Revolutionizing care, fighting fascists, keeping hope alive: Weekend reads for November 2, 2024
Revolutionizing care, fighting fascists, keeping hope alive: Weekend reads for November 2, 2024
What we're reading this week
Happy Saturday!
This is it, the final weekend before Election Day. As we do each weekend, we’re sharing with you the most intriguing writing that’s challenged and inspired us this week. — so we can share these great ideas and insights with you. Of course, with so much riding on the outcome Tuesday, many of this week’s selections engage with the stakes of the election.
But first, if you missed it during the week, we just wanted to call your attention to something critical in Kamala Harris’s closing argument. She deftly connected the battle to defend democracy with the everyday concerns of Americans — the way people actually live democracy. It’s a rhetorical maneuver political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has called the “bank shot to save democracy.” And it’s something essential in telling the story of a better future.
We are all so exhausted by fascist threat mitigation that we forget all the awesome stuff we could be doing instead. So her section on building houses also served as a reminder that building in general, creating, dreaming, can again become our focus when he is finally gone from our lives.
Still looking to pitch in before November 5? There’s plenty of work to do in critical swing states, so check Harris-Walz Volunteer HQ for phone banking and door-knocking opportunities.
And if you’re looking to keep track of all the races across the country that matter, check out this great election-tracking tool from the talented folks at Bolts.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
Readings
Revolutionizing care — or the alternative
When Harris says, “We’re not going back,” she’s not kidding. Her healthcare plans preserve the gains rendered by Obamacare and build on them through her new home care benefit. Trump—and those who hope to ride into office on his coattails—plans to go back by reversing the gains made under the Affordable Care Act and returning to the era when one in six Americans went without coverage and tens of millions were left with skimpy coverage that left them in medical debt. [Washington Monthly]
Can we overturn the dictatorships within our democracy?
I think one of the unacknowledged realities in this country is that voting at home is only as free and fair as the household is free and fair. And in fact, a lot of women and adult children in households headed by an abuser are not free and equal. There was a big move in the 19th century to make voting private and having that privacy allows you to vote your conscience without repercussions. And the move to voting at home I think is really problematic, because I think the number of women—and we’re mostly talking white women married to MAGA Republican men—who aren’t free and equal may actually be significant enough to change the outcome of elections in some places. [Vanity Fair]
The town isn’t big enough…
“Everything isn’t a shade of gray. Jesus is not pleased with Christians using the word tolerance to give the Devil equal airtime on Sunday morning,” Reverend Will added. “We can be tolerant and have moral clarity. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”
What does this look like in action? What does a community do when a fascist intent on destroying democracy arrives? [The Atavist]
How the world sees us
As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I no longer have a unified national audience to address back home due to the government’s media capture. I hope that once this government grip and the media firewall dividing the Hungarian audience are somehow dismantled, things will improve. But, examining America before it votes, I don’t have the faintest idea what should be done. [Columbia Journalism Review]
Our Babel
I’m always struck by people’s belief in a placid media landscape in the past, a time of calm before the internet blew everything up. In fact, the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy — the mid-1800s — coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread disinformation, and nasty fights over free speech. This media landscape helped bring about the Civil War. [Nieman Lab]
The sadness of the manosphere
The point is, you haven’t missed the joke. There was no joke. There are never any jokes. There’s no skill in seeing a Black guy in the audience and saying he likes watermelon. There’s no skill in calling a Chinese guy a slur or testing out whether or not the ladies in the crowd are cool with rape jokes tonight. All it takes is the ability to lie to yourself, to pretend that this is an adequate substitute for what you’re really craving. You don’t need unconditional acceptance and people around you who see and love you. You don’t need a purpose, or a sense of agency. You exist merely to join a circular firing squad of guys who are too scared to be the first to say “why are we doing this to each other?” [The White Pages]
What “concepts of a plan” really mean
An abortion ban plus Obamacare repeal would wreak untold havoc on medical providers. In addition to losing a massive source of income as the uninsured rate roughly doubles, they would lose thousands of critical staff. Many ob/gyns would flee abroad to the many countries with doctor shortages like the U.K. or Germany—and they might be joined by colleagues in other departments. A recent survey of physicians and med students found that 76 percent would not even apply to work in a state with an abortion ban, probably because they know how critical abortion care can be, or want to start a family themselves. [The American Prospect]
Predictions in a chaotic world
The social world doesn’t work how we pretend it does. Too often, we are led to believe it is a structured, ordered system defined by clear rules and patterns. The economy, apparently, runs on supply-and-demand curves. Politics is a science. Even human beliefs can be charted, plotted, graphed. And using the right regression we can tame even the most baffling elements of the human condition. Within this dominant, hubristic paradigm of social science, our world is treated as one that can be understood, controlled and bent to our whims. It can’t. [Aeon]
Hearts and minds
Before he was picked as Trump’s running mate for vice president, JD Vance offered his assessment: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The answer, for Vance, Trump and their supporters is aggressive federal intervention. [University World News]
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
Well, we just started sending the kids back to school yesterday. My wife drops the kids at school then we have coffee on the balcony, watching the smoldering Beirut after a night of bombardment from the safety of my home in the hills above the city. Very unsettling. Then I come to the shop, sit around, give interviews to guys like you, do some record cleaning, archiving, et cetera, and afterwards I have lunch with my mom, who lives not so far away from the shop. [Hearing Things]
The little secret, and the long game of the election
My best advice is that people who would like to see Kamala Harris become the president need to not take their foot off the gas, even after Election Day. November 5 is the last day of our pretend election. The real election starts on December 11, and Republican officials and judges will have to be forced to honor the results of the pretend election for Harris to have any shot of winning the real one. [The Nation]
Keeping hope alive
[W]hatever your policy views on immigration, abortions, tariffs, and the like, a Trump presidency would unequivocally be disastrous for democratic institutions and norms. Even assuming some of the more apocalyptic scenarios are overwrought, it will take time to get things moving back in the right direction — four years if we’re lucky, a generation if we’re not.
So what are the seeds of hope that will survive? A couple of weeks ago I outlined a framework with six main pillars of the future-of-governance movement. Today I’ll use that framework to try to make some predictions. [Futurepolis]
Think of others. The others think of you
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