"Whoever wins—Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Vice President Harris, or anyone else—would be more coherent and more persuasive than Trump."

That's my favorite sentence in "Time to Roll the Dice/Biden’s party doesn’t need to sleepwalk into a catastrophe," by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic.

Until now, I had not seen the name of our Governor in any of the replace-Biden discussions. Why not? He's a very low key calming presence. Example:

"But once glasnost became official policy, once Soviet citizens could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, factory efficiency was not their first choice of topic."

"Nor did they want to rescue the sinking ship of socialism. Instead, there was an explosion of debate and discussion about the past, about the history of mass arrests and mass murders, about the Gulag and Soviet political prisons. Historical accounts, memoirs and diaries that had been hidden in desk drawers, raced off the printing presses and became best sellers. Newspapers printed stories of sleaze and mismanagement in the economy, politics, culture, and everything else. Calls for the creation of a different kind of society, a more democratic society, a more law-abiding society, began immediately.... Contrary to the retrospective Putinist historiography now prevalent in Russia, the glasnost era was a creative, exciting, hopeful time for millions of people, even millions of Russians. Gorbachev seemed bewildered, and no wonder. Having lived much of his life at the top of the Soviet nomenklatura, he never understood the depth of cynicism in his own country or the depth of anger in the occupied Soviet satellite states, most of whose inhabitants rejected even the reformed communism of his youth: They didn’t want the Prague Spring; they wanted to join Western Europe...."

 
Writes Anne Applebaum, in "Gorbachev Never Realized What He Set in Motion/Almost nobody has ever had such a profound impact on an era, while understanding so little about it" (The Atlantic).

"Despite all of that power and all of that money, despite total control over the information space and total domination of the political space, Putin must know, at some level, that he is an illegitimate leader."

"He has never won a fair election, and he has never campaigned in a contest that he could lose. He knows that the political system he helped create is profoundly unfair, that his regime not only runs the country but owns it, making economic and foreign-policy decisions that are designed to benefit the companies from which he and his inner circle personally profit.... He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail. These are big goals, and they might not be achievable. But Putin’s beloved Soviet Union also had big, unachievable goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors... failed—but they did a lot of damage while trying."

From "The Reason Putin Would Risk War/He is threatening to invade Ukraine because he wants democracy to fail—and not just in that country" by Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic).

"Students and professors, editorial assistants and editors in chief—all are aware of what kind of society they now inhabit. That’s why they censor themselves..."

"... why they steer clear of certain topics, why they avoid discussing anything too sensitive for fear of being mobbed or ostracized or fired without due process.... Many people have told me they want to change this atmosphere, but don’t know how. Some hope to ride it out, to wait for this moral panic to pass, or for an even younger generation to rebel against it.... Anonymous reports and Twitter mobs, not the reasoned judgments of peers, will shape the fate of individuals. Writers and journalists will fear publication. Universities will no longer be dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge but to the promotion of student comfort and the avoidance of social-media attacks. Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre....  There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us."

 
From "The New Puritans/Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless" by Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic).

Hawthorne = Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter."

"I think the tearing down of Confederate statues is something people are doing because they can't tear down Trump."

"It's like kicking the dog after a hard day working for a boss you hate," I said a few days ago.

And now here's a column in The Washington Post by Anne Applebaum:

Polish and Ukrainian statues [of Lenin] came down as the result of a revolutionary moment, a sudden break in the political situation. In the United States in 2017, we are living through what feels to many like a similar, though not entirely analogous, revolutionary moment. The election of Trump, the first American president in decades to use unapologetically racist language — starting with his insidious slur that Barack Obama was not American, moving on to his reference to Mexican “rapists” and continuing with his refusal to condemn neo-Nazis — has smashed the ordinary rhythms of American political life. Suddenly, in Trump’s America, a statue honoring a Confederate leader looks like not just a boring monument to the distant past but a living political statement about the present.

Suddenly!

Suddenly I see just how much that damned dog looks like that bastard I have to work for.

"It's always interesting to me to see what others, especially Americans have to say about 'what it was like' to live under Communist rule."

Writes my colleague Nina, as she begins her annual journey back to Poland. She's reading Anne Applebaum's new book — "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956" — and thinking about her own nascent book:

Since I am so close to finishing my great (summer, as it turns out) writing project, it's a good time to take stock: to see if what I wrote still feels right. I'll be looking for that.

Anne Applebaum prattles about the divide in America between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class.

Instapundit pointed me to this piece, so I read it:

Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 per cent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating.

I would argue that the growing divisions within the American middle class are far more important than the gap between the very richest and everybody else. They are important because to be “middle class”, in America, has such positive connotations, and because most Americans think they belong in it...

“Middle America” also once implied the existence of a broad group of people who had similar values and a similar lifestyle. If you had a small suburban home, a car, a child at a state university, an annual holiday on a Michigan lake, you were part of it. But, at some point in the past 20 years, a family living at that level lost the sense that it was doing “well”, and probably struggled even to stay there. Now it seems you need a McMansion, children at private universities, two cars, a ski trip in the winter and a summer vacation in Europe in order to feel as if you are doing minimally “well”. ...

What?! "It seems..."? It doesn't seem that way to me! I'm securely in the "upper middle class" as Applebaum describes it, yet I don't see myself as easily grasping the things on that list of what it takes to feel you're doing "minimally 'well.'" Why would people distributed throughout the middle class feel left behind because they can't get all that? Applebaum seems radically out of touch with reality. Do people even want McMansions anymore? The professors I know seem to love modest-sized houses when they have a nice design and some pretty gardens. And I don't know anyone who comfortably shells out cash for college tuition. And who are these people who think it's necessary to get over to Europe in the summer?

Applebaum poses what she must think is a ponderous question:

[I]f Americans are no longer “all in the same boat”, if some of them are now destined to live better than others, then will they continue to feel like political equals? 

They? Why is she saying "they"?! I'd say we will go on as we always have. We look at those who have more, make some choices, and do what we can. Some of us get motivated to work harder at making money, and maybe we succeed and maybe we don't. Some of us decide not to work so hard but to control our covetousness and develop our capacity to love what we have. (Why not leave Europe to the Europeans and buy an annual pass to your state's parks and value the beauty of the landscape you live in? That's what Meade and I do.)  And, yes, some of us fall prey to bitterness and cynicism, and if that happens, we can either perceive this state of mind as our own character flaw or plunge deeply into blaming others.

We're a diverse bunch, we Americans. But I think most of us understand the way we are equal in America. We have equal rights and equal opportunity. We have never had equal economic outcomes, and very few of us have ever believed in the kind of politics that say we need equal economic status to feel like political equals.

Anne Applebaum says: Roman Polanski "did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways..."

"... In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film."

What she doesn't say:

Applebaum failed to mention that her husband is a Polish foreign minister who is lobbying for Polanski’s case to be dismissed....

Incredible! We're talking about a Washington Post columnist here, who used the corporate pages to write a piece decrying "The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski."

But is that any more absurd than saying he's suffered enough because of all the burdens on his career? Think what this means, generalizing the opinion into an abstract rule. It means that those with high professional standing do not need the usual criminal punishments given to individuals who have very little in this world. Ordinary people must be punished in prison, but big shots are already punished heavily by the mere revelation of their crimes and therefore should be relieved of much or all of the usual prison sentence. Care to sign on to that rule? 

IN THE COMMENTS: Mortimer Brezny says:

I used to agree with Ann that punishment ought to be equal. But then I realized that sympathy is unequal. If you are poor, you are pitied. If you are rich, you are not. No matter if you were born poor and worked diligently over years to build a business that provides you with your present level of wealth. No matter if you were born rich and worked hard to sustain and grow the wealth with which you started. This imbalance, of course, leads to an unfair resentment and hatred of the rich. The poor can get away with all sorts of horrors against the rich and the successful, the talented and the intelligent, and when the favored sons strike back, they are chastened. That is wrong. Equal means equal. If the rich are to be despised and the poor are able to strike them on a daily basis in innumerable ways, then the rich ought to be able to strike back. And the punishments should reflect the toll of the daily indignities. I say punish the poor even worse. Make them suffer for their petty hatred of the rich, for their nasty, impish wrongful jabs at the rich on a everyday basis.

And let us not forget about contribution. Ayn Rand may have been a loon, but the truth of the matter is some create wealth and some do not. Those who create wealth -- of whatever kind; art, business, science, political wisdom -- are rare and deserve our protection and admiration. Those who destroy wealth, those who pilfer from the coffers of others, they deserve nothing but our contempt.