Left Jabs

  Full disclosure: I am still looking for a way to write about the new reality about to descend on us. Meanwhile, please allow me to revisit this piece from August 2020, when Covid was overrunning the country. Remove the initial Covid references and we're left with a lens through which we can see the rise of the American oligarchs who are apparently taking over the country. Back then, I didn’t name names, but since the election, a number of these oligarchs have raised their profiles by an order of magnitude. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and a host of other billionaires have shown their true racist, sexist,   heartless, cruel, and wildly short-sighted colors. What I wrote over four years ago is at least as true now.   Fifty years of Republicanism has brought us to this. A pandemic so out of control, the world sees us as a slow-motion car crash they can’t look away from. An economic nosedive, steeper and f...

  Back when Republicans were just starting to discover the political uses of deception, propaganda, and dirty tricks, one could argue that Jimmy Carter was the first real notch on their belt. Carter’s rise — from way out in left field to the White House — is well-chronicled, and I won’t try to tell it here. But at the time, the GOP was reeling from the fall of Richard Nixon, the first in a long line of bad-faith Republicans whose bad faith does not improve with age. It wasn’t just that Nixon had resigned in the face of his imminent removal from office. It was also that his Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, most of his lawyers, and a rogue’s gallery of underlings and dirty-tricksters had been convicted of felonies and sent to prison. The GOP had been exposed as a party happy to look outside the law for political gain, and they paid a heavy price for it. That was then. Since then, they’ve done far worse, far more often, and caused far more damage, yet they...

  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 But the references to Covid are the only thing outdated here.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...