The Panic Primary
At least we have Lizzo
I am going on vacation this weekend, so this might be the last newsletter for a bit. Read it slowly. Make it last.
Read: Some countries will benefit economically from climate change. Avocados used to be called alligator pears. A Swedish King was wrong about coffee, and hilarity ensued. Alexander Hamilton coined words. Protestors in Hong Kong are appropriating American imagery. Why do we call things porn now, such as “food porn”? What are the indicators of a recession? The Mueller Report had a surprisingly big social media impact. If you don’t want to know how many delivery drivers taste your food, skip this part. Half of all articles in a newspaper go unread. And a smart pollster explains why most Americans aren’t for big, structural changes in health care even though no one likes the status quo.
Watch: Schitt’s Creek, because Glen Weldon said so.
Listen: as Lizzo launches a Tiny Desk Concert into space.
But first: Do you remember what you felt like when you found out Trump actually won?
I’m struggling to come up with a metaphor that captures the trauma of finding out that the country you love has elected Donald J. Trump. Possibly worse was waking up the next day, laying in bed without a word of comfort, just the realization that now we’ve gone and done it. Still, I resist accepting that this happened. Even now, someone will unmute the television at work, and I’ll hear his voice and think, “No, that can’t be right.” Maybe there’s no metaphor for trauma, just the symptoms, the continued disbelief that this marvelous experiment in democracy includes a scientifically valid sample of people who considered their choices and picked the one who…
You can fill in your own blank there, but whether you found him unfit because of Access Hollywood or toadying up to dictators or just being tacky, those are all just rationalizations, illustrations on the wall of the cave to give dimension to the beast outside. Our brains construct arguments to articulate the amygdalian howl of terror. Really? Y’all are going to go ahead and LARP the Weimar Republic now? You’re cheering the abdication of a more perfect union? And even that is an intellectual construct, just a way to explain the screaming that started when Trump was declared the winner, and it hasn’t stopped since.
Do I have that about right? It doesn’t take much to trigger the fear that set in when Trump won, whereas it seems strange that less than a year ago Democrats won almost every election worth winning, flipping enough seats in Congress to build a huge majority. And now some of those people we elected are out there calling the president a racist, or demanding government-backed health insurance, or saying that we have to treat the huddled masses yearning to breathe free as if they are guests in our home, and it’s hard to ignore the fear that we’re waking the beast. The panic tastes metallic.
We’re still reacting. As we learned last week, people in DC are so messed up that now even the therapists are depressed. It would be unreasonable to collectively process a trauma while it is still ongoing, and so here we are, still trying to quell the panic, the voice that says he’s probably going to win again, the voice that makes him bigger and stronger than he is, that describes a man for whom every sentence is a choose-your-own adventure as a master debater, that convinces us that none of our candidates could possibly take him down. This is the voice that tells us that the most important thing is not to piss him or his voters off.
My friend was excited when Joe Biden got in the race. He even smiled and said, “He’s someone I can get behind.” When I asked him why, he said Biden would appeal to people like him and made a reference to the white working class voters whose defection cost Hillary the election, even though I’ve told him this isn’t true. My friend is not working class, and though he is white he wasn’t making an overt racial appeal. He meant that Biden wasn’t gay, or black, or a woman. He wouldn’t upset the beast.
This belief that the way to defeat Trump is to make things safe for white people has taken root. In his open letter to the Democratic candidates, Rahm Emanuel warned that advocating for Medicare for All and health care for immigrants would scare “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.” And far be it for me to quibble with a syllable that Sarah Vowell writes, but in her pitch for Gov. Steve Bullock she dropped this ludicrous expression of the PTSD that I see in too many liberals: “…too much far left jibber-jabber [is] threatening to Mondale-up the electoral map…”
To a lesser extent this argument for electability is what I’m hearing from Bernie. He would have won last time, they say, and he can win this time. His argument in the debate that “he wrote the damn bill” notwithstanding, out on the hustings he’s portraying himself as a different kind of safe choice.
This belief that “electability” is dependent upon making the nominee safe for white people (sorry, “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio”) is animating the Democratic primary. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the feelings behind my friend, Rahm, and Sarah’s advocacy for safe harbor, and they may very well be correct that Biden might be the best chance to beat Trump. And it should be said that beating Trump has value all on its own absent any progress a Democratic president might make. A Trump presidency has a known baseline cost and an unknown downside. It can always get worse and almost always has.
But this primary is not portrayed as a choice between the electability argument (which sounds nicer than appeasing white people) and the policy proposition. We keep hearing one side propose progressive policies and the other saying that we need to tone it down to appeal to swing voters, and the newspapers tell us this is a choice between liberals and moderates. It’s not. The moderates have policies, to be sure, but their answer to the liberals’ proposals isn’t that their policies are better, just that they won’t scare voters. It’s not about ideology. It’s about panic.
There is growing evidence that the country is reacting to Trump’s presidency in a way that subverts the logic of the panic caucus. Trump got a shade over 46 percent in 2016. Now he’s only got 32 percent saying they will definitely vote to re-elect him with another 12 percent saying they’ll consider it. I’m not great at math, but I can add whole numbers. Meanwhile, Democrats are more satisfied with their choices in the primary than they were in 2008, and voter enthusiasm is way up since 2016.
One underreported shift in the electorate is with the women. The gender gap is double what it was in 2016. If you’re into good news, it looks like Trump has turned college-educated white women into a new part of the Democratic coalition, and he’s even starting to lose a plurality of non-college educated white women.
A majority of Americans think Trump is a racist, tried to "derail or obstruct" the Mueller investigation, was not cleared by that investigation, and think Congress should pass new laws to protect our elections from foreign interference that they expect to come next year. A majority of Americans say that conditions in the migrant camps are “inhumane” and that people in those camps should be released even if there is a risk they won’t show up for court. This is America, but not all of it. The only Americans who are overwhelmingly against all this are Republicans and, by even bigger margins, white, evangelical Christians.
Writing all this down makes this seem more real, but then I go back and re-read the first sentence of the press release where I got these poll numbers and blink: “President Donald Trump is racist, American voters say 51 - 45 percent in a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.” And yet we have credible leaders stand up and say that Elizabeth Warren is going to scare the country, and credible analysts say Democrats are having a liberal-versus-moderate intramural fight.
If that’s true, why is Bernie Sanders doing as well with conservative and moderate Democrats as he is with liberal Democrats?
If this is all about liberals versus moderates, why is Bernie the second choice for Biden voters, and vice versa? And why is Kamala Harris the second choice of Elizabeth Warren voters and not her supposed ideological soulmate, Bernie?
Biden’s status as a frontrunner is largely due to the panic that Democrats might lose again. More Democrats have intensely favorable impressions of Warren and Harris than they do of Biden and Bernie. More Democrats would like to hang out with Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Harris than Biden or Bernie. But if the election were held today, more Democrats would still vote for Biden.
You could almost call this an ideas primary, except that while Harris and Warren are getting online attention for their ideas, most of Biden’s social engagement has to do with polls. It’s not a fight over whose ideas are better. It’s a fight over whether having ideas will scare voters, which is why it landed so hard when Elizabeth Warren said, “I don’t understand why anyone goes through all the trouble of running for president of the United States to just talk about what we can’t do and what we shouldn’t fight for,” which is as close as you can come to LBJs famous question “What good is the Presidency if you don’t do anything with it?” without actually quoting him.
I never really understood FDR’s admonition of not having anything to fear but fear itself. You have to be brave leave the cave and fight the beast. Sitting around and being scared of the fight isn’t going to make it any easier to win. Be ye not afraid.
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What I’m reading
The good news is that some countries’ economies (Canada, UK, and US) will benefit from climate change, but only slightly. The bad news is that Russia, Nigeria, and India will be much worse off.
The good news is that the U.S. already has a program to forgive college debt. The bad news? It’s not working.
This seems big: CNN isn’t airing Trump’s campaign rallies live anymore.
Apparently the company I work for is largely responsible for turning the "alligator pear" into the ubiquitous and versatile avocado. Thanks to S.P. for that one.
The EU has changed monetary policy for the first time to allow inflation to rise above 2-percent ceiling. Not sure what this means, but it’s remarkable to see a central bank not worry about inflation so much.
This is, um, wild: Apparently crowdsourcing tourists’ safari photographs yields accurate estimates of animal populations.
King Gustav III of Sweden was hilariously wrong about coffee.
In which Yesterday is compared favorably to a bunch of movies I like (Groundhog Day, The Invention of Lying, Colossal), but I still don’t want to see it.
Here’s why describing Julián Castro as “not fluent in Spanish” is problematic. And apparently he was telling the truth when he said a white supremacist was behind criminalizing border crossings back in the 1920s.
Did you read “The Crane Wife”? I don’t think it’s any accident that the author, who here is writing about calling off her engagement, was writing a novel about something “I had no idea what [it] actually looked like.” They say to write what you know. Here she writes, and does so well, about her ignorance of things: field research, relationships, happiness.
I had no idea Alexander Hamilton coined the word “misstep.” It’s no “amygdalian,” but still…
Saudi Arabia is disappearing dissidents.
A third of China’s population watched at least some of the NBA’s last season. That’s half a billion people, y’all.
Protestors in Hong Kong are flying the American flag and have appropriated “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a protest song because they are under the impression that the United States represents rights, liberties and democracy.
My friend B.B. offered up this musing on the utility and meanings of the word “porn” nowadays. It gets deep quickly, each paragraph a big new thought.
This seems like a smart explainer of what indicators of a possible coming recession you should be paying attention to.
Tariffs are forcing manufacturing jobs from China, but they are not being repatriated to the United States.
Mars used to be wet.
A housing price correction is coming, but it’ll hit New Zealand and Canada hardest.
This is a fascinating history (light, breezy read, don’t worry) about the evolution of brands online.
I know a little something about using humor on social media to engender a digital persona for a public official. Does this metastasize when police departments use this to engender trust with the public?
By the way, I think you’re a bit of alright.
Headline: “More Americans have died in car crashes since 2000 than in both World Wars.”
Most Republicans think Mueller exonerated Trump; he did not. Related: The Mueller report had a bigger social media footprint than the Super Bowl did and almost twice as big as the Oscars.
Did you know China has put more than 1 million of its Muslim Uighur minority into concentration camps? They call them vocational education training centers intended to stem Islamic extremism. They subject them to Communist Party indoctrination all day.
It’s significant that there is no market for John Delaney.
Recent studies indicate: One in four delivery drivers take a bite out of your food order, so yes, my wife is correct and we should always save money by going to pick it up ourselves. You need a break after 90 minutes of concentration. Differing musical tastes can be a dealbreaker in a relationship. In fact, “nineteen percent of the women surveyed said they wouldn't sleep with someone who had music preferences different from their own.” Want your kids to have more successful lives? Raise them in a city. Binge drinking among seniors is up, but they are “less likely to have multiple chronic conditions, like high blood pressure and diabetes.”
News nerds: You know that advertising axiom that half of all ad spending is wasted but they don’t know which half? It appears there is a corollary for newsrooms, too. Speaking of ads, they are doing better on sites with high-quality journalism. This is wild: There is a black market in old links to the New York Times, the Guardian, Forbes, HuffPost, CNN, BBC News, and Bloomberg. Sheesh: 27 percent of Americans don’t know the difference between an editorial and a news article, about half are familiar with the term “op-ed,” and 30 percent are familiar with the concept of attribution. The richer the country, the more likely climate change is going to be covered as a science issue. Most journalists aren’t sure they can spot flawed research. The poor, the more likely coverage will be about the practical effects, such as floods. Finally, there are huge problems with the way homelessness is being covered. (Thanks to A.G. for the last one.)
Last word: Ever wonder why, if Americans think their health care system doesn’t work, they aren’t more willing to pursue big, structural changes such as Medicare for All? Pollster Jeff Liszt explains why in a brilliant Twitter thread.
What I’m listening to
If you haven’t already listened to Lizzo’s Tiny Desk Concert, then somewhere along the way you wasted 16 minutes that could have been better spent watching and listening to her. For some reason they haven’t loaded Lizzo’s TDC onto YouTube yet, probably because they’re getting some sweet traffic on NPR.com, which is where you should go right now. Click on this and enjoy.
What I’m watching
We’ve been over this, right? When Glen Weldon recommends something, we do what? That’s right, watch the pilot, decide that an ironic fish out of Canadian water is not in season, spend the ensuing years coming up with different ways to explain why you’re not watching Schitt’s Creek, sigh heavily when Glen includes Noah Reid serenading David on Pop Culture Happy Hour’s list of the best things in 2018, skip over his lovely review of SC season 5, insist for nearly another year that the show is just not the thing you’re looking for, and only when the missus goes out of town sit down and watch it and find much therein to love.
Why I love this scene (and why Glen Weldon said it was one of his favorite things in 2018) won’t make sense to you if you’re hitting this show fresh. Basic set up: The show trades in stylized irony. Rich, fancy people lose fortune and are forced to move to a tiny town called Schitt’s Creek. The family are ridiculous characters who think regular working people are strange. It comes to pass that David, the young, adult son, and Patrick, the young man playing guitar in this scene, have opened a store and are also falling in love. They throw an open-mic night to drum up business, which scares David because he’ll have to be around tacky people being sincere. Then Patrick tells him that he’ll be singing, which raises the stakes for David. Add to this scene Catherine O'Hara, who plays a faded soap opera star and David’s mom, and you’re expecting this to become a disastrous comedy of manners.
But then she places her hand on David’s bicep and it becomes something quite different. Watching David accept love while his mother supports him has no business being in this show, and it elevates the enterprise to something wonderful. So if you haven’t seen the show, binge it on Netflix and settle into the irony. It’s funny until it becomes thunderingly sincere in the “Open Mic” episode in season 4. It’s like knowing you can look forward to a nice Christmas.
What I’m listening to
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