But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.
This week's featured posts are "MAGA's Closing Argument: Dad's Coming Home" and "Democracy Succumbs in Silence".
This week everybody was talking about the campaign
One featured post tries to explain what Trump supporters could possibly be thinking.
I'm still doing my best to ignore polls and pundits' speculations about who will win. I gather than the race still considered close, which is all I really need to know at this point. For what it's worth, I will toss in my own speculation: Some last-minute shift will make the result more decisive than it looks now. I can't say which way the shift will go, but I don't think we'll be waiting all week to find out who won.
Remember when it would have been an earthshaking October surprise if a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model accused a candidate of groping her to impress Jeffrey Epstein? Well, never mind.
A Trump campaign spokesman repeated its standard excuse, that the model is a partisan Democrat. After all, she gave $25 to Biden's 2020 campaign. I'm always amazed anyone takes such claims seriously. I mean, maybe she's accusing Trump of groping her because she supports his opponents. But isn't it more likely that she supports his opponents because he groped her?
Trump's Madison Square Garden rally yesterday is being widely described as a hate-fest. I haven't had time to digest it all, but apparently warm-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe thought it would be funny to describe Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean". Several people have pointed out that Hinchcliffe was using a teleprompter, so the Trump campaign had seen what he would say and presumably approved it.
From the same rally, Tim Miller posts an ironic picture of Elon Musk and Melania Trump -- both immigrants -- with the Stephen Miller quote "America is for Americans, and Americans only."
The Democrats' most powerful speaker continues to be Michelle Obama. In Kalamazoo Saturday, she laid out the extensive consequences for women's health caused by the abortion bans that followed the Dobbs' decision, and how Trump could extend many of these consequences to the entire country. She also pleaded with "the men who love us" to understand how their own lives could be affected.
If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads, and her doctors aren't sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it's not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.
I had planned to do an article collecting all the former Trump allies who have told us he should never wield power again, but the NYT did it for me.
The standard Trump defense (you can see Vance give it here) is that these are all disgruntled people Trump fired. But usually the cause-and-effect ran in the other direction: Attorney General Bill Barr and cybersecurity czar Chris Krebs were fired because they disputed Trump's stolen-election lies. Mike Pence is out with Trump because he wouldn't violate the Constitution for him.
The typical order things happen is: Somebody in TrumpWorld can no longer tolerate the illegal or unethical things they're being asked to do. Then Trump fires them or otherwise forces them out. They're fired for disloyalty, not incompetence.
The Lincoln Project has translated a number of Trump remarks into German and illustrated them with video from the 1930s. It fits perfectly.
Not to be missed is this Jon Stewart rant about the excuses Republicans make for Trump's fascist rhetoric about "the enemy within", and how major media lets them get away with it.
Grist analyzes the climate and environmental significance of a vote for either Harris or Trump.
In Georgia Wednesday, talking about his plans for mass deportation, Trump gave us some more insight into the "again" in "Make American Great Again". He said:
We had to go back to 1798. That's when we had laws that were effective.
I don't know if they still teach this in US History classes, but the 1798 laws he's talking about are the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were a low point in US civil liberties.
As the Adams administration's relationship with France deteriorated, Federalists became increasingly worried about immigrants who might have French sympathies. So Congress passed a series of laws that together became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of the Acts was the Alien Friends Act, which gave the president power to deport any non-citizen he considered dangerous.
Another, the Sedition Act, made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the government.
Adams was pressured to invoke the AFA against Joseph Priestley, the chemist who isolated oxygen and figured out how to make carbonated water. Priestley had been chased out of England for his sympathy with the French Revolution, and then resettled in Pennsylvania. In many ways Priestley was precisely the kind of person the AFA targeted, but Adams resisted invoking it, citing Priestley's age and fragility.
It's impossible to say exactly how intimidated Priestley felt, but after Jefferson (a friend of Priestley and an opponent of the Acts) was elected in 1800, Priestley wrote: "It is only now that I can say I see nothing to fear from the hand of power".
During the Jefferson administration, some the Acts expired and the others were explicitly repealed. Trump may remember those laws fondly, but he can't legally invoke them.
and newspaper non-endorsements
The billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times stepped in to prevent their papers from endorsing Kamala Harris. One featured post explains why this "obeying in advance" is a disturbing sign for American democracy.
and you also might be interested in ...
A correction from last week:
When talking about how the Steward chain of hospitals went bankrupt, I said that the private equity firm Cerberus (who owned the hospitals) created Medical Properties Trust to sell the hospital's land to.
The sources I link to don't actually say that. I extrapolated from the degree of collusion the two firms displayed to conclude that they were two tentacles of the same octopus. But it seems not to be true.
In the blog The Big Picture, David Pepper describes how Ohio broke its public school system. Once ranked fifth among the state systems, it's now somewhere in the 20s and dropping, after money was siphoned off for charter schools and private school vouchers.
The Tennessee Holler writes about the 400 books Wilson County is removing from school libraries, in accordance with a recent state law.
As I study the list, the fantasy section of the high school libraries seems especially hard hit: George Martin, Sarah Maas, Diana Gabaldon, Margaret Atwood ...
For those who aren’t old enough, you cannot imagine how little race tension there was in this country before Obama got into power
This sentiment is surprisingly widespread among White conservatives, and it even becomes true with a small substitution: Replace "little race tension there was in this country" with "comfortable White people were in their privilege". My rewrite:
For those who aren’t old enough, you cannot imagine how comfortable White people were in their privilege before Obama got into power.
In my view, the increased race tension of the current era comes almost entirely from Whites freaking out about a Black man gaining power.
and let's close with something slimy
When I closed last week with a microscope enlargement of sugar from a Coke, I didn't realize that Nikon runs an annual Small World contest for similar photos. So this week I learned that slime mold can be unexpectedly interesting if you enlarge it enough.
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