MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: Shutdown fight or flight?

Why Democrats need to think bigger, what the climate fight looks like without America, and learning to listen

THE GIST: Can Democrats make Republicans own a shutdown?

Last week, nearly 100 Democratic members of the House voted in favor of a resolution creating a day to honor the “life and legacy” of Charlie Kirk. Where was the fight voters have been asking for? Were they doing their best to play four-dimensional chess? What could this signal about whether the party would stand firm in the face of a government shutdown? Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer wanted to bargain, but Donald Trump canceled their meeting, trying to pin the whole thing on the Democrats. But is all of that beside the point? As independent journalist Jason Sattler of The Cause wrote this week, to win, Democrats need to think bigger — to take a page from the MAGA playbook and try to rewrite reality:

If we pretend, as liberals and the left so often do, that the press should and must see the undeniable merits of Democrats’ points and the malice of the right without our help, and that yelling at Chuck Schumer is all we need to do, we can only lose.

We have to act like the MAGA in one precise way. We must act as if we are part of the fight, that we have some agency, and we’re not just victims of our often feckless Democratic leadership.

We must say loudly and proudly, “No dollars for dictatorship,” emphasizing that this fight isn’t just about Trump ripping healthcare from those who need it most to bail out billionaires. It’s also about restoring Congress’s place in our Constitutional order and rejecting the normalization of authoritarianism.

It’s about telling the better story. As political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio keeps reminding us.

BIGGER PICTURE: Fighting climate change without the United States

Donald Trump spent much of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday denouncing climate change and green energy as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” But he also made a good case for the rest of the world to get its act together, and there’s good and bad news on that front. Many U.N. members arrived at the U.N. Climate Summit without their promised target, and the European Union is mired in negotiations. Meanwhile, China has gone green on a scale that has reversed global growth in fossil fuels — what economists Adrien Bilal and Diego Känzig told us last year: that large nations and alliances can act alone and make a real impact — even if every country doesn’t play along.

[L]arge countries can take unilateral action — it makes sense to them. And…I think given the large technology transfers that happen across borders, that can have pretty substantial effects on the world’s ability to mitigate and potentially adapt as well.

The other thing I’ll say is relative to previous work, the impacts that we find are more similar across countries — where previously we were under the impression that some countries would gain substantially while many would lose and because of this tension it would be hard to coordinate international action, suddenly it looks like countries are much more in the same boat than we thought. And so I think that what we’ve shown strengthens the case for international cooperation.

The momentum is there, with or without the U.S. government. And Trump’s speech seems to have already turned up the heat on E.U. climate negotiations.

Climate change just became solvable because of math

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: Dial-a Poem goes global

Kevin Young talked to us yesterday about the importance of listening to poetry, of receiving it like music. And back in 1969, poet John Giorno — also focused on sound, and with a sense that poetry was lagging behind the other arts in taking advantage of technology to reach people — came up with a solution, hooking up a phone line to a bank of answering machines, set to play a random poem, spoken word piece, or piece of music whenever someone called. Dial-a-Poem was born, and its been running continuously ever since, featuring writers like John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsburg, Amiri Baraka, and Miguel Piñero, among many others. Dial-a-Poem still offers free dial-up service, but it’s gone digital, and now it’s speaking more languages, with international editions organized by local curators launching around the world. Take a chance on a new poem by picking up the “phone” at Dial-a-Poem.org

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