He leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
- George Packer "A Political Obituary for Donald Trump"
This week's featured posts are "Opening Thoughts About the Trump Voter" and "This Week in the Trump Coup".
This week everybody was talking about the virus and the vaccines
The Pfizer vaccine got approval and is being administered starting today.
Meanwhile, we're seeing the predicted effects of the traveling and gathering Americans did over Thanksgiving. Friday, we set a record with 237,000 new cases. More than 17,000 Americans died in the last week. That's like a Vietnam War every month.
The new worry is that people won't take the vaccine. It isn't just the usual anti-vax folks, it's also a Catholic thing and anti-abortion Protestant thing, because the vaccines were developed using stem cells retrieved from aborted fetuses in the 1960s. The Pope doesn't seem to have this scruple, but he's not Catholic enough for some folks.
And then there are the wackos, like this Florida megachurch pastor, who
has advised his congregants not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, urging them to “believe in divine immunity” instead.
After all, divine immunity worked so well during the Black Death.
and the GOP becoming the Autocratic Party
This got covered in one of the featured posts. One thing I left out of that post: the racist nature of much of this weekend's violence. Black churches were targets, including a historic D.C. church whose Black Lives Matter banner was torn down and burned.
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One thing Trump's effort to overturn the election he lost (by over seven million votes) has pointed out is how the minority-rule bugs in our democracy can cascade.
- The Electoral College allows a candidate to lose by millions of votes and still become president, as Trump did in 2016. If Biden's win in 2020 had been only 1% narrower across the board -- if he'd won by 5.5 million votes rather than 7 million -- the Electoral College would have flipped the victory to Trump.
- Gerrymandering allows a party to control the state legislature even if a majority of the voters supports the other party. This is the case in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
- If the state legislature can ignore the vote totals and choose electors on its own -- as Trump is trying to get them to do -- then a candidate can lose the popular vote not just nationally, but also in states that represent a majority of electors, and still become president.
- If no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, the election is decided by the House, with each state delegation getting one vote. If the minority-rule party controls -- or manages to gerrymander majorities in -- 26 state delegations, its candidate wins.
Currently, all these factors favor Republicans. So if they are put together, Republicans could hold the presidency with considerably less than the 46% of the vote Trump got in 2016. A Democrat could win a resounding landslide of votes, but lose the presidency.
John Le Carré, the author who rescued the spy genre from James Bond, died this weekend at 89. Critics are arguing over his greatest novel, and I admit to never having read A Perfect Spy, which tops many lists. But The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a novel writers (of fiction and nonfiction alike) should study as they learn their craft, because it is so perfectly tight. You couldn't edit out a single sentence without losing something.
Le Carré's most influential insight was that intelligence work requires intelligence more than derring-do, and is more about organizations than lone-wolf operatives. First and foremost, George Smiley was a guy who read the files better than you would.
The opening chapters of The Honorable Schoolboy are about picking up the pieces after catching the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The process involves finding patterns in what the mole had prevented British intelligence from doing or discovering -- assembling the gaps in the Circus' knowledge into a story of its own. James Bond would have been useless.
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