The anxiety of affluence, scapegoating and solidarity, artificial artists: Weekend reads for December 14, 2024

What we're reading this week

Happy Saturday, everyone!

As we do each weekend for our supporting subscribers, we’ve collected the most interesting articles we’ve come across in our reading and research as we’ve prepared our posts. For this week, we’ve found essays that examine some key questions about the tensions, emotions, and anxieties that simmer beneath American political life. Is the MAGA movement grounded in economic anxiety — or in a deep-seated desire to see one group subordinate to another? Do any of us really own the fruits of our labor when machines — and those who run them — might end up realizing the profits? Why do we choose scapegoating over solidarity? And what price do we put on a life — and do we worry as much about that as we do about the price of groceries?

But first, with the undercurrent of rage against the American health insurance industry bursting forth into popular support for the man who gunned down an insurance executive in Manhattan. Anand’s essay this week explored the reasons behind the shooting, behind the support for the shooter — and why so many commentators seem to have misunderstood why so many are so angry in this moment.

And let us deplore, loudly and clearly, the assassination of a corporate leader and a family man in Midtown Manhattan while recognizing that the health insurance industry locks so many Americans in despair. That so many of our brothers and sisters and neighbors and friends have experienced that industry not as healing but as a desperate battle against bureaucrats who often seem determined to withhold the most fundamental of human obligations — care.

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We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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Readings

The anxiety of affluence

The American Republic has been pulled down, possibly past the point of no return, by affluent people. People who have lives their ancestors would have literally killed for. Who on average spend 10% of their pay on groceries, the lowest in the country’s history, not to mention human history. Who are lashing out at others at the slightest inconvenience, because they want to lash out at others. [Liberal Currents]