BRIEF: The kernel-of-truth regime
Big thought, small step, deep breath — for April 10, 2025
BIG THOUGHT
How do you even begin to explain the Trump regime to the rest of the world?
Anand appeared earlier this week on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the cultural affairs program of Canadian news channel TVO Today, in an attempt to do just that.
He framed Trump II as a regime that rose to power by seizing on underserved issues, and then went about “solving” them in ways that made life even harder for people:
I would think about the disastrous second presidency of Donald Trump as a kernel-of-truth presidency. And what I mean by that is if you look at each of these areas of destruction, from trade architecture to NATO and the security architecture to DOGE and gutting government programs and government agencies — in each of these areas, Donald Trump and the people who work for him seized on, insightfully, an area of silence or failure, an area where the left, the Democratic Party, the establishment media — these different forces, all of them — were not quite able to name, and see, and solve problems.
Now, we’ve talked about this stuff before in this newsletter: the many failures of American democracy to deliver for Americans opened the door to Trump’s antidemocratic populism. And now that it’s here, it is unclear how any of our institutions will adapt, or even whether they will be able to adapt, making matters worse. Our major media organizations cannot call a demagogue a demagogue, or identify fascism for what it is. And they — and the rest of us — need to learn.
We need to learn to expose that kernel of truth, examine it, and figure out actual rather than made-up solutions. That takes the kind of courage that American institutions haven’t shown, and the willingness to throw out priors we all struggle with.
Case in point: Hamilton Nolan’s post this week, which upends the basic terms of the debate over tariffs and free trade — a debate that’s been conducted wholly around the question of pricing. Why not, Nolan asks, talk about changing the terms and talking instead about wages?
Consider this: International minimum wage. Is there one? No. Should there be one? Yes. America could say, “If you want to sell goods here, if you want access to our attractive markets, the workers involved in producing the goods must have been paid X minimum wage.” The wage itself can be chosen from an ascending menu, depending on how strong you want the effects of the policy to be: it could be “the equivalent of US minimum wage or the average wage of US workers in this industry, adjusted for purchasing power in the poor country in question”; it could be “the actual US minimum wage”; it could be “the actual average wage of US workers in this industry.” Like all minimum wages, it is a policy well suited for fine tuning based on specific economic, moral, and political goals.
Why not change the game on trade by calling for an international minimum wage to flatten trade barriers (or pressure bad-faith players) instead of by erecting barriers? That’s a real populist agenda.
And while things like that may be off the table now, there’s no reason not to have these discussions, radical as they may seem. Progressives, people on the left, Democrats who want change, need to make transformative arguments, go big. But they need to drag the Overton window back from the right, and reset the basic terms of our political conversations. To reclaim the conversation on the pain points, and redefine what’s normal.
SMALL STEP
Know your rights (and everyone else’s)
Law professor and legal analyst Kim Wehle (whom we talked to back in December, approximately several decades ago) has a very useful newsletter that’s been digging into the myriad legal questions raised by the Trump regime’s assaults on the Constitution, the rule of law, and the rights of Americans. This week, she talks to Elizabeth Keyes, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and an expert on immigration law, who lays out a clear guide to what American citizens, legal residents, immigrants, and travelers need to understand and do when they’re negotiating the U.S. border or facing an interaction with ICE themselves or are witness to someone else’s experience. With the Trump regime accelerating its deportation plans and the Supreme Court apparently ready to rubber stamp the whole thing on technicalities, it’s critical information you won’t want to be without.
DEEP BREATH
The kids are alright
It’s truly a golden age for jazz mallets right now. Vibraphonist and bandleader Sasha Berliner, who has a brand-new album, Fantôme, out this month, treads a path that tends a bit more towards traditional jazz harmonies and rhythms than her co-instrumentalist Patricia Brennan. Her playing and compositions are just as virtuosistic, though, and her mostly young band — Alonzo Demetrius on trumpet, Ben Williams on upright bass, and Jong Kuk on drums, with the more seasoned Taylor Eigsti on piano — match her intensity, playing with the assuredness and coherence of the classic quintets.
A programming note: More Live conversation!
Join us today, Thursday, April 10, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re speaking with the philosopher and author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. We hope to see you there!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
Important point: “But they [progressives] need to drag the Overton window back from the right, and reset the basic terms of our political conversations. To reclaim the conversation on the pain points, and redefine what’s normal.”
So much of the conversation on to-tariff or not-to-tariff seems to ignore the need for an incentive for GOOD. Not only the US (and few seem to question how a tariff windfall benefits us when the federal government is being dismantled and funding to support research, poor people, the arts and such is being stopped… where will all the tariff trillions go?) but all people and nations.
There is a profound absence of any moral clarity guiding conversations. Analysis of the facts without such clarity leaves people despondent because we are running in circles and going nowhere.
I'm a bit exhausted from the fuckery we've all been living through since the election, and I'm sure I am not alone in that. One thing this blog has stated over and over again is that the fascists want to steal our joy, and one way to help defeat them is, well, to not let them do that.
Jazz brings me joy. Records bring me joy. So I just wanted to say, thank you for introducing me to Sarah Berliner - I am now the proud owner of her most recent release, on vinyl, thanks to The.Ink and Bandcamp.