Dear Friends --
In the noise of the post-election you may have missed my silence. It was unintentional: a broken ankle required significant surgery, and the recovery has been complicated. But I am feeling better -- finally, cautiously, walking (with some assistance) -- and in the mood to write. Be careful what you wish for…
My wife says it is unbecoming to say “I told you so”, but the last few weeks have been full of “I told you so” moments, cold comfort though they are. Some are lifted right from my 2013 book (the Gamestop madness, hackers capturing essential utilities, corporations creating their own currencies) and some from this newsletter (the fraud of the Lincoln Project, Texas as a failed state, election-related violence, and of course, Rule 1: it will get crazier). At least 8-year-olds are holding NPR accountable for the dearth of dinosaur-related stories.
A long-running theme of this newsletter is the enduring resilience of the Republican Party; those of us nestled in the warm embrace of the coastal media find it quixotic. Lately there has been a lot of talk about a major "schism" or civil war in the GOP. This is ridiculous; I see no evidence of it at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. The GOP is united around Trump and in opposition to anything from Biden or the Democrats.
The entire Trump era — beginning with the announcement he was running for president — has been defined by a failure of imagination about what is possible. Look at the chronology and you can see GOP support consolidating around Trump since November:
126 Republicans backed the Texas lawsuit to overturn election;
138 Republicans voted against certifying PA electoral votes;
199 Republicans voted to protect conspiracy theorist/bigot Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments;
And then the final impeachment vote: overall the pro-Trump GOP vote was 240-17.
Include in this math the voice of the American people: Aaron Blake calculates that Republicans came within 90,000 votes — 43,000 votes for president, 32,000 votes for the House and 14,000 votes for the Senate — from controlling all of Washington. That’s in the midst of a major pandemic and after four years of President Trump.
Nothing about this says "civil war" or portends the collapse/disarray of the GOP. This week, Lindsay Graham is out there saying that McConnell's speech blasting Trump is a disaster for the GOP and that it is "inevitable" that House Republicans will impeach Kamala Harris once they retake the House.
Back in early July, I wrote a column about why the GOP is stronger than ever and I stand by every word: between the structural advantages for a minority party, the sheer volume of "information pollution", and aggressive voter suppression, the Trump GOP is firmly in control of their ship. Voter suppression is particularly worrying. Democrats by and large lost state legislatures in 2020, leaving the GOP in control of the majority of state houses, and the implications are clear. So far in 2021, at least 165 proposals are under consideration in 33 states that will restrict future voting access by limiting mail-in ballots, implementing new voter ID requirements and slashing registration options. Major combat will be required if the Democratic Party wants to hold the precious ground it took this past November.
Around Thanksgiving, I wrote about my fears for the Biden Administration:
Biden may imagine that his longtime perch in the Senate gives him a position of strength as he approaches governing with a vindicated GOP. After all, he and McConnell have known each other -- and worked together -- for their entire political career. But the Trump-McConnell Grand Old Party -TMGOP - has nothing to gain from compromise with Biden and the godless, socialist, flag-hating Democrats. McConnell is playing chess on a chessboard having wagered his soul; Biden is playing tag on a playground. They’re not playing the same game, and in McConnell’s game, there is only one winner.
But I was wrong (at least so far) -- Biden is playing semi-hard ball and not expecting much from the GOP, while being relatively ambitious. Not only did he force through Congress his Coronavirus relief package, in the process of doing so he pissed off Larry Summers, the long-time Voice of God on the economy for Democrats. This is Biden’s gambit. As the Financial Times says:
If Biden’s coronavirus recovery plans are vindicated, they will demonstrate it is possible to ‘build back better’ from the pandemic and that advanced economies have been overly obsessed with inflation for the past 30 years. It will put government back at the heart of day-to-day economic management. If the plan comes off, it will show that unnecessary timidity in recent decades has let millions suffer unnecessary unemployment, starved many areas of opportunities for improved living standards and widened inequalities.
With the Biden administration being policy-centric, the news media (left, right, and otherwise) is struggling to cope with so much substance after an era of pure spectacle. By many measures, the Biden Administration is the most competent in American history. Biden has interacted with nine US presidents and worked closely with almost as many. His chief of staff, Ron Klain, is the most experienced Presidential aide in history; Klain has worked under nine chiefs of staff in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and served as chief of staff to two Vice Presidents (Al Gore and Joe Biden). Contrast that for a moment with newly-elected US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who told the Alabama Daily News that he thinks the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and executive.”
But will experience and competence matter when stacked up against the power of the stories told in Republican media? The Neverending Story continues its merciless drumbeat. One night this week sit down and watch Fox or Newsmax, then read any of the infinite online publishers. You’ll hear a story about how the failure of the state in Texas (where millions are without power, heat, sanitation, water, and in some cases food, for days on end) is not due to decades of Republican leadership in the state or even climate change, but instead the result of the Green New Deal and the socialist Democrats screwing everything up.
If you dwell exclusively in that media landscape (which about half of America does), it’s a familiar story about how a government “for the people is bad”. To hear it told by that media, the latest chapter in the grand story about the individual vs the collective is set in the state of Texas where failed windmill goliaths are freezing the people; never mind that the truth is totally inverted in that telling of the story. But narrative is always king; truth is not.
The competence and ambitious policy-making of the Biden Democrats is not that kind of story. There are no villains; there is no rising or falling action. Narrative in politics isn’t important for the white collar professional class (which is now the base of the Democratic Party). We’ve got The Crown, The Queen’s Gambit, and many other “golden age of television” narratives that are sophisticated and appealing to a narrow (although monied) audience. Douglas Rushkoff writes that the privileged are “simply succumbing to one of the dominant ethos of the digital age, which is to design one’s personal reality so meticulously that existential threats are simply removed from the equation.”
The existential threat we’re hiding from is the way our institutions have ground to halt over the last four decades, allowing the fundamental challenges of income inequality, racism, and climate change to metastasize. People don’t vote on competence and economic policy. We must tell a story, a never-ending story, where the latest pandemic relief package is simply a passing anecdote in a grand, sweeping epic -- the epic of the American people surviving and thriving together, as one nation with liberty and justice for all.
Rule 1 still holds. It is going to keep getting crazier because we’re living in a moment of great brokenness. In the midst of all this madness, we must have the courage to hope — and the sound nerves to take your neighbor in hand and begin to build a better future. It starts, believe it or not, with telling more stories about our time.
Lots of love from your favorite optimist,
Nicco
PS. The three things keeping me sane during the pandemic are Sturgill Simpson, my home-made kimchi, and my crushed ice machine. The crushed ice machine in particular was an extravagant purchase about a year ago but it was worth every penny. Even the New Yorker agrees. Although note I did exhibit some restraint and did NOT purchase the wi-fi enabled model.