Left Jabs

The country is heading over a cliff and the brake lines have been cut. This is readily apparent to anyone paying attention. A rogue political party with malign intent and vast resources is bent on dismantling our entire system, and they’re doing it in plain sight. They assume we’ll just let them. The question is what to do about it. Yes, we hold slim majorities in the legislative branch, but those majorities are frighteningly fragile. If the filibuster is altered — which seems both necessary and inevitable — it could backfire spectacularly when Republicans next take power. Which is more than possible, even as soon as 2022. Democracy itself seems to be backed against the wall. This leaves @Shoq — who takes this all quite personally — perplexed and frustrated. Most of his 25,000 Twitter followers get nourishment from his acerbic but cogent analyses of the ills we face, and they know that his alarmism is well backed by facts, reason, and perspective. The trouble he sees — and wha...

In many ways, the rise of Trump was an accident. But in many more ways, it was the culmination — and the accelerant — of pernicious forces that have been at work for well over half a century. Even among my readers there are those who remain largely unaware of how the GOP became the party of authoritarian rule. While I can hardly tell the whole story, I can point out three intersecting plot lines that built slowly but ominously to our current state of emergency. Let’s remember: The Powell Memorandum By the time Louis F. Powell Jr. — soon to be a Nixon-appointed Supreme Court justice — wrote his famous memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, the business world was hurting and angry. It was 1971, and a wave of progressive regulation had just been enacted to hold companies accountable for the safety of their workers, the protection of their consumers, and their treatment of the environment. Complying with these new laws was expensive and infuriating, and the captains of industry were s...

It’s a given that the next three years — or ten or twenty — will bring much stress to anyone who enjoys objective reality. The stink of Trump has proved thicker and more toxic than we expected. Republicans have stopped pretending democracy holds their interest, and they’re actively working to bring it down. So if you’re feeling like oh shit you have to save the damn country yet again, you’re not alone. And yes, it’s stressful. At the same time, there are lots of companies making lots of money from our stress — either by relieving it or exacerbating it. Media companies do both. They have a vested interest in keeping our psyches on a slow boil. The stories they tell get us stressed out, worked up, and angry as hell. At which point they sell us the very products and services we need to calm us down — anything from gym memberships to prescription drugs, to Jack Daniels, to Bacon Whoppers with cheese. Yes, we want to follow the news, but can we do it less stressfully? As a person wh...

The right has been working toward this moment for half a century, since well before Nixon. They got here through meticulous planning and superhuman patience. They bought hundreds of media outlets, so they could indoctrinate their followers. They targeted state legislatures when no one was paying attention, and won more than half of them. They took over local school boards all over the country, so they could indoctrinate the next generation.  In recent years, they’ve demonized Democrats, first as socialists, now as pedophiles. They’ve packed the judiciary with ideologues. They've stolen the Supreme Court. They’ve gerrymandered their way to what looks, a lot, like minority rule. And now they’ve become complicit in the so-called Big Lie, their Trump-addled pretext for sabotaging the election system. They’ve gone all in on suppressing the electorate, on “frauditing” votes, on gumming up the electoral works wherever they can. They have, in short, put in place most of the element...

I’ve always been taken with the phrase “banality of evil,” and I’ve found it useful in a variety of contexts. But mostly I’ve associated it with my own experience serving on two grand juries. That’s two more than anybody I know. The banality of grand juries derives, not so much from evil as from one of its cousins, stupidity, an apt descriptor for the cavalcade of crimes a grand juror routinely encounters. Case after case, crime after crime, day after day, ten or so cases a day. For a month. Almost all the cases are mind-numbingly banal — stupid people doing stupid things quite stupidly. I served in Manhattan, probably in the same courthouse where Trump’s newly appointed grand jury will sit. Different grand juries serve different purposes, and Trump’s will be quite different from either of mine. But the basics are the same. So is the banality. A grand jury is neither grand nor a jury. It’s more like a committee, but with a certain official power. There are sixteen of us on the ...

A story surfaced last month that I thought would get more traction than it has. When it made The Rachel Maddow Show, I thought it might have some legs. But it’s gone dormant, at least for now. It came from West Virginia, where the United Mine Workers unveiled a startling new plan — almost a manifesto. The union — which represents most of the hard-luck coal miners in West Virginia and Kentucky — admitted what everyone has long known: that coal is on a fast track to oblivion. The union, therefore, is henceforth committing to a transition that phases out fossil fuels and phases in clean energy practices. Yes, you read that right. In return, they’re asking the federal government for generous investments in their states to help them make that transition. They want tax incentives for renewable energy sources, preference in hiring for new jobs, extensive career retraining, and a bunch of other stuff geared towards digging miners out of a very deep hole and putting them, hopefully, on a...

As I have, in the last year, pretentiously weighed in on some of the more pressing issues of the Covid Era, any speculation about the future of Jeopardy might well strike my readers as frivolous. I totally agree. Nonetheless, I ask that you indulge me as I veer off my beaten track to acknowledge this fraught crossroads in American cultural history. Let’s be clear about the stakes here. Whoever replaces the late Alex Trebek might well take up a space in your living room — and your 7 p.m. time slot — for the next thirty years. So who will it be? Who will feed us the “final jeopardy answer” going forward? Who will lend sufficient gravitas to making the daily double a true one? These are not small matters. Because in an age of toxic know-nothing-ness — a time of arrogant ignorance and educational dysfunction — Jeopardy is unapologetically intelligent. Unlike any other regularly scheduled event in our culture, Jeopardy celebrates the know-it-all. It’s a safe space for eggheads,...