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Salvete, amici!

The world has since moved on – Events, dear boy, events! – but I suspect the political polarity reversal evident at this year’s Republican National Convention will come to dominate the US political landscape for the next twenty years, if not longer. There is a perceptible phase transition underway, adumbrated over the past decade and a half. The Democratic Party shore itself of last wooly remnants of its New Deal-era commitments to labor and the poor under Obama; the new populist Republicans have picked up those discarded threads and knitted themselves a new mantle as champions of Middle America’s Deplorable Man, the modern descendant of FDR’s Forgotten Man:

(Chris Arnade’s Dignity and Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism offer the best anthropological and sociological explanations of Homo misirabilis.)

That’s not to say that the entrenched power blocs of Cheneyite neocons, Pencian cryptotheocrats and Romneyite plutonomists have left the scene. They’re still there, but their bases of popular support aren’t anymore, and as a consequence they’re adrift and diminished, though still dangerous – gradually melting icebergs broken off from the main icesheet and lurking sullenly on the fogbank, forever threatening to doom anyone hapless enough to cross them. The most important signifier of this sea change was the anti-corporate address by Teamsters Union president Sean O’Brien. His appearance at the convention riled members of the Teamsters’ national and regional leadership cadre, which is itself a form of PMC misleadership class, but could not have taken place if the union rank and file still felt they owed any fealty to the Democratic Party:

Organized labor acting as independent political agents, extracting a real price from politicians for their backing, and, most importantly, enforcing their bargains by mercilessly and remorselessly repudiating politicians and parties that betray them. Such dinosaurs haven’t been seen in half a century, and were presumed extinct. Who woulda thunk it? Not the Democrats, who’ve managed not to think about organized labor much at all since the First Scabs were elected in 1992:

I watched little of the convention directly, just the first half of Trump’s speech on PBS and intermittent snippets of the some of the speakers. Like most people, I let others watch it for me, filter out the long stretches of tedium, and report on the interesting bits. Epistemic triangulation is the only workable strategy to navigate the news. The New York Times’s coverage, overweight though it may be with opinion and analysis that promotes what to think about events, over and above and usually mixed in with simply recounting the events themselves, is a starting point. Just be sure to read closely, and between the lines, as Ol’ Noam would tell you. Glenn Greenwald and guests on System Update juxtapose the current consensus narrative of events with what’s independently known about and what was being said just a few news cycles ago, exposing lies, hypocrisy, and manipulations. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn of Racket News provide (on what is affectionately(?) referred to in my household as “The Conspiracy Theory Podcast”) a gonzo journalism cum absurdist novel-ish take on the weird, revolting and even direful world events we’ve been cursed to witness – their takes are best viewed through the right kind of polarized lenses (and at 1.5x speed), but at least they’re usually funny.

America This Week

System Update

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