s hope we can at least do that.

Of course, it depends on what is meant by "progressive," given that the differences between Bob Hall and Jeff Gahan are paper-thin at best, but I'll refrain from quibbling with a thought-provoking essay.

As LEO reminds us: Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and law professor. “Midwesticism”is his short-documentary series about Midwesterners who are making the world a better place. Watch it at: patreon.com/dancanon.

"Right now, the grim fact is that the Democratic Party has been constructed to lose, and we should stop acting surprised if it keeps on doing so."

Pretty much.

Doomed, delusional, divided and corrupt: How the Democratic Party became a haunted house, by Andrew O'Hehir (Salon)

Conflicted about ideology and identity and deeply compromised by history, the Democratic Party is built to lose

 ... I’m also not just talking about the party’s steadfast refusal to adopt coherent, progressive and broadly popular positions on issues like health care, gun control, marijuana legalization and electoral reform. But it’s important to grasp why Democrats in power won’t embrace those things — as opposed to embracing them on the campaign trail, which really doesn’t count — because the reasons go well beyond ideological confusion or political cowardice and into deeper, darker places.

Over the last 40 years, the Democrats have become an increasingly awkward coalition of affluent, cosmopolitan whites and urban people of color, and have largely abandoned their previous mistrust of corporate power, Wall Street and big capital in general. Go down the list of powerful congressional Democrats — especially the committee chairs and members of leadership — and pay attention to where and how they raise money, and who their major donors are. The corruption is widespread and deeply rooted, and it cannot be dislodged simply by anointing a reformer or “socialist” as the presidential nominee. If anything, that should be the end point of a renovation or redemption project that has not happened.

I’m not just talking about the peculiar fact that the 2020 Democratic campaign will likely boil down to a contest between three white people in their 70s, each of them with glaring and obvious flaws. I’m not talking about the unresolved post-2016 tactical and ideological struggle between “progressives” and “moderates,” which was a long time coming and is now playing out in the nomination contest. I’m also not talking about the exaggerated infighting on the left between supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, which represents both substantive and symbolic divisions — and which, on both sides, also represents a profoundly unrealistic view of the nature of political power.

Those things can all be pulled apart and argued over individually, of course. But I am truly and honestly not arguing here for the victory of a particular candidate or faction or strategy. I don’t know how impeachment would turn out, and neither do you. I have no idea whether Sanders or Warren or Biden or Kamala Betogieg is the best bet to defeat Trump next year, and nobody else does either. That leaves us with the radical proposition that people should support the candidate they like best and we’ll see what happens, which I realize is deeply unsatisfactory punditry.

But all such questions, when considered piece by piece, ignore the deeper underlying narrative that frames them in the first place. They all signal toward the Democratic Party’s remarkable ability to manufacture defeat, even (or perhaps especially) when objective conditions seem overwhelmingly favorable to victory. The real problem here, I’m afraid, admits of no easy solution: The Democratic Party comprises a wide range of views and voices, some of whom are vigorously trying to change its direction. But all of them are trapped inside a haunted house. Troubled by the ghosts of the past and clinging to useless rituals, Democrats appear largely unable to perceive actually existing reality or react to it appropriately.

This is not exactly a new idea ...

"There are reasons to be cheerful. These are the dying days of a rancid old order."

On the one hand, the essay linked below by Will Sutton bears a degree of thematic unity with my column last week.

ON THE AVENUES: Unless you open your eyes, “resistance” is an empty gesture.

But it's an ideal link for posting because the Democratic Party swamp meme needs to be seen as often as possible between now and November.

There are reasons to be cheerful. These are the dying days of a rancid old order, by Will Hutton (The Guardian)

In the UK and the US, the political wind will soon change in favour of those demanding good government

Don’t despair. We may be living through an attempted rightwing revolution, but its foundations are rotten. There may be a counter-revolution, as there is after every revolution, and it will be built on much firmer ground. The charlatans may be in control in both Britain and the US, but their time is limited. Their programmes are self-defeating and destructive and they do not speak to the dynamic and increasingly ascendant forces in both our societies ...

Amid Adam's wreckage, the case for optimism: "The advances made by liberals last week render Trump’s talk of all-out victory absurd."

It's true that we've been holding straight to the fire the tender feet of local progressives who consistently apply their progressive beliefs to state and national issues alone, and ignore the daily violation of precisely these same principles by their conniving party chieftains right here in New Albany and Floyd County. here's a sampling:

Pretty in Pink Slips: "The Indiana Democratic Party is badly broken, and party leaders must let go of what worked in the not too distant past."

Embarrassment as "the Donnelly campaign demonstrates the futility of seeking to surmount these obstacles by trying to out-Republican the Republicans."

No blue wave, but white flags aplenty as the GOP dominates Floyd County in mid-term elections. Time yet for heads to roll?

Anna Murray's amazing post-election statement.

So immutable is the chairman that he need not speak twice, seeing as he said nothing the first time.

By the way, has the local chairman tendered his resignation yet? As a friend so eloquently stated reality:

When will local Democrats hold the county party accountable for the losses encountered in the last three cycles? Let's remember - not just the losses of Eurton & Badger-Byrd this round, but Chuck Freiberger in 2016 and the loss of the City Council control in 2015 when Baird and Gonder lost. We've watched the FCDP leadership execute the same plan of action year after year despite continual losses. Does anyone believe the FCDP exists for anything other than protecting the leadership's self interest and protecting the Mayor and his clique?

In short, if you're giving Jeff Gahan a pass on matters like campaign finance payola, public housing demolitions and the mayor's eternally duplicitous "Bumbling Mister Rogers Meets Pure Megalomania" fix-is-in persona, you may think of yourself as a progressive, but you're missing a great many obvious points about the nature of hypocrisy.

However, as the future of progressive political thinking pertains to other faraway places and not the confines of the gilded executive washroom in our emerging Reisz Mahal, let's examine the case for optimism.

Wouldn't it be interesting for all of us to talk about how these progressive trends apply here, in this place, without submitting yet again to the local Democratic leadership imperative wherein any discussion about progressive ideals must first pass through the tentacles of Gahan's Money Machine -- to be scrubbed of all their fundamental meaning?

The message from the midterms: a new, progressive US is slowly taking shape, by Will Hutton (The Guardian)

The advances made by liberals last week render Trump’s talk of all-out victory absurd

It has been a dark two years in Britain and the US. The future had seemed to be captured by the worst of the Anglo-American right, a populist, anti-foreigner, anti-EU, ultra-libertarian, anti-common decency alliance that extended from Donald Trump via Nigel Farage to Jacob Rees-Mogg. They were the masters now. If you believed in anything progressive, forget it.

Tuesday’s midterm elections in the US did not lift the pall, or so it seemed at first glance. Trump insisting on “a near-complete victory” in the hours after the polls had closed when the Republicans had lost control of the House of Representatives was vainglorious overclaiming, but it was not wholly stupid. The immediate consensus was that the hoped-for Democrat wave had turned out to be little more than a ripple. They had not won as many seats in the House of Representatives as they hoped, while the Republicans seemed to have consolidated their grip on the Senate. Where Trump had campaigned hard, the Republicans had won. The odds of him being re-elected in 2020 had shortened. Progressive politics was dying.

But look again a few days later and the story is very different. More Americans turned out to vote in 2018 than in any midterm election since 1966 – and more than 10 million more of them voted Democrat than Republican. As the late counts come in, the Democrat tally of gains in the House will top the targeted 30, including what seemed like improbable wins in Republican strongholds in well-heeled suburbs. This is the strongest rebound in recent decades and in an election year when the economy is booming.

The picture in the Senate is also much more mixed than it seemed on Wednesday morning. The Democrats held Montana when it seemed lost, they took Nevada and at the time of writing are ahead in Arizona. In Florida, the race is so tight both for the governorship and Senate that there will be a manual recount. Sherrod Brown won Ohio, a state that went for Trump in 2016, by a stunning 10% margin. The three states that handed Trump the presidency – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – now all have Democrat governors. Texas, one of the most conservative states, was only narrowly held with Beto O’Rourke falling just short against the Republican incumbent. For Trump to call this a near complete victory is fatuous.

O’Rourke’s campaign was particularly illuminating about what is happening in the US. He’s an across-the-board progressive with openly liberal commitments: universal healthcare; an assault on misogyny; pro-immigration (it makes the US strong); for accountable capitalism and gun control; and in favour of ending the federal prohibition on marijuana. He was even against the militarism of US foreign policy.

His cause seemed hopeless. He spoke in favour of black American NFL football players who had taken the knee when the national anthem was played (“There is nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights”), courage of a high order in Texas.

But from an unpromising start – a couple of friends and a rented car – his candidacy caught fire. He campaigned in every one of Texas’s 254 counties and through his website portal ActBlue raised a stunning $70m. By the end, he had recruited 25,000 volunteers; 71% of 18- to 29-year-olds voted for him, along with 39% of “Anglo women” – the most conservative in the US. He made liberalism popular in Texas of all places and came within a whisker of winning.

It is a pattern reflected across the US. Symbolically, Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the confederacy and the ultra-conservative city, fell to the Democrats. Almost every city and large town in the US is now controlled by Democrats; 60% of women voted Democrat. The rightwing view is to mock as liberal fads “political correctness”, the #MeToo movement, greens, climate change, the young’s embrace of the view that gender is a continuum, respect for other cultures, the growing trend for vegetarianism. Instead, let’s hang ’em, shoot ’em and fuck ’em – vote for Trump in the US (and Brexit in Britain).

But the message of the midterms is that this is not what the vast majority of Americans believe in or want. The majority culture so far has been denied its full expression by the US electoral system. Rural conservative states such as Wyoming and North Dakota, with fewer than a million voters, return the same number of senators as urbanised California with 40 million people.

Add the gerrymander of creating artificial districts with Republican majorities and suppressing the votes of blacks and ex-prisoners and the pro-conservative bias is near complete.

Yet the nearest the US has to a national election where those preferences can be expressed is in the House of Representatives. It now looks more like the US than ever – emphatically controlled by O’Rourke-style liberals with a record number of women, of whom two are Muslim. California and New York are now fiercely Democrat, as are the young, African Americans and Latinos. They enlist social media, not in centralised hothouses and data farms, but in myriad individual networks. They are the future, rejecting wholesale Trump’s rhetoric and values. They and O’Rourke’s charisma could carry the country, making inroads into the rural and smalltown US that its political system so privileges.

As in the US, so in Britain. This is where our culture is settling too, masked by our overwhelming rightwing media. Brexit, contrary to Jeremy Corbyn’s defeatism, can be stopped. A “people’s vote” would capitalise on the same trends and save Britain. All we need is the Labour party to wake up – and back it.

Taibbi: "Conventional wisdom is pretty much always wrong, and often spectacularly so."

Earlier I was thinking about the Donnelly shambles, and how I can't seem to take my eyes off the proverbial train wreck.

Embarrassment as "the Donnelly campaign demonstrates the futility of seeking to surmount these obstacles by trying to out-Republican the Republicans."

An hour later, former councilman John Gonder offered a comment perfectly calibrated for the mood.

This is from a speech Harry Truman gave in 1952 to Americans for Democratic Action, it is found at the Harry S Truman Presidential Library and Museum web site:

I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

It was true then and it is true now. The Donnelly campaign's tack rightward was like watching two trains headed toward each other on the same track; the result was inevitable.

Gonder knows all too well what it's like to be progressive and kneecapped by his own local political party, that of crassly indeterminate ethical values and dumpster fires.

Has the local chairman resigned yet?

Forget ‘Conventional Wisdom’: There Are No More Moderates, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Beware the latest call to “move to the center” — which is just the same old tune, re-packaged

 ... Voters are not skittish, brainless creatures afraid of strong policy proposals. That more accurately describes the politicians and corporate donors who are invested in things staying as they are. Most actual people are living on the edge financially, are angry, and will take policy help from anywhere they can get it.

Polls today show Americans in large majorities now support expanded Social Security, drug re-importation, single-payer health care, free college, and they want Medicare to be able to negotiate lower drug prices. These positions would do well if any party threw its support behind them.

But conventional wisdom, once again, will likely insist heading into 2020 that something other than policy will matter, when it comes to picking candidates. CNN earlier this year, quoting pols and consultants, actually said that “in the era of Trump, where uniqueness is prized,” Democrats should search for “candidates with distinct backgrounds” ...

Michael Moore interview: "The director’s latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, is a broadside against both the president and the Democratic establishment that failed to defeat him."

Moore's documentary film didn't last long locally.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9: "The film is as much about how the left and the media have failed us as it is about the dangers of Trump."

My guess is it will have greater success abroad, where people tend to understand realities that we can't, or won't, face here in Merica.

Interview: Michael Moore: 'We have the power to crush Trump', by Owen Jones (The Guardian)

The director’s latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, is a broadside against both the president and the Democratic establishment that failed to defeat him. He explains why a leftwing comeback is on the cards

 ... For young leftists, myself included, Moore’s work was something of a political life-raft back in an era when the traditional left was all but sunk. Fahrenheit 9/11 – his indictment of George W Bush’s so-called war on terror – courageously advanced otherwise marginalised ideas: it suggested that a proposed gas pipeline through Afghanistan may have played a role in the war, and noted links between the Bush administration and the Saudi regime. Moore has called for Bush administration officials to be put on trial. All this strays from the respectable centrist critique of the invasion, that it was simply the wrong war at the wrong time, or a “dumb war”, as Obama put it, rather than a crime.

His documentaries are designed not simply to inform, but to mobilise people. “Yeah, I was hoping to stop the Iraq war, hoping to end gun violence, to ensure every American has health insurance,” he explains. But he is keen to emphasise that his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9 (9 November 2016 being the day Donald Trump was declared US president-elect), is different. “It’s not some single issue, it’s not just about Donald Trump,” he says. “There’s nothing I can tell you about him that you don’t already know. You’d be wasting time and money to watch that.”

(snip)

For me, one of the strongest elements in the film was his J’accuse against the Democratic party establishment. He seethes with profane rage when he talks about their failures. He makes a parallel with his documentary – he’s down a rabbit hole again: if it’s a great film, if the critics like it, then he’s done his bit as a director, he hands his raw materials to Vertigo, the UK company in charge of distributing the film, it’s on them to make it a success.

It’s an allegory for the Democrats, he suggests. The polling shows that on the key issues, such as progressive taxation, or abortion rights, or healthcare, or gun control, most Americans side with the progressive side of the argument. In the past six out of seven presidential elections, he notes, the Democrats won the popular vote. “So the Democratic party are handed a population which agrees with their entire platform,” he says; they even have more voters. “Yet they’re still unable to put themselves and us in power.” If his film distributor kept doing that, it would go out of business. But here is what happens, his film posits, if the Democrats become too much like the Republicans, too in hock to a corporate agenda ...

Thomas Frank explains how Trump could win another term, and how genetically altered Democrats might prevent it.

There's no water at THIS reservoir.

"In the vast catalogue of social posturing, there are few more repugnant sights than rich people congratulating themselves for being righteous. In particular, it is a terrible way to win back the blue-collar white voters who were responsible, even more than were the Russians, for Trump’s win."
-- Thomas Frank

Frank's original essay at Harper's is a longer read, and I recommend it, but the Cliff Notes version is provided at The Nation.

Thomas Frank: Trump Could Win the 2020 Election, by Jon Wiener (The Nation)

Let's focus on two questions asked of Frank by Wiener.

JW: Okay, what about Mueller saving us?

TF: Every Democrat that I talked to is counting on Mueller to deliver the midterms for them. This has worked for Democrats before. The famous Watergate class in Congress in 1974 was entirely the doing of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, and the Democrats are basically expecting that to happen again. It looks like it will work.

JW: What’s wrong with that?

TF: It breeds a kind of passiveness among Democrats where they never have to think about their own message. They may succeed in the coming midterms, but that’s a recipe for disaster in the long term. If Trump is not running for reelection three years from now, there’s going to be another Trump. The Republicans are never going to retreat from what this guy showed them in 2016. They now understand how you beat the Democrats. The next Trump is not going to be so vulgar, he’s not going to have affairs with porn stars, he’s not going to pick fights with NFL players. So the Democrats have to be thinking bigger. They can’t think “Oh, he screwed up. Great! Now we get back in.”

Or, as Frank put it at greater length at Harper's:

How do Democrats change course without sounding like they’re criticizing Obama or the Clintons — or, by extension, the neoliberal fantasy that has sustained the party since the Nineties? The answer is that they can’t, and so they don’t. They would rather sit back and expect Robert Mueller to rescue them. They would rather count on demographic change to give them a majority somewhere down the road. So they “do nothing and wait for the other side to implode,” observed Bill Curry, a former adviser to President Clinton who has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s strongest internal critics. “That’s been their strategy for most of my adult life. Well, how’s that been working out?”

Curry continued his critique. The party, he said, desperately needs to get over its infatuation with its glorious past: “The mistakes of the Democratic Party are the mistakes of Obama and Clinton. Taking responsibility for those mistakes means holding them accountable. And so many people have such deep, positive feelings for Obama and the Clintons that they can’t bear to have that conversation.” His conclusion was as blunt as what I heard from so many others: “Trump wins by the Democrats not changing.”

It would be enjoyable to speak of these matters with our local Democratic horizontal hierarchy, serial drinkers of the DNC's by-the-numbers-bot-speaking Kool-Aid for so very long. But it remains a tableau of circled wagons, dedicated first and foremost to maintaining grassroots beak-wetting at the expense of ideas.

Frank persists in offering the solution to our miasma.

Get that great majority back together, I think, and it would be unstoppable. There is really only one set of successful politics for an age of inequality like this one, and it naturally favors the party of Roosevelt. Trump succeeded by pretending to be the heir of populists past, acting the role of a rough-hewn reformer who detested the powerful and cared about working-class people. Now it is the turn of Democrats to take it back from him. They may have to fire their consultants. They may have to stand up to their donors. They will certainly have to find the courage to change, to dump the ideology of the Nineties, the catechism of tech, bank, and globe that everyone now knows is nothing but an excuse for an out-of-touch elite. But the time has come. History is calling.

It's unraveling, all right, "but he won’t fall without a push."

Meet the Floyd County Democratic Party platform.

Gary Younge is a great writer, and he's on it.

The administration is mired in incompetence and calamity. So why aren’t his enemies presenting a hopeful alternative?

The venality is so baroque, the vulgarity so ostentatious, the inconsistencies so stark, the incompetence so epic and the lies so brazen, it leaves you speechless. His vanity is without guile and the scandals that embroil him without end. Almost everything he says and does has been publicly contradicted, by himself, usually on Twitter.

Wait just one minute.

Damn.

He's taking about Trump, not Gahan.

Trump’s presidency is unravelling. But he won’t fall without a push, by Gary Younge (The Guardian)

... But while the Democrats are happy to take the wins, they have not yet processed why they lost. They are beneficiaries of the frustration and anger. But there is little evidence that they are shifting with it, let alone cohering or leading it.

Politically the country is clearly shifting leftwards ... but nationally Democrats need a more hopeful message with a broader appeal.

They haven’t got one.

If last evening's council performance is any indication, local Democrats haven't got one, either.

Mike Pence: "The effect is that of an unctuous church elder selling pyramid schemes to credulous parishioners, never doubting he is doing God’s work."

As a lifelong Hoosier, I'm compelled to warn those of you currently existing on an steady diet of "Impeach Trump" that waiting in the wings is someone far worse, primarily because Mike Pence actually believes the religious mumbo-jumbo to which The Donald pays only bored lip service.

Three entertaining pieces follow. Many thanks to my friend C for these links; his eye for the polemic remains exemplary.

Leading off, why none of Pence's three simple identities qualifies him to be dogcatcher, much less chief executive.

Mike Pence: The servile schemer who would be president, by Richard North Patterson (Boston Globe)

ON THE EVIDENCE of a lifetime, America’s vice president is not a complex man. Instead he is three extremely simple ones: an incompetent ideologue, an obsequious toady, and a self-serving schemer.

As a side note, Patterson offers what is my single favorite paragraph of the year to date, which might be only slightly refashioned to describe Deaf Gahan and his stuffed board of toady housing bootlickers.

It was utterly in character, then, when Pence kicked off the most excruciating display of synchronized sycophancy in memory — the chorus of praise from cabinet members upon their first meeting with America’s Dear Leader.

Awesome. Patterson covers older ground in this column from April.

Mike Pence and the rise of mediocrity (Patterson; Globe)

(Pence's) public persona reeks of smarmy sanctimony — every untruth, evasion, and vacuous bromide delivered in a portentous pipe organ voice accompanied by squints, nods, and shakes of the head which, Pence clearly imagines, convey a pious gravity. The effect is that of an unctuous church elder selling pyramid schemes to credulous parishioners, never doubting he is doing God’s work. Every self-serving self-deception reveals the depths of his shallowness, the breadth of his hypocrisy.

His salvation is not ours.

Indeed. Finally, to end on a deeper and more prosaic note:

Vice President Mike Pence stays loyal to Trump, but it could come at a cost, by Noah Bierman (LA Times)

The Republicans’ signature healthcare bill was in peril in Congress and President Trump was busy warring against media foes on Twitter.

Vice President Mike Pence, wearing a brown suit and his usual earnest expression, was far from the fray last week, here at a warehouse outside Cleveland amid metal rods and wooden crates for a “listening session” with small-business owners. Sitting at a drafting table, he ignored the camera lights as well as the trouble in Washington, dutifully hearing out complaints about healthcare, taking notes on a legal pad and promising the Ohioans that the Trump-Pence administration was close to replacing Obamacare.

This is how Mike Pence copes with the drama that defines life as Donald Trump’s sidekick: acting as though everything is normal, boringly normal.

Keith Olbermann and The Resistance: "More people are paying attention to my message at the moment than they would be if I were some other host on MSNBC or CNN."

Let us read, and watch, and draw our own conclusions: Watch 'The Resistance" with Keith Olbermann.

Have liberals found their combative new leader in … Keith Olbermann? by Ben Terris (Washington Post)

... Olbermann may have claimed “The Resistance” as his show’s title, but it’s also fashionable shorthand for the emerging, amorphous community — career Democrats, masked anarchists, Hollywood liberals, conservative Never Trumpers — working to topple, or at least rein in, President Trump. Not working together, mind you: The movement has only the barest organization and no true leaders. But plenty of people are looking to fill that void and, in some cases, pave their own path back to relevance.

A skip in my step: "Why Millennials Aren’t Afraid of Socialism."

Bernie at The Exchange after winning the Indiana primary. 

I always knew it. Merely wait patiently until the pendulum comes swinging back, then assume my role as elder statesman.

Finally, some optimism.

Why Millennials Aren’t Afraid of Socialism, by Julia Mead (The Nation)

It’s an old idea, but the people who will make it happen are young—and tired of the unequal world they’ve inherited.

... When I heard Bernie say, out loud, that the billionaire class was ruthless and exploitative, that sounded groundbreaking. Not only did he name the right problem—inequality, not poverty—he named the culprit. I didn’t know you could do that. To me, and to hundreds of thousands of my peers, Sanders’s (and Corbyn’s) socialism doesn’t feel antiquated. Instead, it feels fresh and vital precisely because it has been silenced for so long—and because we need it now more than ever.

My dad—slightly younger and slightly cooler than Sanders and Corbyn—picked me up from the airport the day before Thanksgiving. In the car, he confessed: “I liked a lot of the things Bernie had to say, but I just didn’t think he could get elected.” He sighed, ran a hand through his white hair, and pushed his glasses up his nose. “I thought Hillary had a better shot, but she couldn’t pull it off. Maybe Bernie could have… Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio…”

My dad sounded humble. Trump’s election, which to so many of us feels like a tragedy, prompted him to consider a new way of thinking. Maybe socialism isn’t a lost cause after all. Maybe it’s our best hope.

Weekend history lesson: "Are the Republicans Going the Way of the Whigs?"

Just imagine printing your own ballots ...

Are the Republicans Going the Way of the Whigs?, by Michael F. Holt (Center for Politics)

... Does the Whigs’ sorry story provide a template pointing to what might become the GOP’s fate now?

There are striking similarities, but also some crucial differences, between what befell the Whigs in the 1850s and Republicans’ fractious situation today.

A long Sunday must-read: "Trump is an extinction-level event."

In the past, I've agreed and disagreed with Andrew Sullivan. In this essay, there is room for honest debate; however, this isn't my aim at present.

I have friends who are supporting Donald Trump. Obviously, you know who you are. Can you read this, and tell me your thoughts?

What is your rebuttal?

Democracies end when they are too democratic ... and right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny, by Andrew Sullivan (New Yorker)

... For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

Podcast: Bill Simmons and Keith Olbermann.

An hour and twenty minute podcast, and time well spent.

On the political side, Olbermann's comments about the American "tradition" of compromise are spot on. He also laments the Balkanization of sports -- and the very fact that this term was used tells you much about why I'm an Olbermann fan.

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons welcomes Keith Olbermann to discuss "the never-ending state of stupidity" in politics, learning to compromise in America (19:30), the impact of social media on cable news (25:00), baseball’s future (32:30), Pedro's peak All-Star Game performance (42:40), how to fix 'SportsCenter' (54:15), and modern sports news (1:00:00).

"Do Democratic voters really want to hitch their wagon to four years of a center-right candidate like Hillary Clinton?"

Earlier today, this:

"Don't you feel repression, just closing in around?" Must be time for a GOP conspiracy, says David Brooks.

Here's the flip side.

Fine, give the GOP four years: The liberal case for either Bernie Sanders, or electing a Republican president, by Walter Bragman (Salon)

Democrats can't hold the White House forever. Losing in 2016 might make more strategic sense than losing in 2020

Nobody is acknowledging it yet, but in all likelihood the next president, be it a Republican or a Democrat, will have just four years to get as much done as possible before passing the torch to the challenger in 2020. Republicans have little hope of a two-term presidency (let alone winning in 2016) due to changing demographics, and a narrative shift that favors acceptance and diversity over traditional values, and Southern dominance. There is a realignment occurring in the United States the likes of which we have not seen since the Solid South became solid red.

Democrats, however, should be concerned for a different reason. The last consecutive two-term presidents from the same party were James Madison and James Monroe, who were both Democratic-Republicans. That transition occurred before the formation of our modern two-party system.

The 2020 election is one Democrats cannot afford to lose. It is a census year, which means the future of the House will be determined for the next decade. It is also highly possible that at least two (or three) seats will open on the Supreme Court, given the ages of the justices—more than are likely to open between 2016 and 2020. If the Democrats do not win, the GOP will have a solid hold on government for at least another 10 years.

And that raises one very important question: Do Democratic voters really want to hitch their wagon to four years of a center-right candidate like Hillary Clinton?

"Why Are States So Red and Blue?"

I'm not sure what this theory says about Indiana, 2008 notwithstanding, although it's easy to explain New Albany as an extension of the antebellum South. Perhaps we have insufficient Great Lakes coastline.

Why Are States So Red and Blue?, by Steven Pinker (New York Times)

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, we already know now how most of the electoral map will be colored, which will be close to the way it has been colored for decades. Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

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