No Sift for the next five weeks. The next new articles will appear on November 2. Globally, then, Trump is in exactly the opposite position of where Machiavelli said a prince should be: hated but n…

For weeks I’ve been promising a review of The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán. Now that it comes time to deliver, I find I have more of a commentary than a full review. You can find wide-ranging inte…

Why this lost war is different from the others. In the current Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien announces the end of the “American age”. (The link is a gift from O’Brien and shoul…

They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. – Thomas Zimmer, “How to Stop Trumpism from Rising in Germany and Europe” This we…

What if both kinds of Democrats are taking the wrong approach to resisting fascism? The victory of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region eight days…

My worry is that this gets filed away as a freak event, when the same small river flooded 14 months earlier and nobody moved a gauge onto it. “Freak” is the word that we use for things …

Obeying orders doesn’t mean you can’t drag your feet. In January 2025, a few weeks before Donald Trump would be sworn in to begin his second term, the America First Policy Institute iss…

Labor Day is the traditional signal for Democrats — but usually not Republicans these days — to abandon their edgier positions and “move to the center”. In some situations t…

Bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others. …

Here is the thing. If you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, I am not calling you a…

A few months ago it looked like a pipe dream. But maybe … For some while, conventional wisdom has said that the Democrats were likely to retake control of the House in 2026, but that the Sena…

There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, …

Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests. – Robert Reich “The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan” This week’s featured post is “Why the fre…

Don’t react to labels, paraphrases, or guilt by association. Listen to what he says. It wasn’t the blow-out the polls had predicted, but progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated th…

So, how did we get here? Not because one party discovered a winning campaign slogan, a charismatic leader, or because of one presidential election. We arrived here because one political movement de…

Good short- and medium-term political news has emboldened some writers to remind us of the longer-term bad news. The good news is that polls for the fall elections keep looking better. The unpopula…

People [are] calling us the “far left” and we are literally just out here talking about funding public schools and keeping hospitals open and paving roads. – Jess Piper There is no featured p…

You may think the camps are for someone else. DHS has already floated “100 million deportations” as a real number. Only 47 million people living in America were born somewhere else. Hitting 100 mil…

Cory Doctorow’s recent book not only outlines how “enshittification” works, but lays out solutions. The problem with Google. Recently I was trying to plan an upcoming trip to Pari…

Arms are of little value in the field unless there is wise counsel at home. – Cicero This week’s featured post is “Graham Platner’s exit, and the debate it leads to”. …

A quick convention to replace Platner will raise some long-brewing issues. So Graham Platner is out. Having overcome a number of past controversies, he finally faced more than he could explain away…

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. – the Declaration of Independence This week’s featured post i…

We’re not in a Manichean struggle between two monolithic systems. We’re just deciding where to draw the line between the private and public sectors of our economy. If you believe the he…

If you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes. – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, responding to Republican fears of investigations by a future Democratic Congress This week’s …

The Supreme Court signs off on Trump’s program to Make America White Again. Other than openly professing Nazis, the anti-immigrant voices in the US get incensed at the suggestion that what th…

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share. – Barack Obama, opening the Obama Center Friday T…

How narrative turns into destiny. I’ve mentioned before the writer A. R. Moxon and his blog The Reframe. [See endnote 1.] He doesn’t do the weekly news processing I do here, but instead…

guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one. – Amy (@lolennui.bsky.social) This week’s featured post is “What t…

Can we buy a redemption story without sinking into the same moral morass Republicans have? In spite of a variety of accusations (some of which he has admitted and apologized for), Graham Platner wo…

A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life. Real men serve others. Weak men ser…

It’s the nature of fascism to keep expanding its list of enemies. No matter who you are, they’ll get to you eventually. “First they came for the Communists …” Martin N…

The president is suing himself and compensating other people for legal claims that have not been identified from people that we don’t know. We just haven’t seen anything like that. – Adam Zim…

I hate to even ask this question, because it’s been discussed so often over the years, and the hopes raised have (up until now) always been dashed. But maybe? Maybe? Way back in 2015, when Tr…

We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious …

Maybe the reason the government is working so badly for you is that it works so well for him. Ever since he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has posed a unique problem for his opponent…

Good people, people who go to church, people who love their families, people who believe they’re good have, throughout the history of this country, done deeply, profoundly wrong things to Black Ame…

Why have predictions about recent wars gone so horribly wrong? Ukraine. On February 21, 2022 — just three days before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Robert Kagan, a f…

Can democracy flourish, or even survive, if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it? [A previous version of this post didn’t load for some users, so I republ…

Can democracy flourish, or even survive, if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it? One of the great moments in American politics happened on March 15, 1965. It w…

The best way to achieve what is now the central war aim — opening the Strait — would have been simply not to start the war in the first place. – Josh Marshall This week’s featured posts…

A bad process, but a good cause. One of the first things President Trump did in his second term was to “declare that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” and respond by direct…

Iran is not the only war Trump started, but appears to be losing. Virginia became the latest state to gerrymander its congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections. Tuesday, a referendum t…

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. – Pope Leo XIV This w…

Trump voters are beginning to regret their decisions. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll turn around. What Hungary can teach us about the full process. MAGA discontent. A runni…

The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our ri…

No sifts for two weeks. The next new articles will appear April 13. In the dramatic circumstances of war … the media must guard against the risk of becoming propaganda. … It is up to yo…

With no goal to achieve, it’s hard to see how this ends. Two weeks ago, I opened the weekly summary with a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “If one does not know to which port o…

The transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader …