Some "highlights" from the first two months of Jonathan's Newsletter
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Today is a travel day so, in lieu of a new post - those will resume very soon - I wanted to share a handful of excerpts from posts over the past couple months.
On the January 6 hearings:
Before the January 6 hearings got under way in early June, I hadn’t planned to watch them. I’m not sure why now. I think I lacked confidence that the committee would excavate and narrate the events of that day compellingly. I’d also descended to a place of such pessimism, that I was wasn’t sure what they would accomplish, even as I thought holding them was certainly appropriate and necessary.
But my partner wanted to watch them (and also, once David Brooks announced, on the day of the first hearing, that the committee had “already blown it,” before they even began, I was all in).
Here’s what I wrote after that first day:
It’s common, of course, for us humans to say about something we already know or an event we’ve already lived through that, well, we already know. Therefore, we say, we don’t need to re-live it. But sometimes, actually, we do need to re-live it. It’s natural for us, over time, to discount that which we’ve already experienced, including what felt momentous at the time. It’s part of our adaptiveness, our ability to forget, to move on.
But that ability to forget is both a weakness and a strength. David Brooks wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this morning declaring that the hearings, before they’d even begun, were already a failure. That in essence, there was no point in rehashing what had happened. If Congress wanted to use its time productively, Brooks asserted, it should not engage in staging a pointless spectacle about the past. Instead, it should focus on how to prevent threats to democracy in the future.
I thought that view was wrong before the hearings began. But it took watching them to crystallize why. People need reminders of even disturbing events. Congressional proceedings about the future of democracy would be little more than an inert, bland, intellectual exercise, without some clear, fresh animating sense of fear and urgency about how close we are to the brink.
What the select committee presented, in its opening salvo tonight, was precisely that: a sense of immediacy, of threat, of urgency.
I think it’s fair to say that, while we still don’t know what impact these hearings will ultimately have, the committee has masterfully framed and clarified the stakes. The result has been a far more compelling and unsettling presentation than most people anticipated (including me). Among other things, the proceedings appear to have wounded Trump himself. And though Senators had been working on it for months, the bill now ready for debate to shore up the electoral count and otherwise lessen the likelihood of a replay of January 6 surely gained momentum as a result of the hearings.
On the GOP
It’s been a recurring theme here that it’s impossible to understand Trumpism independent of the longer arc of the Republican Party’s embrace of grievance-fueled blame-shifting and falsehood. It has eagerly pushed for economic policies that have created a wealth chasm in this country not seen in a century. At the same time, the GOP has worked overtime to push a politics of racial and cultural grievance via an inversion of reality, whereby the party most invested in oligarchy-friendly policies presents itself as anti-elitist. Both Trump and George W. Bush are, in their own ways, perfect exemplars of such politics. And you can’t pull that off without a whole lot of lying.
Here’s what I wrote about how that culture of dishonesty led us to the coup attempt:
From the Bush administration’s repeated falsehoods to justify its invasion of Iraq, to Kyl’s “not intended” statement, to Paul Ryan’s shamelessly fraudulent budget proposals, to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” comment in response to embarrassing photographic evidence that, no, Trump’s inauguration day crowd was not bigger than Obama’s, to the Big Lie, to the imbecility of Herschel Walker, whose own staff assumes he’s lying all the time, an avalanche of untruth continues to gather momentum. Some instances and exemplars of blatant disregard for reality might seem cartoonish. Giuliani, for example, is a blithering idiot at this point. But all of these lies, repeated over and over again, add up to a sinister attempt to undermine the shared understandings that make living in community possible. They’re the foundation of a nihilistic fantasy that the Bannons of the world, with their allies among the increasingly emboldened militias, are desperate to bring to fruition.
They found a willing instrument in Trump, whose election in the first place was made possible, in significant measure, by all the lying that came before. And that foundation of lying made a coup attempt, if not inevitable, an unnervingly viable possibility.
On the overturning of Roe v. Wade
I’ve written several posts about the Dobbs decision ending a constitutional right to abortion. Here’s one set of conclusions:
So, once you strip away the highly contested premise that life begins at conception and the scientifically dubious claim that fetuses experience pain before 24 weeks, there is nothing legitimate about almost any of the interests the Court says states have prior to viability. Though the Court did say protecting “maternal health and safety” is a legitimate state interest, it has clearly put its thumbs on the scale in favor of fetuses. That’s because the Court majority cannot shake its core belief, deeply rooted in misogyny, that fetuses are more sacred and more worthy of state protection than the humans who carry them. As a result, the Court has simply punted on trying to meaningfully balance the interests of the latter with those of the former. The laws that are now going into effect make that crystal clear.
Though I know it sounds otherwise, I am not dismissing the idea that the government has a valid interest in protecting “potential human life,” as its previous jurisprudence has recognized and that that *could* mean a threshold other than viability for imposing abortion restrictions. But if the Court is going to argue, for example, that fetal pain matters, it’s the Court majority that has opened the door to the viability threshold, since that is when science believes fetal pain begins. And if it rejects prevailing science on such questions, it is simply ignoring any reality inconsistent with its own ideological predilections.
The United States and the world
I’ve also written some about the ways that the US stacks up to other countries on indicators of well-being. One of the most frustrating aspects of our politics is how hived off from the rest of the world we are, how much our knee-jerk sense of exceptionalism closes off learning from others. To make our shortcomings a point of pride. That’s more than just an annoyance. It has real and profound consequences for ordinary people. So, what passes for “radical” here, like universal health care, is the norm in every other wealthy society, to take one glaring example.
In short, American exceptionalism, in lots of ways, is for the birds (no offense to our fine, feathered friends):
On a range of measures of social policy and well-being, the United States fares worst or among the worst compared to its peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 countries that tracks a variety of social, economic and health indicators. Among those countries, no one spends more money per capita on health care than the United States. But in important respects, few have worse outcomes. Among the OECD countries, the United States ranks about 30th in life expectancy, at just over 77 years. The OECD countries that do worse are all manifestly less well off overall, including Mexico and Colombia. Among our European peers, we live four years or more less on average. And of course, we are the only wealthy country without an essentially universally guaranteed system of health insurance for all citizens.
As the Times reported last year, while the right to access to abortions is expanding elsewhere globally, including much of Latin America, where there has been strong resistance historically to legal abortion, the United States is among only two OECD countries (Poland is the other) that is rolling back access (and, of course, that’s about to get worse). Despite the spike in crime the past two years, the United States has experienced a dramatic reduction in its homicide rate since the 1990s. Nevertheless, among OECD countries, only Colombia’s and Mexico’s are higher.
We are, famously, an outlier on access to guns (which contributes importantly to our very high death rates, including by suicide). And we have more road fatalities per capita than any other country. And, for another post, we fare particularly poorly across on many indicators of poverty, inequality and wealth concentration. We also have among the highest incarceration rates in the world, if not the highest.
And with that, thanks again for reading.