It’s like everyone said:
Haaretz:
No, You Do Not Have to Feel the Trump Voter’s Pain
There is no reason, after five and half years of untruths, dog-whistles, slurs and conspiracies, and weeks of Trump trying to undermine Biden’s win, to hug the people who want to disenfranchise you
Of course, it is part of the ethos of liberal newspapers to offer a broad spectrum of views on its opinion pages. I’m proud to do that myself, whether my good faith is accepted or not.
But it is not a requirement to adopt a quantitative ratio for pro-Trump views when the right-wing media ecosystem is so huge, and it is vanishingly rare for liberals and leftists to appear in their prime editorial real estate. It’s not like Fox News or the Federalist have published an op-ed by Kamala Harris.
There is no shame for liberal newspapers to foreground the arguments that relate to their center and left politics. There is no shame when a newspaper endorses a candidate, and that candidate wins, to celebrate the win without offering participation trophies to the losing side, and to enjoy success for the few nanoseconds before the left resumes cannibalizing itself.
Politico:
Elissa Slotkin Braces for a Democratic Civil War
Victorious but chastened, the moderate from Michigan thinks her party has something to learn from—yes—Donald Trump.
This should have been a moment to revel—or at least to exhale, to look on the bright side after a long, dark campaign. But Slotkin is not wired that way. The same mentality that kept her on edge during three tours in Iraq, endlessly monitoring threats—old and new, real and perceived—animates her approach to politics. She cannot relax. She cannot stop “thinking strategically” about what’s around the corner. Not when she had so many questions and so few answers. Was the president, Donald Trump, going to concede defeat and allow for a peaceful transition of power? Would the Democratic Party, which had won the presidency but suffered dramatic losses down-ballot, fracture along emergent ideological fault lines? Were Americans, who had been told on the authority of the White House that the election was illegitimate, facing a crisis of confidence in their democracy?
Jonathan Mahler/NY Times magazine:
Can America Restore the Rule of Law Without Prosecuting Trump?
The stakes of an indictment would be very high. The commander in chief’s broad powers under the Constitution could make it difficult to secure convictions. The damage to democracy that would be caused by a failed prosecution of a former president is hard to even fathom. An acquittal could also set back future efforts at accountability, and embolden aspiring abusers of authority. Even once he’s out of office, Trump is going to be a powerful force in the country’s political life; putting him on trial for his conduct as president would be tantamount to putting on trial the more than 72 million Americans who voted for his re-election. One institution that Biden will no doubt be focused on trying to rebuild is the Justice Department; prosecuting Trump could complicate any effort to restore the agency’s reputation for independence and integrity. There are logistical issues, too. Prosecuting a former president could mean convicting him, and the idea of sending a former president to prison does indeed seem fantastical.
If history is any guide, the desire to “move on” will only grow stronger in the weeks and months ahead. But how does the country move on from a president whose disregard for the law has been so constant and pervasive? Every president seeks to exploit the immense power of the office, but Trump’s exploitation of this power represented a difference in both degree and kind. Never before had a president leveraged so much of the “energy” of the executive branch — Alexander Hamilton’s word — to advance his personal interests. Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush stretched the limits of their authority in the name of national security. Trump stretched the limits of his authority not just to enrich himself and his family but to block investigations into his personal and official conduct and to maintain his grip on power.
Yuval Noah Harari/NY Times:
When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure — and their inherent falsehood.
Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the global cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”
Thirty-seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.
Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.
But at its heart, Nazism was a global cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”
Kevin M Kruse/MSNBC:
Trump’s accusations of fraud in Georgia echo decades of racial violence
Georgia’s Black voters are carrying on the fight their parents and grandparents started.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, however, eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, ending the pre-clearance requirement and opening the door for renewed campaigns of voter suppression.Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, Brian Kemp, a Republican, purged an estimated 1.4 million voters from the rolls from 2010 to 2018, with nearly 670,000 removed from the rolls in 2017 alone. A year later, Kemp blocked registration efforts from 53,000 state residents, 70 percent of them Black. At the same time, his office closed 214 polling sites across Georgia, predominantly in poorer counties with sizable African American populations. As he wrapped up this massive campaign of voter suppression in 2018, Kemp ran for governor himself. He won, but by the narrowest margin in nearly 50 years — roughly 55,000 votes.
Roxanne Khamsi/Wired:
This Pandemic Must Be Seen
If we could watch what’s really going on in hospitals, there would be no more complacency.
IN MARCH, WHEN the new coronavirus prompted lockdowns around the world, many people felt it came out of the blue. There were plenty of earlier warnings, though, for those who knew where to find them. At the end of December, a low-tech news site beloved by infectious disease doctors relayed that the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee had sent out “an urgent notice on the treatment of pneumonia of unknown cause.” By January 4, STAT’s Helen Branswell was warning of a possible link to “a new virus, and perhaps even a new coronavirus.” As for me—a medical journalist who has been reporting on coronaviruses from time to time since 2004—the terrifying, revelatory moment of this pandemic came not from reading any sentence in a news story or by checking bulletins from overseas. It came from watching a woman’s scream.I first saw the scream at the end of January: A 14-second clip passed around on social media that showed a health care worker sitting in a chair in what looks to be a break room. She’s letting out one devastating howl after another, while most of the others in the room are doing what they can to ignore her anguish. (The woman just beside her noodles anxiously on a cellphone.) I do not know who these people are. I do not know where the clip was filmed. I don’t even know for sure that the footage is from Wuhan or that it was taken during the pandemic. But the rawness in her cries crystallized the possibility in my mind that this new viral outbreak was something far beyond the norm.
