"Some of the People and Moments That Got Me Through Week One"

"This is a terrible moment, but it's also a historic and challenging one. We can't avoid it and we shouldn't try to. Even if we occasionally have an inexplicable compulsion to put a blanket over our head, move to another country, or dive into a household chore we've put off for forty years."

Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark offers a "Sanity Check After Trump's First Week Back in Office."

Ed Kilgore at New York argues that "Trump's 'Shock and Awe' Looks More Like Chaos and Confusion."

At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes that, at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting, "The Democrats Show Why They Lost."

And John Avlon at The Bulwark says that the Democratic Party "should look back to the message from Bill Clinton."

"Democrats Must Offer Material Improvements to the Lives of Working-Class Americans, not Just Ironic Camouflage Trucker Hats"

"But the subjects of Shenk's narrative aren't the not-so-great men at the end of history. Rather, they are the insiders, standing behind those men, out of the spotlight: strategists Stan Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, 'political Zeligs' who emerge, again and again, on the scene of left-liberal parties' fabulous failures across the globe, hopping from ship to sinking ship over the past 30 years. But Greenberg and Schoen were no chameleons. They brought with them dueling ideas on how to reverse the losses wrought by dealignment. And through their rivalry, Shenk contends, we can understand the real story of dealignment, and how we might reverse it."

Ben Metzner at The New Republic reviews Timothy Shenk's Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.

"The Old Man Who Saved American Democracy. Twice."

"This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable."

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark reacts to President Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

While Robert L. Borosage at The Nation writes that the convention is "Waving Goodbye to the Neoliberal Democratic Party."

The Yuppie Candidate

"Though they were a minority in the country, the well-educated baby boomers who had come to the fore in the first half of the '80s effectively became America’s ruling class. Their basic political philosophy—liberal on social issues, conservative on economic ones—dominated for decades, with support for gay marriage and abortion rights growing at the same time that taxes continued to be cut and globalization increased."

Tom McGrath at Politico describes Gary Hart as the proto-Bill Clinton.

"'Identity Politics' Is the Ideology"

"For Fraser this tendency became increasingly explicit in the form of corporate feminism, embodied by Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, and so on. As she put it in a 2015 interview with the New York Times, 'The mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to "lean in" and "crack the glass ceiling"—in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class.'"

In a 2019 n+1 article, Gabriel Winant discusses the evolution of the term "professional-managerial class."

If "Good Enough for A Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, for FDR and JFK, It Should Be Good Enough for Today's Democratic Party"

"A Democratic party that adopts these principles has a real shot at political domination given Republicans' serious problems and weaknesses. Conversely, a Democratic party that continues on its present course dooms American politics to continued stalemate and polarization. Like the prospect of an imminent hanging, that should concentrate the mind."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot writes that it is "time for Democrats to try something that really could unite the country: liberal nationalism."

"When the Cold War Ends, It Loosens Not Just the Motivation for Conservatives to Get Involved Internationally, but Also the Motivation for Them to Champion Democracy"

"We think of the end of the Cold War as reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but it also really changed economics and politics in the United States. There is a major recession in the U.S. at the time of the '92 election, and parts of California that have been propped up by government spending and the aerospace industry had collapsed almost overnight. There was this sense of uncertainty about what the world is going to look like going forward and who is going to prosper and who is going to fail. It's also at a pivot point in decades of deindustrialization and shifting toward a knowledge economy and a service economy. So things really were in flux, and I think the politics of the day reflect that."

Ian Ward at Politico interviews Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

"It's Imperative That Democrats in Swing Districts and States Are Defined the Way Joe Biden Was in 2020—Mainstream, Pragmatic and Focused on Issues That Resonate"

"They believe that by brushing that aside, the party could forfeit seats in swing districts with populations that simply aren't as liberal as some major metropolitan areas where several House progressives have risen to fame."

Hanna Trudo at The Hill reports on the rhetorical battle between moderate and progressive Democrats.

And Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark lists what Joe Biden should say in order to distance himself from progressives.

"There's an Enormous Dignity Gap in the Culture"

"Longtime Democratic consultant Joe Trippi muses that prominent liberal politicians would face a penalty from voters if they skipped straight from government office to goofy reality shows. 'I think a lot of Democrats would think it lacked seriousness,' he says. '"With all the things that you could be doing with the experience you built up, that's what you decided to do with it?"'"

Joanna Weiss at Politico discusses the rise of reality-television Republicans.

"Those Willing to Trash the Democratic Cultural Regime Most Loudly and Consistently Are Firmly in Command"

"When Republican voters made Trump their presidential nominee in 2016, they chose gloves-off culture war over either Jeb Bush's earnest compromise or the imitations of a careerist provocateur like Sen. Ted Cruz. Trump tapped into a very real dissatisfaction in the American electorate with the liberal status quo around speech and culture, and reaped both the attendant rewards and backlash. Someone like Dave Portnoy is, if not a viable presidential candidate, at least a credible successor to the role of the office's last Republican occupant: Trump, Gaetz, Boebert, Cawthorn and their ilk all share Portnoy's single-minded obsession with scoring headlines and affirming their constituents’ cultural identities at any cost."

Derek Robertson at Politico explains the rise of the "Barstool Republican."

"Has Done What Neither Clinton nor Obama Could Do"

"'This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse,' wrote David Brooks of the New York Times. 'It's not just that government is heading in a new direction, it's the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting. Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them.'"

John Blake at CNN argues that Joe Biden has "dethroned the Welfare Queen."

"It Is, Perhaps, a Socialist Majority in Embryo"

"Sanders had a different theory, and his campaigns assembled a different coalition, centered on younger, lower-income voters from Brownsville to Duluth. In 2020, that working-class coalition was not enough to win the Democratic nomination. And no, Sanders did not manage to turn history on its head and bring the vast reservoir of alienated, apolitical workers back to primary politics.
"But by 2032, today's Bernie voters under fifty will likely represent a majority, and certainly a plurality, within the party electorate. What sort of left will be there to greet them?"

Matt Karp at Jacobin looks at Bernie Sanders's legacy.

"The Problem for Trump Is He Has Yet to Find His Willie Horton"

"'He spent eight years as vice president and the solid Reaganites were always suspicious of Bush 41 for not being conservative enough. And he endured a lot of lousy press coverage that was a caricature of him.'
"'The turning point was the convention,' Grissom said. 'That was our reintroduction of Bush and our first real opportunity to define him without filters. People saw him through the convention, the convention speech. "No new taxes." "Kinder, gentler."'"

Adam Nagourney at The New York Times writes that "Republicans are looking back at the 1988 race as a beacon of hope in a bleak political landscape."

German Lopez at Vox writes about Donald Trump's embrace of Richard Nixon's "Law & Order" politics.

And Jeff Greenfield at Politico calls the 1996 election "the least suspenseful, least intriguing, least consequential election of my lifetime, your lifetime, anybody’s lifetime."

"They Have Been Useful Idiots"

"Because of the redactions, a definitive reading of the committee's account of this successful Russian influence campaign is not possible. The public cannot tell exactly what Deripaska did. The role of Solomon's work cannot be fully evaluated. Yet the top lines of this Republican-okayed report are stark: Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump, Ukraine did not interfere to aid Clinton, and Trump and others who have pushed the Ukraine tale have been boosting Kremlin propaganda designed to confuse and to cover up Putin's attack on the United States. The committee wouldn’t say the obvious, but the verdict is undeniable: Trump and his crew are dupes for Putin."

David Corn at Mother Jones reacts to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report.

"The Product of a Completely Different World Than the Ivy League Meritocracy That Has Taken Over the Democratic Party"

"Catering to society's well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he 'had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values'.
"'I said I've never found a distinction,' Biden claimed he replied. 'Never found them hard to sell.' He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: 'We treat them like they're stupid. They know they're in trouble, and nobody's talking to them. Nobody's talking to them. That's what we used to do. That was our base.'"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian explains "Joe Biden's mystique."

"This Desperate Blame Game"

"By continuing to blame everyone else for their loss, the Clinton camp is suppressing serious reflection on the problems with their own campaign. These ranged from the 'Pied Piper' strategy of urging media allies to elevate Donald Trump to front-runner status, to the sabotage of Bernie Sanders by Clinton surrogates in the DNC.
"The deflection strategy also seeks to cover over a key factor in Clinton's loss: her record of serving Wall Street, promoting corporate trade deals that hurt working people, and supporting endless war and regime change disasters."

Jill Stein defends herself from Hillary Clinton at The Guardian.

"Could Warn Against the Hubris of the Present"

"If a Gen Xer doesn't win in 2020, there will be another chance in 2024. But by that time the field may be crowded with Millennials—born from 1981 to 1996—whose ranks include Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and rising Republican stars such as Representatives Dan Crenshaw and Matt Gaetz. Sandwiched between two larger and more politically consequential generations—Boomers and Millennials—Generation X may never produce a president at all."

In The Atlantic, Peter Beinart laments the fate of middle-aged politicians.

"The 'John the Baptist' of the 'Disenchanted, Displaced Noncollege White Voter'"

"For the sizable portion of the population not old enough to remember Perot's renegade campaign, it is hard to describe just how thoroughly he captivated media attention and the public imagination, but a single statistic makes the case: He won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote, the largest share for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. He split the white vote with Bush, who blamed him for handing the presidency to Clinton, whose winning plurality was just 43 percent. (Exit polling disagreed.) Arguably, American politics has never been quite the same."

Todd S. Purdum at The Atlantic writes that Ross Perot showed that "[t]here is a big chunk of voters who feel disaffected, harmed by free trade, threatened by demographic change, and attracted to an eccentric outsider who promises to upend the status quo."

"Great Historians Are Known for Their Appreciation of Irony"

"But if Wilentz were not so closely associated with the Clintons, he might now be claiming vindication as a Bernie bro ahead of his time. Thirty years ago, he was urging leftists not to give up on electoral politics and calling on Democrats to put working-class solidarity and a critique of corporate power at the center of their agenda. He even was one of America's first Bernie bros, celebrating the Burlington mayor's rise. Admittedly, by the time Sanders entered the Democratic primary in 2015 and began putting this strategy into practice, Wilentz had lined up behind Clinton."

Timothy Shenk at The Nation reviews Sean Wilentz's The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics and No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding.

"Options Are Available"

"The Trump era presents a host of new challenges for evangelicals who believe in the Gospel—the 'good news' of Jesus Christ. The first step in addressing these challenges must come through a reckoning with our past. Evangelicals have taken many wrong turns over the decades even though better, more Christian, options could be found by simply opening up the Bible and reading it. We must stop our nostalgic gaze into a Christian golden age in America that probably never existed to begin with and turn toward the future with renewed hope. It is time, as the great theologian of hope Jurgen Moltmann taught us, to 'waken the dead and piece together what has been broken.'"

John Fea at The Atlantic presents a "very short history of evangelical fear."