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What Was Behind The MAGA Republicans' Florida Stumble?

What Was Behind The MAGA Republicans' Florida Stumble?

Is the 2024 MAGA magic fading already?

Don’t bet on it. And yet, Tuesday’s special election results in Wisconsin and Florida were…not terrible for the Democrats.

Let’s start with Wisconsin, where the news is good. Liberal Democrat Susan Crawford pulled out a State Supreme Court win [in a "nonpartisan" election] by a healthy ten points, despite tech billionaire Elon Musk having sunk $25 million of America PAC money into the race. Jill Underly was also re-elected as State Schools Superintendent, defeating education consultant Brittany Kinser by a comfortable five points. Kinser, who was running on the Republican ballot line, described herself during the campaign as a “blue dog Democrat.”

In fact, OpenSecrets identifies Kinser as a consistent Democratic donor. That said, she supports school choice and ran a public charter school network. She outspent Underly more than 2-1, much of the money from the Wisconsin GOP, and I am sure she had nothing to do with the mailers and texts targeting blue districts that falsely identified her as the actual Democrat in the race.

However, our main focus today is Florida, where the Democrats did not win either congressional race, but demonstrated potential Republican weaknesses as we make the turn into 2026.

These two special elections, on opposite sides of the state, were in solid GOP districts: the job was to restore two votes to Speaker Mike Johnson’s whisper-thin Congressional majority. FL-06, in northeast Florida, was vacated by Mike Waltz, who is now Donald Trump’s national security advisor and the genius who let The Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg into the Signal chat. FL-01 is Matt Gaetz’s former seat, which he vacated to become Trump’s attorney general. Except that didn’t work out. Long-suppressed evidence of Gaetz’s bottomless yuckiness finally became public, and even Republican Senators found themselves unable to vote for him as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Democratic Party messaging had held out no hope that either of these seats were winnable, and they weren’t. And yet, here is what I want you to notice. In FL-06, with more than 95 percent of the vote in, State Senator Randy Fine beat Democrat Josh Weil by 14 points. Yet five months earlier, in November 2024, Waltz won the seat by 33 points.

Those 19 points shifting into the Democratic column are, some pundits argue, the victory. But there’s more. Let’s take a look at the county-level margins. Here are Waltz’s numbers from five months ago:

Courtesy of The New York Times


And here are Fine’s margins from Tuesday:

Courtesy of The New York Times

You see disproportionate gaps in two places: Volusia County and St. Johns County, both popular destinations for Canadian snowbirds (these are not birds, but actual people who come to Florida in the winter months.)

Like other Florida property owners, these folks have faced escalating insurance costs and HOA fees, which they are paying with weaker Canadian dollars that will decrease further in value as the Trump tariffs go into effect. Then, as one insurance industry site noted a week before the election, there’s the general Canada-hatred, which has caused Canadians who rent or stay in hotels and resorts to cancel their vacations too.

But, you say, Canadians don’t vote in American elections! Right you are.

However, the many Floridians who rely on snowbird home ownership, rentals and tourism for their own income do vote. And what they are seeing is not good: 25 percent of Florida real estate sales in the past year have been Canadians dumping their property.So, pay attention to that. We may be seeing something similar in FL-O1, where Gaetz trounced Gay Valimont by 32 points in November 2024. His replacement, Florida’s chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, beat Valimont yesterday by less than half of that. Here’s the part that intrigues me: in Escambia, Florida’s most western county, Valimont—who lost to Gaetz by 14 points—beat Patronis by 3 points.

People, 20 points is a lot of ground to make up in five months.

There’s more: according to Tobie Nell Perkins at First Coast News, Escambia has not voted for a Democrat in the last eight gubernatorial cycles, and last voted for a Democratic president in 1960, when it went for John F. Kennedy. This area, anchored by Pensacola, is also a popular snowbird destination. What may be more significant is how heavily military the area is: Pensacola contains over 16,000 active-duty troops, and 7400 civilian employees, an estimated 5-8 percent of whom will get the axe any day now. Greater Pensacola boasts more than 35,000 retired military, contributing to the largest concentration of veterans in any congressional district in the country.

You see where I am going here? During her campaign, Valimont hammered on the cuts to veterans’ services and federal employees. “Trump’s executive orders and the slash-and-burn tactics of billionaire Elon Musk ’s DOGE take aim at federal agencies that serve the region’s veterans,” AP political reporter Kate Payne observed last week; “the faith of some of the district’s conservative voters is being tested.”

Heather Lindsay, a Republican and the mayor of Milton, Florida, in neighboring Santa Rosa County, called the cuts “disastrous,” saying they’re a threat to services that veterans like her brother rely on.

“We have a demonstrated need in this area. And yet they’re going to cut VA services,” Lindsay said in an interview.
Jason Boatwright, a former staffer for Gaetz, said Patronis should be defending the Pensacola VA.“

He needs to stand up and say: ‘You want to make cuts? That’s fine. But don’t do it here. We can’t afford it here,’” Boatwright said.

Lindsay said she doesn’t understand “why more questions haven’t been asked” by Republican leaders like Patronis.

A reliable Republican political consultant I contacted is taking the Escambia results with a grain of salt. Although the GOP had to spend $4 million in FL-06 to beat back Josh Weil, Ryan Girdusky doesn’t see these contests as a referendum on Trump by Republicans, only an energized Democratic one. “I just don’t think people were that engaged,” he told me. “Also, Republicans spent less than $1 million” in FL-01, while Democrats spent $6 million. Republicans “knew it was in the bag so they just didn’t invest in it,” Girdusky explained, and reliably red active-duty military did not make a special election a priority.

So, what have we learned in the last 24 hours?

First, yesterday’s results reinforce what we know: there are Trump voters and there are Republican voters. While the two categories overlap, Trump voters don’t necessarily get off the couch to vote in other elections, even when Elon Musk leaps around the stage in a foam cheese hat handing out checks.

Second, Musk might have been a negative factor in the Wisconsin race, and this is something to watch. As Reid J. Epstein, Julie Bosman, and Emily Cochrane report at the New York Times, the $25 million and massive social media posting Musk invested in the State Supreme Court race did not move the needle—at all. “Even more than Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk emerged in Wisconsin as the primary boogeyman for Democrats,” they write about a billionaire whose approval rating took a steep dive the day before the election. “Instead of making the race an early referendum on Mr. Trump’s White House and abortion rights, Wisconsin Democrats pivoted to make Mr. Musk their entire focus, while Republicans rode the wave of his largess.”

In other words, because Elon Musk is tied to Donald Trump, here is the unexpected opportunity. If attacking Donald Trump doesn’t work, attacking his policies does. Elon Musk has become the face of that. So, if this election had accomplished nothing else, it gives Donald Trump a choice: risk failure by sticking with Musk, or dump Musk and risk having ripped the federal government to pieces for no gain whatsoever.

Fourth, Musk’s unpopularity might also have cut GOP margins in Florida. We don’t know whether Florida veterans voted in significant numbers, but we do know that they—and their dependents—are getting it from two directions: the direct DOGE cuts to the Veterans Administration, and the cuts to other federal agencies and services that disproportionately employ veterans.

Finally, despite the high media focus on how much money is being raised and spent, it appears there are limits to how much a sea of money can accomplish. Can billionaires buy elections? Sometimes, and sometimes not. If voters either do not like the candidate, or they do not like the candidate’s high-profile supporters, they’ll take the money—and then run.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie.



Conspiracy 2025: White House Bozos Bungle Release Of JFK Assassination Files

Conspiracy 2025: White House Bozos Bungle Release Of JFK Assassination Files

Late on Tuesday night, the Trump administration released approximately 77,000 more documents generated in the course of the investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. You can access them here.

Like everything the Trump administration does, it was ill-considered, but it also speaks to the iconic place this event has in the history of American conspiracy theories. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had promised that, if elected, he would release these materials, and it was an easy promise to keep. Presidents have the power to declassify files, a privilege of the office that presumes such a process will be thoughtful.

Is it any surprise that Trump simply went ahead on a whim, making files that have not recently been vetted public?

Predictably, the outcome has been self-serving and dangerous. Yes, by releasing new documents, and formerly released but redacted documents in virtually unredacted form, Trump has burnished his self-proclaimed, and undeserved, reputation for transparency among his own constituents and acolytes. “President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard gushed on X. “Promises made, promises kept.”

However, aside from the fact that Trump is not at all transparent when it comes to his own business dealings, and lies about so many things we have lost track (30,573 times in the first term alone), transparency is not necessarily a virtue when it comes to government data. According to Sarah Maslin Nir and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times, by not taking the time to do this right, or checking their work (now a signature Trump administration move), the clowns in the White House managed to expose “personal information, including Social Security numbers, of hundreds of congressional staff members, intelligence researchers and even an ambassador.” As they write,

White House officials acknowledged on Thursday that it was only after the papers were made public that they began combing through them for exposed details.
On Wednesday, the White House ordered that the pages be combed for exposed Social Security numbers, and officials directed the Social Security Administration to issue new numbers to the affected people, according to a senior administration official, in an extraordinary response to mitigate the potential harm of the disclosures. They will also be offered free credit monitoring.

Nice work, Bozos!

It gets worse. “Administration officials knew before the documents went out that releasing them without redactions would expose some personal information,” Nir and Haberman tell us, “according to one person with knowledge of the effort who was granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations.” Speaking of redactions….

A slightly more mixed bag is the other thing that government officials were protecting all these years: information about CIA and embassy operations around the globe. I know some historians who are excited about this, but it’s also the case—as someone who wrote my first book out of FBI files—that there are other things to protect. The names of, and contextual information about, confidential sources and undercover operatives are usually redacted because any who are still alive could be in physical and political danger today from past commitments they made in good faith.

Why would this mean anything to a president who has refused entry to Afghans who also helped the United States in good faith, were cleared for immigration and resettlement? It wouldn’t. Other people are not real to Donald Trump.

Yet we forget that the left has a long history of distrusting government, and for good reasons: McCarthyism, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq I and Iraq II, and the current campaign to deport legal immigrants on specious grounds are but a few. And in fact, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory originated, and was sustained for its first couple of decades by progressives.

Let me explain. Coincidentally, as Trump was doing the document dump this week, I was revising a chapter of the book I am working on, a biography of radical feminist Susan Brownmiller. And—by another coincidence—that chapter concerns a man who was her lover for several years in the early 1960s, New York civil rights attorney and progressive civil rights activist Mark Lane. While there are many authors of alternative theories of the JFK assassination (that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the shooter, or if he was, there were multiple shooters, and that these people were employed by organized crime, the CIA or both), Lane was the first, and most persistent, author of the theory that Oswald was innocent and had been framed by a sinister…well, let’s call it the deep state.

Brownmiller had nothing to do with Lane’s conspiracizing: she is only the reason I came across it. In fact, as far as I can tell, it might have been one of many final straws that caused her to leave him. Why do I think this? Because even though Brownmiller had numerous connections to left-wing and sometimes Communist-adjacent groups in the 1950s, she does not appear once in the FBI file associated with Lane in the Kennedy dossier that was already public prior to this week. For seasoned FBI file readers this can only mean one thing: she was not only not part of it but actively sought to distance from Lane’s activities.

Lane, however, is a crucial figure in the conspiratorial narrative that emerged in the weeks and months after Kennedy’s death. First, only weeks after the shooting, he publicized a series of questions about the investigation and its findings that Kennedy conspiracists believe remain unanswered today and that they hope this new document dump will resolve. "This is a major breakthrough in the JFK assassination story,” Jefferson Morley, a journalist who has devoted most of his professional life to proving that agents of the federal government were complicit in Kennedy’s death, told Fox News’s Jesse Watters. “One of the documents we saw yesterday where CIA Official James Angleton talks about his surveillance operations, he talks about the way he approached people—the way he put them under mail surveillance and that document suggests... that Angleton was running a counterintelligence operation involving Oswald." Morley used to work for The Washington Post: he now writes a Substack devoted to his decades of inquiry into the Kennedy assassination.

The second reason Lane is important is that Kennedy conspiracism originated on the left and moved to the right. JFK’s initial, and in retrospect, somewhat feeble, efforts in support of the civil rights movement had aroused the rage of the organized American right. Furthermore, prior to the Warren Commission’s investigation in 1965, the chief investigator of the crime was an icon on the American right: J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI, which was one of the agencies charged with investigating the assassination. In addition, Oswald was identified early on as having flirted with Communism, so much so that he defected to Moscow for several years.

The idea that right-wing elements had conspired to kill Kennedy and frame a man of the left made the event red meat for someone like Mark Lane. Thirty-six years old in November 1963, he had long identified as an anti-institutionalist and with the emerging progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Six feet tall, with intense brown eyes, Bronx-born, Jewish (his father had changed their surname from Levin to Lane), Mark was a movie-star handsome military veteran, a working-class guy who attended college and law school on the G.I. Bill. While attending Brooklyn Law School, Lane worked for the left-wing Lawyers Guild. Upon graduation, he hung out a shingle in East Harlem, doing criminal defense, fighting evictions, and doing other kinds of social justice work for poor Puerto Rican clients who were not just underserved but, as recent immigrants to the mainland, at the bottom of the racial ladder in New York City.

Lane used that platform to mount an attack on New York’s political machine, winning a State Assembly seat in 1960 as part of the Progressive Democrat insurgency that would ultimately boost candidates like Bella Abzug and Ed Koch into political office as well. It was during this campaign that Brownmiller met and fell in love with Lane, and it was one of his political donors that gave her the opportunity to leave dead-end editorial jobs behind and run her own political newsletter, the short-lived Albany Report. However, that relationship and Lane’s political career ran out of steam simultaneously. In 1962, Lane ran for Congress and lost; the following spring, Susan was making steady progress with her career, landing a job as a researcher at Newsweek. As a woman she had little future at Newsweek, but it put her in the major leagues of journalism all the same.

Thus, at the end of 1963, Lane was at loose ends, personally and professionally. He had gone back to lawyering, but it didn’t interest him much; while the pace of work at Newsweek, as well as the intense social life that surrounded the weekend production of the magazine, fueled Susan’s independence from him.

Then Kennedy was shot and killed. The immediate arrest of Oswald, Oswald’s murder by gangster Jack Ruby a few days later, and the immediate assumption that the case was solved, fueled Lane’s suspicion and he began investigating the case on his own.

But it is also not hard to believe that Lane did not also see in this event an opportunity to become a player on a national stage. On January 14, 1964, despite any ability to pay him, Lee’s mother, Marguerite Oswald (author Deanne Stillman describes her as a narcissistic and habitual liar), retained Lane to prove her son’s innocence. Thus, throughout 1963, two things were happening: Lane was barnstorming the country sowing doubt about the government’s desire to convict Oswald posthumously and without trial, and a variety of government agencies continued to investigate the case, as well as those who doubted Oswald’s guilt. It was not until November 29, 1964, a year after the events in Dallas, that President Lyndon Baines Johnson issued the executive order that established the Warren Commission.

Beginning in early February, Lane began to give talks, often collecting “donations” for the defense of Lee Harvey Oswald that amounted to several thousand dollars a speech in today’s money. In an eerie echo of today’s MAGA movement, Lane framed his work as “just asking questions.” Local journalists didn’t have to listen that hard to hear the real message: Oswald was innocent.

The FBI was already watching Lane when he held a press conference in Washington in the lobby of the Veterans of Foreign Wars building on February 11 to announce that investigations by the Dallas Police Department and the FBI had been cooked to establish Oswald’s guilt and close the case. Three weeks later, Lane gave a similar speech at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Buffalo, New York. Sponsored by local college students associated with the socialist Workers World Party, his appearance was originally scheduled for a hotel, which then hastily canceled, igniting a free speech controversy and elevating Lane’s conspiracy theory in the process.

Reports of the event reveal a snapshot of student politics prior to the mobilization against the Vietnam War. But they also reveal that conspiracism was fed by extremists across the political spectrum. Sponsored and attended by students affiliated with a variety of left-wing groups, including the Communist Party, the event was also picketed by right-wing students carrying signs that read: “Oswald and Lane are two of a kind, Oswald was a red killer,” and “Our churches are for God, not Communism.”

Lane gave a stem-winder of a talk that night, packed with his own analysis of the evidence and purported holes in the case that didn’t just create reasonable doubt. Why had Oswald’s wife, Marina, been held virtually incommunicado for weeks, Lane asked, intimating that she had been given some version of the third-degree until she made the statements investigators wanted. Such antics, the secrecy of the government’s investigation, Lane argued, unreliable or even falsified witness testimony, the reliance on police statements, and the “lack of intelligible answers” to his questions pointed strongly to Oswald’s innocence.

Lane urged the group to form citizens’ committees to pressure the government on his client’s behalf. On February 18, at a forum at New York City’s Town Hall, Lane announced that one such committee had been formed, with himself at the helm.

Dubbed The New York Citizens Committee of Inquiry, Lane’s organization began the presumption that the FBI, with its disdain for civil rights, had not: Oswald’s innocence. “New York Lawyer Thinks Oswald Is Not the Assassin,” the Buffalo Evening News headline blared the day after his first appearance on the multi-city speaking tour. At other student-sponsored events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, and other cities, Lane elaborated on his view that, by focusing on Oswald, the Bureau had failed to adequately investigate other theories of the case. Nor had they taken seriously additional witnesses whose accounts of the shooting differed from the government’s. Lane claimed to possess numerous affidavits, as well as an informant with ties to the Communist Party, who was making inquiries in Mexico City’s left-wing expat community.

In fact, the Kennedy assassination, and his role as an antagonist to the Warren Commission and its findings, became Lane’s career. He and Susan Brownmiller ended their relationship in mid-1964: she went to Mississippi to become a civil rights organizer, joined a television news crew in Jacksonville, wrote an article for The Village Voice that launched her career as a freelance journalist. She became one of the first radical feminist journalists in the United States and published a deeply researched book about sexual assault, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) that made her a national figure for decades to come.

Lane’s trajectory was quite different. He became dramatically more famous, and then, as alternative theories of the assassination became relegated to the realm of conspiracy, slid into irrelevance. His 1966 account of the assassination, Rush to Judgement, became a bestseller and the basis of a 1967 documentary; in 1968, he ran as the vice-presidential candidate on the Peace and Freedom ticket headed up by comedian Dick Gregory. The Citizen’s Inquiry lasted until the early 1970s; while he remained a strong proponent of civil liberties and a practicing attorney, Lane was also a popular writer, producing ten more books about the JFK Assassination and other controversial legal cases, as well as a memoir (which never mentions his almost four-year relationship with Brownmiller.)

The Trump administration is itself an artifact of the conspiracist right, particularly the Kennedy-conspiracy obsessed QAnon movement. This is undoubtedly why the Trump administration made the hasty, performative, and lunk-headed release of these documents a priority.

But the deep distrust of government that has given this conspiracy life over the years? It isn’t confined to the right at all: in fact, it began on the left. And it suggests that the history of MAGA is far more complex than we can yet account for.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie


Democrats Should Be the Party Of Social Security -- Not On Social Security

Democrats Should Be the Party Of Social Security -- Not On Social Security

Remember last June, as the growing anxiety about President Joe Biden’s age gave way to a stomach-churning post-debate transition to a Kamala Harris candidacy? I do, and the Biden camp made two arguments unrelated to the President’s obvious infirmity. The first was that it was simply too late to swap in a new candidate, something that may have been true: Harris lost an election that she might have won if given more than 100 days, or a primary season, to frame a candidacy.

The other argument was that in the United States, incumbency is king. That was trickier, since for the first time since the 19th century, there were, in a sense, two incumbents: when Biden relinquished his candidacy to Harris, Trump became the closest thing to an incumbent in the race. Incumbency carries candidates over the line, not because they are the best candidates, but because they are the best-known candidates. The fact that Strom Thurmond (R-SC) died as a Senator in 2003, or Dianne Feinstein in 2023, both visibly in the grip of dementia, had everything to do with the power of incumbency. People who saw what the rest of us saw voted for them anyway.

On the other hand, you could also see 2024 as a wide-open race with no incumbents—and maybe that’s the kind of race Democrats should learn to run if they want a more youthful, nimble, and relevant party. So, what if the Democrats stopped running candidates in their 70s and 80s, and gave younger people a chance?

I am thinking about this because of the angst out there about New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen’s decision, announced yesterday, not to run for re-election to the Senate in 2026. In true New England style, she offered little explanation other than: “It’s just time.” This is another way of saying: I am 78, for God’s sake: what more can you possibly want from me?

The fact that Donald Trump is also 78; and that seven Senators who have not announced their retirement are 78 or older, including Chuck Grassley (90, R-IA) and Bernie Sanders (82, I-VT), makes the idea that Shaheen would serve until she was 84 seem reasonable. In a true national emergency, Shaheen’s decision is “A blow to Democrats,” headline blares. In the New York Times, long-time Granite State watcher Felice Belman warns of a “high-stakes race in a state whose voters are famously fickle.”

But Shaheen knows what she is doing. “I think 2026, given where I think the country’s going to be, and New Hampshire is going to be,” she told Senator reporter Burgess Everett, “it should be a good year to hold on to the seat.” Translation: Donald Trump is driving the country into a ditch, and it is going to hit New Hampshire very hard; if I step back now, the Democrats can nail down this seat for the next two decades.

Listen to her, Democratic leadership. The first woman to serve both as governor of a state and as one of its Senators, Shaheen has been in politics for half a century; and when she retires, in the Senate for almost a quarter century.

Shaheen is speaking not so indirectly to a huge problem for Democrats: the party sorely needs a youthful makeover. It needs a leadership cohort whose ascent to the Senate doesn’t pre-date the browsable internet, cable news, cell phones, social media. It needs a deep Senate bench for key committees, like Shaheen’s Foreign Affairs committee.

New ideas don’t come out of old bottles, but frankly, the Democrats also just need a new look. Politics is more telegenic than ever, and frankly, too much of the Democratic leadership is not TikTok-able. Good as he is at the job, 74-year-old Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has virtually no neck anymore, and 82-year-old Bernie Sanders presents as a shouty old guy. How does this inspire people in their 20s and 30s? Worse, the longer they stay, the more the talent in their states does not have a viable shot at power and influence.

You know who would make a great Senator from Vermont? Congressperson Becca Balint. She’s 57, an out lesbian, and we know she can win a statewide race because Vermont only has one Representative. You know who would make a great Senator from New York? Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But back to Shaheen’s decision: Yes, an incumbent stepping away is always a risk, and New Hampshire is a tricky state: its voters are highly independent, they love to split their tickets, and of course the Democrats could lose the seat. A very popular former Republican Governor, Chris Sununu, might run, and would be favored as the only person in the state’s history to be re-elected three times. Only 50, Sununu currently seems to be resting.

Legendarily coy about his plans, he is undoubtedly aiming at a presidential run in 2028, and two years as a Senator doesn’t help him do that. The downside to a Sununu candidacy is his family history as Bush Republicans and the moderate record (yes, signing a 24-week abortion ban definitely makes you a moderate in today’s GOP) that makes him good primary material in New Hampshire, but not in Texas or Florida.

Other candidates? There’s some buzz that a perennial bridesmaid, the border-hopping 65-year-old Scott Brown will declare. A former nude Cosmo centerfold, Brown was boosted into the late Democrat Ted Kennedy’s seat by the Tea Party Express in a 2010 special election. Those are almost the only two things Brown has ever done, or had a chance to do: he was pantsed in 2012 by law professor Elizabeth Warren, who came back from an eight-point deficit to win by almost as much. In 2014, Brown then ran against Shaheen in New Hampshire in 2014, and lost again, this time by three points.

So, in addition to Brown being the first male Senator to pose nude, he also became the first man in American history to lose Senate races to two different women. “When you write the stories, please write that he colors his hair, and I don’t,” Shaheen told Everett; “his big accomplishment is he coaches a women’s basketball team, and it’s in Massachusetts.”

But Shaheen’s retirement is important for a bigger reason. We must stop treating every Democratic Senator as irreplaceable, regardless of age, and retirements as unacceptable risks.

To be explicit? there is a youth revolution going on in the GOP, and not in the Democratic Party. If Democrats do not get younger and become more knowledgeable about what younger voters want and need, they will consign themselves to irrelevance for decades to come. One thing that the lack of general horror about Elon Musk destroying the government reveals (a Harvard poll cited by White House spokesbimbo Karoline Leavitt says that as many as 76% of Americans approve of the DOGE project), it is that Americans are frustrated with a government that has been in irons for several decades.

Democrats do believe in an administrative and regulatory state, and it is what distinguishes them from a GOP taken over by libertarian populists and corporations. But what Democrats haven’t done in recent years is build a better state that can meet the moment, as opposed to reforming the basic structure. Barack Obama’s 2009 economic package and his 2010 Affordable Care Act, as well as “Bidenomics” were really patches to, and revivals of, New Deal and Great Society policies. From the vantage of Trumpism, these policies look like liberalism’s dying gasp—not its next, bright, chapter.

In other words, we Democrats forgive student loans; we don’t fundamentally restructure and rethink education. We expand healthcare, but we don’t make it affordable or available (current wait time for a primary care provider in Western Mass? Eight months.) We say we will build houses so that middle-class people can own them, not so working people can rent them and still pay for food, clothing, and the occasional night out. We want to preserve and expand Medicare, but we don’t have a clue how to find the workers that elderly people need to support them.

Democrats’ insistence on running candidates who are well beyond conventional retirement age does not inspire confidence that they are open to new ideas. It’s worth noting that part of the disbelief about Shaheen stepping back is that, in the scale of the Senate, at 78, she only looks a little over the hill. The median age of this body is 64.7, down six months since 2022, while the median age of Democratic Senators is slightly higher at 66.

The most progressive states also have some of the worst records when it comes to leaving aging Senators in place. Take my own state, Massachusetts. Barring illness or death, my Senator, Elizabeth Warren (who I adore) will serve until she is 81; while my other Senator, Ed Markey (who I like), will seek a third term in 2026 when he will already be 80.

You know who would be great Senators? The current governor, Maura Healey (54); Congressman Jim McGovern (65—particularly since Hakeem Jeffries, who is 54, is locked in as House Leader); Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (40); and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (51). The talent in my state is bottomless, and like California, the path to policy power is very narrow.

That path narrows even further when we are talking about a Senate race. Why? They are statewide, so it’s hard for people successful at the district level to make themselves well-known. They are expensive, so candidates who already have significant accomplishments, either electoral or in business, are most likely to win because wealthy donors like people who are successful already.

This is why Democrats wanted Shaheen—who is moderate, popular, accomplished, and brought the Democratic Party back to life in New Hampshire—to run again. None of the Democratic representatives who will duke it out in a primary have a statewide reputation, and the party, unlike the GOP, doesn’t seem to have a deep back bench of carpetbagging, self-funding hedge funders to port around the country.

In our tightly polarized country that no longer sees huge swings in the House or the Senate, running incumbents is good defense against Trump’s six-seat GOP majority. Even though the Republicans still need seven Democrats for a cloture vote (see: the Republican spending bill currently on life support in the Senate), a viable Democratic majority seems out of reach. The party to claw back three seats in2026 just to get Vice President JD Vance off his ample rump to cast a tiebreaker. It would take four seats to win the majority back, retake all those chairmanships, and then—only then—imagine the process of winning the hearts and minds of nine Republican Senators to move legislation.

But it’s the fact that majorities have been so tight for years that put us in this place to begin with. Twice, a Democratic House brought Donald J. Trump’s impeachment to the Senate, and twice, because Republicans have no moral compass, it failed. So here we are, not just with Donald Trump as President again, but with Elon Musk and a Cabinet of Looney-Tunes characters ripping the government apart like so many Tinker Toys.

Democrats don’t have to accept a democracy perpetually lived on the brink of disaster, but in order to create something else, they may have to stop playing defense, and attack.

Let a younger generation have its shot.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.

Reprinted

Over And Over, Trump Kicks America's Farmers In The Teeth

Over And Over, Trump Kicks America's Farmers In The Teeth

This is the time of year when hobby gardeners like me begin setting up grow lights, buying peat pots, sketching out a map of this year’s beds, and whipping out credit cards for mail-order seeds. If you like the physical work, a 40x40 plot will keep you in flowers, berries, and produce for most of the summer; while root vegetables, garlic, onions, and frozen produce last for a good chunk of the winter (butternut squash, anyone?)

Things happen, of course. A mama vole built a nest next to my friend’s sweet potato bed, eliminating her harvest but growing a robust family of pups. Two years ago, a rainy June meant that everyone in the community garden ended up with a rollicking case of tomato blossom end rot, and when the flea beetles show up, if you haven’t set up hoops and covers, rows of kale become green lace.

We in the local community garden shrug such things off. Real farmers can’t; nor can they take the economic gut punches that the Trump administration is handing them daily. At a time of year when they have already purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of seed and fertilizer on credit, and the market is shrinking, farmers are said to be nervous.

Strikingly, given the role that food prices played in the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump had little of substance to say to the nation’s food industry last night in his 99-minute stemwinder of hatred last night. Reprising his Greatest Campaign Hits, not only did Trump seem almost entirely unaware of how agriculture works, but he seemed not to care. At the same time, his Cabinet and policy staff also seem unable to coerce him into even thinking about agriculture, a $1.5 trillion sector of our economy that represents over 5% of our gross domestic product (GDP).

It’s particularly odd since the agricultural Midwest and South powered Trump to victory less than five months ago. Look at this map of the 2024 presidential election results:

Source: 270towin.com

In a word: although these are not densely populated states, they represent a substantial chunk of Trump voters. And those Blue states? Farmers and rural communities vote Republican there too, Let’s take California as an example. Most of the votes that make these states Democratic come from the coastal districts, while the agricultural regions of the state are very red, and keep that razor-thin GOP House majority even remotely viable.

Source: Politico.com

It’s puzzling, then, that out of that ninety-nine minutes, Trump addressed the economic structure of American agriculture and the future of its workers for fewer than five.

Beginning with a brief nod to the price of eggs (which is even higher than it was in the fall), Trump took the opportunity to blame President Joe Biden for letting eggs “get out of control. The egg price is out of control,” he repeated, “and we're working hard to get it back down. Secretary, do a good job on that. You inherited a total mess from the previous administration. Do a good job.”

I’m not sure which secretary he was talking to—probably Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture—but Trump gave no indication that he understands why eggs are expensive, or that Secretary Rollins recently unveiled a $1 billion initiative that includes “$500 million for biosecurity measures, $400 million in financial relief for affected farmers, and $100 million for vaccine research, action to reduce regulatory burdens, and exploring temporary import options.” None of this is going to bring the price of eggs down any time soon; nor did Trump acknowledge that an egg shortage affected anyone but your average American breakfast eater.

But the more important question is: given the deep cuts to the federal workforce authorized by Trump, who will be there to carry out Rollins’ program?

According to one independent news source in Minnesota, mass layoffs at the USDA “are `crippling’ the agency, upending federal workers’ lives and leaving farmers and rural communities without needed support.” Nebraska Public Media reports that “dozens” of researchers working on animal disease control in Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Kansas have been terminated—although recently, “the USDA scrambled to hire back employees who deal with the government’s response to bird flu.” Federal agricultural specialists have also suffered mass layoffs in Oregon and Washington.

If the uncertainty and chaos of disease prevention and research programs is not making farmers nervous enough, add the effects of weather events due to climate change, and shrinking federal price supports for the commodities market. Yet, this is what Trump had to say about how his isolationist foreign policy and trade wars will affect farmers. “Our new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer:”

I love the farmer. Who will now be selling into our home market, the USA, because nobody is going to be able to compete with you. Because there's goods that come in from other companies, countries and companies. They're really, really in a bad position in so many different ways. They're uninspected. They may be very dirty and disgusting, and they come in and they pour in and they hurt our American farmers. The tariffs will go on agricultural product coming into America and our farmers starting on April 2nd.

Of course, Trump conceded, “It may be a little bit of an adjustment period. We had that before when I made the deal with China.”

It wasn’t a little adjustment period: it was a permanent slide in commodities prices, and shrinking foreign sales, whose effects are felt today. “There was an immediate impact, you know, on the market,” one soybean producer told NPR reporter Scott Simon in February. “We saw within the first few days of the retaliatory tariffs from China in 2018 nearly a $2 drop when it comes to soybeans in the cash price that we were able to receive.”

This must be what Trump was referring to when he mused: “I said, just bear with me. And they did. They did. Probably have to bear with me again and this will be even better. That was great.” But farmers don’t remember it as “great,” but rather “a Band-Aid approach” that permitted China and other countries to shift their attentions away from United States producers. The permanent damage, according to the farmer interviewed by Simon, has been a 30-50% drop in commodity prices.

The only thing that kept many farmers in business were compensatory payments—from the Trump administration! And it was Biden pumping money into farm subsidies, grants, and loans that kept many farmers afloat long enough to vote for Trump in 2024.

Already in a period of mild economic decline, American farmers will be harmed by other Trump policies, including cuts to USAID and other foreign aid programs. These are, in essence, cuts to federal spending on American farmers, whose products the United States has purchased and sent abroad since World War II.

Farmers stand to lose approximately $2.1 billion from these cuts.

You also don’t have to be a policy wonk to understand why labor shortages fueled by Donald Trump’s war on immigrants will simultaneously drive up costs and leave crops to rot in the field. While machines can pick some crops, they can’t pick all of them, and they don’t move irrigation pipes, care for livestock, drive tractors, sex chickens….the list goes on.

I partly grew up in farm country, southern Idaho to be precise, a place you know for potatoes, but which grows a far greater range of agricultural products because of its light, rich volcanic soil and mild climate. Idaho is also a perennial employer of migrant laborers, despite the fact that potatoes and sugar beets are no longer dug by hand. Of the almost 62,000 agricultural workers that labor in the state, almost 81 percent are migratory. An estimated 10,000, or 1/6 of that labor force, is undocumented. Nationally, Idaho is on the low end of undocumented labor: 42 percent of the approximately 240,000 workers who make up the farm labor work force are vulnerable to deportation under Trump policies. Another 17 percent are immigrants authorized to work, but now more vulnerable under the Laken Riley Act.

In a strange twist of fate, Idaho—one of hte most MAGA states in the country—is suffering such a severe labor shortage, that it is trying to legislate its own guest worker program. This is almost surely unconstitutional, and puts Idaho on course for conflict with Trump aide Stephen Miller, who would feed immigrants to sharks if he could.

History suggests that, in breaking with decades of policies that have supported and promoted agriculture, MAGA policies are terrible for farmers. Take a look at this next chart, which graphs farm bankruptcies between 2015 and 2024, the period spanning the first Trump, and then the Biden, administrations.

Source: Market Intel

Do you see what I see? Farm failures, already on the rise, accelerated under Trump, rising dramatically in 2019 when the effects of the 2018 tariffs undermined the subsequent growing season. Bankruptcies decreased slightly as the administration pumped money into the system in 2020, receding when the Biden administration began to reinstitute traditional farm supports.

And here’s the thing: each of those farms -- whether they are part of a large agribusiness enterprise or the 89 percent that gross $250,000 or less annually and are classified as “small family farms” -- supports rural people and the communities they live in. They underwrite the state and local tax structure, small businesses, and the people those businesses employ.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are, of course, in love with an idea about reviving industrial labor on a model that hasn’t been dominant in the United States since the mid-1970s. MAGA fanboys in the media are just as urban as Trump, uninterested in and ignorant about farming: one political consultant I was sparring with on X disparaged farmers as “whiners.” That characterization is anything but true—one of the reasons farmers tend to be Republicans is that they are the opposite of that: independent-minded, uncomplaining, tough people who, season after season, continue in an uncertain enterprise that can flip on them overnight because they love the work.

But Donald Trump doesn’t love them back: he barely seems to know farmers are alive. And none of the Cabinet members tasked with the health of the agricultural economy have the courage to tell him the truth about what his policies really mean for America’s heartland—as well as prices at the grocery store.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.

If Republicans 'Back The Blue,' Why Does Their Budget Defund The Police?

If Republicans 'Back The Blue,' Why Does Their Budget Defund The Police?

In the summer of 2020, an ominous design began to exceed the boundaries of Trump World: bumper stickers, tee shirts, banners, and hats adorned with a black and white American flag. A middle stripe that should have been white was instead a bright, royal blue. Initially designed in 2014 as a symbol of support for policing by University of Michigan student Andrew Jacob, sales at Thin Blue Line USA surged as urban police battled angry anti-racist protesters in the summer of 2020.

For people my age, the Serpico generation, it was impossible to see such imagery, however well designed, as anything but extremist. “The thin blue line” was a term popularized in the 1950s by William Parker, the Los Angeles chief of police who warned the public that only the police stood between them and chaos. The phrase was also code for segregation in the North, and the brutal policing of Black people that enforced the racial separation of neighborhoods.

But the phrase also evoked the ways that cops preyed on underground economies, which also tended to be Black and Latino. Court cases taught the public about something called “blue wall of silence,” a code by which police protected each other from the laws they were sworn to uphold.

While supporting the police is not exactly a “white thing” (after all, people who aren’t white don’t want to be the victims of crime either), this long history of racism means that there was a pre-existing bond between the Republican party’s right wing and police institutions even before 2015, when Donald Trump launched his MAGA movement. Criticisms of police violence that flared in the final years of the Obama administration proved to be the perfect foil for this alliance: in response, Trump and extremist Republicans urged their voters to “back the Blue.” In a deployment of law-and-order politics that harks back to Richard Nixon’s 1968, in Trump World, the police were always right—and anyone who said otherwise supported crime.

A weak man who tries to appear tough, Donald Trump has always been fond of going before large crowds and murmuring over and over, “I love the police. I love the police.” And yet, like many policies he associates with his brand, Trump has never taken any real interest in policing itself: how it’s done, what works or doesn’t work, and what police officials need to support their work. Possibly one of the weirder aspects of the 2024 campaign was that, even as some on the Left smeared Kamala Harris as nothing but “a cop,” Trump successfully portrayed her—a career prosecutor—as soft on crime. Instead of policies to address the causes of crime, he promised to expand the death penalty, deport undocumented people, and unleash police violence on protesters, shoplifters, and anyone else who got out of hand.

"One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately," he free associated at a campaign stop in Erie, Pennsylvania last September.

Trump does understand the core principle of the “thin blue line:” that omnipresent, random intimidation is supposed to prevent crime. Adherence to this principle is why, since the 1970s, Republicans have promoted hard solutions to social disorder—such as incarceration, fluffing police budgets, and militarizing police—over icky soft solutions like jobs programs for teenagers, social services, and education

But as it turned out, if conservatives love the police, MAGA partisans don’t, particularly when it is they who are being policed. They just like wearing the tee shirts. In the most notable example, an extremist pro-Trump mob fought a pitched battle with the law on January 6, 2021, beating, maiming, torturing, and ultimately killing Capitol Police officers who tried to stop them from preventing a legally constituted election from being certified. These same extremists, and their antecedents, have long imagined agents of the ATF, Treasury, and FBI as enemies; while Republican politicians now refer to these federal police as the “deep state.”

More importantly, it is Republicans who have repeatedly, since the 1990s, tried to cut federal aid to police departments. Not surprisingly, given this contradiction, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is almost silent on the question of how the Trump administration to support policing.

Let’s begin with the first Trump administration’s policies, which I would characterize as the “Merry Christmas” approach: deluging state and local departments with military equipment that most police officers are not trained to use, and do not need. In a 2017 executive order, Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era ban on the transfer of military equipment to local police forces which covered “racked armored vehicles, armed aircraft or vehicles of any kind, .50-caliber firearms and ammunition, grenade launchers, bayonets and camouflage uniforms.”

Paid for by tax dollars appropriated by Congress for national defense, military-grade equipment suitable for a battlefield was sent to police departments and sheriff’s offices around the country. But in addition to the fact that there was no domestic threat that required $7 billion worth of counterinsurgency weapons, much of this materiel was in the warehouse because it was unsuitable for forms of modern warfare that navigate civilian populations.

The vehicles, in particular, were “inefficient in their counterinsurgency purpose, because they’re big vehicles that basically prevent soldiers from being able to interact with the community,” Cornell government professor Sabrina Karim told a reporter in 2020. “And so, if it was ineffective in counterinsurgency, I’m not quite sure that they would be effective in local law enforcement when the job of the police is to be able to engage with the community.”

So, if it wasn’t about policing, what was all this junk for? Perhaps the grand gesture, the theater of the thing, which we know Trump loves: one recalls an ecstatic Oprah giving a car to everyone in her audience: “You get a car! And you get a car! And you get a car!”

But there was something more serious at stake. If Republicans love police and policing, they hate community policing, partnerships between cops and citizens that prevent crime and violence. Why Because friendly, non-violent interactions between the community and the public dissolve the thin blue line.

What we are seeing in the new GOP budget is a classic case study in Trumponomics: Give away billions, and cut millions. In this case, we are talking about $650 million a year that the federal government has spent on community policing for 30 years. Again, this is where looking at Trump I is helpful. In 2019, the Trump White House proposed a 50 percent cut to the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program, a 1994 Clinton initiative that provided federal funds to hire 100,000 additional officers at the state and local level and train them as community police.

Although Congress initially passed the legislation with a six-year sunset, “the policy proved so popular,” Vox reporter German Lopez wrote, “that it’s been extended every year since then.” The Bushies loved it, Obama loved it, and although the Democrats had a House majority in 2019, my guess is that Republicans voted for it too. Communities submit grants to acquire these positions and, as Lopez argues, over time it has incentivized local departments to pay for community policing out of their own budgets.

You can see why it has something for everyone. “Policing works best when officers are out of their cruisers and walking the streets, engaging with and getting to know members of their communities,” President Joe Biden, who had chaired the Senate committee that initially shepherded the program into existence, explained in 2021. In addition, grants were conditioned on hiring police officers who “mirror the racial diversity of the community they serve.”

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Sounds woke to me, although oddly, that’s not why the GOP wants to kill the program in this round. “Conservatives support our men and women and blue,” the Republican Study Committee (RSC) that wrote the House FY 2025 Budget Proposal asserts, “but should question whether the government should involve itself in state and local law enforcement, even if it is only a matter of funding.” This document, otherwise known as “Fiscal Sanity to Save America” proposes to reduce the approximately $600 million COPS budget by an unspecified amount by cutting Democratic cities like San Francisco and the District of Columbia out of the program.

It’s a self-serving states’ rights argument aimed at a puny budget line. And by the way? This proposal comes out of a committee that includes not a single member from the Northeast or California, and only one member from a mid-Atlantic state. The argument about municipal budget cutting is also a transparent lie. Taking San Francisco as an example, net police spending increased between 2019 and 2022, as did law enforcement budgets in 90% of American cities. True, the District of Columbia decreased the Metropolitan Police Department operating fund in 2022 by 7.2%, funds that were redirected to the hiring and training of new officers and community intervention programs. But the District then overspent that budget by almost 10% in 2022 and 2023. So, its budget also went up.

The real issue that needs to be addressed is why so many positions in police departments are vacant, Bright Blue New York City spends $5.8 billion on its police force (a number that does not include benefits or pensions), and has cut its budget five percent as part of an effort to reduce city spending by five percent across the board. Yet, there are over 1100 uniform and 600 civilian vacancies, resulting in an additional overtime budget of a little more than $788 million.

This is not a problem free military equipment solves.

The RSC argues that personnel deficits are not the federal government’s problem to solve. In their view, if large cities have a policing problem, it’s their own fault for undermining the fragile self-esteem of public safety officers who are no longer allowed to hurt people freely and without consequences. As they write, “In recent years, we have seen elected officials in urban areas vilifying their law enforcement officers, disincentivizing any new police recruits.” Similarly, in a 2020 White House press conference, Donald Trump mused that “they can’t get any police in Milwaukee because you’re not allowed to use pepper spray or tear gas.”

This is far from the truth. Police departments are subject to a tight labor market, as well as job applicants who are out of shape, overweight, undereducated, and with morally questionable histories. In 2023, while noting that the scrutiny police had been under had led to veteran officers retiring at higher than normal levels, Washington Post reporter Robert Klemko reported that departments did not lack new applicants—only qualified applicants. “Illinois department chiefs, surveyed anonymously, admitted they were lowering standards for educational and criminal records so they could achieve bare minimum staffing,” Klemko wrote. Memphis, TN, even had to lower its physical training standards to graduate a sufficient number of recruits. Message board are full of advice about how aspiring police can lose weight to pass a physical exam.

Another problem, many police chiefs agreed, was not that people don’t want to be police officers: it’s that the right kind of people—civic-minded, educated, physically fit, and committed to building community through resolving conflict—were choosing to do that work in other ways. Policing, one said, needed to appeal to people with a sense of purpose—not people raised on video games and snacks who understand the job as a version of urban warfare.

This is, of course, the kind of person the COPS program—as it was envisioned in the Clinton administration and renewed during the George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations—recruited. So, of course Trump and House Republicans see it as a perfect place to save a few hundred million dollars.

In fact, while criticizing liberals and left-wing activists for wanting to “defund” policing, the Trump Republican Party consistently tried to cut police budgets throughout the Biden administration too. In addition to targeting COPS for cuts, in 2023, the GOP majority maligned and consistently sought to dismantle federal policing. Their plan was to “decrease FBI personnel by approximately 11,000 people, and freeze hiring at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That will mean 190 agents, 130 Industry Operations Investigators, and 180 technical and support staff would be lost to attrition, and ATF's entire workforce of over 5,000 personnel would have to take 36 furlough days.”

All of these people are police. More importantly, since the 1930s, federal police agencies have been a crucial training, data, and manpower resource for state and local police (believe me, I wrote a whole book about it.)

My bet? COPS won’t be killed—but keep your eyes on these other agencies are about to take damaging hits. And no amount of fancy toys deployed to police forces around the country can replace them.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015.

America's Silence Is Not Compliance (And Here Is How We Prove It)

America's Silence Is Not Compliance (And Here Is How We Prove It)

After watching the inauguration, and listening to President Donald J. Trump’s weird, ramble-y, post-speech event in Emancipation Hall afterwards, I am oddly less worried than I have been since the election.

Perhaps it was the funny stuff. For example, Melania’s odd hat. It covered half of her face, allowing her to sleep sitting up if she chose to and, as The Daily Showpointed out,almost exactly matched the Pizza Hut logo. Others compared it to Spy vs. Spy from Mad Magazine, and to McDonald’s Hamburgler.

Or perhaps it was Joe Biden, who cracked his old, familiar “can you believe this shit?” smile at some of Trump’ old, familiar lies and boasts.

Then, there was country star Carrie Underwood, who ended the long awkward pause as someone was unable to start the music, said a silent “fuck it,” and sang “America the Beautiful” a cappella. If only she had followed that song up with “Before He Cheats.”

You have to wonder: if the Trump people can’t get the music started at their kick-off event, what else can’t they do?

We will soon find out. Will everything in the new Trump administration run like the switch watch we have been warned about, or will it be as—or more—dysfunctional than the last time? Will the policy agenda, in the end, be bigger or smaller, as befits an already-lame duck guy? Will President Donald J. Trump—who promises bigger—be more empowered because he has a better-organized executive team and faces little opposition in his own party? Or will he shed members of the executive branch at the same rate as in his first term (news flash: Vivek is already gone.)

Another unknown: will the institutions that are designed to stop Trump and his MAGA thugs be better able to do it because they have had time to prepare, because Trump has telegraphed everything he plans to do, and these well-funded groups have legal teams standing ready to stop, or at least slow, him in the courts?

I suspect that the next two to four years (depending on whether the Democrats can flip the House or the Senate in 2026) will both be worse than what we went through between 2017 and 2021, and better in ways we can’t know yet. Perhaps this, and not apathy or depression, accounts for the virtual silence from the 50.1 percent of voters who did not cast their ballots for Donald Trump.

But silence is not compliance, which is why I bristled yesterday when I read Peter Baker’s column in The New York Times, in which he equated the absence of street-level protest and outrage to popular acquiescence in the coming weeks and months. Observing the contrast between the elaborate security measures taken around the Capitol and the lack of activists to defend against, Baker writes that “if Washington looks like a war zone again, it does not necessarily feel that way. Unlike the last time President-elect Donald J. Trump took the oath of office eight years ago,” he continues, “the bristling tension and angry defiance have given way to accommodation and submission. The Resistance of 2017 has faded into the Resignation of 2025.”

It gets worse. “Much of the world, it seems, is bowing down to the incoming president,” Baker writes:

Technology moguls have rushed to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage. Billionaires are signing seven-figure checks and jockeying for space at the inaugural ceremony. Some corporations are pre-emptively dropping climate and diversity programs to curry favor.
Some Democrats are talking about working with the newly restored Republican president on discrete issues. Some news organizations are perceived to be reorienting to show more deference. The grass roots opposition that put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Washington to protest Mr. Trump just a day after he was sworn in back in 2017 generated a fraction of that in their sequel on Saturday.

“Hashtag-resistance has turned into hashtag-capitulation,” MAGA strategist David Urban told Baker. “The pink-pussy hats are gone, and they’re replaced by MAGA hats worn by Black and brown people.”

Bullshit. Nothing is gone, no one has capitulated, and Trump’s base is still majority white. The resistance is waiting, we are rebuilding, and we are trying to do it better next time. Instead of spending our days unspooling as the ideas and values cherished by liberals and the left disappear from the stage in Washington, we are trying to figure out why what we did didn’t work, and learn how to fight differently and better.

And this is where you, dear readers, may want to start.

Identify vulnerable people, help them, and stand up to anyone who bullies them.

The policies Trump says he will pursue in the next four years will not just withdraw protections from social minorities and women, but also many of the middle-class and poor people who voted for him. Tax policies will be presented as putting money in ordinary Americans’ pockets, even as other policies are quietly picking those same pockets.

So, there is no doubt that people will be hurt. Give them money. Help them get to where they need to go for an abortion, to get transgender care, to get away from an abuser—or from ICE. If you are a lawyer, set aside some (or more) of your time for pro bono actions. Don’t throw electronics, clothes, furniture, and other useful items away: instead, join the Buy Nothing Facebook in your area and give them to people who need them.

Leak: if you have factual information about a raid, or an action, that promotes an unjust use of state power, tell a local reporter. Already, it looks like the leaked plans for ICE raids in Chicago this week have caused that action to be postponed.

Most of all, as MAGA policies normalize abusive behavior, stand up to it. Say no to cruelty and stupidity. Say no to violent behavior and language. Get between abusers and the abused. Teach your children that only weak, angry people hurt others who are less powerful, and give them common-sense strategies to stand up to bullies.

Don’t let elections go by without volunteeringand never miss an opportunity to cast your vote.

It’s not enough to give money. The billions of dollars sloshing around our electoral system have only produced more polarization and paralysis. People know less about what is at stake in an election than they ever did. We now know that an unprecedented outpouring of energy, donations, and volunteering that greeted Kamala Harris’s candidacy was not enough to avert a second Trump presidency.

Imagine going local and rebuilding the Democratic Party from the grassroots up. What if this kind of organizing, and the conversations between friends and neighbor it incites, did not just happen every four years—and was not just focused on the Presidency and other higher offices? The conservative 1776 Project, which has been working to flip school boards across the nation to MAGA policies for the last four years, demonstrates that a well-chosen candidate and just a few thousand dollars for pamphlets and signs can win a local election.

For a starter pack on how to run for office, and access to resources and training, check out Run for Something. But you don’t need a national organization to help you do this. All you need is your local Democratic committee: go here for your state party website, which will lead you to those of your neighbors who are already doing the work.

Screen out the noise and seek out information. Stop relying on social media and cable TV for news.

Anyone who follows me knows that I am very engaged on social media, and how devoted I am to this Substack. But it has limits: what you don;t know is how much time I spend reading actual books, magazines, newspapers, and political research. Social media and cable television have blurred the distinction between reported journalism and opinion writing. Everyone needs reported journalism run order to understand what is going on in politics and respond to it with words or action.

I know many people don’t trust major newspapers anymore but pick one (or two) and read the reported stories about politics. Jeff Bezos or no Jeff Bezos, I think The Washington Post still delivers the best reporting on national government; the Wall Street Journal on foreign policy and economics; and The New York Times has a team led out by Maggie Haberman that will be critical to reporting what is going on in the White House.

Other sources I cherish: ProPublica and the PBS NewsHour (which you can see on YouTube any time after it is broadcast.)

And here’s something you can do to change the future: if you have kids, get them accustomed to reading the newspaper too. Watch the NewsHour with them—or even just a segment from it—and discuss the news informally by asking them what they think.

Here’s the thing: kids who get their news on TikTok and Instagram become adults who get their news on TikTok and citizens who vote for people they don’t know anything about.

Support local media.

Do you have a local newspaper? Subscribe to it, and while you are at it, write for it. Ask the editor if they would accept reports on local politics from freelance you. If you have a business, advertise in it. If you have no local paper anymore, start one on WordPress or Substack.

Local media is the heart and soul of democracy, and is traditionally one of our most trusted sources. If our local and regional news outlets had not been gutted, we would better understand how national events affect our local communities.

Pay attention to local K-12 education and library systems; defend and improve them.

We managed to get through an entire Presidential election in which neither political party had anything to say about education. At all. Yet, conservative activists powered much of the culture wars from school board meetings, beginning in 2021. And liberal parents are up in arms about pandemic policies and the harm they believe has been derived from them—yet there is virtually no public conversation about what we want our education systems to be and do. Librarians in three dozen states are fighting a rearguard action against censorship, with virtually no pushback from citizens.

And for God’s sake, when you know what is being cut from your kid’s education, pick up the slack and teach that to them yourself.

So that’s all for now. Fasten your seatbelts friends: it’s going to be a bumpy four years, but we will go through it together.

Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie

J.D. Vance

If You Want Families To Thrive, The Political Truth Is Inescapable

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s puerile remarks about “childless cat ladies” did have one positive effect, aside from the entertaining political cat memes that have colonized the internet. He pushed me to think about the causes, and consequences of the falling birthrate, not just in the United States, but around the globe.

When I was in my 20s, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was at the height of his popularity: his work featured angry, frustrated women, often dating, or married to someone named “Brad” who was oblivious to their pain and frustration. As we young women, gay and straight, powered our way through graduate school, Lichtenstein T-shirts circulated. One featured a woman waking up from a nap, thinking: “Oh my God! I left the baby on the bus!” Another shows a woman clutching her forehead in frustration: “I can’t believe it,” she says. “I forgot to have children.”

This is funny because no one forgets to have children: you either can’t, which can be a heartache to those who want them; or you decide not to, and you retain a measure of life’s freedoms for yourself.

My own decision to not have children, or partner with someone who did, was an almost direct consequence of homophobia. I was born in 1958: during my peak, and even late, childbearing years, queer family formation was a largely invented thing. As we know, same-sex marriage was not federally protected until 2015, and second parent adoption did not begin to become legal until 1993 (and still is not legal, or straightforward, in all 50 states.) By the late 1990s, when lesbians could be sure in states like New York that their own and their partners’ custody rights were secure, I was well past the age when I could easily conceive or carry a child to term.

But I also did not particularly want to have a child, and in the 1980s, I entered a relationship with someone who felt the same. And as the first generation to come to maturity after second-wave feminism, my cohort of women—armed with legal abortion, plentiful birth control, and the right to go to graduate and professional schools, some of us just said no. Others said “Maybe,” a position that could become an effective no if the question was to be reconsidered after tenure, making partner, or finishing up a prestigious medical residency. Some of them slid under the wire and had a baby or two at what used to be considered an advanced age; others tried and failed.

I wouldn’t describe any of these people as miserable: we have all had, regardless of whether the choice to not bear and raise children was conscious or not, wonderful careers, partners, lives, and happiness in the same measure as those who did.

But was the choice “selfish,” as Republicans would, have it? In some part, of course it was. When any person decides not to procreate, it is an act of putting the self before the collective—whether that collective is family, society, or the nation. At the level of the individual, that choice is not invidious; in fact, some climate activists (one extreme is the Voluntary Human Extinction movement) view not reproducing as a form of planetary repair.

And here’s the news: having just retired at the reasonable age of 65, what made it possible was not having children. That’s right. I did a rough calculation the other day, and it probably saved me around $300,000, most of which went into my 401(k) to earn compound interest.

Did I miss something? Sure—but I not only had lots of young people in my life in my role as a college professor, but I have also had the pleasure of helping the children of friends and relatives find themselves. I am willing to stipulate that parenthood is unique, transformative, and special (on a certain level, I fervently hope it is), and that parenting is some people’s greatest joy.

But Sen. Vance (R-OH) is simply wrong that the childless are miserable, or in denial about being miserable. As sociologist Jennifer Glass and her colleagues wrote in 2018, using data gathered in 22 countries, with a few exceptions (Norway and Hungary), parents are less happy than non-parents. Those who did have children intentionally had fewer: “The decrease in family size among those having children suggests that the early experiences of parenthood in many countries convince parents that their social, economic and emotional well-being is improved by reducing their fertility intentions,” the Glass study hypothesizes.

And parents in the United States are the unhappiest of all. By ignoring this, Vance and the Republican Party are unable to either define or solve the problem of falling birthrates they claim to care so much about.

As I said, I was born in 1958, a year when the birth rate in the United States was higher than it had been since before the Great Depression: 3.5 live births per woman. However, for the next 20 years, the baby boom turned to baby bust, halving that number by 1978. While American childbearing rose slightly between 1980 and 2000, it then dipped again, settling in at 1.8, where the U.N. projects that it will stay, not just in the United States, but globally.

There are lots of reasons for this decline in the United States, some of which I noted above. But you didn’t have to be a radical feminist to want birth control: prior to 1960, while some people had large families for religious reasons (in my neighborhood, there was a Catholic family of 12), many couples had more children than they wanted to have sex and lacked reliable conception. Then, in 1960, the birth control pill became widely available to those who could afford it. Unmarried women and married couples gained even more control over reproduction through the constitutional right to birth control (1965) and abortion (1973). Barriers fell to women’s participation in the workplace, and while some fathers became equal participants on the domestic front, most didn't.

Today, despite the fact that Republicans are systematically attacking both the right to abortion and birth control and the right to assisted reproduction, large majorities of Americans (including Republicans) believe they should have the right to determine their own reproductive futures. And except for the poor, who lack access to both contraception and now, to abortion, the birth rate has remained low because Americans exercise that right. According to Pew Research, a growing number of American adults between the ages of 18 and 50 simply prefer not to have children: that’s 60% of women, and 50% of men.

The question is: why? And this is where politics matters. The Republican party chooses to believe it is a cultural problem: feminists are selfish, gays can’t make babies on their own, “transgender ideology” is turning boys into girls without uteruses and girls into boys without sperm, and masculinity is under attack by the libs.

Democrats, on the other hand, want to do concrete things that address the problems Americans say they have.

OK, not all conservatives.

If you want to read the conservative thinking person’s argument for why Americans should have babies, and why they don’t, travel on over to my friend Ryan Girdusky’s Substack and read his most recent post, which is a gentle rebuke from inside the house to Vance’s “miserable cat ladies” screed. Ryan and I have very different political philosophies, but one of many things I like about him (other than that he is kind) is that he spends a lot of time talking to young conservatives and thinking about what they say.

In this post, Ryan says all the things that Vance could have—and should have—said, an apology of sorts that Vance might have made without ever straying off the Republican reservation. As Ryan writes, women in his own circles “who have had miscarriages, medical issues, or wanted children but were never in the right relationship at the right time to make a family have said they were upset about the clip they saw, not realizing the Ohio Senator was not referring to them.” Other women Ryan talked to explained that they “just never wanted children,” and “also felt targeted by his comment that their lives were miserable.”

As Ryan notes, the uproar over Vance’s two-year-old appearance on Tucker Carlson

is an important learning lesson for the right and the conversation that conservatives should be having with women.
The individual choice of whether or not someone has a family is deeply personal. If someone says it’s not for them, it doesn’t mean their life isn’t valuable or worthy. Having children is not the only meaningful factor in a woman’s life. Thankfully, we live in a society and time where women are afforded options for who they want to be and where they want to take their life.

That said, Ryan also believes that we should all be concerned about the material consequences of population decline. While he is a cultural nationalist who decries immigration, he is also a policy wonk, and believes that falling birthrates trigger material problems: among them are greater global competition for workers, and how a larger, aging population will be cared for by fewer younger workers (currently a significant problem in Japan.)

But this isn’t just a conversation on the right, but one that Democrats understand as linked to the national social safety net and the larger economy. In the United States, the debate over the future of Social Security and Medicare is linked to demography, since these programs do not actually return money we paid into a so-called “lockbox.” Instead, those dollars come from taxes paid by millions of active workers, who will in turn be supported by the taxes of even younger workers.

Now, the United States is not in population decline—yet: births have flatlined. By 2021, the nation was effectively at zero percent population growth, something that briefly ticked up from .1 to .4 percent growth post-pandemic (according to the National Immigration Forum, 81 percent of that .3 growth was due to global migration.) But lower birthrates mean that the portion of the population over 65 is disproportionate. Currently at 18 percent, according to Pew Research, older Americans will constitute almost a quarter of the population in 2053.

This, of course, has led JD Vance to insist, as he did in 2021, that “we have to go to war” against people who say it’s ok for women not to have children. That’s stupid. But the economic argument for making it possible for people to have the children they wish to raise is not unimportant, because the United States needs to replace, if not grow, its workforce in the coming decades. Yet, what Republicans do, instead of making that argument, is say it is a cultural problem with cultural solutions which can be achieved by coercion: eliminating abortion, restricting birth control, and social shaming (e.g., “childless cat ladies.”)

Republicans have also created a theory of gender that privileges men in two ways. First, it draws on complementarity (a long-standing conservative principle in which women do not require equality with men because they are different from them) to frame even highly accomplished women as wives and mothers first. More troublingly, they position the decline in marriage and childbearing as a failure of male leadership—for which MAGA hypermasculinity is the solution.

But what we know is that many people who would like to have children, or more children, and would also like to educate those children, pursue professional self-fulfillment, retire comfortably, buy a house, and not worry about money all the time, are under tremendous pressure to choose one or the other. We know, for example, that achieving economic well-being and being overwhelmed with caretaking that they cannot afford to outsource, are the primary reasons why women choose abortion. “Most abortion patients say that they cannot afford a child or another child, and most say that having a baby would interfere with their work, school or ability to care for their other children,” according to the Guttmacher Institute; while 75% of abortion patients are poor or financially-stressed people.

Which is why you must wonder if the Republican Party has drunk so much of its own Kool-Aid that they do not understand the problems that shape real Americans’ futures. It’s not transgender ideology, critical race theory, or sex talk in public schools: it’s a lack of infrastructure that would allow potential parents to afford the children they want. And here are the Democratic policies that Republicans have refused to support, just in the last four years:

  • An income-based student loan relief program that would be similar to Australia’s;
  • SNAP, the most successful nutrition program for low income children in history;
  • Expanding the Child Tax Credit to reflect inflation (this battle is going on right now; the bill passed in the House with Republican votes, but is expected to fail in the Senate);
  • Affordable housing: Republicans want to cut the HUD budget, which mostly targets low income Americans; Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, has rolled out a half-trillion dollar plan “to encourage the construction of new housing, bring down costs for renters, and make it easier for first-time buyers and veterans to purchase homes.”
  • The GOP opposes paid parental leave and universal child care, two policies that have eased the stress on family formation nearly everywhere else in the developed world.
  • Republicans have persistently opposed reforming the national health care system, regulating it to reduce and prevent abuses, and supporting Medicaid programs for low-income Americans. They have also consistently opposed a federal program to fund health care for uninsured children.

If anything reveals the bankruptcy of the Republican culture wars strategy, it is the falling national birthrate they claim to care so much about. Culture wars are, by definition, nostalgic, displaying a commitment, not to the future, but to an imagined past, one in which women (and men) who were coerced into having larger families whether they wanted to or not become uniformly happy families.

Furthermore, it is simply wrong that the childless have “no stake” in the future of the nation, as Vance asserted when he addressed the backlash to his “cat ladies” slur. Parenting is one kind of stake in the future; another is work. Teaching, designing and building things, coaching, organizing, art, opening a small business, volunteering, medicine, research, policy-making, running for office, policing, technology—any work that engages human needs—is de facto a commitment to the future.

And so are Democratic policies.

Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015.

Why Nobody Can Slut-Shame Boebert And Greene: They're 'Gun Chicks'

Why Nobody Can Slut-Shame Boebert And Greene: They're 'Gun Chicks'

After Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) disgraced herself at a Denver performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” last week by (among other things) going to third base with her date, here were three trends on X (the App Formerly Known As Twitter.) The first was the kind of name-calling you expect about any woman who is openly sexual in public: slut, skank, bimbo, whore—you choose a word for it, Boebert’s foes used it to call her out.

The second (which we will not pause on) is that political analyst Nate Silver is getting massively trolled for asserting that Boebert acting out loudly at a live performance that the rest of the audience would like to enjoy in peace is just as irrelevant as Senator John Fetterman wearing a hoodie and shorts to work. I mean, he is right, but there is a time and a place for everything, and really, no one wants to hear this now, Nate.

And the third? Sex-positive feminists reproving anyone on Twitter who called out Boebert as a slut, skank, bimbo, whore, etc.

Do you wonder why politics in this country are so screwed up? Americans would literally rather talk about hoodies, hand jobs, and whether we are all slut-shaming Lauren Boebert than policy. Across the board, the media encourages this nonsense for the sake of clicks and ad buys.

However, I must confess it had never occurred to me to call Lauren Boebert a whore until I was instructed not to. And it’s not, as Michelle Obama so quaintly said as Trump was kicking the bejesus out of Hillary Clinton with lies, insults, and conspiracy theories, because “when they go low, we go high.”

It’s because self-respecting feminists don’t characterize other women by their sexual behavior. That’s true even when said women are famous for using sexuality and gender as political weapons against other people, yet also engage in mutual groping with a male date at a regional musical theater as if she were at home watching Pornhub. The groping was, of course, only the culmination of Boebert and her date’s entitled behavior. There was also vaping, singing, dancing, loud talking, and illegal recording. You can read about the event here, with video. Or, if you just want to see Boebert getting her breasts fondled and fumbling in her date’s crotch in return, you can click here.

That said, I do not feel inclined to lecture other people who slut-shame Lauren Boebert. I think it is misguided, and it isn’t because of the unproven allegations that she actually worked as an escort on a sugar-daddy website. It’s because she has spent a lot of time and energy polishing her reputation as a Gun Chick, a popular erotic figure on the right who we might tentatively define as “the slutty girl next door—with a gun.”

It’s not an accident that Boebert looks and acts slutty; it’s calculated. It is something you are supposed to notice, and it is supposed to cause Republican dicks to lead the male voters they are attached to into the voting booth on election day. I seriously doubt that Lauren Boebert would be in the House of Representatives at all if many voters in Colorado’s Third didn’t love it that she looks and acts like such a slut with a gun.

Boebert voters, and to a lesser extent, admirers of another congressional Gun Chick, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14), do not care that they are not serious people. They do not care that these women are paid to legislate and have never actually done it. Instead, Boebert and Greene’s brand of out-there, raunchy female sexuality is central to their appeal in a right-wing party that spends much of its time not taking women seriously as human beings and trying to suppress everyone else’s sexuality and gender expression. Being dignified is “establishment,” but being slutty “makes the libs melt down.” Perhaps most importantly, it means that these women may be in authority, but they don’t have to be taken seriously because it’s all just a joke. Really, they don’t want to be in government; they just want to fuck, have fun, and shoot guns with men.

Once seen as a matched pair, Boebert and Greene shot into the spotlight in 2020 as full-fledged Christian nationalist MAGA partisans even as Trump, the guy who made them electable, was being shown the door. While Boebert periodically flew in the QAnon slipstream, Greene was a wholly convinced follower, something she renounced on the floor of the House in February 2021 after she had been kicked off all her committees for spouting weird, antisemitic conspiracies at the drop of a hat. And although they touted their “family values,” both women’s marriages quickly died after they came to Congress. Perry Greene filed for divorce in 2022, a decade after Greene reportedly had several affairs and briefly tried to ditch him. The 36-year-old Boebert dumped her husband Jayson, whom she married at sixteen. Perhaps he still loves her: he took responsibility for her disgrace at the Beetlejuice performance by admitting that he has treated her badly.

Despite their similarities, Greene and Boebert have since broken up with each other. On opposite sides of the Kevin McCarthy speaker fight, they had a final falling out in June when Boebert plagiarized MTG’s impeachment bill, and Greene called her a “little bitch” on the House floor. And yet, as Gun Chicks, the two women still call our attention to the centrality of slutty, trashy behavior to MAGA world.

Boebert owes both her business and political careers to exploiting the nexus of guns and sex that the Gun Chick represents. She and Jayson owned a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, called Shooter’s Grill (note: the name rips off the “Hooters” brand), where waitresses dressed in revealing clothing also wore pistols on their hips. Boebert first came to public attention when she confronted then-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke in Aurora over his plan to institute federal gun control, mostly through a buy-back program. Before running for office, Boebert became a local pro-gun organizer and also publicly associated with several militia group chapters (which are full of Gun Chicks) in Colorado.

Greene, too, campaigned as a Gun Chick in 2020: among other things, she posted a video of herself brandishing a semi-automatic long gun and warning “Antifa” to “stay out of northwest Georgia.” Although Facebook pulled it down, it got over 2 million views there and another 1 million on Twitter. She also shared a second controversial image of herself with a weapon on Facebook; in the background were progressive women of color in Congress, and in the foreground, the phrase: “The Squad’s Worst Nightmare.”

The Gun Chick is always white. She meets right-wing men where they are, politically and sexually, and is, by definition, an erotic figure who captures both the allure of female beauty and the thrill of barely contained violence. She is one of many contradictory figures (for example, the large number of closeted gay men) in an extremist movement shot through with Christian Nationalism.

In Congress, Boebert and Greene represent this much larger phenomenon, draw strength from it, and style themselves in ways that other Gun Chicks and their admirers recognize. Gun Chicks wear clothes that emphasize their cleavage and large breasts, bare their arms, sport visible tattoos, are verbally aggressive (particularly with other women), and carry a weapon whenever and wherever they can.

Christian nationalism and unrestrained sexuality merge in the Gun Chick. Being a Gun Chick can be part of, or your entire, professional and social identity. For example, former porn star and stripper Alaina Hicks (a.k.a. Bonnie Rotten), who has gotten out of the business, has re-branded herself as a Second Amendment advocate and someone who has a lot of remorse for her life in porn. Now, as a Gun Chick, she’s a kind of firearms influencer who gets to wear more clothes than she formerly did when she does photo shoots. But those images never fail to draw attention to her impressive physical assets, which are accented by draping weapons over and around them.

Gun Chicks are barely restrained by clothes that are intentionally slutty: they are skin tight, falling off, and otherwise revealing of boobs, butts, and pubes. You can see this in the popular Girls With Guns calendar: here are shots from the 2020 edition, which not only feature breasts popping out of bikini tops and tac vests but incorporate porn tropes. Take a look at February’s lesbian twin scene, Miss March in full leather, or Miss April in black lingerie, fuck me shoes, and an ammunition clip directed towards the space between her legs. Then, there is Miss October, who is bruised, has a split lip, and looks to be waiting for her abuser to come home so she can take him out with what looks to be a small shotgun. And this is a site with high production values. You can visit a cheaper, sadder version of Gun Chick World on the subreddit r/hotchickswithguns.

In other words, Gun Chicks are, by definition, slutty. You can slut-shame them if you like, but it only makes them stronger—which is why it is stupid to get involved with defending someone like Lauren Boebert from slut-shaming. It would be like trying to humiliate Jim Jordan for acting like a rabid animal all the time or criticizing Ted Cruz for acting like a stupid person. It’s part of the package and part of the brand.

So, my fellow feminists, if you wish to go high in this case, be my guest. But you aren’t fighting a battle that Lauren Boebert is interested in. Boebert’s sluttiness is intentional, and it’s something she works hard at. And she knows that what she did in that Denver theater will only make the people who voted for her love her more.

Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian at the New School for Social Research. She is executive editor of Public Seminar and was the author of the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. She lives in New York City.

President Joe Biden

What The Media Gets Wrong About The Centerpiece Of Biden's Agenda

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Last week's election results, which showed modest Republican gains across the nation, set off alarm bells in America's pundit class about the power of progressives in the Democratic party.

Democrats promised change, the Times contrarian Maureen Dowd complained, and instead offered "wokeness" and infighting. Bloomberg's Ramesh Ponnuru warned that even though the Virginia governor's race normally means nothing, former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe's loss was a "portent" and "bad news" for the national party as it moved forward on a human infrastructure package.

Why? As the editorial board of the New York Times warned, with Joe Biden's $1.75 trillion Build Back Better framework, Democrats were moving too far to the left. "The concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government," the Times wrote, "should not be dismissed."

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll argues that 52 percent of Americans prefer a smaller government, up an alarming 11 percent since last year. But does this mean Biden should scale back his aspirations?

No.

It means Americans are radically underinformed.

In every industrialized country but the United States, government programs perform an essentially moderate task. By supporting workers, they support business. They create vital economies that support well-paying jobs. They keep workers healthy, and vulnerable family members safe. They lower tuitions, train workers so that employers don't have to, and make it possible for students to pay back modest loans at affordable rates.

And best of all — if you are one of those centrists — government programs keep people at work. There is no more graphic example of how the United States has failed at this than the number of healthy Americans who cannot, or will not, return to their jobs.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of mid-October, 10.4 million jobs are unfilled. More than 1 million of those workers are mothers who cannot find, or afford, childcare. Some missing workers — 80,000 truck drivers, for example — mean American consumers face shortages of everything from paper towels to covid tests as container ships bob offshore. And prior to the pandemic, school districts in the United States were already short 110,000 teachers.

Republicans, and some centrist Democratic senators, such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, argue it won't. Government "giveaways," we are told, will only make Americans dependent and cripple the economy with higher taxes.

Manchin complains the US will move "toward an entitlement mentality" if Americans who can care for themselves without government help don't. And Sinema, who has raised almost $1 million in donations from lobbying groups, has given a thumbs down to higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, making Build Back Better even harder for deficit hawks in the Democratic Party.

But it isn't clear what Republicans know that conservatives in other countries don't. The United States is the only industrialized country that does not offer paid family leave, and universal childcare, healthcare, and eldercare. In the United States, not only new parents, but sick and injured workers, are back on the job long before they are ready and able to work. And those who can't pay someone to care for family members have to cut back on consumption: experts estimate that American business may be leaving $28.5 billion a year on the table when families re-budget to account for a lost salary.

There is no question that all these policies are moderate because they benefit business. They keep families consuming, and they bring valued workers back on the job rested, healthy and focused. Similarly, knowing that elders and children are well cared for, at an affordable cost, means that families can plan for the big items that drive a healthy economy: houses, cars and appliances, and the thousands of skilled jobs the market in durable goods support.So how would Build Back Better make American business stronger?

But perhaps the biggest categories of government spending that could drive the United States economy are healthcare and education. These economic categories are not only a leading cause of national consumer indebtedness, but also of corporate spending. The cost of college doubles every nine years, and medical debt is currently pegged at $140 billion. Worse, healthcare costs are expected to rise almost six percent through 2028, well above the projected GDP of 4.3 percent.

Why is this bad for business? Because the employers who offer healthcare coverage for over 23 million American workers spent almost $14,000 per employee in 2020. That's over $3.2 trillion.

That number is only slightly less than President Biden requested to pay for a capacious package of universal programs, a number that has been whittled down to half that amount. And corporations spend billions more to administer these programs.

Last Friday, the House finally passed the $1.2 trillion hard infrastructure framework: it had yes votes from Manchin, Sinema — and even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, 17 other conservative senators and 13 House Republicans. Why?

Because it was bold in its scope but moderate in its vision. Businesses know they can't compete in a global economy without modern transportation, roads, technology and data security, and that only federal spending and coordination makes national projects possible.

Human infrastructure — healthcare, eldercare, childcare, education and family stability — is also good for business.

It's not progressive. It's just common sense.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian at the New School for Social Research. She is executive editor of Public Seminar and was the author of the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. She lives in New York City.

Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy

Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy

With fake news on Facebook, trolls on Twitter, and viral outrage everywhere, it's easy to believe that the internet changed politics entirely. In Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy, historian Claire Bond Potter reveals the real roots of today's dysfunction by situating online politics in a longer history of alternative political media. Soon after World War II, pioneers on the left and right began to develop alternative outlets that made politics more popular, and ultimately, more partisan. When campaign operatives took up e-mail, blogging, and social media in a new century, they supercharged those trends.

The following is drawn from Chapter 8, MYBARACKOBAMA, which looks behind the pioneering digital strategies of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

The same passion that brought [veteran Democratic consultant David] Axelrod to Obama also drew a much younger, but equally successful, digital alternative media professional to the campaign. When 23 year-old Chris Hughes took leave from Facebook, the company he had cofounded with Mark Zuckerberg three years earlier, to work with the Obama campaign, he found that despite its eighteen million users, Axelrod and his seasoned operatives neither knew nor cared about the alternative media platform devoted to personal storytelling, friendship, and community building. And yet, everyone in Obama headquarters used digital tools nonstop. Speechwriter Ben Rhodes remembers the young digital natives on the campaign routinely "communicating by Instant Messenger even when we were sitting next to each other." However, Hughes was warned not to speak of Obama as a "Facebook candidate," and to instead say that he was an "organizer," like everyone else, because "the campaign and its energy were not about Facebook at all." Undaunted, Hughes spent his early weeks building a social network around the candidate, using all the digital tools available. Most crucially, he brokered the purchase of a popular MySpace page, MyBarackObama, that a supporter had built after Obama's 2004 convention keynote. It had already accrued 160,000 subscribers.

While they made an establishment campaign consultant like Axelrod nervous, he knew these techniques were the future. Netroots volunteers had ideas about how to "brand" their candidate and "sell" him to their peers, and they were not shy about sharing them with the campaign chiefs. Axelrod had interacted with these activists before when he ran Deval Patrick's 2006 campaign for Governor of Massachusetts. These "young insurgents, some of whom were refugees from Howard Dean's failed presidential bid . . . had glimpsed the potential of the Internet," Axelrod recalled, "and tech-savvy Massachusetts proved to be fertile ground for their new, expansive digital strategies."

Obama's 2008 victory would later be framed in terms of the campaign's mastery of digital alternative media channels, but its leadership, drawn from the political consulting establishment, was reluctant to give authority to progressive populists at the grassroots who might be difficult to control. The many successes of the Dean campaign, such as DeanLink and CivicSpace, built on the early popularity of social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook. But its failures—the high burn rate of campaign funds, overreliance on digital outreach, failure to cultivate mainstream media outlets, and supporters' often eccentric and unrestrained sense of humor—told a cautionary tale about progressive populism's potential for sending a campaign off the rails. Hughes struggled to persuade Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe that social media networks were made up of real people, a new generation of potential political junkies who influenced each other. Making good on Obama's promise that "this campaign is about you," Hughes argued, was more important than Axelrod's insistence that the campaign, not a network of digital volunteers, control the message. Initially rebuffed as "the crazy tech guys in the corner," Hughes and his team began to prove their point with results. By the end of the campaign, the MySpace platform Hughes bought had racked up 2 million friends. Supporters had "planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fundraising pages."

While Obama did not seem to have to work hard to be liked by Democrats, despite her extensive digital outreach, Clinton was saddled with a perception that she was unlikable, stiff, and inauthentic. As cultural critic Susan Bordo reflected later, even Clinton's accomplishments were used against her. Her "polish and poise" were read as insincerity, her familiarity with a broad range of issues as ambition and opportunism. The liberal and feminist blogospheres split bitterly on this issue. Obama and Clinton partisans littered each other's blogs and supporters' social media with vicious comments. Bloggers at Daily Kos, journalist James Wolcott wrote, "faced off like the Jets and the Sharks," a reference to the 1957 Broadway play about gang rivalries, West Side Story.

Unquestionably, the Obama team owned YouTube, and that, too, became a vehicle for creating suspicion about Clinton as conspiracy theories circulating about her on conservative populist sites leaked into the Democratic primary. In March 2007, Obama supporter Philip de Vellis created a mash-up of the now-classic Apple "1984" ad. Now titled "Vote Different," it superimposed Clinton's campaign launch speech on the screen that had displayed Big Brother in the original version. Designed to emphasize Clinton's establishment credentials and association with a controlling federal government, by implication, it promoted Obama's antiestablishment, even revolutionary, potential. As Clinton spoke, the same torpid audience listened, but the hammer thrower wore a singlet with the Obama campaign logo. The final screen read: "On January 14th, the Democratic primary will begin. And you'll see why 2008 won't be like '1984.'" Like the earlier Macintosh ad, this video went viral. One media scholar, blogger, and confessed political junkie remained unsure about how such interventions would reshape the campaign, but admitted that he found "the underlying message of citizen empowerment" in the video "irresistible."

Clinton partisans continued to resent what they saw as mainstream and alternative media bias against their candidate. Indeed, the New York Times assigned newcomer Amy Chozick to Clinton, perhaps believing that her gender was more important than experience: Chozick had never covered a single political campaign and never fully connected with the candidate. Worse, as younger female voters migrated to Obama, some older progressive white women, whom Clinton had imagined to be her core constituency, cooled on her as well. In 2007, a multigenerational group of women writers, journalists, and academics agreed that Clinton was not resonating with them. Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary was a collection of essays published as the campaign was getting off the ground: in them, feminists agreed that Clinton did not meet the challenge of authenticity, which was "shaping up to be the buzzword of the 2008 campaign." Why was she simultaneously so well-known and so unknowable? they asked.

How had professional media women who had supported Clinton through the eight years of her husband's presidency and worn buttons that asked voters to "Elect Hillary's husband" come to dislike and distrust her? How did media women fail to identify with an establishment candidate whose life, successes, and challenges, in many ways, paralleled their own. One answer was that feminism was no longer a sufficient bridge between generations, nor did it speak to the growing partisan divide between establishment liberals and progressive populists in the Democratic Party. Novelist Lorrie Moore saw Clinton's public persona as "too often in pragmatic retreat, overmanaged, increasingly botoxed and schoolmarmish." Political journalist Jane Kramer, reflecting on the Cleavagegate controversy, wanted Clinton to be "a good, generous, and loving person and a steely, scary, effective person." According to novelist Lauren Collins, compared to Obama's direct online connection to voters, Clinton's budding social media presence was "frumpy," just an online version of her managed mainstream media image. Ignoring Obama's thin history as an elected official, Judith Thurman charged that Clinton had paid her political dues, but "not from her own account," running for Senate in a state "where she had no roots" (something that was far from unprecedented, particularly in New York). Some of the authors remarked that Clinton's feminism was simply outdated. "There's something about the reality of Hillary Clinton, the accommodations she's made and the roles she's played, that leaves many of us cold," grumbled Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.

At a moment when progressive populism was on the ascendant in the Democratic Party, Clinton's inability to persuade voters that as a woman, she, too, was an outsider to the establishment, was fatal to a national candidacy. By contrast, the Obama team, however reluctantly at first, successfully leveraged digital alternative media support to redefine the race as a generational contest and capture everyone outside the establishment, regardless of gender or race. The Democratic National Committee helped to push this narrative by reframing traditional political rituals. On July 23, 2007, the eight candidates in the race—Clinton, Obama, Joe Biden, Edwards, Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson—debuted in a debate broadcast on CNN and YouTube, where viewers were invited to send in their questions. The United States Department of State billed the event as a triumph of American political values, inspired and facilitated by the internet. "Politicians accustomed to controlling discussions saw people in T-shirts pose cheeky, incisive questions from all over the country and the world," one press release read. "One question came from an aid worker surrounded by children at a refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan." YouTube was becoming a primary destination for all populist political junkies that year. When they learned that Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul was receiving more hits on YouTube there than any Democrat or Republican, the Republican National Committee quickly announced a YouTube debate for November.

Social media was now a routine tool for political campaigns and for the political establishment. Politicians used it not only to capture the grassroots zeitgeist but also to reach demographics beyond the youth vote, as older people increasingly adopted Facebook. And yet, although the internet was still cheap, it was also still a labor-intensive site for strategizing a campaign. Before turning over the Barack Obama MySpace page to the campaign, its creator had invested thousands of unpaid hours administering it. By March 2007, he sometimes spent his entire evening just approving friend requests. Perhaps this was why one marketing professor who reviewed the sites and apps being used by every campaign in 2007 found many of them hard to navigate, disconnected, and sometimes abandoned.

While maintaining control of their message, the Obama team found creative ways to keep the netroots occupied and energized, while generating content that had a fresh, antiestablishment look. Midway through the primary season, the campaign launched a contest that invited supporters to produce their own political commercials. Sponsored by MoveOn, the "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest was inspired by an earlier, far more divisive 2004 MoveOn contest, "Bush in 30 Seconds," in which political junkies had been invited to create attack ads. This time, makers were carefully instructed to create a positive message. Of course, both worked, since the secret to YouTube virality was to inspire emotion in viewers that caused them to want to view the video repeatedly and share it with others. Videos created by the grass roots were likely to meet that standard; carefully crafted and focus-group-tested videos generated by the Clinton campaign were not.

Organizations like MoveOn, Blue State Digital, and ActBlue, which emerged from the 2004 campaign with powerful email lists of progressive populists, played a game-changing role in 2008 as digital alternative media moved to center stage for fundraising and voter outreach. Well in advance of primary voting, MoveOn, now a political action committee, endorsed Obama, the first time it had ever explicitly supported a candidate. It was also a sign that the netroots alternative media apparatus was throwing its weight behind a challenge to the Democratic political establishment whose most influential, often invisible fundraisers and power brokers were used to picking the candidate they planned to support. MoveOn was now a fundraising and digital alternative media giant. Yet the organization still insisted on its grassroots identity, the importance of small-donation fundraising, and on acknowledging its constituency as collaborators from whom it solicited advice and ideas, not just money. By extension, Obama became the grassroots candidate, a brand that was, ironically, strengthened by his thin political experience.

Why not invite voters with no experience in campaign advertising to join the party? The MoveOn contest rules stated that the ads were not for profit and could not be copyrighted. Instead, the group encouraged the use of the Creative Commons license developed by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. Capitalizing on the cultural obsession with reality television contests, the crowd would vote to choose the finalists. The winners would be chosen by a jury of celebrity Democrats that included blogger Markos Moulitsas; progressive actors Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Adrian Grenier; feminist Naomi Wolf; and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Running the contest allowed MoveOn to identify even more potential Obama supporters as they registered with the site to view the videos and choose their favorites, adding 5.5 million emails to their supporter list. Data collected during those visits also identified the digital profile, and physical location, of each participant. The winner, "Obamacan," featured John Weiler, an Air Force veteran and Republican crossover voter. It ended with a catchphrase that gestured to the growing political divisions between right and left that digital alternative media were accelerating: "Bringing America Together."

Excerpted from Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracyby Claire Bond Potter. Copyright © 2020. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.