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Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politics The Guardian/static.texastribune.org/media/files/4ff8be4f252befbade11cf6981db0ac3/Abbott%20Paxton%20MGO%20TT%2009.jpg)
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If you’re having a hard time telling where government work stops and campaign work begins, which announcements are political and which ones are civic, which ones are paid for by political donors and which are financed by Texas taxpayers, it’s because there is often no difference between the two.
The top three Republican incumbents on the ballot have each amped up their campaigns and their official efforts as the elections approach, with the political and government offices running in parallel, reinforcing the campaigns’ themes.
For instance, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick rolled out a campaign ad touting his hard-line position on immigration and border security. At about the same time, under his state letterhead, he announced the formation of a new Senate Committee on Border Security.
“Public safety is government’s first responsibility and there is no greater threat to public safety in Texas right now than the failed, open-border policies of the Biden Administration,” he said in that news release. Pretty close to what he says in the TV ads for his campaign: “Texas must secure the border because Biden and his administration won’t. And we must stop those here illegally from voting.”
Gov. Greg Abbott held another news conference on the U.S. side of the border — it’s hard to keep count of these things — this time accompanied by a dozen Republican attorneys general, to excoriate the administration’s handling of border security and immigration. Can you guess what ads his campaign is running? They’re about what the campaign sees as the Biden administration’s failures at the border and about Abbott’s endorsement by the union that represents many Border Patrol officers.
Attorney General Ken Paxton’s official press releases are written in the overblown rhetoric of closely fought Republican primary races — like the one he’s in the middle of right this minute.
“The Biden Administration has sown nothing but disaster for our country through its illegal, unconstitutional immigration policies,” Paxton said under government letterhead on Friday morning. “Biden’s latest round of flagrant law-breaking includes his Central American Minors Program, which has contributed significantly to many states being forced to take in even more aliens. My fellow attorneys general and I are suing to stop it.”
His ad echoes that language.
Texas has laws against using public employees and state resources for campaigning. There is a regular seasonal cycle of top state employees of elected officials moving to their bosses’ campaign offices a few months before an election, then moving back into their state jobs after a win. They’re careful to use state phones and computers for one job, campaign equipment for the other.
The fuzzy part is in the work they do, no matter where they are, and how it melds the political work of campaigning with the work of governing. The messages might well be the same, maybe even legitimately in harmony. Someone campaigning for better border security might genuinely want it, and might be saying the same thing in their state job.
But the complaints about what’s happening on the border, while directed at the federal government, might as well be directed at the state officials talking about state-based solutions who haven’t been able to solve the problem. In the case of Abbott, Patrick and Paxton, that’s seven years and counting, through Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, D.C. Their campaigns might as well be directing fire at the incumbents they’re trying to reelect.
If the campaign pitch is that they should be reelected because they want border security fixed, it suggests they’ve been sitting on their hands for all those years — spending billions in taxpayer money, dispatching state police and National Guard troops, rounding up migrants they can accuse of breaking other laws, squalling at and suing the federal government.
It’s a case of politicians listening to Texans’ concerns without solving their problems. Texas voters, and Republican Texas voters in particular, have had border security and immigration atop their lists of most important problems facing the state for more than a decade, according to dozens of University of Texas/Texas Tribune Polls.
They’re still waiting for the government folks to do what the politicians promise every election cycle.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Welcome to the New Political Order. It was announced, ceremoniously, by President Biden
Joe BidenRussia relocates naval exercises due to Irish concerns UK's Johnson says he's ordered armed forces to prepare for deployment next week amid Ukraine tensions Youngkin sparks Democratic backlash in Virginia MORE at his Jan. 19 news conference marking the end of his first year in office. “The public doesn’t want me to be the president-senator,” Biden announced. “They want me to be the president and let senators be senators.”
Biden was announcing a transition from government by deal-making to government by leadership. Deal-making, negotiation and compromise are skills essential to a legislator. But they are not the skills essential to a president these days.
“I’m used to negotiating to get things done,” President Biden said at his press conference. “In the past, I’ve been relatively successful at it. But I think the role as president is a different role.” After all, the president, along with the vice president, are the only political offices elected by the entire country.
Since John F. Kennedy’s administration, television has made politics both more national and more personal. The president’s role is to lead — to articulate the goals and aspirations of the American people.
Biden’s more partisan policies have gotten nowhere — voting rights, expansion of the social safety net, climate change, police reform. Those issues require presidential leadership strong enough to overcome partisan resistance. Not so easy in an era of intense party polarization, when compromise is often seen as betrayal.
“Voting rights always used to be bipartisan,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lamented. This year, only one Republican senator voted to end the filibuster on voting rights. Partisan interest took priority. Republicans know that demographic trends are not in their favor — Democrats have carried the national popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections. So Republicans now want to tighten voter restrictions.
What’s driving partisan polarization? The rise of populism has a lot to do with it. Populism involves resentment of elites. Left-wing populists resent the rich. Right-wing populists resent educated elites and experts who tell them what to do (get vaccinated, wear masks). The radical right has been around for a long time (McCarthyism, the John Birch Society), but the election of Donald Trump
Donald TrumpTrump says he'll treat Jan. 6 rioters 'fairly' if reelected: 'If it requires pardons, we will give them pardons' North Korea fires suspected ballistic missile in 7th test this month Overturning Roe isn't only about red states or abortion MORE has driven them to open revolt. Especially against President Biden, because, in their view, Biden cheated their hero out of re-election.
Social media weaponizes populism. It gives ordinary Americans — especially those with strong opinions — a voice. In social media, there are no editors, no producers, no fact checkers. You can say whatever you want.
Social media also creates a sense of belonging. People find a community of shared opinions online. That re-enforces their views and helps produce a sense of identity. Identity politics is usually depicted as coming from the left (women, minorities, gays) — but it is equally powerful on the right, among people who identify as whites, Christians, “real Americans.” (Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said last week, “African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”) When people’s views are invested in their identities, compromise becomes impossible.
President Biden got elected on a promise of bipartisanship. The clearest sign that we are in a New Political Order came when Biden said, “I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.”
Republicans long ago gave up on bipartisanship. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent calls attention to a revealing statement made by McConnell in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was being considered in the Senate. “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of those proposals,” McConnell said, speaking for his party. “When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
The failure of Biden’s bipartisan efforts, mostly because of solid Republican opposition, has had the effect of making Biden look weak. That is very damaging for a president. A participant in a New York Times Opinion focus group said about President Biden, “He’s a nice guy, and sometimes you don’t need a nice guy being president. You just need someone tough.” A participant in another focus group called Biden “wishy-washy,” an adjective often used in the 1970s to describe former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Jimmy CarterA common-sense salute to the presidency of Jimmy Carter Meghan McCain: COVID-19 battle made me doubt if nation will recover from pandemic Trump and Biden should stop denigrating US elections MORE.
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Bernie SandersCarville says he'd help fundraise for potential Gallego Senate bid Schumer finds unity moment in Supreme Court fight McConnell warns Biden not to 'outsource' Supreme Court pick to 'radical left' MORE (I-Vt.), a populist of the left, offered President Biden this recommendation for a way out: “Our job now is to show the American people what we stand for and what the Republicans stand for.” In other words, show some fight.
In the New Political Order, maybe President Biden could toughen up and use the “how dare they?” trope:
“How dare they argue that protecting the filibuster is more important than protecting the right to vote?”
“How dare they refuse to see climate change as a serious threat to our country?”
“How dare they force suffering Americans to pay exorbitant prices for essential medication?”
In 1886, Winston Churchill’s father uttered a famous battle cry during the fight over Irish home rule, then the most divisive issue in British politics. Lord Randolph Churchill, an opponent of home rule, declared, “Ulster will fight! Ulster will be right!” Imagine President Biden issuing a similar rallying cry when he delivers his first State of the Union speech in a few weeks: “Democrats will fight! Democrats will be right!”
Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable" (Simon & Schuster).
A New York Times analysis reveals how the left outdid the right at raising and spending millions from undisclosed donors to defeat Donald Trump and win power in Washington.
For much of the last decade, Democrats complained — with a mix of indignation, frustration and envy — that Republicans and their allies were spending hundreds of millions of difficult-to-trace dollars to influence politics.
“Dark money” became a dirty word, as the left warned of the threat of corruption posed by corporations and billionaires that were spending unlimited sums through loosely regulated nonprofits, which did not disclose their donors’ identities.
Then came the 2020 election.
Spurred by opposition to then-President Trump, donors and operatives allied with the Democratic Party embraced dark money with fresh zeal, pulling even with and, by some measures, surpassing Republicans in 2020 spending, according to a New York Times analysis of tax filings and other data.
The analysis shows that 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 — compared to roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the G.O.P.
The findings reveal the growth and ascendancy of a shadow political infrastructure that is reshaping American politics, as megadonors to these nonprofits take advantage of loose disclosure laws to make multimillion-dollar outlays in total secrecy. Some good-government activists worry that the exploding role of undisclosed cash threatens to accelerate the erosion of trust in the country’s political system.
Democrats’ newfound success in harnessing this funding also exposes the stark tension between their efforts to win elections and their commitment to curtail secretive political spending by the superrich.
A single, cryptically named entity that has served as a clearinghouse of undisclosed cash for the left, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, received mystery donations as large as $50 million and disseminated grants to more than 200 groups, while spending a total of $410 million in 2020 — more than the Democratic National Committee itself.
But nonprofits do not abide by the same transparency rules or donation limits as parties or campaigns — though they can underwrite many similar activities: advertising, polling, research, voter registration and mobilization and legal fights over voting rules.
The scale of secret spending is such that, even as small donors have become a potent force in politics, undisclosed money dwarfed the 2020 campaign fund-raising of President Biden (who raised a record $1 billion) and Mr. Trump (who raised more than $810 million).
Headed into the midterm elections, Democrats are warning major donors not to give in to the financial complacency that often afflicts the party in power, while Republicans are rushing to level the dark-money playing field to take advantage of what is expected to be a favorable political climate in 2022.
At stake is not just control of Congress but also whether Republican donors will become more unified with Mr. Trump out of the White House. Two Republican secret-money groups focused on Congress said their combined fund-raising reached nearly $100 million in 2021 — far more than they raised in 2019.
Here’s how we conducted our analysis.
The Times’s analysis of 2020 data is likely incomplete: Lax disclosure rules and the groups’ intentional opacity make a comprehensive assessment of secret money difficult, if not impossible. Nonprofits come and go, adapting to shifts in political power and tactics. Some exist in the gray space between philanthropy and politics, many transfer money back and forth, and some can remain hidden in unexamined tax filings for years.
Yet a number of strategists in both parties said their own understanding comported with The Times’s findings that the left eclipsed the right in politically oriented nonprofit spending and sophistication in 2020.
That shift was fueled by several factors.
The big-money right was fractured over whether to support Mr. Trump’s re-election. Anti-Trump Republicans started new groups that were welcomed into the left’s big-money firmament: Defending Democracy Together, co-founded in 2018 by the conservative pundit William Kristol, spent nearly $40 million in 2020 — $10.5 million of it from the Sixteen Thirty Fund. And Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud hamstrung Republican efforts to compete with progressive groups that spent heavily to promote early and mail voting.
On the left, the prospect of a second Trump term spurred a new class of megadonors, and helped allay lingering qualms about the corrosive effect of secret money among some Democrats.
“A range of donors — not just traditional progressive Democrats — had a wake-up call around 2019 where they realized that our constitutional republic was at risk, and that they had to compete through whatever financing vehicles they could, which resulted in a tremendous outpouring of support,” said Rob Stein, a longtime Democratic strategist and adviser to some of the party’s biggest donors.
Mr. Stein, who now focuses on finding common ground between the parties, worries that the increasing embrace of secret-money vehicles will usher in “an ominous new dark-money arms race” and further undermine fraying public trust in government and elections.
There is no legal definition of “dark money,” but it generally has been understood to mean funds spent to influence politics by nonprofits that do not disclose their donors. These groups are usually incorporated under the tax code as social-welfare and advocacy groups or business leagues. Legally, these groups are allowed to spend money on partisan politics, but it is not supposed to be their primary purpose.
The Times also included a select few charities, which provide donors not only anonymity but also a lucrative tax deduction. Charities are supposed to completely abstain from partisan activity, but some have taken advantage of provisions in the tax code that allow them to engage in the political sphere through efforts that are technically nonpartisan, like voter education and registration. On the left, two charities raised tens of millions of dollars each for registration efforts that employed pinpoint targeting of demographic groups that typically vote Democratic.
The analysis also looked into two charitable groups, one aligned with Democrats and one with Republicans, that doled out millions of dollars in grants to nonprofits that engage in voter outreach, and which spent millions more on litigation over voting rules.
The left’s advantage in secret spending holds true even if these charitable groups are excluded from the analysis.
Kevin McLaughlin, who oversaw the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm in 2020, marveled at how Democrats had “built an elaborate, multibillion-dollar dark-money network, while simultaneously railing against the scourge of dark money.”
Republicans still gave heavily to political nonprofits in 2020, though the most well-funded efforts were primarily focused on Congress, underscoring how some donors remained committed to the party even when they were less enthusiastic about directly supporting Mr. Trump.
Two nonprofit groups affiliated with Republican House and Senate leaders were roughly at financial parity with three similar Democratic groups, according to tax records and interviews.
Beyond those nonprofits, Mr. McLaughlin said, “Republicans are bringing spitballs to a gunfight.”
Back in 2005, Mr. Stein helped start the Democracy Alliance, which would grow into an influential club of some of the wealthiest donors on the left. Warning of the superiority of conservative infrastructure, he urged affluent liberals to create counterweights. They responded, seeding institutions like the turnout group America Votes, the Media Matters watchdog group and the Center for American Progress think tank.
But Democrats’ concerns about losing the big-money race spiked again after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. It expanded the kinds of permissible political spending by nonprofits and unleashed a torrent of dark money into elections, particularly on the right, where the industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch oversaw a political operation that came to outstrip the Republican Party financially.
Democrats publicly assailed the Koch operation as epitomizing a corrupting dark-money takeover of American politics. Privately, they plotted ways to compete.
Not long after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Stein returned to the alliance with an alarming new analysis outlining how, by 2016, the right’s spending advantage had resulted in “political dominance” in 30 states and nationally.
As their outrage grew over Mr. Trump’s presidency, so too did Democrats’ giving. Money went to an array of nonprofits working to undermine Mr. Trump, and to boost Democrats.
Campaign watchdogs argue that, since some of that spending went to functions similar to those of party and campaign committees, the same anticorruption disclosure laws should apply. The watchdogs say that dark-money groups flout the spirit of those laws by casting their efforts as focused solely on issues, and not elections.
In North Carolina, for instance, a group called Piedmont Rising received $7 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund and spent $9 million, much of it attacking Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican up for re-election. Some of the group’s ads were designed to look like local news reports from an outlet calling itself the “North Carolina Examiner.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who has sponsored legislation to crack down on secret spending, said the proliferation of dark money has unleashed a “tsunami of slime” that “disserves democracy.”
But he saw one potential silver lining. “With any luck, now that the Democrats are more seriously in the dark-money business,” he said, “Republicans actually might begin to support some transparency.”
President Biden last year urged the Senate to advance legislation to rein in dark money, but it was part of a package that was blocked in January.
The legislation would have closed a loophole that allows nonprofits to transfer secret money into super PACs.
In 2020, the two main super PACs devoted to helping Mr. Biden’s campaign received $37.5 million in dark money. The main super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump received $20.3 million from a linked nonprofit.
A Biden-backing nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, with ties to Silicon Valley billionaires, raised $150 million in 2020 and transferred more than $60 million to an affiliated super PAC, while directly spending nearly $25 million on TV ads, almost $2.6 million on polling and analytics and $639,000 on focus groups, federal records show.
That group’s top data scientist, David Shor, has emerged as a leading Democratic strategist. “I try to elect Democrats,” his Twitter bio reads. Tax records show that he worked 35 hours a week in 2020 for the nonprofit, whose primary purpose is not supposed to be partisan. Future Forward said it advocated for candidates that supported its agenda “consistent with normal nonprofit organizations like ours.”
The lines were just as blurry on the right.
One Nation, a nonprofit affiliated with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, transferred $85 million in 2020 to a linked super PAC, which in turn paid One Nation for rent, salaries and other costs.
In each case, had the donors given directly to the super PACs, their names would have been publicly disclosed. Because the money took an indirect route through a nonprofit, their identities remain unknown.
While the Kochs pioneered the use of centralized hubs to disseminate dark money to a broader network, the left has in some ways improved on the tactic — reducing redundancy, increasing synergy, and making it even harder to trace spending back to donors.
One of the leading purveyors of this technique now is the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which serves as a fiscal sponsor, incubating and supporting an array of progressive projects. Amy Kurtz, the fund’s president, said those projects solicit donations to the fund and direct how the money is spent. All told, Sixteen Thirty provided grants to more than 200 groups — many operating in battleground states.
“While we are dedicated to reducing the influence of special interest money in our politics, we are also committed to level the playing field for progressives,” Ms. Kurtz wrote in a post about the group’s 2020 spending.
Sixteen Thirty is part of a broader network of progressive nonprofits that donors used to fill specific spaces on the political chessboard.
The groups in the network, which also included Hopewell Fund, New Venture Fund, North Fund and Windward Fund, were administered by a for-profit consulting firm called Arabella Advisors. Taken together, the Arabella network spent a total of nearly $1.2 billion in 2020, including paying Arabella a combined $46.6 million in 2020 in management fees, according to the funds’ tax filings.
While the Arabella-managed groups do not disclose their donors, foundations backed by some of the biggest donors on the left have disclosed major donations to the network. Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire eBay founder, disclosed personal and foundation gifts of $45 million to Sixteen Thirty and $1.6 million to Hopewell. A foundation backed by George Soros disclosed gifts of $17 million to Sixteen Thirty and $5 million to Hopewell.
Steve Sampson, an Arabella spokesman, sought to downplay the firm’s role or comparisons to the Koch network, casting it as providing administrative services rather than strategizing how to build the extra-party infrastructure of the left. “We work for the nonprofit, not the other way around,” he said in a statement.
On the left and right, dark-money hubs mixed politically oriented spending with less political initiatives. The Koch network’s main financial hub gave $575,000 to the LeBron James Family Foundation. Hopewell gave nearly $3.8 million to a clinic that provides abortion services and more than $2 million to a Tulane University fund.
In weighing which nonprofits to include in its analysis, The Times considered both their spending on politically oriented efforts, as well as their relationships with allied groups. Some major institutions, such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club, are involved in politics but were excluded because they spent heavily on membership-oriented activities.
The analysis includes three of the five Arabella-administered nonprofits, among them one charity, the Hopewell Fund. It donated to groups that work to reduce the role of big money in politics, but it also gave $8.1 million to a dark-money group called Acronym, which spent millions of dollars on Facebook advertising and backed a company called Courier Newsroom that published articles favoring Democrats and received millions of dollars from dark money groups. It was paid $2.6 million by a nonprofit linked to House Democratic leadership to promote articles.
Hopewell also sponsored a project called Democracy Docket Legal Fund that filed lawsuits to block Republican-backed voting restrictions enacted across the country. It was led by a top Democratic Party election lawyer, Marc E. Elias. His firm at the time, Perkins Coie, was paid $9.6 million by Hopewell, according to tax returns, and another $11.6 million by the Biden-backing Priorities USA nonprofit group.
Two other groups, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, spent a combined $147.5 million in 2020 to register and mobilize voters. They described their targets as “young people, people of color and unmarried women” — demographics that tend to lean Democratic — and said they registered 1.5 million voters in 2020.
Tom Lopach, a former Democratic strategist who now runs both groups, said their work was apolitical and “an extension of civil rights efforts.”
Some groups on the right spent dark money battling Democrats in court over voting laws.
An entity called the Honest Elections Project financed legal briefs defending measures that Republicans cast as protections against fraud but that were being challenged by Mr. Elias as hurdles to voting. It appears to have been the intended recipient of $4.8 million from a dark money group known then as America First Policies, which was started by Trump allies and helped fund a pro-Trump super PAC.
Honest Elections was housed within a nonprofit called the 85 Fund, a charity that is part of a network formed by Leonard A. Leo, a conservative legal activist, to counter what he saw as the left’s increasing superiority in nonprofit political infrastructure.
Mr. Leo left his position as executive vice president of The Federalist Society last year to become chairman of a company called CRC Advisors, modeled on Arabella. Mr. Leo said in a statement that Arabella and its affiliated nonprofits “have added significant firepower to the left’s political agenda.”
“We believe our enterprise can do the same for the conservative mission,” Mr. Leo said.
The Leo-linked groups — the 85 Fund, Rule of Law Trust and The Concord Fund — emerged as a dark-money force in 2020, spending $122 million on issues that animate the conservative base, including judicial confirmation fights.
But their resources paled in comparison to the biggest traditional dark-money powers on the right, which have drawn criticism from allies for backing away from Republicans during the Trump years.
Charles Koch expressed regret over his network’s financial backing of Republicans and proclaimed that his network had “abandoned partisanship” in favor of bipartisan efforts like overhauling the criminal justice system. The United States Chamber of Commerce was accused by a former political strategist of drifting to the left in the weeks before the 2020 election.
A handful of ventures on the right have aspired to fill the vacuum.
Marc Short, who once ran the Koch political operation and later was a top Trump White House aide, raised $15 million for a group started last year to fight Mr. Biden’s domestic spending bill.
“There were some big battles that were going to be fought on taxes, and we did not see that there were groups that were prepared to fight them,” Mr. Short said.
Mr. Biden’s allies created their own dark-money nonprofit to rally support for the bill.
The New York Times’s analysis of dark money in 2020 relies primarily on spending figures disclosed by nonprofit groups in their annual I.R.S. tax filings. The Times reviewed the filings of more than 150 nonprofits to select 15 of the most active politically oriented organizations that generally aligned with each party.
Several of the nonprofit groups included in the analysis file their returns on schedules that do not align with the calendar year. In some cases, those groups voluntarily provided total spending figures for the 2020 calendar year, which were used in the analysis. In other cases, the analysis used figures from the tax returns that covered part of 2019 and part of 2020.
The analysis includes groups registered as chambers of commerce, social welfare groups and charities, registered under sections 501(c)(6), 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(3) of the tax code, respectively.
It does not include think tanks, which can play an outsize role in shaping political debates; donor-advised funds, which funnel hundreds of millions of dollars from major donors into causes that are both political and apolitical; or labor unions, some of which spend heavily on politics, but which are funded mostly by smaller dues payments from individual members.
Grants and transfers made between the groups in the analysis were omitted from the overall spending tallies, but were included in the totals of individual groups.
(CNN)When I read Tom Vanderbilt's "Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning," I found myself underlining and dog-earring stats, notes and quotes on virtually every page. The conceit is simple: Vanderbilt decides, in his mid-40s, to try his hand at a lot of things he had always been interested in but never really pursued -- from singing in a choir to surfing to making a wedding ring.
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In France, anti-vax fury, politics make public service risky CBS17.com
One of the most consistently intelligent and unbiased sources of news about Covid has been The Times’s newsletter The Morning, anchored by David Leonhardt, who fully respects science while being cleareyed about what it hasn’t figured out yet, opts for data over diatribes and tends toward understatement in an age of hyperbole. So when I see that his focus on a given day is the pandemic, I perk up and pay special heed.
That was the case with his analysis earlier this week of the first pandemic-related poll that The Morning commissioned. Its big takeaway, more confirmation than revelation, was distilled in its headline: “Two Covid Americas.” The paragraphs following that demonstrated anew that while a virus isn’t partisan, many Americans’ responses to this one have been emphatically so.
“Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives,” David wrote, elaborating on what the poll showed. “Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives.” And so, he explained, all of those Americans filter information selectively through their political affiliations, which also determine their triage of concerns.
He wasn’t equating a Covid denier or vaccine paranoiac with someone whose mask is more badge than barrier. Nor am I. He was making a wider point about passions and prejudices. He was drawing necessary attention to the intense tribalism of American life now.
The pandemic, which could and should have brought us together, has instead driven us further apart, exacerbating our tribalism, which is an enemy of real progress but a friend to all sorts of dysfunction, all manner of meanness. The irrational obstructionism in Congress and lawmakers’ taste for vitriol and vengeance are tribalism run amok. Cancel culture, be it on the left or right, is a tribal impulse, not merely abetted but amplified by the technology of our time.
We humans are inherently tribal creatures. I get that. I’ve read and remember enough history and headlines not to be surprised. But the work of civilization — the advance of it — involves containing that tribalism, controlling it, moderating it with grander and more unifying ideals.
That work in America is currently in a state of crisis. You saw that at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. You see it in public opinion surveys that document how darkly Democrats and Republicans regard each other. You see it almost hourly on Fox News, which casts Joe Biden not as a flawed president but as a doddering autocrat or socialist puppet turning the United States into a crime-besieged hellscape. You see it every minute — no, every second — on social media.
I’m obviously talking in particular about political tribalism, which, fascinatingly, is growing just as Americans’ attachment to organized religion is waning. Political observers have noted that and mulled the consequences. One of this tribalism’s obvious drivers is many Americans’ substitution of investment and involvement in physical communities with investment and involvement in online ones that more efficiently sort them into cliques of the rigidly like-minded. Another is many people’s use of the internet not to check or challenge their thinking but to validate it.
I also sense that many Americans, overwhelmed by the volume of competing information that comes at them and the furious pace of its delivery, outsource their judgment to a tribe and its leaders. Those leaders give them certainty in place of ambiguity, definitive answers in lieu of smarter questions. They’re liberated from genuine inquiry and freed from doubt.
In the short term, that’s a simpler, easier way to live. And in the long term?
I fear that we’re in the process of finding out.
Sam Anderson’s profile of the Icelandic novelist Sjón in The Times’s Sunday magazine brims, as Sam’s profiles tend to, with magical snippets. “A big orange cat happened to be sprawling in the middle of the sidewalk,” Sam wrote. “Sjón stopped to pet it, and as he did so, he poured out a soft stream of affectionate Icelandic — vowels stretching and plunging and leaping, R’s rolling like creekwater over stones.” Also, focused on that same consonant: “Sjón’s full name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurdsson — a cascade of soft G’s and rolling R’s that sounds, when he says it, like a secret liquid song, sung deep in his throat, to a shy baby horse.”(Thanks to Darren Katz of Amsterdam and Vipan Chandra of Attleboro, Mass., for these nominations.)
Also in the magazine, Alex McElroy explored the satisfaction of holding a grudge, explaining: “A grudge is not a resentment. Sure, they’re made of the same material — poison — but while resentment is concentrated, a grudge is watered down, drinkable and refreshingly effervescent, the low-calorie lager to resentment’s bootleg grain alcohol.” (Kathy Black, Philadelphia)
Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who recently announced that he will run for re-election, is ready grist for rich prose. In The Times, Michelle Cottle noted the dearth of enthusiasm for him in the state he represents: “Polling suggests the senator is about as popular there as Brett Kavanaugh at an Emily’s List happy hour.” (Audrey Brooks, Tucson, Ariz., and Maureen Ryan, Hattiesburg, Miss.) And in The Washington Post, Michael Gerson called him “America’s most reliable source of unreliable information about Covid-19,” adding: “He offers his lack of intellectual seriousness as an element of his political appeal — similar to handing out a résumé with the firings and felonies highlighted.” (Mike Profit, Dunwoody, Ga.)
Here’s a priceless aside in an article in The Guardian by Zoe Williams about the cultural significance of the infamous 1995 sex tape involving onetime spouses Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee: “Arguably, Anderson is just very into nuptials; she managed a marriage, an annulment and another marriage to someone different during 2020, which I think puts your sourdough successes to shame.” (Todd Boes, San Anselmo, Calif.)
In a lovely column in The Times about Ciro Scala, who went back to college after a half-century pause, Ginia Bellafante wrote: “The high school Ciro went to in Brooklyn could not provide his transcript, which turned out to be on microfiche and thus might as well have been preserved on bark.” (Nancy Friedland, Manhattan)
Pithiness, thy name is Maureen Dowd: “Joe Biden better Build Better or he won’t be Back.” (David Stout, Albuquerque, and Bob Walthers, Port Townsend, Wash., among others)
Or is thy name Gail Collins? Pushing back at the idea that Biden should announce that he won’t run in 2024, Gail wrote: “If you don’t have to be a lame duck, why volunteer to hobble when you waddle?” (Karen Coe, Seattle, and Stephen Manes, Santa Monica, Calif.)
Lyricism’s name is Margaret Renkl, who had this to say about people’s claims of ownership of the greenery around them: “A tree’s shade belongs not to us, but to the furtive bobcat making its shadowy way through our cacophonous world.” (Peter Comerford, Providence, R.I.)
It’s rare that I revisit an article praised in a previous installment of this feature, but I’m making an exception for Mike Tanier’s preview of the N.F.L. playoffs, in which he spoofed the key vulnerability of each contender. It was that much fun. Here’s Mike on the Kansas City Chiefs, and for those not familiar with the references to come, Patrick Mahomes is their star quarterback and Tyreek Hill their star receiver: “Nearly every turnover the team coughs up is a Rube Goldbergian series of improbable coincidences: The intended receiver slips before Patrick Mahomes delivers a side-armed pass, the ball ricochets off the receiver’s helmet and the antlers of a gazelle grazing along the sideline before landing in the hands of a defender, who bobbles the ball directly into the hands of a teammate, who nearly runs for a touchdown before being chased down by the gazelle, or by the slightly faster Tyreek Hill.” (Frank Friedman, Voorhees, N.J.)
It’s also rare that I showcase words within an article other than the author’s. But in putting together an obituary of Howard Solomon, Richard Sandomir had the excellent sense to make use of an email he’d received from the man’s son, the writer Andrew Solomon, about how his father had helped him through the depression he recounted in his extraordinary memoir “The Noonday Demon.” From that email: “My father was like a reef that took the violent waves of a frightening world and broke them down into gentle, manageable undulations before they reached the beach where I stood.” (Pete Browne, Kansas City, Mo.)
And now I’m crying.
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
Is affirmative action in college admissions nearing its end? That’s a real possibility, a complicated subject and an important story, addressed in this article in Vox and this one in The Times.
By what strange path did the Republican Party arrive at its current destination? That’s an even more important story, addressed in a new book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” by Jeremy Peters of The Times, that will be published on Feb. 8.
I was late to “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” by Patrick Radden Keefe, which was published last April. But I’m so very glad I finally got to it. I’m halfway through and wholly impressed: It not only tells the story of America’s premier opioid peddlers in a comprehensive and highly readable fashion but also provides an education about diverse facets of American history and industry. I’ve been reminded of past chapters of American antisemitism. I’ve been introduced to many unsavory tricks of the pharmaceutical trade. I’ve been made smarter all the while.
A newsletter reader emailed me the other day with a complaint. I used to refer occasionally to “my man,” he wrote, but since moving to North Carolina, I mention “my dog” instead. “For me you have lost a bit of your edge as a result,” he added. “Still, good luck with the dog.”
And warmest wishes to you, too, sir.
I share his email not in an angry or self-pitying vein. An overwhelming majority of you send me warm wishes, tell me your thoughts about the issues of the day, push back firmly but politely at something I’ve written or even confide your secrets. I’m flattered by your engagement. I’m touched by your generosity. And I’m moved by our mutual sense of this newsletter as a space that’s essentially good-natured and fundamentally respectful.
So much of American life these days is neither. People are slow to decency and quick to nastiness. They too seldom pause to consider fully the object of their sassing or the target of their sniping. It’s more fun just to pop off.
And maybe they assume that we’re all walking around in armor, given the nonstop political and cultural wars into which we’ve been drafted and the fusillade of insults on social media.
That’s why I mention the reader and his email. In his small way, he reflects that ugliness. Forget his inaccuracy: I have never in my life written the phrase “my man,” and my dog, Regan, appeared in my life and in this newsletter long before my move south. Focus instead on his petty cruelty.
For all he knows, my nearly 10-year relationship, the end of which he rightly picked up on, left me devastated. For all he knows, I had no say in its end. For all he knows, I’ve very much wanted a next relationship but simply haven’t succeeded in finding it — and Regan isn’t my substitute but my consolation. For all he knows, I’ve been stripped of my armor and he drew blood.
I’m not saying that any or most of that is true; if he cares to read my soon-to-be-published book, about my medical and emotional odyssey over the past few years, he can learn what’s what and make a fresh appraisal of my “edge.”
I’m saying that if you don’t know all the facts, shouldn’t you hold your fire?
That’s a good rule of thumb for our private interactions.
It’s equally good for our public ones.
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