Politics & Rule
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“The Unrestricted Dumping Ground,” via The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c146bf32-7fda-68d3-e040-e00a1806693f. This page includes a high resolution TIFF download option, which is what I used to examine the detail. ↩︎
Via Stephen West (@stephenwest.bsky.social) comes news that businesses and offices near the White House are boarding up their windows. The pictures resemble hurricane preparations, but this is about possible riots and would-be insurrectionists.
Telling myself that we often take the hard way, but eventually we get things right. Hoping we’re nearing the inflection point toward the latter now.
The past is being whitewashed at the National Archives museum.
The changes to the new exhibits are remarkable. A photo of King was replaced with one of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley. A “proposed exhibit exploring changes to the Constitution since 1787,” including “amendments abolishing slavery and expanding the right to vote,” was reduced in size, and employees were told that “focusing on the amendments portrayed the Founding Fathers in a negative light.” Shogan “told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees” and her aides “also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational material.” An exhibit on coal communities “cut references to the environmental hazards caused by the mining industry.” Shogan’s aides “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” A photo of Betty Ford wearing an Equal Rights Amendment pin was removed from a video, and in an exhibit of “patents that changed the world,” the birth control pill was replaced with, of all things, the bump stock.
Nathan J. Robinson, “It’s Going to Take a Constant Fight to Preserve the Historical Record,” Current Affairs, October 31, 2024.
It’s striking how many candidates for state office in New Hampshire don’t make their party affiliation obvious in their campaign mailers and ads. Was it always like this? Is it a side effect of our contentious national politics? Or is it due to the orange candidate’s problems?
One of the 8-inch M110 self-propelled howitzer crews I served on in the mid 1980s was majority Puerto Rican. If I recall correctly, two of us were white, two Black, and six Puerto Rican. I feel richer for having had such experiences than the orange role-playing garbage man will ever be.
If you’re gonna put people on the phone to urge residents to support your candidate, you better make sure they know more than their hastily read script. They should also make clear what organization they’re working for, not just what candidate they’re supporting. I say “working”, because I’d expect a volunteer to be better informed than the caller was, and the caller sounded more Mid-Atlantic than New England. I guess scaling this kind of effort is never easy. Besides, I only answered because I was curious what local pitch I might hear, but this wasn’t that.
Election Refusal as Career
Highly recommended reading: “David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal” by Anna Bower and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, October 31, 2024.
The phenomenon described is worrying, but the telling is engaging, even entertaining—maybe because it feels so American to me.
Seeing pictures of the crowds of Harris–Walz supporters at the Washington Monument in DC tonight is heartening. They make me feel at home. That’s where I stood for Obama’s inauguration in 2009 – and for Independence Day celebrations despite the post-9/11 security theater.
'The Unrestricted Dumping Ground' (1903 Cartoon)
This color cartoon by Louis Dalrymple appeared in Judge magazine in 1903.1 It linked immigration to national security by portraying Italian immigrants in ways that prefigured Trump’s despicable, racist rhetoric about “bad hombres” and pet-eaters in the present presidential race. The federal government, personified here as Uncle Sam, comes off as old and ineffectual.
At least, that’s what I see. Here: Old Uncle Sam stands at the ramparts of fortress America, bounded by the sea. The smoke from his pipe forms a wreath to his left. In that appears the late President William McKinley, assassinated in 1901 by the Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Uncle Sam has an arm and hand around the flagpole and a cane in the other hand. Rats, monkeys, and other immigrating vermin emerge from the water, clamber up the rampart, and scurry away.
Some of the dehumanized immigrants are armed with a knife or pistol, and they wear a floppy, broad-brimmed hat or a bandana in anarchist red or the Italian tricolor. Their weapons and head apparel read “Socialist,” “Anarchist,” “Murderer,” “Assassination,” and “Mafia.” More inhuman riffraff falls from a garbage chute marked, “Direct from the slums of Europe daily.” There is also a cluster of regular gray rats in the harbor.
The message is clear. The immigrants, in this case Italians, are criminal, radical, or just socially undesirable. They are other, vermin, and their presence threatens the country.
Whenever Olaf Scholz sees an opportunity to do the wrong thing for European security and Ukraine, he seizes it. I don’t know how his foreign and defense ministers put up with this. The Wall came down 35 years ago, and yet there’s still no backbone or leadership in sight.
I never thought I’d be reprising this post from February 2017. Even the dominant color of this 1926 Mussolini cartoon is on point. 🍊
It hurts to hear that someone’s getting sucked even further into the black hole of MAGA, parroting the worst lies and injuring the feelings of family in the process because the orange dipshit is somehow a model of masculinity worth emulating.
Wow! Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement (report by David Folkenflick for NPR)
Pre-Election Jitters Be Still
I don’t think that would-be MAGA putchists should be under any illusions about the Biden administration’s willingness and ability to use force to defend the results of the upcoming election, should that become necessary. Public officials acting in bad faith will only be able to go so far without risking prison. Yes, many of us are nervous because of the Supreme Court’s interference in 2000, the January 6 debacle, and the work the GOP has been doing to undermine the upcoming election in battleground states. But the bad-faith actors are delusional. They might try some tricks, but most won’t stick their necks out. The country will happily embrace a clear result in Harris’s favor, as it did for Biden. It will just replace the ageism with sexism and racism.
I am adding some old blog posts that were largely saved by the Internet Archive. I’m doing this by hand in order to review links and to skip posts that no longer have a context. I started this effort because I remembered blogging a little about politics in 2008, and I wanted to bring that in for perspective in these fraught times.
Evening update: I made it through 2008. (I forgot how angry I was at McCain in this campaign.) There will be at least a few more bits and bobs from 2009 to add later.
Societies, societal attitudes, and cultural norms change, but people not so much. Positive societal developments reinforce a healthy sense of progress and purpose, but they also trick us into taking too much for granted. Blind to the darkest parts of our own natures, we are caught off guard when the greed, cynicism, hubris, fear, prejudice, and hatred of individuals and mobs assert themselves.
The paradoxical relationship between societal change and human nature can be confounding, but it must not be permitted to immobilize us. There are so many examples of people following their better natures in the final weeks of this electoral fight, so many doing their best to be brave and not despair.
It’s one thing to criticize presentist thinking and optimistic notions of human progress that don’t comport with professional historiography. It’s quite another to be punched in the face repeatedly by the reality of historical contingency in our national experience these past few decades.
Photo of “African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs ‘We demand the right to vote, everywhere’ and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama” by Warren K. Leffler, March 12, 1965. Source: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014645538/.
We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday 2024), Epilogue, “Decouple, De-Risk, Rebuild”
"[American] conservatives hyped anti-Ukraine videos created by a TV producer who also worked for Russian media" – AP News, Oct. 18, 2018. #DefendFreedom #VoteBlue #RussiaIsATerroristState
“Autocracy in America” – a podcast by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look.
This is a fascinating and deeply unsettling listen by the authors of books indispensable for understanding the current moment: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024); and Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). 📚
A remarkable indictment: “We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’" by John D Miller (head of marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal for some 25 years), U.S. News, Oct. 16, 2024.
Thoughtful, informative, even fun reporting by Kerry Howley: “Code Red: Watching the Tim Walz Magic Trick Up Close”, Intelligencer, Oct. 17, 2024.