On Gen Z’s nihilism, Bluesky’s limits, and Trump’s underperformance: Weekend reads for November 30, 2024
What we're reading this week
Happy Saturday, readers! We hope you’ve been able to connect with family and friends over the Thanksgiving holiday, and that this weekend you’re taking time to recharge for the work ahead.
In the readings we share this week for our subscribers — and we’re truly thankful to all of you, because you make everything we do possible, and your readership and commentary are the reasons we do this in the first place — we look again at what got us here and at some visions of the way we live now and might in days ahead: what we expect from politics and how those expectations hold up to reality; what technology has done to us and what can be recovered from its initial promise; and how our divisions contest our unity and what can be done to bridge the gaps between us.
But first, in the spirit of reconnecting and recharging for the work ahead, we encourage you to revisit the two-part conversation we had earlier this week with historian of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Continuing our series of conversations on rethinking our priors and revisiting our presuppositions about American politics in light of Kamala Harris’s electoral loss, Ben-Ghiat talked with us about how to understand this age of oligarchic power in the context of authoritarian movements at home and abroad, why we need to rebuild a politics grounded in real values, and why the paradigm for achieving that change in the coming years is not resistance, but resilience.
You also have to choose your battles. And the problem with living in a Trumpian world is that there's constant outrage. It's like there's so many targets, there’s firing in all areas, that the idea is to make you unable to react at all. So you have to choose your battles. And you have to be smart about it. There's going to be much more suing. These are litigious people. And Berlusconi was too. People will be sued for defamation, for libel. So depending on your level of exposure, you have to be smart. It doesn't mean you are backing away. It means you're being smart because if you're silenced or you're financially exhausted and psychologically exhausted, you're not going to be good in the long run because this is a long-term struggle.
And if you haven’t joined us yet: Run, don’t walk, to the last hours of our Black Friday flash sale. A year of The Ink for 50 percent off. Expiring very soon! Let us make you smarter and more hopeful every week. Support the media you want to see.
Readings
Does policy matter for politics?
For too long, the party has relied on liberal Hollywood and celebrity Democrats to press a cultural advantage. But 2024 saw those celebrities fail to deliver, a great example of the misunderstanding Democrats have about cultural power today. Our side asks multimillionaire superstars like Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen to sing at rallies; their side makes superstars out of lesser-known people who are willing to ride shotgun in people’s lives, offering folks daily podcasts and multi-hour video streams that interpret everyday life through a right-wing lens. MSNBC is often touted as the liberal counter to Fox News, but it has no central organizing narrative about the world; it covers the news of the day with whack-a-mole criticism of Republicans and Trump. MSNBC producers and hosts don’t scour the news for stories of corporate greed the way their counterparts at Fox seek out examples of “reverse racism” and criminal migrants. At Fox, the “news” is incidental; the zero-sum narrative of grievance drives the programming. [Democracy: A Journal of Ideas]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The.Ink to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.