Listen, Liberal: Why the Democrats Fear Populism

Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures. (Video version of this podcast is here.)

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Nathan J. Robinson
People should pick up and buy your books because they never expire. But it is also depressing because it means that you are one of the most astute and least listened to people in the country.

Thomas Frank

But I've grown used to that. Nathan, when I was young, I had these ambitions that things might be otherwise. I used to feel bad about how nobody cared and nobody listened, but I don't care anymore.

Robinson
But Listen, Liberal even had the finger on the cover pointed straight at them, so they knew—they knew—who it was that had to listen. And you couldn't have worded that more directly, and the liberals didn't listen. Let me read it here from the last page of Listen, Liberal published in 2016, before the calamity of that year.

“Now all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions of the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the party of the people, even as they dedicate themselves everywhere, resolutely, to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse, they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach turning. But every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation.”

Frank
Yes, and by the way, I wrote that before I even knew about Donald Trump.

Robinson
And here we go. You say, “this cannot go on,” but you make a prediction, and you say, “yet it will go on,” which I like, and it has gone on. As I say, you wrote this in 2016. That's a long time ago. And then we just saw a catastrophe that I think is partly caused by some of the problems that you identify in this book.

Frank
Yes, well, come on, this is the Democrats...What can I say? When I wrote that, it was a description of a life of disappointment at the hands of the Democratic Party, first Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama. I think Trump is mentioned once in the original version of the book. I later wrote an afterword, and I think I called him names or something. (...)

Robinson
Let's dive into what it was that you were identifying then more precisely. I read a paragraph that nicely summarizes it up, but let's go into a bit more detail about when you were pointing this finger directly into the face of the liberal and saying, listen, look, this is headed for catastrophe, and it's going to continue until you have a serious revelation. What would you describe as the revelation that was not had?

Frank
Well, this is a big question. What people often don't realize is that this is a long process. It's not just something that just happened. It's not Kamala Harris, it's not Hillary Clinton. They have a lot to answer for, but this is something that's been going on for a very long time. And steadily, but surely, the Democratic Party—they did this out in the open. It wasn't a conspiracy. They talked about it and boasted about it, gave speeches, wrote books and magazine articles about it, turned their back on what they used to be. When I was young, you would turn on the TV after each electoral disaster, like after Reagan had worked this incredible defeat. The one that really got me was when George Bush senior beat Michael Dukakis, where Dukakis had actually been in the lead in the polls. George Bush senior was this kind of awful man, and he won anyway.

And then you go on TV the day after, and the pundits would always say the same thing: the Democratic Party has to abandon the New Deal. They can no longer be the party of the New Deal. They would have these various terms for it, but one of the favorite ones was they have to become neoliberals. This was the big idea in the '70s and '80s. There are other names for it. They call themselves Atari Democrats. But the idea of it is they had to become the party of a social cohort, of a social class, that was identified with futureness. That sounds like bullshit, and nevertheless, it is true. They really did say these things in the '70s and '80s and into the '90s. And then finally they got their way. Here comes the New Democrats, Bill Clinton and his group, and he's speaking exactly the things that they've been describing, and lo and behold, hallelujah, he wins.

Robinson
It works. It's vindicated. It's true. They were right.

Frank
Yes, exactly. And that's how they take it. His election, and then especially his reelection, is our vindication from heaven that this is the right path, that this is the way to go. You identify yourself not with working people, but with the highly educated. They had these pet love names for them. They called them the learning class. I love that one because just so obnoxious. They called them the wired workers. These pet names for the group that they saw as a party of the left in a two-party system. What it has to do is to dedicate itself to this group of people. And they did what they did, and they did it deliberately. And you look at the works of Bill Clinton as president. He was a very consequential president. It's often forgotten nowadays, but he actually did things as president. It wasn't all just his chummy Arkansas— (...)

Robinson
...So, okay, Bill Clinton: how this all started with Bill Clinton?

Frank
Well, it started before him. There were predecessors. So it goes back, actually, to the McGovern years, when in '72, the Democratic Party deliberately wrote organized labor out of the party. They reorganized the way that the Party chose its presidential nominee, and along the way, they basically contrived to take all the power from organized labor, which used to be very closely associated with the Democratic Party. If you're old enough to remember, they were basically their party, and the McGovern people contrived to kick them out. They did it with the best of motives, let's put it that way. They did it with the best of motives, but they also did it with some pretty shitty motives.

And you go back and look at the literature of that campaign and of that moment, and they were already saying, we cannot be this party of labor. We have to be the party of enlightened professionals, of the kids coming out of Yale Law School. People were actually saying things like this at the time, and the Party has been working out of that theory ever since. What's funny is, I don't know too many people that have critiqued that theory. I think I can count them. This is me, I'm one of them. Listen, Liberal is one of those books. But there's maybe five others. It’s like it happened and nobody paid any attention to it, even though it was on TV. You had guys saying this nonsense on TV after every election. You had Bill Clinton boasting about it, but there were very few critiques of it. And now here we are. It's been allowed to run for 50 years.

Robinson
Like we were saying, Clinton seemed to prove that the theory worked electorally.

Frank
That was his promise. That was his magic. That's why they loved him. So the Wall Street Journal had this story like two days ago reminiscing about Clinton, and it's entirely about his manners, and he's a homey Arkansas folksy guy who can connect us with working people. And I'm like, wait, are we talking about the same guy that deregulated the banks? Are we talking about that guy? Is that the one? The friend of the working man who allowed Wall Street to become what it is today? That guy? And that is what they mean. It's funny how nobody can talk about the two things at the same time, his manners and what he actually did. Bill Clinton, who screwed working people in this monumental way with NAFTA and PNTR China and also the Bill Clinton who had that soft southern accent and was so lovable and liked to go to McDonald's.

Robinson
So I take it that you see the Trump victories as the culmination of a decades-long process whereby the Democrats abandoned the New Deal as the kind of exemplar of democratic aspirations, abandoned labor, and became something else that is often called neoliberalism or corporate liberalism.

Frank
Yes, they did that. This is what happened. And now, if you ask me, we're at the end of the road for this thing. You look at whose votes they win now, and it's entirely affluent people. (...)

But that's who the Democrats are. That's who they have wanted to be all these years. That's what they talked about becoming, and they got their wish. And here's the thing, Nathan, I don't know what power, what rebuke, what form of chastisement can convince them that this is a mistake. I don't know if anything can. Because it's such a self-flattering form of politics to believe that you're these wonderful people who are so enlightened and so tasteful. And what do you do when you lose? You scold. You scold the world.

Robinson
On the one hand, you can say clearly they're making a terrible mistake by not pushing policies that are going to help ordinary people. Clearly, ordinary people understand that Democrats are not pushing policies that will help them. They understand that they're out of touch. But also, there are structural reasons now why it's very hard for them to change. On the Kamala Harris campaign, it was interesting. She came out with this anti-price gouging policy that was kind of—

Frank
It was kind of good. And I never heard another word about it after the convention.

Robinson
Well, I have read that what happened is that her Uber executive brother-in-law gave her a phone call and said, Wall Street doesn't like this, you need to back off on it. And so they altered the policy, and they said, it's actually just groceries, and it's just an emergency, and it doesn't mean anything. So one of the problems here is that they can't listen. Because now, when you have to satisfy the donors, it doesn't matter if you know that what you're doing is wrong, and you're going to lose. They are now so dependent upon big money.

Frank
Yes, it's part of the machine. And that's an excellent point, and it makes it an even more depressing story. So I've been talking to different people over the last couple of days, and we argue about what they should do. All of those arguments are exactly, as you say, kind of moot, because they're not allowed to do the things that they need to do basically. For them to do these things would require some kind of political earthquake. Now, arguably, we just had that. But it can get worse for them. They can screw this up even more. (...)

Robinson
I'm trying to understand the distinction between the things that are mistakes and the things that are built into the party as it is, because of the process that you describe in terms of the changes in their constituencies.

Frank
Maybe I am totally wrong about this, but I think that their allergy to an open convention tells us something really important about these guys. I think their desire to avoid primaries tells us something really important about these guys, that they are desperate to stop certain voices from having a say in the way that candidates are chosen at all.

Robinson
When they had an open primary, Bernie terrified them, and they all had to come together and find someone to stop Bernie.

Frank
He might have a chance. If they had an open convention, they might choose someone like Elizabeth Warren. Who the hell knows? That might happen. Anything could happen. One of the really fascinating things about the Democratic Party is that, over the years, they have managed to keep a lid on it. The same bunch always wins. This is the Clinton/Obama faction that always comes out on top, and has, since Walter Mondale, always been the nominee, and they are determined to keep it that way. In some ways, it is their party. They own it in the same way that organized labor used to own it in the old days. It is their party. They're not going to give up. They're not going to surrender it. You can go and ask them for it. You can ask them very politely, Mr. Nathan Robinson, and they're not going to give it to you.

Robinson
Well, in a certain sense, then, Listen, Liberal looks like it's intended for the people who are causing the problem, but actually, it's intended for those of us who need to throw those people out of power.

Let me ask you how Joe Biden fits into the picture. There is a certain narrative that suggests that the Biden presidency was a sharp break from the neoliberal Democratic Party that you describe. Joe Biden obviously made a big effort to appear more pro union. He declared, I'm going to be the most pro-union president. In the first year, he said he wanted to be the next FDR, etc. Do you see that as entirely a fraud? Or is there something to that?

Frank
There is something to it. I think now everything that you and I are talking about has started to dawn on them. But back in the day, when I wrote Listen Liberal, I would say you could count the number of Democrats who agreed with me on one hand. There's like five of them. I could probably list them for you. Bernie is one. Sherrod Brown was one. But I think to a certain degree, Biden actually got it and did take the initial steps that you would take if you were going to try to put the party on a different course. He did. So look what he did on antitrust. That's probably the brightest spot of his administration. He did inspiring things. And this is stuff that I had once called for. I used to write articles about this back in the day, about how the Democratic Party needs to break with the sort of Clinton legacy on antitrust, and they need to get tough on this again because it's one tool where you don't need Congress. The laws were passed over 100 years ago. You just have to start enforcing them. And I'll be goddamned, he did it. I was very excited about that.

You mentioned Lina Khan earlier. I think she's exactly the kind of person that they should have running federal agencies. That is exactly what they should have been doing. Now, that said, with everything you described, these are tiny, tiny steps in the right direction, but they're massively overshadowed by the other things: by the Gaza disaster, by inflation, by Biden's age issue. In some ways, I think the Biden years are a kind of tragedy. This is a guy who seemed to understand it to some degree, and then who the hell knows what happened? Well, we still don't know.

Robinson
There's something very strange to me where you're indicating there that Biden started to get some hint that maybe you should do these things that actually deliver for people. Bernie Sanders understands this intuitively and has understood it forever, and it strikes me every time I see—I like looking at the comments section. And comment sections are a cesspool, but they give you an interesting indication of how people respond to things. And so when you watch Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan or on Fox News, and you look at the comments section of the people who are the typical audience for those kinds of things, and when you go out and talk to normal people, and you say, what do you think of Bernie Sanders? They say, well, I'm a Republican, but I always respect Bernie. He tells it to you straight, every single time. The Bernie Sanders theory of how you reach people and what a social democrat should look like, and all of this stuff you're saying about how you just need to be like an honest, plainspoken New Deal Democrat who offers to help people and doesn't lie to them, is really intuitive.

Frank
In some ways, Bernie is this reassuring figure from long ago. He's selling politics from the 1940s in a 1940s accent. I really like that guy. (...)

Robinson
You recently wrote this op-ed for the New York Times after the election. You've been writing about these things for 20 years, and you say,

“I began to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the light bulb for liberals. I fear that '90s style centrism will march on.”

And in this election, we saw a worsening of the tendencies that you describe, where it's even more rich people voting for Democrats and even more working-class people going into the Trump coalition. But of course, ultimately, Trump is a fraudster. You write about the history of populism, and left and right populism are not the same thing.

Frank
You asked three different things there. So first of all, about the idea that centrism is not really centrism at all but this sort of Clintonism that we were talking about at the beginning of the show, this philosophy that the Democrats developed through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, that absolutely and utterly controls the party now. And I said in the article—I think the Times cut this line out because, obviously, they have house style, and you're not allowed to say certain things. But I said this philosophy will go on because it makes too much pundit sense. It's too obviously true to the professional elite of our world, the people who control our world. It's too obviously true even though it's false. Even though it's completely wrong, it's too flattering to the kind of people who write columns in the New York Times, to the kind of people that are on MSNBC, the kind of people who run American universities, foundations, and Wall Street firms. It makes too much sense. They're like, yes, the learning class should be in charge. Yes, the intellectuals, the elites, or the people who have advanced degrees should be in charge. That's why they call it an advanced degree. That's why they call it Yale.

Robinson
We are seeing this class realignment. You point out the neighborhood that you grew up in went from Republican to Democrat, and people who used to be Democrats and working class are now Republicans. Even Latinos in South Texas are starting to vote for Donald Trump in larger numbers. But it's not like we're going to see the Republicans embracing New Deal style, authentic populism.

Frank
Well, they talk about it, don't they? They make those noises.

Robinson
Right. But then Trump gets into office, and everyone's anti-labor.

Frank
And he cuts your taxes and puts the oil man in charge of the EPA, or whatever the hell it is. Nathan, we talked about how much fun it is to write and everything. You've sort of teased me because it's very frustrating that nobody listens. And this is one where I am just banging my head against a wall. I'm from Kansas. Populism means something there. It was a movement that we had in Kansas. It's a well-known thing. Even if people don't know the details, they know that it existed. They know what it was, roughly. It was a left-wing farmer labor movement a long time ago that swept over the state and then disappeared. Everybody knows those basic facts. When I was in graduate school, I decided it would be my subject. I would study it, and I did. I studied it for several years, and then I gave up on it because everybody was writing about populism back then.

This is in the '80s. Everybody was writing about populism. It just felt pointless to add another monograph on top of this already gigantic pile of essays and books about American populism, but it's always been the motif of my political writing. In addition to it being important because I come from Kansas, populism is also important because it's the beginning of the modern left in American life. This is literally where it starts, with the Populist Party. They're the first ones to actually start calling for a regulated economy, nationalization of things, votes for women, among other things. To basically formulate economic policy in the interests of ordinary people rather than in the interest of big business. That was unthinkable at the time. That was revolutionary. It was absolutely new, and it was shocking, and they were more or less beaten down.

But it was also the beginning, and it later grew and flowered into what we know as the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. And this became what the Democratic Party was about, up to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's grandfather, by the way, was an actual uppercase “P” Populist in the Texas Legislature. It's neither here nor there, but this is the backdrop of everything that I know about American politics. In What's the Matter with Kansas?, I was describing the people who were once the rank-and-file of populism being drawn over to the other side, and that it was being done with language that sounded populist.

So this is an important distinction. It feels like I've lost it here, but it's fake populism. So the Republicans use populist language all the time. You go back to Reagan. They did it with George W. Bush, and this is one of the reasons he annoyed me so much. They did it all the time, but they always did it in a cultural sense. You might remember George W. Bush with his pork rinds and touring the country with the country singers. This crap. And Reagan was very good at doing this act as well, but it's always an act. At some point, I lost control of this, and people just started calling it right-wing populism, and they started using the word populist as a synonym for racist, and then they started using the word populist as a synonym for fascist. (...)

There are consequences for it, and the consequences are what we see around us. When you say that populism is actually fascism and racism, you have made this whole species of politics off limits to yourself. And it's a species of politics, frankly, that we have to have if we're ever going to get out of this. (...)

Robinson
... You have a passage in your New York Times op-ed where you say, “can anything reverse it?”

And you say, “only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old, a great society of broad, inclusive prosperity. That means universal health care, higher minimum wage, robust financial regulation, antitrust enforcement, unions, welfare state, higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. And it means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming together of ordinary people,” not, as you've just said, a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals. (...)

Frank
Okay, let's look at these people in Listen, Liberal: “New Democrats,” the neoliberals before them. They did it. They conquered the party. The party is a site of contestation, as we were saying earlier. This is one of the reasons they always stave off the contest. They always manage to suppress the contest or to rig it in some way. You look at what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2020 or in 2016. With an open convention, no thanks.

But parties are contested, and it has been done in our lifetimes. There has been a group that took over the Democratic Party and remade it in their own image. Now they've clung very tightly to the levers of power ever since, and nobody has a plan for how to get them out of there. But that doesn't mean you couldn't dream one up. You could do it.

The other way is economic catastrophe in the manner of the New Deal. Nobody knew what Franklin Roosevelt was going to do. They just knew that he was the man of the moment, and he was able to completely remake the world as he saw fit. Now, the problem with this theory is we had that chance. That was 2008. That actually happened. And we did that, and we elected a man. If you're anything like I was, drinking the hope Kool-Aid back then—I went for Obama in a big way. I thought he was the man for the moment. I thought he was our generation's Franklin Roosevelt. I was completely wrong. And instead, he proceeded to enshrine this sort of neoliberal agenda.

by Nathan J. Robinson and Thomas Frank,  Current Affairs  |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Kessler Syndrome

Kessler Syndrome
Images: NASA
[ed. Add another 300 in 2025. Musk's Starlink/SpaceX program already has 6,957 in operation. Bezo's Kuiper project proposes to add 3,332 more.]

The Kessler syndrome, also known as the Kessler effect, collisional cascading, or ablation cascade, is a scenario proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais in 1978. It describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions between these objects cascade, exponentially increasing the amount of space debris over time. This proliferation of debris poses significant risks to satellites, space missions, and the International Space Station, potentially rendering certain orbital regions unusable and threatening the sustainability of space activities for many generations. In 2009, Kessler wrote that modeling results indicated the debris environment had already become unstable, meaning that efforts to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating past debris sources would likely fail because fragments from future collisions would accumulate faster than atmospheric drag could remove them. The Kessler syndrome underscores the critical need for effective space traffic management and collision avoidance strategies to ensure the long-term viability of space exploration and utilization.

What Did the War in Gaza Reveal About American Judaism?

Peter Beinart on the story of Israel and the moral blind spot of the Jewish diaspora.

In a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” Peter Beinart argues that many American Jews who defend Israel have lost their moral bearings. He makes the case, in a series of linked essays, that Jews in America and around the world should push for a single state comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories which grants everyone equal rights. “This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams,” Beinart writes. “It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip—­the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name—­and shrug, if not applaud.”

I recently spoke by phone with Beinart, whom I met almost twenty years ago when I went to work for The New Republic. (...) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what he misjudged about the U.S.’s unwillingness to change its relationship to Israel, whether a one-state solution is really a more likely alternative than two states living side by side, and how debates over Israel have warped conversations about antisemitism in America.

There was hope about a decade ago among people like yourself that American Jews—especially younger ones—were moving away from ironclad support for Israel. Do you feel surprised or disappointed by the degree to which the United States, and even the Democratic Party, seems to have not moved in that direction after October 7th?

I think I probably underestimated the degree to which, even inside the Democratic Party, politicians could remain unresponsive to shifts in public opinion, because they don’t really face much of a cost. There are other forces that just matter more than public opinion.

Which are?

Well, the role of money in politics is a really, really big one. And I think that was especially true for Joe Biden, because he didn’t have the capacity to raise money from the public at large. He wasn’t a Bernie Sanders or a Barack Obama who could raise large amounts of money from small donations. It’s also a problem for members of Congress. Except for a small handful of celebrity members, they are not national figures who can raise enough money that they can compete with an organization like AIPAC if AIPAC decides to target them.

But I think there is a danger in focussing too exclusively on money. Money plays a role in this, but there’s also a deep way in which the Israeli story is one that’s very resonant to many Americans, because it’s so similar to the American story. It’s a promised land forged on a hostile frontier. And the more invested you are in America’s own founding myth, the more you’re going to find Israel’s founding myth appealing. I think a lot of people in the Republican Party, even if there was no campaign financing at stake, find this narrative very, very powerful. And Israel, in some ways, is a vision of what they would like America to be, which is a country that’s more nationalistic, more militaristic, has stronger border protection, and has clear hierarchies based on ethnicity and religion.

As Edward Said famously said, Palestinians still lack permission to narrate. Their story is in some ways a threatening story to America’s founding myth. When you start using phrases like “settler colonialism,” it doesn’t take much for Americans, especially white Americans, to get uncomfortable. And beyond that, October 7th was a horror. It was a horrifying event. And so there was a natural desire to express sympathy and solidarity with Israeli Jews in this moment of incredible trauma. And then the Israeli government says, “O.K., you want to show you care about Israeli Jews? Then support us in destroying the Gaza Strip.” It was a little bit like a post-9/11 moment, when it was very difficult in the public discourse to distinguish between the act of horror—what had happened, and empathy for the victims—and a policy response, which was just disastrous.

Why was the Biden Administration so unwilling to really do anything to sanction Israel or to try to stop its behavior?

If you come up in Washington politics and policy circles, you become accustomed to a template for how you deal with Israel. And that template is generally to avoid public fights, because those are not going to go well for you. And I think the people in the Biden Administration remember the Obama Administration. I will never forget the moment when, after Obama basically gave a speech about how there should be a Palestinian state near 1967 lines, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate, went before AIPAC and threw Obama under the bus.

If you’re in Washington for a long time, you almost turn off a part of your brain when it comes to the question of Israel and Palestine. You just take the safest political route and you block out some of your human responses to what actually happens to Palestinians. You just become so accustomed to basically just looking away and rationalizing and not doing anything. I think folks in the Biden Administration underestimated the degree to which ordinary progressive Americans who had not undergone that kind of acculturation would simply look at what was happening in the age of social media and say, What the fuck? Why are we supporting this? And they underestimated the degree to which Gaza mattered for American progressives.

One of the things you say in your book is that many American Jews responded differently to this war than they would have if any other country had done what Israel did to Gaza. How do you understand that now?

Well, for most American Jews, it’s not just another country, right? It’s a country that we have been raised to see as deeply, intimately, connected to us, as a central part of our story—our story of genocide and survival and rebirth. And it’s a story of pride and safety. The Jewish tradition has this kind of metaphor of family running through it, this kind of imagined family. Imagine if you start getting pieces of evidence that members of your family are doing terrible, terrible things, right? That’s very painful to acknowledge. Plus, you recognize that generally people in a family don’t take kindly to those members of the family who start saying, “Hey, we’re doing horrible things.”

And this leads to the way the organized American Jewish community really functions. Whatever Israel does, they come up with some post-hoc justification. “It’s Hamas’s fault because it’s using human shields. It’s the people in Gaza’s fault because they voted for Hamas. The numbers are a lie—you can’t trust them.” (...)

What changed your thinking about the need for a one-state solution versus a two-state solution?

I spent my whole adult life as a supporter of the two-state solution, of partition. I think two things changed. The first was just the recognition that I was arguing the same position year after year after year. And facts on the ground were changing, right? Every year, Israel was more deeply entrenching itself in the West Bank, which would be the heartland of a Palestinian state. And the chances of a Palestinian state that could ever really be sovereign and contiguous were becoming harder and harder to imagine. I found an article from someone saying the two-state solution was almost dead. It was Anthony Lewis writing a column headlined “Five Minutes to Midnight”in the New York Times, in 1982, when there were maybe not even a hundred thousand settlers in the West Bank. Now there are seven hundred thousand if you include East Jerusalem.

It was actually a Palestinian interlocutor, I remember, who said, “Peter, something can’t be perpetually dying. At a certain point, it’s dead. And you have to be willing to think about alternatives.” And, when I started to think about alternatives, I came to the conclusion that this principle that Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law in one political territory—this idea is considered so radical and outlandish, if not downright antisemitic, in American political discourse. But it’s actually the principle that, as a general rule, we tend to think is the right principle for most countries, including our own. And I was struck by political-science literature that suggests that in divided societies, things tend to be a lot more peaceful when everyone has a voice in government.

If you support a two-state solution because you want to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, that means that Jews will rule, that Jews are going to be the vast majority of the population or at least the vast majority of the population that can vote. You are in an ethno-nationalist framework. I think I probably became more aware of how uncomfortable that was when I started listening to Tucker Carlson speaking that way about the United States. Because it is the discourse of the ethno-nationalist right in the United States and in Europe, that basically countries should be ruled by members of one tribe and everybody else is a guest in the country. I began to be more uncomfortable with making an exception to this principle for a Jewish state. Especially because I noticed that that exception didn’t stay in Israel, because Israel had been a bright shining example for every ethno-nationalist who wanted to make their own country attack the principle of equality under the law. I’m thinking of people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, Narendra Modi in India.

At one level, the question could be framed as whether Israel should give equal rights to everyone it rules over. And that seems hard, for me at least, to argue with. But that’s a little different from saying, “My long-term solution to the problem is that these people live in one democratic state together rather than in two partitioned, hopefully democratic states.” I agree that a two-state solution seems almost dead. But especially after October 7th and Gaza, isn’t a one-state solution even less likely?

Both of them at this point are completely unrealistic. What is realistic is that Israel maintains permanent control over millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights and, indeed, moves toward the destruction of the Palestinian people through active expulsion and death. If you had to put a gun to my head and ask me what I think is the most realistic likelihood that we will see over the coming decades and generations, it would be what I would call an American-style solution to the Palestinian question. By which I mean the nineteenth-century American solution to Native Americans. You just continue this process and it grinds away without restraint until basically the population is destroyed as a functioning political entity.

I think we’re in the process of seeing that play out. The question to me is what force in the world could be powerful enough to stop that and to create a different reality? To me, it seems like there would need to be a mass movement of people all around the world in the tradition of the anti-apartheid movement and the civil-rights movement. It’s the power and strength of that movement that really matters. And I think that movement almost inevitably has to be a movement about human equality and freedom. It can’t have the moral power it needs if it’s about partitioning into competing ethno-nationalist states. I think a movement is going to be more powerful if it is built around the principle of equality rather than the principle of partition.

But what about the people within Israel and Palestine? Do you think they want to live together?

There was a vote last year in the Knesset on two states and not a single member of a Jewish political party in Israel voted yes. So that’s Israeli discourse. It’s basically the center is pro-status quo, and the right is pro-expulsion. Among Palestinians, I think that there was historically a desire for one equal state, what was sometimes called the secular democratic Palestine. That was the P.L.O. position.

Then there was this shift in 1988 where the P.L.O. accepted the idea of a partition. And the truth is now we don’t really know, because there’s no democratic process that exists among Palestinians for them to express their political views. Most popular Palestinian leaders are in jail. There are no elections in the West Bank or Gaza. And so I guess one of the things that I should acknowledge about this conversation is that my own view about this has to be deeply informed by what Palestinians want. They’re the group of people who lack rights. The way in which they want their rights to be vindicated is crucially important.

And so as a process matter, it’s really, really important that we support mechanisms by which Palestinians can actually create a legitimate political process to reflect on these questions of one versus two states. If we see some kind of legitimate process in which Palestinians say, No, no, we still really want to commit to the idea of two states, it’s kind of silly at that point for me to be more Catholic than the Pope. But I don’t think we have that process. And when I listen to what we have in the absence, which is the Palestinian public discussion that one hears in the United States, or around the world, I think the current has clearly moved toward the idea of equality and historical justice in one space. And so, I think I’m partly responding to that.

In the book, you talk about the degree to which American Jews are blamed for things that Israel does and how that is of course antisemitism. And also how many American Jews view any criticism of Israel as antisemitic. You and I can sit here and say, Well, that’s absurd. But when you hear Jews say that the phrase “from the river to the sea,” for example, is antisemitic, does any part of you want to defer to people who might feel that way, even if you might disagree on the substance? How do you wrestle with the idea, which we have heard more of in the last decade, that minority groups should broadly get to decide what they consider offensive?

Yeah, so the first thing is when people claim that only Black people get to determine what constitutes anti-Black racism or only trans people get to determine what constitutes transphobia, I sometimes think, What country do they think we’re living in? Donald Trump just outlawed D.E.I. The idea that those minority groups, or historically disadvantaged groups, have complete power to determine the discourse is nonsense.

I know it’s not how America functions in 2025, but it’s definitely how a lot of people attuned to bigotry wish it functioned. To me the question is whether, generically speaking, one should be using terms that many people use in a bigoted way even if you don’t mean it that way.

First of all, I don’t like the idea that basically only members of one ethnic, racial, religious group should have a monopoly on defining what discrimination means, whether they’re Black or whether they’re L.G.B.T., whatever. First of all, because it quashes the diversity that exists within every community, right? There is political diversity in every community. Just because people have the same identity status doesn’t mean they all see the world in the same way. And that’s especially true for Jews. As you know, there’s a very profound division among American Jews now on some pretty basic questions related to Israel. And you see it most strongly among younger American Jews, where you find polling which shows that maybe not a majority, but very large minorities of American Jews think Israel is an apartheid state and that, depending on how you ask it, many of them have very serious concerns about Zionism.

So the irony becomes that when you paint Jews as monolithic and say, basically, that anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism, the way that plays out on college campuses is that a bunch of the students who then get suspended and disciplined are Jews. You get this absurd situation where Jewish Voice for Peace is suspended at Columbia. And the Anti-Defamation League congratulates the president for keeping Jews safe. Well, not those Jews, right?

Let’s say that you think Black people should get to define what constitutes anti-Black racism, so Jews should get to define what constitutes antisemitism as it relates to Palestinians. The problem with this is that the relationship between Jews and Palestinians is not the same as the relationship between white and Black people. Palestinians are not the historically superior group that have ruled over Jews for generations. They’re the group that, in Israel-Palestine, is legally subordinate and that the United States has basically marginalized from public discussion. So when you say that Palestinian discourse, which tends to be anti-Zionist, should be deemed antisemitic because a lot of Jews find it antisemitic, you’re completely erasing the Palestinian experience. And what you end up doing is basically silencing Palestinians and not allowing them to speak about their experience.

by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Michael M. Santiago

Never Gamble With Strangers

[ed. Will be in LV later this month (but definitely not playing cards).]

Carly Simon

[ed. She reportedly suffered from near debilitating stage fright, which makes this performance all the more impressive.]

National Nature Assessment Goes On

After President Donald Trump canceled a report on the state of nature in the United States, the scientists working on it — many from the Seattle area — say they’ll continue their work and build on it.

The report, announced by President Joe Biden during a visit to Seattle’s Seward Park on Earth Day in 2022, was intended to be the country’s first nationwide assessment of the state of nature.

In all, more than 150 scientists were at work on the assessment across the country — and they had nearly completed the first draft of their work. Then Phil Levin, professor of practice in the University of Washington College of the Environment, and the national director for the report, was informed shortly after Trump took office that the assessment was being terminated.

He said he got the news indirectly, and without explanation other than the one he was required to send to project participants: “ … as called for in the Executive Order Unleashing American Energy, released on January 20, 2025, we are discontinuing the work on the National Nature Assessment.”

Trump’s order was a broadside against a wide range of green energy and environmental initiatives under the Biden Administration and a sweeping directive to achieve American dominance in mining, energy extraction and facilities such as pipelines.

Levin sent that email as directed. Then sent another — this time from his personal account:

” … Yes, this is disappointing. Yes, this is frustrating. However, it is not unexpected. Therefore, I am moving on from those emotions to see opportunity in this challenge. This work is too important to die … And so, inspired by Lenny Kravitz (1991): I say, “It ain’t over ’til [we say] it’s over.”

In the works now is completion of a new report. It will still be comprehensive, peer-reviewed, and the first report of its kind. Originally scheduled to be released in 2026, the report will still make that deadline, Levin said, or maybe even beat it, now that every chapter doesn’t have to be cleared by a government agency. (...)

The report is not just a species count; it takes stock of biodiversity and species, but there also are chapters on nature and the economy, bright spots in conservation and restoration, environmental justice and equity, nature and climate change, and even nature and cultural heritage, delving into people’s perception and understanding and value for the natural world.

Levin said he has been amazed at the outpouring of support to continue the work. After a story on the ordered cancellation ran in The New York Times, his University of Washington inbox was stuffed with hundreds of emails, Levin said. Many publishers have since stepped forward, interested to bring out the report, as have academic journals, wanting to publish portions of the report within their discipline. Copy editors, artists and others have volunteered to help.

The assessment was authorized as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, created by Congress in 1990 to assist the nation and world in understanding, assessing, predicting and responding to human-induced and natural processes of global change. The first National Nature Assessment was intended to examine the status, observed trends and future projections of America’s lands, waters, wildlife, biodiversity and ecosystems and the benefits they provide, including connections to the economy, public health, equity, climate mitigation and adaptation, and national security.

An outline of the report has already been published in the Federal Register.

“It’s a different game, but the overall project remains the same,” Levin said, “to really think about the status and trends and what the future looks like for American nature and why it matters in people’s lives today.” (...)

Josh Lawler, a professor of environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington, is an author on the chapter about frameworks and approaches. It’s crucial the assessment still be published, he said, because it will help people understand what we get from the natural world, how we depend on it, and what state it is in. “It’s like going to the doctor,” he said of the assessment. After all, “We do depend on these natural systems for our survival.”

by Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Ivy Ceballo
[ed. Heros of the day.]

Deconstructed Wonton Soup

I’ve never met a wonton soup I didn’t love. A bowl (or plastic takeout container, more often than not) of succulent dumplings suspended in a savory, salty broth is reliable comfort. My friend Abbe described the dish as “a dumpling giving you a warm hug,” which is why it’s one of my go-tos when I’m under the weather. But it’s much more than just something I crave when I’m sick — wonton soup is delicious any time.

Any food that involves a flavorful filling wrapped in some sort of dough — gyoza, pierogi, samosas, mandu, empanadas, ravioli, etc. — immediately piques my interest. Something about these little parcels really embodies the gifts they resemble. But wrapping each present can take time, typically more than I have to spend on weeknight dinner, and that time increases with a lack of experience. That’s why I was so intrigued when I first saw a video for a deconstructed wonton soup. (...)

“Deconstruction” can mean different things in the world of gastronomy. Seattle Met senior writer Kathryn Robinson defined it as “breaking a classic dish down to its component parts — then reimagining from there. Sometimes it means recombining. Sometimes not combining. Sometimes recasting ingredients in clever ways.”

In fine-dining circles, the adjective can be a synonym for overcomplicated plates or more artistic interpretations. In this instance, fussiness is nowhere to be found. Instead, deconstruction is all about streamlining the dish to make it easier to prepare at home. Store-bought wonton wrappers are cut into strips that end up resembling hand-pulled noodles, and ground pork seasoned with soy sauce, scallions, toasted sesame oil and sugar is shaped into meatballs. (One could argue that “unconstructed” is a better descriptor since you skip the step of folding and sealing the wontons entirely.)

Bowls of juicy meatballs, slippery noodles and baby bok choy (for added nutrition) in a ginger-scented chicken broth or stock that’s ready in about 40 minutes? Sounds like a winning combination to me. Sure, there aren’t any little “pockets of happy,” as my other friend Anne described traditional wonton soup, but all the flavors are there, and the time saved is well worth their absence. Finish each bowl with a spoonful of chili crisp and a drizzle of more toasted sesame oil and you won’t even miss the wontons.

Deconstructed Wonton Soup

Adapted from Cook’s Country
Total time: 40 minutes
Servings: 6 (makes about 10 cups)
This recipe delivers all the flavors of wonton soup without the trouble of making the dumplings. Instead, the filling is formed into meatballs and store-bought wonton wrappers are cut into strips to form noodles. Drizzle each bowl with chili crisp and toasted sesame oil for extra punch and flavor.
Make ahead: The meatballs can be formed, covered and refrigerated up to 24 hours in advance.
Storage: Refrigerate for up to 3 days.
Where to buy: Wonton wrappers can be found at Asian markets and well-stocked supermarkets.

INGREDIENTS

1 pound ground pork
4 scallions, thinly sliced, divided
1 large egg, lightly beaten
4 teaspoons grated or minced fresh ginger, divided
1 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari, preferably reduced-sodium, plus more as needed
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil, plus more for serving
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
½ teaspoon fine salt
8 cups no-salt-added or low-sodium chicken stock or broth
6 heads baby bok choy (1½ pounds total), halved or quartered, if large, and cut into 1-inch pieces
8 ounces wonton wrappers, defrosted if frozen, cut into roughly 1-inch-wide strips
Chili crisp, for serving

STEPS

Set a sheet pan or platter as well as a bowl of water near your workspace. In a large bowl, use your hands to gently mix the pork, three-quarters of the scallions, the egg, 2 teaspoons of the ginger, the soy sauce or tamari, sesame oil, sugar and salt until evenly combined. (The mixture will be a little loose.) Use a small cookie scoop or 1-tablespoon measuring spoon to form the mixture into 1½-tablespoon portions about 1 inch in diameter. Use damp hands to gently roll the portions into balls, and arrange on the prepared sheet pan or platter, rewetting your hands as needed. (You should have about 24 meatballs.)

Set a large Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed pot over medium-high heat, add the stock or broth and the remaining 2 teaspoons of ginger, and bring to a boil. Add the bok choy, return the liquid to a boil, then stir in the wonton wrappers, a handful at a time, separating them as you work so they don’t stick together.

Carefully add the meatballs to the pot; cover and cook until the meatballs are cooked through, about 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining scallions. Taste, and season with soy sauce, as desired. Ladle the soup into bowls and serve hot, with a spoonful of chili crisp and a drizzle of sesame oil.

Substitutions: Ground pork: another ground meat or plant-based alternative. Scallions: shallots or yellow onion. Allergic to sesame oil? Omit it. Granulated sugar: other types of sugar. Chicken stock or broth: vegetable stock or broth. Baby bok choy: spinach, chard or cabbage. Chili crisp: sriracha, chili-garlic sauce or other hot sauce.

by Aaron Hutcherson, Washington Post/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images: Peggy Cormary and Carolyn Robb
[ed. I know this is all about expediency, but wrapping the fillings is not that time consuming after you've made the mix. And worth it, I think (for those little 'pillows of happiness' or whatever). Plus, throw a few in hot oil and you've got crispy wontons.]

Aki Sogabe
via: (and here)

Bo Burnham

Lyrics

The whole world at your fingеrtips, the ocean at your door
The livе-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show
Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go
Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall...

Tired of Losing

In a sleepy Washington state beach town roughly five miles from the U.S.–Canada border, you’ll find Birch Bay Storage. Last December, my mom, 64, reached out her car window to punch in a code that opened the electric gate. She was reluctant to unlock her unit, sensing that something she cherished was crushed under heavy boxes and Rubbermaid bins. In the dark recesses, I could see items precariously stacked 14 feet high.

Next to a couch tipped on its side, she showed me a landscape painting by my grandmother. She found a broken frame that she planned to fix. She put both items in the back car seat along with a kid-sized plastic Santa. When I asked why she couldn’t use the trunk, she told me it was full. Just like her closets and garage were also full. She pulled out a cracked plastic bin filled with charred pots and pans and a random bag of marshmallows from the early aughts. Another bin contained just tank tops. “Why did I think I needed that many tank tops?” she laughed. (...)

In the U.S., there are an estimated 52,000 self-storage facilities, covering 2.1 billion square feet‍—‍enough for 6 to 7 square feet for every American. The self-storage market is expected to be worth $50 billion by 2029. The industry itself is the perfect union—a service that fulfills a human need and a growth investment that can thrive during historical shifts, such as the dot-com boom and bust, the Great Recession, and COVID-19. One recent survey found that 38 percent of Americans use self-storage, spending an average of between $75 and $185 month, usually due to one of the four Ds: death, divorce, dislocation, and a disputed fourth D, which toggles between disaster and downsizing, depending on the source. (...)

In 1994, my mom signed the paperwork for her first unit with Birch Bay Storage. She had lost my father to brain cancer in 1991. A 31-year-old widow with three girls under age 11, my mom moved from Seattle to Birch Bay, where she met my stepfather. In 1992, she got a divorce when it was clear he was dependent on drugs and alcohol. “I had to be very sneaky,” she told me, in order to maintain full custody of my newborn sister. The need for a second storage unit arose when we moved and continued moving for six years.

Over the phone, my mom explained that the early ’90s were like a “dark alley” she didn’t want to wander down. Together, we tried assembling a timeline of the places we’d lived: a tent, a hotel room, with family members, and in rentals in several cities in Washington state. Those years were about survival—an effort to escape another D that could be added to the reasons people rent storage units: domestic abuse. (Women are more likely to have units than men.) Despite a restraining order, my stepdad always found out where we were staying and maintained an unyielding presence in our lives until he died in 1997. By that point, we’d returned to Birch Bay, attempting to regain stability after moving seven times.

The Great Recession was really the inflection point that proved the storage industry could thrive amid an economic tailspin. In late 2009, more than 15 million people were unemployed. That same year, foreclosure filings hit a record high of nearly 4 million homes lost. Between 2007 and 2009, family homelessness rose by 30 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Americans didn’t simply have too much stuff and nowhere to put it: People had lived through the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, and many had nowhere to go.

Where the housing market was in sharp decline, the self-storage industry was the one area of Real Estate Investment Trusts—investments sold on the stock exchange—that were delivering growth, with 5 percent return during an economic nosedive for housing values. While people may have been forced to rent, move into smaller places, or live with family, they didn’t want to give up all they owned.

And if people could no longer afford to pay the cost of storage, the facilities could always hold an auction. Shows like Auction Hunters, Storage Hunters, and Storage Wars began to personify the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”—except with objects of value, monetary or sentimental, on the line.

I assumed that because my family was already low-income, we’d somehow weather the storm, just as we always had. I was wrong. In 2009, my mom filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

In 2012, after missing three mortgage payments, she was encouraged to do a short sale by her bank, Washington Mutual, a subprime-mortgage pusher and the largest bank to fail in U.S. history. She was offered roughly $4,000 to walk away from a property—worth $350,000 today—to avoid foreclosure. She owed over $5,000 in missed payments, and without the ability to make the full payment, she didn’t feel she had a choice. That year, she rented two more storage units for a total of four.

Two impulses pushed my mom’s habit beyond clutter: ordering things online and saving everything because each item held a memory, a meaning, a story. Two lamps weren’t just two lamps, but the best outing she spent antiquing with my grandmother before she passed away from Alzheimer’s disease. Two oak chairs weren’t just two oak chairs, but beautiful 100-year-old antiques my dad carefully refurbished and nicknamed “Grandma” and “Grandpa.” When one of the chairs was damaged in storage, she was deeply hurt. Already knowing the answer, I asked her if she threw it out. She replied knowingly: “Me, throw anything out?”

Storage provided a place to keep things at a safe distance from familial judgment. After six years of renting four storage units, my mom finally narrowed it down to one. Or at least that’s what I thought. When I visited that storage unit in Birch Bay last year, I learned that there was a second. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I have a big one and a little one.” By that point, I’d learned to have more compassion—storage wasn’t just a space the size of a room, it was a fixture “always there … it’s always on my mind,” she said. (...)

As of 2024, the monthly storage facility occupancy rate remains high at around 84 percent. For the many individual business owners who operate more than half of the country’s facilities, new technology has allowed for fewer employees, and self-storage is easy money thanks to the most basic truth: After people move stuff into storage, it’s a pain to move out.

Between 2020 and 2021, it became clear that the self-storage industry was not only “recession-proof.” Extra Space Storage Inc. and Public Storage were 97 percent full during the pandemic, according to the Wall Street Journal. The same four Ds applied: death, divorce, dislocation, and disaster/downsizing.

But there are other reasons people need storage. Many homeowners association rules forbid boats and RVs in driveways and side yards. As summer approaches, I’m bombarded with emails about student storage discounts (despite no longer being a student). Year-round housing isn’t standard practice, which leaves students facing housing insecurity with nowhere to go. (...)

The cost of dislocation is very real. Unless people start making the connection between a lack of affordable housing and storage use, it’s not likely the narrative will shift from an overconsumption issue to an inequity issue.

When I visited Birch Bay again in July, my mom and I sat down at the kitchen island and calculated how much she’d spent on storage fees since 1994. When I finally did the math, I reminded her that I was in nearly six figures of student debt and was in no position to judge. Self-storage had cost her approximately $106,000, a staggering amount considering that since 1991, my mom has mostly relied on an annuity from my dad’s death that brought in roughly $12,000 annually.

I struggled to reconcile that the money my mom put toward storage fees could have been enough for another down payment on a house. But I was missing the point. She was trying to maintain a grip on normalcy—waiting for a time when she could set up her antique farm table and favorite dish set and gather her kids and grandkids for a home-cooked meal.

A couple of years ago she told me, “I think I know why people hoard. They’re tired of losing.” I sat down on a bench when she told me this because I finally understood. Loss was at the root of it. When you’re tired of losing, you hold on to whatever you can.

by Julie Poole, EHRP/Slate |  Read more:

Image: yalcinsonat1 via Getty Images

[ed. I've always thought driving ranges and storage units would be great businesses to own if you've got the upfront capital. Low operational and maintenence costs forever after they're installed.]

Pierre Piscitelli/Lyle Mays

[ed. Pierre Piscitelli has a YouTube channel for piano instruction (a very good one) and seems like a nice guy. A week ago he posted a video about his friend Lyle Mays on the fifth anniversary of Lyle's death: Remembering Lyle Mays, My Biggest Musical Hero. As most probably know, Lyle was the principle keyboardist and co-composer with the Pat Metheny Group, a successful solo artist in his own right, and an extraordinary musician. Pierre talks about how they met, quickly became friends, and how he eventually ended up collaborating with Lyle to transcribe all his music into a songbook before he died. The video above - Slink - started it all. Apparently someone who knew Lyle had found it and forwarded it to him. He was so impressed he contacted Pierre out of the blue, they started exchanging emails and that's how it all got started (as well as Pierre's eventual path to his own YouTube channel). So anyway, that's the story. Enjoy.]

Stephanie Kelton on the Disastrous Republican Economic Agenda

"We don't have two years. You won't be able to pick up the pieces."

Right this minute, Elon Musk and the Trump administration are trying to subject America to a rapid program of destructive austerity. There is no one better to discuss the economic implications of this than the economist and professor Stephanie Kelton. A former chief economist to the Senate Budget Committee and economic advisor to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, Kelton is the author of “The Deficit Myth,” the book that catapulted the ideas of Modern Monetary Theory into the mainstream.

Much of Kelton’s career has been spent on dismantling the intellectual underpinnings of the idea that the government cannot afford to help us all. I spoke to her about the Republican economic agenda, inflation, crypto, Donald Trump’s inexplicable beliefs, and what the feckless Democrats should be doing now. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

Hamilton Nolan: What’s your basic assessment of the austerity argument being put forth by Elon Musk right now—that cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget is a necessary or desirable thing to do?

Stephanie Kelton: He amplifies all the time that the country is going broke. He’s constantly tweeting that we’re bankrupting the nation. There could well be a self-serving motive. I don’t know to what extent he actually believes what he’s saying, or if he just sees it as a convenient narrative that most people are already primed to accept. Logically, intuitively, people think, “If you put more money out there, money will be worth less.” Sounds right. Therefore part of the reason that we experienced the high inflation, and part of the reason that even very high profile economists, former Treasury Secretaries, politicians, they’re all saying there’s a problem with budget deficits and the debt, and something has to be done. You’ve heard these warnings for decades. So, along comes a guy who says, “I’ve identified the source of the problem. The federal government’s too big, and it spends too much money. And my DOGE crew and I are going to go in and right size the federal budget.”

What’s your explanation for what caused the pandemic-era inflation? Is there an alternate narrative you think people should hear?

Kelton: There is no simple story when it comes to inflation. In the case of the pandemic and post-pandemic inflation, there were a whole lot of things that happened. A series of mostly supply shocks, the pandemic itself being the first major shock. When you shut down large parts of the economy, and you mostly aren’t producing on the service side of the economy—and 80% of spending is on services.You tell people, you can’t go to the gym, you can’t go to a coffee shop, you can’t go to a restaurant, you can’t go to a theater, and so forth and so on. People were still spending, but they couldn’t spend in the ways they otherwise would have spent.

So they tried to cram a lot of spending into the goods pipeline, because you couldn’t buy services, but you could still buy goods. People turned their spare bedrooms into home offices. They ordered furniture and computer equipment and all that stuff that has to be manufactured and shipped. A lot of that stuff is made abroad. And we all remember what happened with the ports, and ships that were backed up. So the first thing we did is clog that pipeline, and then encounter bottlenecks in the supply chain, and disruptions. And that led to some price increases. Shifts in the composition of demand. Alongside that, you had the start of the Ukraine war, with Russia invading Ukraine. Then you had energy price increases, and that led to additional supply side shocks. Food and energy prices increased.

And against this backdrop of high and rising prices, you had companies who said, “I’m raising prices in part because I’m paying higher prices—you had pressure on wages—but also because the cost of my inputs was going up. So I’m raising prices to protect my profit margins—but you know, I think I can get away with even more. I can raise prices above and beyond what’s necessary to protect my profit margins. I can actually fatten them.” So you had economists who were pointing this out, most visibly Isabella Weber, who said, “this is a form of seller’s inflation.” It got described as everything from price gouging to greedflation. But it was real. I’m not saying it explains all of it, but it certainly was a contributing factor. If you look at some of the studies that have tried to do kind of an autopsy—Where did all of this inflation come from?—they assign a non-trivial part of the story to corporations taking advantage of the inflationary environment and pushing prices even higher. (...)

Speaking of the element of inflation that was greedflation, or increasing corporate prices—isn’t it possible that the set of political policies now being enacted, including gutting the CFPB and other forms of government oversight of corporations, could make that element even worse?

Kelton: Oh, sure. You’re removing some guardrails that were in place to provide checks on the extent to which—whether it’s financial institutions or non-financial firms—could charge higher prices and gouge consumers. Everything from the FTC to the FCC to the CFPB. But also the tariffs and other policies. When people start hearing the world “inflation” creeping back into the national conversation, you’re priming the consumer to expect to see higher prices. In total, whether it’s the stuff they’re doing on the regulatory side, or the stuff they’re doing with respect to tariffs, I think you’re very right to say, “Could this be another opportunity for companies to raise prices?” Yeah.

What do you make of the tariffs? What will the economic impact be, and also, why the hell do you think Trump is doing this?

Kelton: I think he got this in his head, maybe decades ago. When I was growing up, it was Japan. I remember being in high school and hearing people say, “The Japanese are killing us. We’re all going to be speaking Japanese.” Because they were a manufacturing powerhouse. They were running these large trade surpluses. The US had gone from a trade surplus position in the 50s and 60s and early 70s, to running persistent trade deficits. And this was just seen as part of the demise of the United States of America. This other big country was beating up on us. Trump has talked like that for many, many decades when it comes to trade. Only now it’s China. Only the names have changed. He even looks at Canada, $200 billion in trade deficits, and says, “They’re killing us. We can’t subsidize them this way.”

It’s like…what are you talking about? Somehow he thinks that if you import from another country then they’re taking advantage of you. All he looks at are the dollars. He sees a trade deficit, and he sees that another country ends up with our money. What he doesn’t see, apparently, is that we end up with their stuff.

I remember watching the 2016 Republican primary debates with my son. There’s Donald Trump on stage, and he’s talking about “Mexico’s killing us, China’s killing us, Japan is killing us. We don’t win any more. All killing us on trade.” He said, “look at Japan, they send us millions of cars. We send them wheat. This is not a good trade.” My son looks at me and says, “Wait a minute, what?” They manufacture cars, we get the cars, and we export wheat, and somehow he thinks we’re being ripped off in this deal. It’s just a very strange oversight.

But there was also something [legitimate] in 2016 when he talked about trade. He would go into hollowed-out Rust Belt communities in Ohio, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania and the like. And he’d say, “Your communities are a shadow of their former selves. The good jobs are gone, aren’t they? They’ve gone to China, they’ve gone to Mexico. We had bad trade deals that have hurt American workers, and we’re going to fix that.” And that spoke to real pain in these communities, where they had suffered a loss of good-paying union jobs with security. And you had another candidate on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, who was talking very much along those lines when it came to trade and the impacts on working class Americans. So I don’t want to say Trump completely misses it when it comes to trade, because some of that narrative was recognizing a real byproduct of some of what’s happened.

Ironically, the top Republican priority is the tax cut bill, which will primarily benefit the rich. What do you think the economic results of that tax cut bill would be, if they pass it?

Kelton: First, let’s remember that the last time Donald Trump was president, the signature piece of legislation, the one really big accomplishment, was tax cuts. In December of 2017, Trump signs the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% down to 21%, made that permanent, doubled the standard deduction—which actually is a good thing for mostly lower income folks who don’t itemize and have complicated tax returns. That was actually good. And then huge tax cuts that were concentrated at the very top of the income distribution. There are estimates that some 83% of the benefits went to folks in the top 1% of the income distribution. Everybody got a little something all the way down the chain, but the people at the very top did extremely well. A huge windfall. That’s what they accomplish: They exacerbate income inequality, wealth inequality. They don’t do much to stimulate the economy. This is why people say trickle down economics doesn’t work. Because it just doesn’t trickle down. Those [rich] folks tend not to spend that money, disproportionately, back into the economy. They mostly save.

So what are they trying to do now? Extend the tax cuts, because they’re set to expire at the end of this year. But they want to go beyond, so they’re talking about reducing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%. More tax cuts for people at the very top. Make no mistake, the overarching goal is to enact tax cuts that once again disproportionately benefit people who are already doing extremely well.

People on the left often say that the government should tax the rich and use the money to pay for social programs. Can you explain the flaw in that thinking, which was a key theme of your book?

Kelton: The flaw is thinking that the federal government’s budget works like a household budget—that if you want to spend more, you’ve got to find the money somewhere. And, that the federal government has two options when it comes to financing its spending. This goes back to Margaret Thatcher, who would say, “The government has no money of its own. There’s only taxpayer money.” She’d say that if people want more from their government, then the government is either going to have to tax them more, or borrow their savings. And that borrowing means the government going into debt, which has its own assumed limitations and risks. So this idea that if government is going to do more, it’s going to have to come up with more money, and that relies on us, the taxpayer, to finance spending, is actually getting things quite wrong. And in fact, backwards.

Think about what happened when Covid hit. The first big piece of legislation passed in March of 2020, and it was a $2.2 trillion fiscal package called the CARES Act. Everyone knows, or should know, that Congress has the power of the purse. If you think about what happened with that piece of legislation, there was no tax increase to “pay for it.” We didn’t go to China and ask if we could borrow $2.2 trillion. They were spending more to deal with the pandemic themselves. Congress writes a piece of legislation. The piece of legislation is a set of instructions that essentially tell the government’s bank, the Federal Reserve, “we are ordering $2.2 trillion to be created and spent into existence.” That’s how all government spending works. There’s no menu of options when it comes to paying for things, where you can say “Well, we could use tax revenue to cover some of the government’s budget, we could borrow to cover the rest of it, or we could print money in the extreme and finance spending that way.”

There’s only one way to pay. The reality is that every single dollar the federal government spends is a newly created dollar. Taxes don’t pay for government spending.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: What the data says about federal workers (Pew Research):]
"In November 2024, the federal government employed just over 3 million people, or 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce, according to BLS data."

They Are a Minority

For many politically minded people who are not fascists, the weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration have felt like an unstoppable whirlwind of doom. By plowing ahead with plans to shutter entire federal agencies, cut tens of thousands of federal workers, and generally govern by decree in bold defiance of written laws, Trump and his allies are inculcating in their opposition the feeling of being overwhelmed. I have already heard entirely too much despair creeping into the tone of those who should form the backbone of the political opposition to what is happening right now.

Without minimizing the potential for the utter destruction of the rule of law in this country—a genuine possibility!—I want to make two basic points that may be helpful in restoring a little fire to everyone who does not care to live in a fascist state. First: the political faction carrying out the Trump-Musk agenda right now does not have the support of the majority of the public. Far from it. And second: the fraction of the public that is happy with the agenda currently being enacted is going to get smaller for the foreseeable future.

When you brush away the chaotic bombardment of daily outrages and look at the actual base of support for these policies, you will see that that base is a significant minority of the public, and that it is going to shrink as the impact of the policies begins to be felt in the real world. (...)

Rather than allowing yourself to be drowned in frantic headlines, consider what Donald Trump’s base actually looks like. He got about half of the 150 million votes cast in 2024. (Close to 90 million eligible people did not vote.) Out of the half of the population willing to vote for him, a significant portion are more or less traditional Republicans, who view the party’s MAGA turn with some level of distaste, who would be happier with Mitt Romney or George Bush or Ronald Reagan, but who prefer Trump to a Democrat. Of the portion of Trump’s base that are MAGA faithful—the red hat variety of Republicans—a majority or close to a majority are going to bear significant negative material impacts from the actions that Trump is allowing Elon Musk to take. Every Republican voter who receives any form of Medicaid is now at risk, and Social Security and Medicare cuts may well come as well. Everyone who has relied on the federal government for consumer protections or environmental protections is going to be disappointed. Everyone who likes to take their family to national parks is going to find that they are understaffed. People will find that their health care system does not work as well. Multiply this by everyone who is touched by the myriad functions of the federal government which are now being dismantled. The farmers going on Tik Tok to complain about how they voted for Trump and are now being screwed over by USDA budget cuts have become a source of schadenfreude, but they represent one small part of a much bigger constituency: Trump voters who are finding out in very tangible ways that Trump’s presidency is going to be materially bad for them.

This constituency is only going to grow as more and more functions of the federal government are destroyed. There is no way for it not to. And every new person that falls into this category represents a shrinkage of the enthusiastic base of support for Trump’s presidency. This trend will happen not for any ideological reason, but because Trump’s best buddy is systematically breaking things that performed key functions in millions of Americans’ lives, up until now. That will not go unnoticed. [ed. As I've said before, I don't know any engine or piece of machinery that works better once you've removed a good portion of its parts.] 

Now think about Trump’s institutional base. He has the billionaires, and I will give him the business community for now as well—both of these groups are fundamentally agnostic and/ or cowards when it comes to things like “right and wrong,” and they lend their political support to whoever they think has the power to help them, and that will be Trump for the foreseeable future. Money is behind him. (They may regret this support if he, you know, destroys the economy by undermining the dollar and launching idiotic trade wars and smashing the stability of the financial system, but that is a separate matter.) Notably, though, Trump has, in less than a month, pissed off some significant sources of institutional support—groups that may in fact have preferred him in the election, but who are now finding that they themselves are targets of his agenda, rather than beneficiaries. These groups include, but are not limited to:

• Millions of government workers and their families, who may have voted Republican but now find their own livelihoods threatened;

• Veterans who will see the VA decimated;

• Members of the military, who will see austerity imposed upon them;

• Clean cut law and order types at the FBI and the Justice Department who are finding that Trump is actually lawless, and is attacking them;

• Law enforcement types disillusioned by Trump’s pardoning of January 6 protesters who attacked cops;

• Parents of schoolchildren who will find their public schools getting worse and worse;

• Latinos who voted for Trump who will find themselves and their families targeted by his anti-immigration agenda;

• Black people who voted for Trump who will be unhappy with the wave of officially condoned racism he has unleashed;

• Women who voted for Trump who will at some point find themselves or their family personally harmed by the restrictions on reproductive rights;

• Sober small business types who will find that they are, to their surprise, on the losing side of the oligarchy;

It is easy to say “these people deserve what they get!” and it is easy to say “nah, these people are blind dead-ender racists who will ride the Trump Train to hell no matter what!” but both of those sentiments miss what is consequential here. Sure, within all of these groups, it may be the case that most of the people who suffer material harm will grit their teeth and ignore it and continue to back Trump because of unshakeable party affiliation or racism or cultural mores or failure to pay attention or whatever. But I guarantee you that some portion of all of those groups is going to be so pissed or disappointed or disillusioned with what Trump and Musk are doing that they will lose their enthusiasm for Trump. They will lose their will to affirmatively support him. And all of these defections, remember, are coming from a base of less than half of the public to begin with. MAGA is a minority, and the more it carries out its political program, the more it will shrink.

The many people who have already become and the many more who will soon become pissed or disappointed or disillusioned with what is happening will not automatically rush off to register as Democrats. Rather, these people compose and substantial and growing pool of support that is up for grabs. They are the persuadables. Many of them will experience the cognitive dissonance of having their own image of what Trump stands for contradicted by things happening to them or their families or friends personally—things that they cannot deny, because they are living them. When this happens, they will search for explanations. Trump, of course, is always ready with lies about why things are bad: it’s immigrants, it’s Biden, blah blah, you know the things he says. When people are confronted with hard realities, though, the power of lies is weakened. The political opposition—already at least half of the country, and likely more, at least on a policy level—will have this expanding pool of people who have been burned to work with, to talk to, to bring in, to ally with.

The opposition is the majority.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Unpopular people/Getty
[ed. Actually, the majority should be all rational people, Republican or Democrat, who love their country and hate seeing it disassembled before their very eyes. As Ezra Klein notes in his recent podcast Congress has become NPCs (so-called nonplayer characters in video games): "Agreement with Trump’s policy aims need not mean agreement with his power grab. But the most powerful branch of government — the branch with the power to check the others — is supine. It is not that it can’t act to protect its power. It’s that it will not act to protect its power. This is a nonplayer Congress... What a strange life to rise as far as they have in politics and be as afraid as they are to use their power and judgment... This is the NPC problem we actually face: a nonplayer Congress, driven by Republicans who serve Trump’s ambitions first. We are left relying on the courts, and that may work. But this is not the system working. It is the system failing." See also: The Business Community is Extraordinarily Stupid (HTW):]

"If you follow American politics, you may think of a “pro-business” platform as something that consists of the things that business interests often lobby for: lower taxes, less regulation period, less oversight, less protection for labor, less responsibility of all sorts to anyone other than their own shareholders. Yet all these things that they seek (for the purpose of increasing short term profits) are things that they assume will exist within the context of the basic principles outlined above. Businesses want lower taxes, but they still want well-maintained roads. They want weaker labor protections, but they still want a healthy and well educated workforce. They want less regulation, but they still want transparent laws and functional enforcement. Their short term greed, unwise and distasteful as it may be, is only something they fight for because they assume that the big, fundamental pillars of society and government that allow them to operate freely will always be in place. [ed. emphasis added]

Dictatorial strongman governments in which the rule of law is subsumed by the whims of the lone unaccountable leader are not ideal for business. Sure, some businesses can flourish by flattering the leader enough to be granted special privileges. The oligarchs flatter Putin, and in return they are allowed to loot the country. That’s good for the net worth of the oligarchs. But is it good for business? No, because it will always be a minority of businessmen who are blessed by the strongman, and a majority of businesses will remain subject to unpredictable lawless rule. You cannot make long term investments if you can’t trust that contracts will be enforced fairly. You can’t grow your business if you can’t find adequate workers because the public school system has been decimated and too many people have medical issues because the health care system has been privatized for profit. You can’t feel confident reinvesting your profits in research and development if you have little idea which regulatory agencies will exist, or whether the strongman will launch a war in a fit of pique, or whether your own business may become food for one of your more politically favored competitors. A stable, democratic, well-governed society is good for business. An unstable, undemocratic, wildly governed society is bad for business. The business lobby’s many years of ceaselessly trying to nibble away at the foundations of stability and democracy and fairness for their own immediate gains have now brought us to the brink of a strongman government that will, I assure you, be very bad for business.

Unpredictable trade wars are bad for business. Eroding confidence in the US dollar because you want to prop up crypto scams for your donors is bad for business. Letting religious zealots control public education is bad for business. Destroying access to contraception and abortion is bad for business. Constantly toying with provoking wars is bad for business. Allowing the environment to become polluted is bad for business. Even enormous wealth inequality is bad for business, because it means a few people have all the money, instead of all your customers having plenty of money to spend with your business.... The tech oligarchs who sat on stage with Trump at his inauguration were not there because he is good for business—they were there because being there, right there on the inside, is the only way to flourish.

Let me distinguish what I am saying from some common criticisms of the way business interests act in the political realm. People often criticize business as greedy. Yes. It is greedy, as water is wet. Understanding corporations as anything other than soulless robots seeking profit is a mistake. This is why it is wise to tightly regulate them and unwise to allow them to do whatever they want. In a related sense, people often say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be in the self-interest of business to pay more taxes and subject themselves to more regulations and and generally push for more progressive values because it would help to create the stable and happy society outlined above, which is good for business in the long run?” Well, sure, but this question misunderstands the fact that the political actions of the business lobby assume that they will always be pushing against some force that is pushing back, and that the progressive forces they are pushing against will be enough to protect the basic structure of democratic society, even as businesses try to undermine it just enough to put money in their own pockets. Businesses want to pick up pennies in front of the steamroller, but they don’t want the steamroller to run them over.

Well fuckers, you have miscalculated. You rats. (...)

The business lobby’s many years of selfish conduct and support for deleterious public policies have produced so much inequality and undermined our democratic institutions so successfully that we are now watching a strongman seize control of our government... Your efforts have gotten us here. All the Koch Brother/ Federalist Society types who invested so much money in capturing the courts for the right wing have gotten us here. All the nice Chamber of Commerce types who supported the Republican Party even as it radicalized further and further because they wanted those tax cuts have gotten us here. Some of these people still anticipate that the second Trump administration will be a prosperous time for business. They are wrong. Putting zealots and incompetents and outright grifters in positions of great power in the government does not produce the stability and social health inherent to business growth. We, the people, will not like oligarchy, but neither—I assure you—will all the businessmen who are not, themselves, oligarchs. Watch and see."

A New AI In Shorts

YouTube is upgrading the YouTube Shorts experience with more generative AI features — but it looks like they’re already falling behind ByteDance.

YouTube introduced Dream Screen last year, which is a feature that lets people generate unique AI backgrounds for Shorts with just a text prompt. Now, Dream Screen is getting another upgrade with the integration of Google DeepMind’s newest video generation model, Veo 2. The update gives YouTube Shorts creators the ability to generate standalone video clips that can be added to any Shorts.

“Need a specific scene but don’t have the right footage? Want to turn your imagination into reality and tell a unique story?” the YouTube blog announcing the feature asks. “Simply use a text prompt to generate a video clip that fits perfectly into your narrative, or create a whole new world of content. It’s that easy!”

The move closely follows some scarily-realistic videos previewed by ByteDance via its AI unit, OmniHuman. That included a number of Taylor Swift performance videos that looks amazingly realistic despite never occurring. After a brief, pre-launch preview of those Swift ‘shows,’ OmniHuman abruptly removed the videos.

The development is undoubtedly grabbing the attention of YouTube and others. Whether it’s DeepSeek or OmniHuman, the message is clear: China’s AI capabilities are incredibly-competitive, and potentially far ahead of US-based tech giants like Alphabet.

Back to the YouTube release, Veo 2 can generate high-quality videos in a wide range of subjects and styles intended to match creators’ vision. YouTube says it has also made improvements to Dream Screen so that it now generates videos faster than before. Veo 2 also understand real-world physics and human movement better, making its output more detailed and realistic. AI generated videos tend to have a hazy, bokeh effect in the background—while human movement can be uncanny.

YouTube says creators will be able to specify a style, lens, or cinematic effect to generate, making Dream Screen an easy way to express yourself. Here’s a peek at how to utilize this new feature on YouTube Shorts.

by Ashley King, Digital Music News |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Return To Forever: Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola, Lenny White - 43 Jazzaldia Festival

[ed. Doesn't get any better than this, RTF at their peak. Check out 52: 00 - 1:30 for a master class in bass playing by Stanley Clarke.]