"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."

"The Decade That Forced American Politicians and Commentators to Confront the Limits of the Country's Own Mythology"

"Political elites in both parties had long shared the same conventional wisdom about the United States, grounded in ideas of exceptionalism and institutional perfection. But with the rise of Donald Trump and the return of a virulent politics of xenophobia and exclusion, it became increasingly difficult, even for many in the political establishment, to reproduce these past homilies. Today the US is truly at a crossroads. Are Americans willing to confront the failures that led to the present, or will the US remain trapped in the same cycles of crisis and popular disaffection?"

Aziz Rana at The Guardian looks the politics of the 2010s.

As does Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic, regarding the economy.

And Politico asks historians to write a paragraph about the decade for a future textbook.

Billionaire Tears

"'The vilification of billionaires makes no sense to me,' Cooperman told CNBC. He called her policies 'idiocy' and said it was 'appealing to the lowest common denominator, and basically trying to turn people's heads around by promising a lot of free stuff'.
"Warren responded with a tweet, saying: 'One thing I know he cares about–his fortune. He's a shareholder in Navient, a student loan company that has cheated borrowers and used abusive, misleading tactics. He even went so far as to ask how I might impact his investment in the last earnings call with Navient.'"

Dominic Rushe at The Guardian discusses the "great plute freakout of 2019."

"This Is the Heavy Undertow That Churns Beneath the Apparent Rising Tide of the American Left"

"This fundamental shift—from the party of Humphrey to the party of Schumer—remains the most important American political development that confronts the Left today. It is no accident that the decline of class voting has corresponded with fifty years of retreat for American workers: stagnant wages, accumulating debt, and increasing precarity, even as corporate profits have soared. Nor is it a coincidence that even popular two-term Democratic presidents in this era, elected by such dealigned class coalitions, have proven unable or unwilling to push for structural reforms on anything like the scale of the New Deal era, even after facing the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression."

Matt Karp at Jacobin contrasts Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

"It Might Be the Best General-Election Appeal Any of the Candidates Has Devised Yet"

"Democrats have been racing haphazardly to the left, with Warren often in the lead. Some of their ideas, like moving everybody off employer-sponsored insurance and onto a public plan, are toxic to general-election voters. But some ideas have appeal to the left and to swing voters. This is one of them."

Jonathan Chait at New York praises Elizabeth Warren's plan to increase Social Security benefits.

"A Single, Grand Reset for American Higher Education"

"Her basic message is that our entire system of financing college for the past 30 or so years has been a mistake, one that has led to higher tuition costs and saddled millennials with debt that's left them poorer, measured by wealth, than previous generations, while possibly hurting the broader economy by lowering home ownership. The idea is that we need to clear the slate and start over, while 'making sure nothing like this ever happens again,' as she put it in a blog post. In other words, she's pitching a collegiate new deal."

Jordan Weissmann at Slate argues that "Elizabeth Warren's Plan to Forgive Student Debt Is Smart Politics and Decent Policy."

"Successful Political Campaigns Are Based on Themes and Not on Policies"

"And she has real accomplishments in Washington to boast of.  It may be that her own themes–her attack against a 'rigged system'–have gotten lost in the details of her policy proposals. She is not a thematic politician the way Buttigieg or Sanders is.  Or it may be that the controversy over her Native American ancestry has nullified the impact of her impressive up-from-the-bootstraps biography.  Or, finally,  it may be, as I've heard from other Democrats, that she sounds too 'professorial.'"

John Judis at Talking Points Memo writes that he is "not sure why [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren's campaign seems not to have taken off."

"All Those Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes That You Called Right-Wing Nuts and Kooks"

"Additionally, in their exhaustive examination of the tea party movement, political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto argue that Obama's election instigated the rise of today's far right. Much like how the John Birch Society arose as a rejection of progress on civil rights, tea party supporters felt anxious about what they saw as the 'real' America slipping away when the country chose a black man to be its president."

Christopher Towler at The Conversation marks the sixtieth anniversary of the John Birch Society.

"The Idea That Economic Populism and Social Inclusion Are at Odds Is Wrong-Headed and Ridiculous"

"Warren is the kind of fiery economic populist many Sanders-style progressives would have supported in a heartbeat if she'd run against Clinton in the primaries. But 'the system is rigged' is a surprisingly tidy narrative arc that could fit almost any issue progressives care about. The system is rigged against working people who want a fair shot at success as America's productivity gains go to the super-rich. The system is rigged against women as bosses still don't pay or promote them as much or as often as men, and people still blame and disbelieve women who are sexually assaulted or raped. The system is rigged against black Americans as America continues to grapple with the wreckage of slavery, Jim Crow laws and redlining, and as both implicit and explicit racial bias persist. The system is also rigged against white rural Trump voters whose neighbors are dying of opiate overdoses and suicide, and whose communities are crumbling because nobody sees any profit to investing in them.
"The system is rigged against everyone who isn't a wealthy white male elite, and it has been for a long time."

Emily Crockett at Rolling Stones argues that liberals should have an "inclusive, interconnected view of politics."

"The Idea of the University Has Carried a Weight in This Campaign Which It Doesn't Ordinarily Hold"

"The Clinton campaign has honed in on the aspiration that it represents, and the nostalgia, but also the way that a college degree can become, for ordinary people, a rebuke to racism, sexism, or inequality. From the stage at St. Anselm on Monday, the young Democratic nominee for governor of New Hampshire, Colin Van Ostern, spent much of his five minutes talking about the nonprofit he helps lead, which works with companies and universities to get employees to college on the cheap. The story he told is of a middle-aged woman whose husband once told her that she was 'not college material.' The woman went on to get a two-year associate's degree in her forties and was now working on a bachelor's. In her stump speeches, Clinton acknowledges the need for more expansive technical education, but this has none of the thematic force of when she talks about the traditional liberal-arts system. The lurking question for Clinton, through the long span of the election, has been how to respond to the people who feel left out of the globalized market that the Clintons helped design, and whose frustrations fired both Sanders's movement and Trump's. More and more, it appears that the Democratic response is to swell the ranks of the educated—to identify the university as the essential American institution, and to bet on it."

Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker writes that "[t]he Democratic understanding of the symbolic power of the university has sharpened in this election."

DNC, Day One

Bustle provides transcripts of Cory Booker's, Michelle Obama's, Elizabeth Warren's, and Bernie Sanders's speeches at the Democratic National Convention.

"No Experiments"

"In their times of greatest success, Republicans came from the middle class. Republican politicians felt middle-class aspirations and anxieties as their own. They would do things that tangibly helped the people who sent them to office: hold taxes down, yes, but also ensure public safety, clean water, affordable state university tuition, and more. To fill the vacuum left by Barack Obama, Republicans will need to rediscover their heritage of the Nixon-Ford years, and of governors like New York's Thomas Dewey and California's Earl Warren."


David Frum in The Atlantic gives advice to the Republican Party.

"One of the Few Democrats in the Nation Who Are Enjoying 2014"

"'Mitch McConnell is here to work for the millionaires and billionaires. . . . This is right in line with the Republican philosophy across the board, because their view is the most important thing government can do is protect the tender fannies of the rich and powerful,' Warren said Tuesday in Kentucky. McConnell (R-Ky.) is the Senate minority leader, and the incumbent that Grimes is trying to unseat. 'Let's be clear about this: The game is rigged, and Mitch McConnell wants to keep it rigged.'"


David A. Fahrenthold in The Washington Post follows Elizabeth Warren as she campaigns for Democrats.

"The First People to Make Politics a Business"

"Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting. As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, 'So far,' he wrote, 'Big Business has won every skirmish.'"

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker discusses Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, the first professional campaign consultants.

They Lived by Day

The Los Angeles Times publishes obituaries for musician Ralph Mooney, pioneering spelling-bee champion Frank Neuhauser, lawyer Leonard Weinglass, documentarian Richard Leacock, politician Geraldine Ferraro, actor Farley Granger, Super Glue inventor Harry Wesley Clover, Jr., and California's former legislative analyst A. Alan Post.

"The Radical Ideas of One Generation Are Often the Common Sense of the Next"

"Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks or even on the History Channel. Indeed, our history is under siege."

Peter Dreier in The Nation presents a list of "The Fifty Most Influential [Activist] Progressives of the Twentieth Century."

Redistribute This

"In 1964, law professor Charles Reich wrote a hugely influential article called 'The New Property.' Reich's idea was that some benefits, once conferred by the government, couldn't be taken away without some sort of legal process. Reich's 'benefits' weren't necessarily for the poor. 'When he was a law clerk to Justice Black, Charlie was struck by the injustice that a doctor, licensed to practice law in New York, could lose his right to practice—in this instance because of allegations he'd fought against Franco—without any procedural protection,' says Yale law professor Judith Resnik, who taught the civil procedure class I read Reich's article for in law school. Reich's idea was that a government license could be a form of property, in the sense that, once granted, it shouldn't be taken away without a fair hearing. In 1970, the Supreme Court picked up on this idea in the context of welfare benefits. In a 6-to-3 decision, Goldberg v. Kelly, the court said that the state could not terminate those benefits without giving the recipient a hearing.
"And that's pretty much where the idea of using the federal courts as a vehicle of economic justice begins and ends. There was an effort in the legal academy, in the wake of Goldberg, to establish poverty as a classification, like race, ethnicity, gender, and religion, that draws extra scrutiny from the courts when governments make categorizations based on it. But the Supreme Court didn't go for it. 'Thundering greatness shall forever elude it,' University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein wrote of Goldberg 20 years after the decision, arguing that its influence proved limited. In the 2001 radio interview, Obama is talking along with another University of Chicago law professor, Dennis Hutchinson, who says, after a passing reference to Goldberg, 'The idea that you can use due process for redistributive ends socially, that will be stable, was [an] astonishing assumption in [the] minds of litigators, and it didn't last very long.' And Obama adds, 'And it essentially has never happened.'"

In Slate, Emily Bazelon explains the legal issue at the heart of the fuzzy charge that Barack Obama is a "redistributor."