"What Rural Voters Want is a Glimmer of Hope That Things Will Change"

"It was not for a lack of effort that the Biden campaign was unable to connect with rural voters this year. In May, Biden convened a virtual 'rural roundtable' in western Wisconsin to show the candidate listening to stakeholders about rural economic development, health care and the crisis in Wisconsin's dairy industry, brought on by chronically low milk prices. Nor was it for a lack of policy proposals: The Biden campaign released an exhaustive 'rural plan' for anyone to read. All of these political gestures, however, are filtered through the lens of what political scientist Katherine Cramer calls 'rural consciousness'—including a perception that cities are where decisions are made, culture happens and resources flow, and that rural communities are not in control of their own futures. Even as a kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden was seen as a creature of an establishment that has marginalized rural communities for decades." 

Bill Hogseth at Politico writes that "many rural people have lost trust in the Democratic Party."

"Too Late to Save His Reputation"

"The critics who flay Ryan as a coward have never understood that his actions are a form of idealism. To Ryan, the greatest danger to liberty lies not in a president who defies the rule of law but in high tax rates and a functioning social safety net. When Ryan speaks with pride about the policy accomplishments he helped carry out with Trump, he is not spinning. In Ryan's worldview, he has struck a powerful blow for liberty against the socialist hordes. Ryan leaves his endangered majority convinced he has done his job well. It is a triumph of his own propaganda that so few people believe he is actually sincere about this."

Jonathan Chait at New York writes a political obituary for Paul Ryan.

And Alex Shepard at The New Republic describes the end of Ryan's speakership as the "Twilight of the Reaganites."

"Donald Trump Outperformed Mitt Romney's 2012 Campaign on Minority Vote Share"

"A big part of the story is that Hillary Clinton did much worse among minorities than Obama did. Not only was her share of the minority vote worse than Obama's, but minorities turned out less for her than they had for him.
"For example, in Michigan, Hillary Clinton received 50,000 fewer votes in Detroit's Wayne County than President Obama had in 2012. Trump's margin of victory in Michigan over Clinton was about 11,000."

In a 2016 Forbes article, Avik Roy looks at changes in the American electorate.

And Omri Ben-Shahar argues that "Trump Won Because Of Lower Democratic Turnout."

"Perhaps It's Time Someone Asked Them"

"In short, the story of a white working-class revolt in the Rust Belt just doesn't hold up, according to the numbers. In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000. The rest stayed home or voted for someone other than the major party candidates.

"This data suggests that if the Democratic Party wants to win the Rust Belt, it should not go chasing after the white working-class men who voted for Trump. The party should spend its energy figuring out why Democrats lost millions of voters to some other candidate or to abstention. Exit polls do not collect information about why voters stay home."

Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr at Slate argue that turnout, or lack thereof, was key to the 2016 presidential election.

Eric Levitz follows up at New York.

"The Philistines Are on the March"

"The culture wars over the humanities that dominated discussion of higher education in the 1980s and 1990s had enduring historical significance. Shouting matches about academia reverberated beyond the ivory tower to lay bare a crisis of national faith. Was America a good nation? Could the nation be good—could its people be free—without foundations? Were such foundations best provided by a classic liberal education in the humanities, which Matthew Arnold described as 'the best that has been thought and said'? Was the 'best' philosophy and literature synonymous with the canon of Western Civilization? Or was the Western canon racist and sexist? Was the 'best' even a valid category for thinking about texts? Debates over these abstract questions rocked the nation's institutions of higher education, demonstrating that the culture wars did not boil down to any one specific issue or even a set of issues. Rather, the culture wars often hinged on a more epistemological question about national identity: How should Americans think?
"But in our current age of austerity, Americans are not asked to think about such questions at all."


Andrew Hartman in In These Times argues that conservatives "have abandoned the humanities entirely."

"Even the Triangle Workers Got One Day a Week Off"

"The men who owned the Triangle factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, didn't want 146 of the people who worked for them to die in agony. But they also never bothered to supply their factories with effective firefighting equipment of any kind because that cost money—and because they had a history of suspicious, end-of-the-season fires that conveniently burned up their heavily insured, surplus cloth.
"Public unions could have put policemen and firemen out of the Tammany machine's reach. Private unions could have protected the women working at the Triangle factory. Even in safer times, the need endures to guard workers from the worse tendencies of government and business."


Kevin Baker at The New Republic connects the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to today's labor issues.

Defend the Wisconsin Idea

"The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I work, is an urban research university that has been nationally recognized for service to the community. Twenty million dollars—our campus's likely share of the cuts—represents the entire annual budget of our business school, or our college of engineering, or our schools of public health, information studies and social welfare combined. Which should we eliminate to help students prepare for 'real world' jobs?

"We should reject Mr. Walker's claim that he knows best what the limits of Wisconsin students' education should be. As my students understand, the humanities train critical thinkers and citizens. That may be inconvenient for politicians who see their constituents as merely a 'work force,' but it is definitely good for our democracy, as well as our economy."

In The New York Times, Christine Evans slams Governor Scott Walker's attempt to undermine his state's university system.

What's the Matter with Wisconsin?

"Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—'the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,' as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it. Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his party—let alone win a presidential election—needs to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind."


In The New Republic, Alec MacGillis analyzes Scott Walker and Wisconsin politics.

"Winners Deserve to Be Winners Because They Are Winners"

"'The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,' Paul Ryan said in 2009.  'And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.' In time for Team Romney’s vetting process, the freshly-minted V.P. nominee has since walked back his devotion to Rand and her philosophy, telling National Review that an admiration for the mid-century Soviet émigré does not 'suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.'

"Wherever Ryan currently stands on Objectivism, which Rand invented, it’s worth reviewing the basics of the world’s greediest philosophy."

In The New Republic, Simon van Zuylen-Wood names "The Ten Strangest Things About Objectivism."

Ann Friedman at New York calls Paul Ryan "Your Annoying Libertarian Ex-Boyfriend."

David Stockman in The New York Times says that Ryan "is preaching the same empty conservative sermon."

John Nichols at The Nation writes that Wisconsinite Ryan is against the "Wisconsin Idea."

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic argues that Ryan makes for a poor Randian.

In The New Republic, Jennifer Burns traces Ayn Rand's influence over the past fifty years.

On Wisconsin's Results

"In postwar America, the labor movement supplied more than money to Democrats. It supplied a movement, the kind that gets people elected and then empowers those people to do something. 
"As labor has declined, Democrats have turned to other sources of financial support, such as Wall Street and, more recently, high tech. That money helped make Bill Clinton a two-term president and may yet do the same for Barack Obama. But that money doesn’t push for economic populism and, at times, it pushes against it. Only on non-economic issues, like abortion, gender equality, or gay rights, does Democratic money steer the party in a progressive direction."

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic reacts to the recall election in Wisconsin.

"As for Marxists, They’re in Short Supply in This Current Congress"

"But West might take a measure of comfort in knowing that he is not entirely wrong about the fact that the Congress has included readers of Marx, ideological allies of the Communist Party and members who were elected in alliance with the Socialist Party."For the most part, these radicals have operated under a single banner. But it is not that of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—and certainly not that of the Democratic Party."

John Nichols at The Nation explores the socialist past of the Republican Party.

Dodger Blues

"Two years ago, Michigan's then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm described automakers as 'a healthcare provider that happened to make cars.' For a generation now, baseball has been a highly leveraged real estate urban development plan in which men happen to play a game. Now, young fans are disconnected from the game, and a franchise such as the Dodgers, with all its history and dazzling brilliance, is in receivership. The L.A. Chamber of Commerce has worried that in a worst-case scenario, the team would leave Los Angeles. Although this might provoke cheers in Brooklyn, it would be a tragedy for the game."

In the Los Angeles Times, Dave Zirin argues that the Dodgers should become like the Green Bay Packers.

ALEC Bald-Faced

"But in today's political climate, there are consequences for taking a stand. As surely nearly everyone who has been following developments in Wisconsin already knows, the Republican Party of Wisconsin has filed an open records request demanding access to any emails Cronon has sent or received since Jan. 1 containing the search terms 'Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.'
"The obvious goal is to find something damaging or embarrassing to Cronon--although judging by Cronon's account, smoking guns seem unlikely to be lying around in plain sight. (Eight of the names referenced in the request belong to the eight Republican state senators targeted by Democrats for recall.)"

Andrew Leonard in Salon reports on conservative attacks upon historian William Cronon.

"This Is Our Moment"

"The ferment in the Midwest—a place that many people on the coasts assume just waits around for revolutionary ideas to be flown in, like day-old sushi—exists in part because the region has been the center of so much of the industry where the union movement first took hold.
"'That environment bred very different ideas of political freedom and justice,' said Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown whose book 'The Populist Persuasion' traces the growth of populism both left and right. 'On the one hand, there were the business conservatives who believed that their skills and entrepreneurial energy had enabled the country to become rich. On the other hand, the people who worked for them thought they were leeching from them.'"

In The New York Times, Kate Zernike explores Wisconsin's labor history.

Racing to the Bottom

"Why is this model of economic growth so appealing to the Tea Party? For one, it tends to jibe very well with the Ayn Randian belief in producerism: the idea that 'job creators'—business owners—are the only source of economic growth in society, and that everyone else—the workers, government employees, and the poor—are just “useless eaters” shackling those who exercise individual initiative. While many Democrats are baffled by Scott Walker’s attack on the unions—shouldn’t he be focused on jobs rather than eliminating workers’ protections? they ask—the fact is that today’s conservatives believe this is the right and only way to create jobs. The same delusion is present at the federal level, where House Republicans insist that deregulation and spending cuts are the only ways to create jobs. That doesn’t sound like a formula for job growth, unless you account for the conviction that rolling back the public sector, and in the process impoverishing the middle-class families that depend on its services, is essential to keep any costs low enough for corporations to work their magic. The fact that the 'beneficiaries' who get jobs as a result of this corporate development model will have to work for lower wages and fewer benefits, and suffer from poor schools and a violated environment, is beside the point."

In The New Republic, Ed Kilgore explains the stakes in the battle of Wisconsin.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker connects Wisconsin to the national labor movement.

Peeling The Onion

"The rise of the parodic industry poses new riddles for media observers: In years to come, will America's faux news prove a more enduring enterprise than the news itself? What might it mean for our nation that joke news could outlast the institutions it ridicules? 'Speaking as a citizen of America, it's a little terrifying that real news is crashing while fake news is growing,' said Chet Clem, the Onion's editorial manager. 'It's scary. You wonder where people are going to get their facts.'"

Wells Tower in The Washington Post investigates America's "leading satirical newspaper."