"The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a 'rapist' and wrote 'Fuck Kamala Harris'..."

"... on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028. The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western 'bullying.' She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism. These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone 'woke' era. They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic...."

I'm reading "There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists," by Jonathan Chait, at The Atlantic.

"The right to publicly carry weapons is a centerpiece of Second Amendment advocacy and has emerged as a key issue in the shooting of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti...."

"Bill Essayli, Los Angeles' top federal prosecutor and a Trump ally, received fierce blowback from gun-rights groups over his Saturday claim that there is a 'high likelihood' law enforcement will be 'legally justified' in shooting someone who approaches them with a gun. The National Rifle Association responded on X that this sentiment was 'dangerous and wrong.' Gun Owners of America condemned Essayli's statement, writing that the Second Amendment 'protects Americans' right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon.' Essayli claimed that condemnation 'mischaracterize[d]' his statement...."

From "Gun rights groups challenge shooting of legally armed Minneapolis man" (Axios).

And here's Jonathan Chait, in "What MAGA Really Thinks of the Second Amendment/Now Americans know" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn."

"Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding.... But... it isn’t happening any more.... The era lasted almost exactly 10 years.... The political precondition was the giddy atmosphere that followed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which appeared... to reveal a rising cohort of young, socially liberal nonwhite voters whose influence would continue to grow indefinitely. The rapid progression of causes like gay marriage seemed to confirm a one-way ratchet of egalitarian social norms....

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "How Liberal America Came to Its Senses/The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump" (The Alantic).

I'm not agreeing with the tale Chait tells. In fact, I find some of it hilarious. I'm presenting it for critical discussion. So let's continue. How did America "come to its senses"? Chait writes:

"The [Democratic P]arty’s current 51st seat, held by Joe Manchin, will turn Republican next year. The 50th seat, occupied by Jon Tester..."

"... in heavily Republican Montana, also seems to be gone.... In theory, Democrats could hold 50 seats and break ties by sweeping every other contested race and deposing either Rick Scott in Florida or Ted Cruz in Texas.... It is possible Cruz will be upset, but the chances that occurs and Democrats hold on in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — all of which appear closer than Texas — are remote at best, and fantastical at worst. The race for House control remains a toss-up. It is possible that Trump would have to contend with divided government. But it is almost certain Harris would do so. That means that her legislative ambitions are largely dead on arrival.... Harris is not going to be enacting new social programs, and her latitude in confirming judges and even picking a cabinet will be tightly constrained..... Trump is a different story.... The options on the table in all practicality are Harris governing in conjunction with Republicans, or Trump implementing his unfettered vision of American Orbanism."

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "The Election Choice Is Divided Government or Unrestrained Trumpism/Harris won’t be able to implement her plans. Trump will" (NY Magazine).

To restate that argument: Don't worry that you don't know who Kamala Harris really is, because whatever plans she might be hiding will never be revealed.

And speaking of Ted Cruz, here's a bumper sticker my son Chris photographed in Austin, Texas 2 days ago:

"[T]he conviction of a former president is novel only in the American context."

"Many global heads of state of democratic countries (France, Japan, Israel, etc.) have gone to prison.... The incongruity of the Manhattan case as the venue for Trump’s legal humiliation is that it did not represent his worst crimes, or close to it. The case was always marginal, the kind of charge you would never bring against a regular first-time offender. It was the sort of charge you’d concoct if the target is a bad guy and you want to nail him for something. This, too, is not without precedent. Al Capone’s conviction for tax evasion is the paradigmatic example.... The legal ramifications of this weakness will play out in some indeterminate, possibly terrible fashion.... Life isn’t fair, nor is the legal system...."

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "Trump’s Conviction Means Less Than You Might Think/A lot depends on what happens next" (NY Magazine).

Possibly terrible.... It's obviously terrible. It's only a question of which form of terribleness lies ahead.

So Chait is openly saying the the legal system isn't fair and Trump was convicted for being "a bad guy." You want us non-haters to just accept that, as if it's a form of world-weary sophistication? No, you will have to bear the weight of the consequences of persecuting a political opponent. You should not get off easy. 

"[V]arious ax-grinders want to use Biden’s struggles to push the party toward their positions. Critics of Israel have fixated..."

"... on the problems created by encampments at elite universities. And it is true that the news media’s intense coverage of an issue that splits the Democratic coalition and unites the Republican coalition hurts Biden and helps Trump. But that does not accurately reflect the nature of Biden’s polling deficit. The Harvard youth poll found Israel-Palestine at the bottom of young voters’ concerns.... Overall, the public continues to sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 41 percent to 22 percent.... [S]iding with the unpopular protesters would not address the source of Biden’s unpopularity. Another, more traditional form of ax-grinding came recently from Mark Penn in a Times op-ed. Penn... a key strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign... [has a] long-standing fixation... [on moving] to the center across the board.... In reality, taxing the rich and corporations is Biden’s most popular issue.... The economy is still healthy, and the anti-Israel protests might — might — die down. But the trajectory remains grim...."

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "No, Your Pet Issue Is Not Making Biden Lose/It’s inflation, not Israel or class warfare" (New York Magazine).

"It is theoretically possible, I suppose, that an 81-year-old teetotaling Catholic has suddenly embarked upon a drug-fueled lifestyle."

"But this raises the question of why, exactly, we should care that Biden is using these wonder drugs to elevate his public performance. After all, in sports, we limit steroid use and other performance-enhancing drugs because those drugs have awful side effects, and give those willing to accept them an unfair advantage. What are the side effects of Biden’s alleged drug use?... Or is the idea that Biden is somehow rigging the election by using some kind of drugs that turn him into an energetic public speaker?"

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "Biden Was So Good, Trump Is Accusing Him of Performance-Enhancing Drugs/We need a president who can get high on life?" (NY Magazine).

1. All Trump did was post, at one point during the SOTU, "THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF."

2. I suspect Chait knows a lot that he's not saying about how many Washingtonians use drugs. Instead of making analogies to sports and jokes about accusations of rigging elections, why not give us more information about Washington drug culture? I see that a few days ago, Rolling Stone came out with "Trump’s White House Was 'Awash in Speed' — and Xanax/Under Trump, the White House Medical Unit was 'like the Wild West,' and staffers had easy access to powerful stimulants and sedatives, sources tell Rolling Stone." How awash in speed is Washington? I'd like to know. Don't play innocent.

3. What's with Chait's subtitle? "We need a president who can get high on life?"

Did Elon Musk use the word "blackmail" incorrectly? Jonathan Chait thinks so...

... and makes much of it, in "Elon Musk Doesn’t Understand What ‘Blackmail’ Means/Companies refusing to pay for your ads is not blackmail" (NY Magazine).

We were just talking about the Elon Musk statement — "If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising — blackmail me with money — go fuck yourself" — and I, a law professor, didn't think of going technical on the word "blackmail." Musk wasn't purporting to make a legal argument, and he was speaking spontaneously, and it was easy to grasp what he was saying: You can't use money to control what I do. He wasn't using the word "fuck" literally either. 

Chait writes:

Blackmail is a specific crime in which the perpetrator threatens to release public information unless the victim pays them or performs some service.

But Chait isn't really about what legal terms technically mean. 

"The strangest thing about this harrowing circumstance is that no mainstream Democrat is challenging Biden for the nomination."

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "Biden or Bust/Why isn’t a mainstream Democrat challenging the president?" (NY Magazine).

What's so "strange" and "harrowing" about party discipline? The incumbent President is running for a second term. It's completely normal that he'll be his party's nominee. Chait doesn't concede that there's anything wrong with Biden, so his agonizing looks silly.

"The demand for a different option is robust. What is mystifyingly absent is the supply."

No, it's not mystifying. It's exactly what you would expect.

Chait dismisses RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson as "a pair of kooks." Yes, it's kooky to challenge your party's incumbent President. You have to attack him. Yet Chait asserts that a challenger — some Senator (Warnock?) or Governor (Whitmer?) — could run and "maybe wouldn’t have to question Biden’s accomplishments"  (or differ much on his policy stances"). Chait invites them to limit their campaign to the fact that Biden is too old.

And it's supposed to be "strange" and "mystifying" that no one will undertake that doomed mission. Chait never even mentions that Kamala Harris is the Democrat officially waiting in the wings. How can any good Democrat elbow past her and say, no, me first?

"They reject any question of his ethics! And they somehow believe that their position as clerks, whose careers benefit from Thomas’s prestige and influence..."

"... somehow makes them more rather than less suited to make this judgment. Taken at their word, they believe a factual allegation of ethical misconduct can be adjudicated entirely on a combination of Thomas’s identity as a once-poor Black man and their say-so as judges of character. This doesn’t tell us anything about Thomas’s compliance with ethics rules."

Writes Jonathan Chait in "Even Clarence Thomas’s Law Clerks Can’t Defend His Misconduct/A truly pathetic letter vouches for the disgraced Justice’s character" (NY Magazine).

Chait is reacting to an open letter in which 112 ex-clerks of Justice Thomas assert that "His integrity is unimpeachable" and "unequivocally reject attacks on his integrity, his character, or his ethics."

"Two developments over the last week significantly increased the likelihood that Donald Trump will be elected president next year."

I'm reading "Biden May Face Two Spoiler Candidates in 2024/Cornel West is running and No Labels is getting ready" by Jonathan Chait (Intelligencer).

At first, I thought this might be about the stellar RFK Jr. performance on Joe Rogan, but no. It's about Cornel West and No Labels. 

First, Cornel West announced his candidacy for the presidency, first on behalf of the People’s Party, before switching to the Green Party. Next, No Labels revised its criteria, and now says it plans to run a third-party presidential candidate unless Joe Biden is “way, way out ahead” in polls....

"Biden’s Document Blunder Is Nothing Like Trump’s Crime."

 That's not sarcastic. It's sincere. It's Jonathan Chait (at New York Magazine).

"... the theory that depolarizing opinion on electric cars by making Musk a right-wing culture war hero helps Tesla?"

doesn't this cut against the theory that depolarizing opinion on electric cars by making Musk a right-wing culture war hero helps Tesla?

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) November 19, 2022

"Understand the difference between 'ask' and 'guess' cultures."

I suggested, in the first of 9 TikTok links I posted last night. The link went to this short video by Mary Robinette Kowal. She's a Hugo, Nebula, Locus award-winning author of SF and fantasy, and her videos are presented as writing tips.

Several of my readers singled out that video as their favorite of the 9 I'd selected, and it may have been my favorite too. I put it first on the list, which doesn't mean I like it best, but does mean I think it may draw you in.

One commenter, tim maguire, said:

Guess culture is obnoxious. Just say what you want and don’t make the other person try to figure it out. “The cereal box is too high” could mean you want help getting the cereal, but more logically it means “we need to reorganize the kitchen.” 

Labyrinthine sentence of the day.

"It’s now much harder for progressives to depict, say, support for enforcing immigration law or opposition to defunding the police as inherently racist when it’s clear the communities supposedly offended by those positions support them."

From "Political Correctness Is Losing" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

I feel challenged to rewrite that so that the word "support" doesn't appear twice. I especially hate the complexity of supporting opposition to defunding. If you oppose supporting defunding, you just support funding.

I think Chait's point is that many black people oppose defunding the police, and many Hispanic people want immigration law enforced, and that makes it inopportune for progressives to call these positions racist.

I was going to blog everything in that article, but it's an effort at expressing optimism, and it feels like a con. Don't worry about wokeness. It's on its last legs. Is it? Chait's main reason why it's played out is that it's hurting the Democratic Party's quest for power.

"It is now indisputable, and almost undisputed, that the year and a quarter of virtual school imposed devastating consequences on the students who endured it."

"Studies have found that virtual school left students nearly half a year behind pace, on average, with the learning loss falling disproportionately on low-income, Latino, and Black students. Perhaps a million students functionally dropped out of school altogether. The social isolation imposed on kids caused a mental health 'state of emergency,' according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The damage to a generation of children’s social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable. It is nearly as clear that these measures did little to contain the pandemic... Progressives were carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.... 'Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters.'...  Most progressives [now]... just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong."

Writes Jonathan Chait in "School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It. Sometimes you need to own up to an error so it’s not repeated" (NY Magazine).

"When confronted with the reality that the Democratic Party is losing Black and Latino moderates, the response on the left is often to treat their views as morally beyond the pale."

"'Yes, it turns out that a number of people of color, especially those without a college education, can see the allure of the jackboot authoritarian thuggery offered by modern Republicans,' wrote The Nation’s Elie Mystal....  Obviously, nobody is proposing Democrats run on authoritarian thuggery. The question is whether any compromise with the center is acceptable. Obama competed for moderate views by promising that people could keep their private insurance even as he covered those who couldn’t get any coverage, that he would secure the border even as he gave amnesty to Dreamers. Reducing all these spectra of belief to a simple binary, then declaring the opposing position so horrific it cannot be accommodated, is not a political strategy. It is a kind of anti-politics. This anti-politics did not materialize out of thin air. It is the working assumption of a vast array of progressive nonprofit organizations and the millionaires who fund them. Over the past half-dozen years, several people who work in and around the nonprofit world have told me, the internal political culture at progressive foundations has undergone the same changes that have torn through elite universities, mainstream-media newsrooms, and private schools. An uncompromising version of left-wing political rhetoric has put the leadership of these organizations on the defensive and often prodded them to fund more radical organizations and ideas than before."

From "Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze Progressive donors to the left of him, cynical centrists to the right — a theory of why his popular agenda is so unpopular" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

"Youngkin’s new ad features the heart-wrenching story of Laura Murphy, a mother who tried to shield her son from having to read Beloved, by Toni Morrison."

"The ad does not identify the book, nor does it mention that Murphy is a Republican activist. But the story was covered by the media at the time, back in 2013. Murphy’s son told the Washington Post that the book, assigned for his Advanced Placement English course, 'was disgusting and gross. It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.' He also complained that he suffered 'night terrors' as a result of reading it. Murphy sought to have Beloved banned until 'new policies are adopted for books assigned for class that might have objectionable material,' said the Post. One irony here is that Republicans are rallying around a privileged snowflake who claims a book millions of children have read caused unbearable trauma. If their principle is that parents should be able to prevent schools from assigning texts that upset their kids, what are they going to say when progressives start demanding the school excise texts by Mark Twain, Richard Wright, and other authors who have run afoul of the left for depicting racist dialogue?"

From "Glenn Youngkin’s Closing Message: Ban Toni Morrison From Schools/Virginia Republican wants the angriest parents to have a veto on school curriculum" (NY Magazine).

Here's the ad: 

What's it like to have Terry McAuliffe block you from having a say in your child's education?

This mom knows – she lived through it. Watch her powerful story. #VAgov pic.twitter.com/u8EjmMQX0n

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) October 25, 2021

"Anybody Fighting Joe Biden Is Helping Trump’s Next Coup/All Republican politics is now functionally authoritarian."

There's an incendiary headline! But it shows too much, I think. It's demanding that everyone quiet themselves and act as though the current regime is good. Isn't that what they do in North Korea? And yet if you criticize Biden, you're the fascist. Functionally. 

Where is that headline? New York Magazine. On a column by Jonathan Chait. 

Is "coup" the word we're using now for anytime the wrong candidate wins an election?

I'll read the article. Highlights:

Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative and formerly influential Republican adviser, seized the attention of the intelligentsia by warning in a Washington Post essay that the constitutional crisis had already arrived. Trump is likely to win the party’s presidential nomination; ergo, the Republican Party is presumptively a vehicle for Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. 

Therefore — and here was the sharp end of the argument — anything advancing the Republican Party is a vehicle for Trump’s attack on the Constitution. Kagan’s provocation irritated his former allies because it closed off any pretense that Republicans engage in normal politics without endangering the republic...

What's "normal"? This is an argument of labels. Trump is "authoritarian." Democrats engage in "normal politics." 

Zero Republicans have even entertained joining with Democrats to support a bill to protect voting or elections from the subversion campaign Trump’s allies are energetically carrying out in various red states. Their apparent calculation is that even if they still harbor private concerns over the party’s direction, “normal” Republican partisanship remains completely kosher....

"Normal" gets quote marks there because Republicans act as if they can be considered normal but they cannot. Chait dictates.

The reason you can’t cordon off Trump from the rest of the party is that we now live in something functionally resembling a parliamentary system.

Chait likes that word "functionally." When things aren't what you want to say they are, just add "functionally."

Biden leads the governing party. Trump is the leader of the opposition. To oppose the one is to support the other....

No, that's not how America works. You were just scaring us about "Trump’s attack on the Constitution," but now you're assuming the Constitution out of existence, kicking it to the curb, and we're not supposed to notice, and if we do, we'd better be quiet... or we're functionally authoritarian.

It is true that some of the weapons at [Trump's] disposal last January will be in Biden’s hands in January 2025. But many of the state officials who resisted him last time have been replaced with more pliant figures; Trumpist Republicans seem likely to gain control of the election apparatus in Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia. In any case, Trump might well win the election fairly — and then what?

Well, then it's not "Trump's next coup." It's Trump's second election, like the one in 2016, and it will be your obligation — if you actually do care about the Constitution — to accept the results of the election and aim at winning the next election. That's democracy, and if you don't like that, who's "functionally authoritarian"?

... Does the probability of a catastrophic outcome like the end of American democracy actually need to exceed 50 percent before we take firm action to stop it? While conservatives like [Ross] Douthat are correct that Trump is not a Hitler, that is setting the bar for action rather low. Trump doesn’t need to be a potential Hitler, or even a Mussolini, to justify suspending our normal rules of political conduct.

Again, who's the functional authoritarian? You're openly justifying suspending our normal rules of political conduct!

ADDED: Think a bit more about this idea that "some of the weapons at [Trump's] disposal last January will be in Biden’s hands in January 2025." I'm seeing this at The Atlantic: "Kamala Harris Might Have to Stop the Steal/Constitutional scholars are already worrying about another January 6 crisis, and they warn that the next election might be harder to save" by Russell Berman: "How would [Kamala Harris] handle a certification from a Republican governor or secretary of state that appeared to subvert the popular vote in that state? What if, in other words, it were up to her to stop the steal?"

"Franzen’s position is a common one among liberal intellectuals: He concedes the threat to free speech norms on the left is real, but..."

".... insists it is too insignificant to merit criticism....  Franzen’s position, a common one on the left, implicitly concedes that there could be a point at which the problem grows to a level that it does merit criticism... Franzen takes the clarifying step of making that level explicit: when 'people start being sent off to Lubyanka' — the headquarters of the Soviet secret police — 'for having said the wrong thing to the wrong person.' I would suggest that, once we have gotten to, or anywhere near, the point at which stray comments result in abduction, torture and execution, it will be a bit late to speak out. Yet that is apparently the point at which Franzen is willing to start complaining publicly... Franzen’s mind seems to have particular difficulty calibrating and ordering multiple problems; the same befuddlement once inspired him to argue that environmentalists should focus on saving birds because mitigating climate change is hopeless."

From "What Jonathan Franzen and the Left Get Wrong About Free Speech/Don’t wait for an emergency to criticize dangerous ideas by your allies" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

Franzen refused to sign a letter. I'm not going to accept Chait's characterization of why he refused, because I can see that Chait is misinterpreting the Lubyanka statement, which I'd read as hyperbole. People who say "It's not the end of the world" don't mean it's not worth worrying about if it's not the actual end of the world. 

And I suspect Franzen doesn't like signing his name to other people's writing. He seems to prefer to craft his own very particular statements. I've read a couple books of his essays, including one where he takes on the critics of his remarks about birds and climate change, and I don't think he would appreciate Chait's paraphrase — befuddlementization — of those remarks. 

I won't purport to paraphrase it myself, but here's what Franzen wrote in The New Yorker in 2019, "What If We Stopped Pretending?/The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it." It begins: