Doom Report (Week 58: Of Leopards, Plumbers, and Ranty Ranty Confessions)

This week, Trump delivered a long, rambling, incoherent monologue which I certainly did not watch—and hopefully you didn’t either—which some are generously calling a “State of the Union address.”  There were lots of people covering that and telling you how useless it was, but, at the end of the day, it was so utterly useless that even knowing how useless it was is fairly useless.  But I will point you at the Zeteo response, which includes not only Mehdi Hasan, but also all of the other 3 Zeteo correspondents: Prem Thakker, Swin Suebsaeng, and John Harwood.  Now, I don’t always watch all of these fine gentlemen, because they are serious newspeople and I don’t do a lot of serious.  Mehdi himself is a bit of an exception: he can be funny, but, even when he’s not doing that, he’s still remarkably entertaining—he has a “no bullshit” style that’s just really refreshing.  So I thought I’d give this video a try, and it’s pretty good overall, but it was this incisive exchange that ultimately made me glad I watched.  At one point, Mehdi says this:

Historians will look back and look at this carnival barker; they’ll look at this guy from Home Alone 2; they’ll look at the damage he did.  But fundamentally, he took the Republican party with him and they allowed themselves to be taken for this ride.

And Harwood responds:

That’s right.  And they were on this ride before Donald Trump came along.  The Republican party’s moral and intellectual collapse has been going on for quite a long time.  You know, the root cause was the decision during the height of the civil rights movement to embrace white Southerners’ resistance to civil rights and milk that for votes.  And as the country has drifted closer and closer to becoming a majority minority country, which is going to happen, the intensity of the political exploitation—the demagoguery—has increased.

And this struck me as practically epiphanous: the Republicans decided to trade on the fears of white people.  First it was their fears of black neighbors, and then (perhaps after getting trounced twice in a row by Obama), they just switched wholesale to capitalizing on fears of brown immigrant neighbors.  And this is how the Republicans have managed to stay in power, despite decreasing membership numbers.  They’re not the party of small government, they’re not the party of fiscal conservatism, they’re not the party of gun rights or abortion restrictions or family values—they’re the party of pitting white people against other people and praying they found somebody sufficiently scary to demonize this time around.

Of course, I wrote all that stuff above before Trump started indiscriminately bombing Iran, including at least one elementary school.  But we (apparently) killed the Ayatollah, so it’s all worth it, right?  You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.  Or killing a few little girls.  Or a hundred.

Really good coverage of this from (again) Zeteo; the first half is commentary, while the second half dives into some more details with a couple of Middle East experts.  But the big quote for me was this one from Mehdi Hasan:

Every Republican president does this, right?  Every Republican president comes to office, cuts benefits for the poor, cuts taxes for the rich, raises prices, and then bombs a Middle East country.  Ronald Reagan did it, George Bush Senior did it, George Bush Jr. did it, and Donald Trump has done it.

And I’m old enough to have known all that, but I guess I’ve just never heard it put put into such stark terms before, so I guess I never connected the dots before.  It’s a bit chilling.  But I’m glad we have Zeteo to point out the historical throughlines.  For further coverage, let me point you at Brian Tyler Cohen, who has a great parade of Trump clips from 2012 claiming that Obama was going to start a war in Iran because he didn’t “know the first thing about negotiation” and his approval numbers were “in a tailspin” and that was “the only way he can get elected.”  Man, when they say “every accusation is a confession,” they aren’t kidding.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• This week really is the Zeteo week: Mehdi Hasan released a 5-minute video laying out the problems with the SAVE Act.  In this short video essay, Mehdi efficiently dismantles Trump’s State of the Union claims that the Dems oppose the act because “they want to cheat” and that “their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”  Every accusation is a confession indeed.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon interviews Ali Velshi.  I found his take on independent news media interesting: basically, he says that courting eyeballs is not the sin of corporate media—he actually thinks that part is fine—but rather it’s the fear of offending the administration that makes corporations unfit to present us news.  Not sure I entirely agree, but I appreciated the discussion nonetheless.

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This week, two of my worlds collided when Anthropic, the company that makes the AI tools we mostly use at work, had a kerfuffle with the Department of Defense.  I actually got that story in my company Slack well before it started showing up in my YouTube feed.  And, look: I’m not necessarily defending Anthropic here—I enjoy using their products, sure, but the fact that they are willing to work with this regime at all is a bit suss, not to mention that anyone who intentionally uses the wrong names for any of the myriad of things Trump has tried to rename without any authority to do so (in this case, “Department of War”) always comes across as sycophantic to me.  But I also think it’s good to notice when even the capitulators hit a red line they won’t cross, and we should probably support them in their too-little-too-late efforts.  That red line in this case?  That their AI could not be used for spying on Americans, or for making the decision to employ lethal force without human intervention.  As red lines go, it’s actually pretty weak.  But still too much for drunken sockpuppet Pete Hegseth, who promptly cancelled Anthropic’s contract, gave it to OpenAI, and declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation which has never before been applied to an American company.

My response to this story in Slack was a mix of “curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” and “I never thought leopards would eat my face”; in olden times, we might have said that when one lies down with dogs, one gets up with fleas, but these days we have more hip pop culture references.  Also I think we probably like dogs better now.

While I was searching for the best link to explain the Leopards Eating People’s Face party (and refusing to pick the one that goes to Twitter, because I will never point anyone there), I came across this article from the Progressive Democrats of America.  It’s from last year, just a month after Trump took office, which was plenty of time to see just how bad shit was going to get (that was week 6 from our perspective).  After a brilliant 3-paragraph opening that eerily echoes my own contemporaneous post, it goes on to talk about reaching out to Trump voters and, instead of saying “I told you so,” to “persuade them to vote for candidates courageous enough to stand up to oligarchs and corporatists.”  Of course, it doesn’t really go into much detail on where we’re going to get such candidates from.  But it’s a nice sentiment.

So what’s my note of hope for the week?  Well, over in the UK, a 34-year-old plumber just won a seat in Parliament.  Why should you care?  Let me see if I can explain it.

I’ve often said that the UK politics is something of a mirror of our own—not exactly the same, of course, especially because they have viable third parties, but there are analogs.  So, when I give you the background, make these mental substitutions: when I say “Labour,” think “Democrats”; when I say “Conservatives” (or “Tories”—same thing), think “Republicans”; when I say “Reform,” think “MAGA Republicans”; when I say “Greens,” think “Progressive Democrats.”  Again, not perfect analogs, but similar enough for us to draw correlations.

So there’s a constituency (that’s like a Congressional district) called Gorton and Denton.  This a working class urban area (it’s part of Manchester, which is a city with about the same population as Chicago, though it’s physically bigger, so the population density is lower).  And, you know how there are districts in places like Massachusetts that have voted Democrat since the 50s?  Well, the last time Gorton elected someone from a party other than Labour was 1931.  This is the very definition of a “safe seat.”  But Labour (just like the Democrats) is pretty unpopular these days: they came into power on the grounds that the Tories sucked (which they did), and they’ve spent the last couple of years coddling big donors and shitting on the working class ... sound familiar?  They’re a few years behind our cycle, but it’s weirdly similar.  So here comes Reform, taking over the job of being rightwing nutjobs from the Conservatives, and promising the working class all sorts of things they both can’t deliver and also have no intention of delivering, because they’re even more tied to the billionaires than Labour, and also blaming immigrants for everything.

So when the current Gorton and Denton rep (a member of Labour, of course) stepped down after some embarrassing texts came out, it triggered a by-election (what we would call a “special election”).  And the Reform challenger was a rightwing nutjob of the highest caliber, a GB News presenter (think “Fox ‘News’ anchor”) who was supported by Elon Musk—not the UK equivalent of Elon Musk, the actual Elon Musk.  And he was polling pretty high.  So the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham (also a member of Labour), said he would step down to run for the seat, but Labour wouldn’t let him.  There were excuses, but most people believe that the Prime Minister Kier Starmer was scared of Burnham getting into Parliament and becoming so popular he might take Starmer’s job.  So Labour put up some rando (not to be mean to her, but she’s so little known that she literally has no Wikipedia page at all).  Because, it’s a safe seat ... right?

Except here comes Hannah Spencer, the aforementioned plumber and local councillor.  And she stepped up to run for the Green party.  And Labour told everyone that a vote for the Green was a wasted vote.  And the Reform nutjob literally drove around yelling over a loudspeaker that the Greens would legalize crack.  Even the Greens themselves didn’t think they had much of a chance: they listed it as 127th on their list of seats to go after.  And the “wasted vote” argument is strong: while there are more than 2 parties in the UK, it’s certainly the case that the system is dominated by Labour and the Conservatives.  The Greens currently hold less than 1% of the seats in Parliament, and that’s the highest level they’ve ever achieved.  And yet ... Hannah was charismatic, and knows what it’s like to have to work for a living, with just enough experience in local government, and new Green Party leader Zack Polanski decided to back her to the hilt.  And the bookies (you’re absolutely allowed to bet on elections over there) suddenly started giving better odds to the Greens than to Reform, with Labour in a distant third.  Labour, who thought this was a safe seat.

And, on Thursday, Hannah won.  No, wait: I misspoke.  She destroyed her competition, beating Reform by 12 points and Labour by 16.  If you want even more details than I’ve given you here, Owen Jones has a great summary of all the implications.  But the real upshot of it all is that the wasted vote argument is now completely neutralized.  This means that Green campaigns will start to snowball: instead of just ignoring the Greens and assuming that progressives are a locked in constituency (because who else are they gonna vote for?), Labour now has to worry about serious threats from Green candidates.  And voters now see the Greens as a viable choice, and many who were unenthusiastically voting Labour—or had just given up and stopped voting altogether—will now have someone to rally behind.  Owen’s joy in that video is a bit infectious.

So what does that mean for us here in the US?  Well, just like Mamdani’s victory in New York, it proves that progressive candidates can win, despite what the consultant class has been telling Democrats for years.  Remember when a Bernie run for President was considered a joke?  Even Colbert would just make jokes about Bernie’s crazy hair instead of seriously considering his political positions.  But those days are gone.  Now Bernie is an elder statesman, and some people are even wishcasting an AOC presidential run.  Our 2-party system won’t allow the US Green party to make any inroads, but the progressive wing of the Democratic party is gathering power, and that: that right there is hope.