Left Jabs

  This essay is from April of 2020, just as the enormity of the Covid pandemic was still settling into our collective consciousness, and the Trump administration was already prodigiously mismanaging the crisis. But the references to Covid are the only thing outdated here. What I called the Shallow State then is set to grow even shallower now, as Trump 2.0 promises to outsource the government to oligarchs, and replace as many federal workers as possible with loyal Trump hacks.   The “Deep State” was an invention of the Trump crime family. They needed someone to frame for their crimes, and government workers made a convenient scapegoat.  It was a sly piece of rebranding, part of Steve Bannon’s noxious legacy. Through sheer force of rhetoric, he turned the federal bureaucracy — that staid, non-partisan synonym for boring — into a sinister, mustache-twirling villain. The people who inhabit that bureaucracy are, of course, anything but sinister. Th...

  A few weeks ago, I revisited my least popular post of all time, so there’s a certain symmetry to my now offering my most popular one — or at least my most-opened. It was written in mid-summer of this year, a bit recent for a look-back, yet it seems to take on more resonance as the Times continues to indulge in collaboration with a fledgling regime bent on fascist takeover.   My father would not live any place where the  New York Times  couldn’t be delivered before 7:00 a.m. To him, the  Times  was “the newspaper of record,” the keeper of the first drafts of history. It had the reach and the resources to be anywhere history was being made, and the skills to report it accurately. He trusted it more than any other news source, including Walter Cronkite. Like my dad, I grew to associate the  Times  with serious journalism, the first place one goes for the straight story. Their news was always assumed to be objectively present...

A few years ago, I posted to this blog a piece of pure speculation . It was about the failure of Senate Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2017. Based on no evidence whatsoever, I posited that the Senate vote had failed because Mitch McConnell had rigged it to fail. My reasoning was that even though Republicans had been screaming for the repeal of “Obamacare” since its inception, repeal was the last thing they actually wanted. Sure, they’ve had a jolly old time trashing the ACA over the years. Trump lost no opportunity to call it “a total disaster” in his 2016 campaign. But the prospect of coming up with a workable replacement for a healthcare system so big and complex was something the GOP had neither the intelligence nor the policy chops to take seriously. Republicans don’t go into government to govern. Still, even they could see that the ACA had grown remarkably popular over the years — people with health insurance tend to be protective...

  I’ve long had a morbid fascination with totalitarian states, starting with a major in Soviet Studies back in college. I immersed myself in the Orwellian mechanics of Stalin’s four-decade reign of terror, and I’ve been a student of autocracies, kleptocracies, theocracies, and hypocrisies ever since. I will eagerly engage in any conversation about Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, or Muammar Khadaffi, even if I don’t know what I’m talking about. One thing they all had in common was the prioritization of loyalty over ability. The people charged with carrying out the regime’s agenda inevitably lurched their way into remarkable inefficiencies and dysfunction, which, in almost every case, culminated in the collapse of the regime itself. Not that they didn’t do cataclysmic damage in the meantime. Of course, I was fortunate to be studying these rogues from a distance, and the thought of actually living under one of them was, until recently, the furthest thing fr...

  Going forward, I will try to look on the bright side, whenever I think there’s a bright side worth looking on. That said, there is much to look out for in the meantime, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out some of the more pernicious developments as I spot them. Accordingly, I'm revisiting a post from two-and-a-half years ago. What was true then seems to be getting truer every day. The legal sanctioning of informants described here has only grown closer to the Stalinist model, but that’s not why I’m reposting. Rather, it’s that the Stalinist model itself needs a brighter light trained on it, since it’s that very model that Americans just voted for, whether they know it or not. It’s a model currently on full display in Putin’s Russia and Kim’s North Korea, among others. Here in the U.S., we can see that more pieces are falling into place every day.   Rage over the Texas abortion laws comes naturally to anyone with eithe...