Three Theories That Explain This Strange Moment

I’m not much for postelection narratives. They’re like the flashy jacket that looks just right when you try it on at the store, only to prove all wrong once you wear it out on the town.

After losing in 2012, Republicans knew they needed a kinder, gentler approach to a diversifying America. Then Donald Trump offered exactly the opposite and won. After losing in 2004, Democrats believed they needed a drawling good old boy who could reconnect them with “the heartland.” Then Barack Hussein Obama ran for president and bent the arc of American history.

The stories we tell, in politics as in life, leave us stuck in the past even as we’re forced, pitilessly, into the future. What I’m more interested in is patterns that explain more than one election, in more than one place. Three of them are on my mind right now: calcification, parity and cultural backlash.

In September, John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck released “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy.” The authors, who are all political scientists, spent the last two years gathering, crosschecking, collating and analyzing the data on the 2020 election. What they found clarifies not just 2020, but 2016 and 2022: Because politics is so calcified, virtually nothing matters, but because elections are so close, virtually everything matters.

 

America Said No to Election Denialism

On Monday night, NBC News called the Arizona gubernatorial election for Democrat Katie Hobbs over Republican Kari Lake. It resolved the last big outstanding statewide race of the 2022 cycle to be called besides the Georgia Senate election that will be decided in a runoff vote next month.

In the lead-up to the midterms, Lake, a former TV news anchor who issued bombastic threats to the news media and was a lead cheerleader of Donald Trump’s big lie, had been billed as a future MAGA star. The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey described her as Trumpism’s “leading lady” and “the new face of the MAGA movement.” Then, as votes were being counted this past week, Lake’s ridiculous pivoting—between election denialism when she was trailing and accepting the results as fair when she was ahead—was so ostentatious that a parody of it was the highlight in SNL’s cold open on Saturday.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/kari-lake-loses-arizona-election-deniers-swept-midterms.html

 

Abortion is a bread-and-butter economic issue. We need to treat it that way

Being a parent is expensive. Being a criminal is also expensive, whether you lose economic opportunities to avoid apprehension or spend money on your defense if apprehended or go to prison and lose everything and, marked as a felon, emerge unemployable. Abortion is an economic issue, because when it’s not legal, those are the two remaining options, leaving out being dead, which you could argue is either very expensive or absolutely beyond the realms of money and price. And being dead is also on the table because women have all too often died from lack of access to reproductive healthcare, including abortions (to say nothing of being unable to leave an abuser, to whom pregnancy and children can bind you more tightly). They are facing more of that now.

Having no options but to be dead, criminal or a parent is not a sane or moral argument for parenthood, and it’s also pretty different than having certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Also, now that abortion is unavailable under almost all circumstances in Texas and other states, it’s an economic justice issue in that those with the financial capacity to take time off, travel in search of care and pay for it out of pocket are not affected the way those who cannot do so are. And those who can afford to get an abortion under these circumstances are also those who can afford to defend themselves against possible criminal charges.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/03/abortion-women-inequality-dobbs-supreme-court

 

Democrats did far better than expected. How come?

Many known unknowns remain in the US congressional elections, including the critical question of who will hold the majority in the Senate.

But it’s already clear that Republicans are going to perform far worse than the typical out-party in a midterm election. Democrats appear to be on track for a result that, while certainly not spectacular if viewed in isolation, is the best midterm performance for any incumbent party since 2002. There’s nothing like the massive “wave” elections of 1994, 2006, 2010 or 2018 here, or the steady opposition gains of 2014. In 1998, Democrats did break with precedent and actually gain seats in the House and Senate, despite holding the White House. But that was a question of shrinking existing Republican majorities.

That leaves 2002 as the only real example on record of a more successful midterm defense.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/09/democrats-did-far-better-than-expected-how-come

 

Trump’s biggest midterm bets don’t pay out

It was meant to be a crowning evening for the former president, a chance to show that he remained the axis around which the Republican Party still orbited.

It ended up a night of missed opportunities and disappointments — and rumblings of unrest within the party.

Donald Trump spent Tuesday evening at his club in Palm Beach, hosting a lavish midterm election watch party for a who’s who of MAGA elite and reporters from some of the top media outlets in the country, invited there by his team.

But as the results began trickling in at Mar-a-Lago, the site of his most recent legal troubles, the party took a turn. A tropical storm barreled toward the east coast of Florida, forcing some in the press to flee for the airport and a quick flight out. Then, a different type of storm — a Republican wave — failed to materialize.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/09/trump-endorsed-candidates-2022-election-results

 

The CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine. Why Did They Get It So Wrong?

Ever since Ukraine launched a successful counteroffensive against Russian forces in late August, American officials have tried to claim credit, insisting that U.S. intelligence has been key to Ukraine’s battlefield victories.

Yet U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine — especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war. When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.

The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers. By the time of the February invasion, the CIA was already planning how to provide covert support for a Ukrainian insurgency following a Russian military victory, the officials said.

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/05/russia-ukraine-putin-cia/

 

The OPEC+ oil cut and the lessons of imperial overreach

What should we make of the spat between the United States and Saudi Arabia, following last week’s announcement of a sharp cut in oil production by the Russian- and Saudi-headed cartel OPEC+? Shocked analysts and officials in the United States and Europe called the Saudi move a betrayal and a hostile act against the Western allies mired in the Ukraine war. Many see this as a personal humiliation for President Joe Biden, with Riyadh siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine — even after Biden fist-bumped with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a meeting in Jeddah, in a complete reversal of his campaign promise to make the Saudis “the pariah that they are.” American officials are now considering a series of retaliatory measures, including stopping arms sales and even withdrawing all 3,000 U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia (and the 2,000 U.S. soldiers in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, another OPEC+ member; Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the UAE, had a friendly meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week).

As reports emerge of Saudi officials apparently ignoring U.S. warnings not to go ahead with the oil production cut, I can’t help but think of the lessons of history. A much longer time frame and wider context may be necessary to fully analyze this situation and accurately capture what it is all about. I’ve chronicled the modern Middle East and its links with the United States for the past 54 years, including two decades during which I also wrote books on archaeology and the Roman Empire in the region. With that much history in mind, the immediate issues here are no doubt important, evolving according to many factors beyond oil prices: Ukraine, the upcoming U.S. elections in November, Arab worries about Iran, and the roles of Russia and China in the Middle East. But they may not be the best frame in which to appreciate these furies.

https://agenceglobal.com/2022/10/17/rami-g-khouri-the-opec-oil-cut-and-the-lessons-of-imperial-overreach/

 

Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality

Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Florida’s Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the “Waterfront Wonderland,” America’s fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.

“Come on. Does this feel crazy?” he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the city’s population boom, he scoffed: “No way.”

Then he paused to reconsider. Irma had swerved away at the last minute, and even that near miss had made a big mess. “Look, if we get 15 feet of storm surge, holy shit, that would take out Cape Coral.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/hurricane-ian-florida-real-estate/671629/

 

Want to see political change? Look to the margins

These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.

Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.

Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/14/we-need-to-celebrate-incremental-change

 

Jackson, Mississippi, Water Crisis Previews a Wetter, Hotter US Future

The water crisis unfolding in Jackson, Mississippi, was decades in the making: the culmination of crumbling infrastructure, systemic racism and more extreme weather. It’s also a stark warning of trouble to come as climate change piles new stress onto the essential services Americans rely on every day. 

In addition to warming up the planet by nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, climate change is making precipitation events more intense, and therefore more likely to overwhelm strained systems. Lower-income and minority communities such as Jackson — which is 82% Black and where a quarter of residents live in poverty — bear the brunt of the impacts. “The situation in Jackson isn’t new,” said Dominika Parry, president of the climate activism group 2CMississippi and an environmental economist. “It’s a consequence of many, many decades of disinvestment in water infrastructure, in general infrastructure in the city of Jackson.” 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis-previews-a-wetter-hotter-us-future