Category Civil Rights

Our elections ARE at risk, if you know who gets his way

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The most surprised I ever was about anything in my life was the day I watched on television as thousands of members of MAGA world rioted at the U.S. Capitol, physically assaulted the law officers on duty there and tried to illegally interfere with the peaceful transfer of presidential power, because they believed Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.  Ultimately they only delayed the work of Congress, and the fact that the criminal convictions of more than 1200 people for their actions that day were erased by TFG’s clemency doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; it did, and we all saw it.  He hasn’t stopped lying about that ever since; he’s now laying the groundwork to easily steal the next election.

Earlier this month the president repeated a call for the Republican Party to nationalize federal elections.  Despite the Constitutional provision that elections for federal office are to be run by the states (or perhaps just ignoring the Constitutional direction, as he often does), Trump appeared on a podcast and said he “believed the federal government should ‘get involved’ in elections that are riddled with ‘corruption,’ reiterating his position that the federal government should usurp state laws by exerting control over local elections.”  You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the places he believes to be “riddled with corruption” are places where Democrats do well.  Only  places where Democrats do well.

Mr. Trump’s comments and an intensifying Republican push in Congress to tighten voting laws — along with an F.B.I. move last week to seize ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga., — suggests a broader drive by the president and his allies to sow distrust of American elections ahead of midterm balloting in November.

Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly forecast in recent months that Republicans would lose midterms, after the party was rattled by losing several local races last November, and a Democrat won a special election in Texas last week in a district that Mr. Trump had won by double digits.

Voting by noncitizens happens rarely, and it is already illegal in federal elections. But Mr. Trump and many of his allies repeatedly and baselessly insisted during the 2024 election that noncitizens were flooding to the polls — a campaign of misinformation that has ramped up in recent weeks as the election nears.

The Justice Department, which has been newly politicized under Mr. Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file.

You’ve got to give the Trumpers credit for being better organized about election rigging this time around: his new director of election security and integrity, “with the power to refer criminal investigations…into things that have been thoroughly debunked,” is “Kurt Olsen, a rather prominent character in Mr. Trump’s election denialism movement. Mr. Olsen, who is a lawyer, was considered by people in the first Trump administration to be a fringe menace.”  Fox, meet henhouse.  (No, not that Fox.)

No matter how many times the results of the 2020 election have been rehashed, Mr. Trump’s fixations have not abated. Mr. Olsen’s position is proof of that.

But he is not the only one. The president has installed proponents of his fraud claims all across his administration. And increasingly, he has started to cast doubts on the coming midterm elections as Republicans face potentially big losses in November.

(snip)

“Kurt Olsen has a history of abusing his law license to spread lies about our elections,” said Christine P. Sun, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections. “Now, he’s using his role in the administration and the power of the federal government to take actions fueled by those same lies. It’s part of a multipronged approach that threatens state power over our elections.”

Mr. Olsen has said he began his career in the 1990s at the large corporate Washington firm Kirkland & Ellis. He went to Christmas parties at the home of Jeffrey A. Rosen, a partner in the law firm at the time who would go on to become the acting attorney general during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Olsen has said. Mr. Olsen has said that he never did any election legal work.

During the frantic weeks following the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and others immediately began claiming, without evidence, a wide variety of problems with election machines. Mr. Olsen, too, came to believe that “something was not right,” he said in a legal deposition in 2023.

(snip)

That started him on a path of taking on cases that many other Republican attorneys avoided putting their names on, including one brought before the Supreme Court in December 2020 seeking to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat at the polls. Mr. Olsen has said that the team worked “round the clock” to put the case together.

After the Supreme Court rejected the case, Mr. Olsen said he spoke to Mr. Trump and discussed a strategy to have a similar suit brought by the Justice Department. He also pressed his old colleague Mr. Rosen to bring the case on behalf of the country.

But Mr. Rosen told Mr. Trump in an Oval Office meeting that the case would not be accepted because of a lack of standing. Mr. Trump responded that Mr. Olsen had promised it was a “slam dunk,” according to a report from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Even after Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Olsen continued to press the false claims about election machines. He found a like-minded ally in February 2021 when, according to Mr. Olsen’s testimony, Mr. Trump introduced him to Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, who has become best known for promoting the falsehood that voting machines are often rigged and have flipped elections.

The two worked together for years with a movement of activists and cybersecurity experts around the country to promote conspiracy theories about election machines through lawsuits, media appearances and yearly conferences.

Mr. Lindell was a public face of the movement. With less bombast, Mr. Olsen served as the lawyer for many of the cases, including an attempt to overturn the 2022 election for Arizona governor. Mr. Olsen represented Kari Lake, an election denier who ran failed campaigns for statewide office in Arizona. (She was also rewarded with a role in the new Trump administration, one that allowed her to oversee the firing of most of the journalists at Voice of America.)

Repeatedly, though, Mr. Olsen faced resounding defeats. In Arizona, he was sanctioned in federal court for making false claims. In Georgia, a legal effort on behalf of the DeKalb County Republican Party challenging the state’s use of election machines failed.

Still, the movement’s proponents have survived despite those defeats.

Heather Honey, who was a witness for the unsuccessful lawsuit that Mr. Olsen brought on behalf of Ms. Lake, was given a position in the Department of Homeland Security overseeing election integrity. Marci McCarthy, who was the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, now oversees public affairs at the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Clay Parikh, who served as an expert witness for Mr. Olsen in his cases in both Georgia and Arizona, is now a special government employee whose analysis was relied on in the F.B.I.’s Fulton County investigation, according to the affidavit.

And not least is Mr. Trump himself — the man who keeps trying to rewrite the country’s past and is now in charge of its future.

An important point to acknowledge here is that there may be  good reasons to have the federal government involved in running elections.  In a 2012 book UCLA law professor Richard Hasen argued that an independent, non-partisan body in charge of national elections “could decrease the amount of partisan fighting and litigation over election rules, increase the competence of election administration, and assure we have a system run with integrity and fair access to voting.”  But one thing has changed his mind…actually, one person:

Donald Trump has caused me to abandon this argument. As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: “What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles.”  At this point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion. [emphasis added]  Courts have ruled that parts of Trump’s executive order are unconstitutional because the president has no role to play in the administration of elections.

Trump’s comments on nationalizing elections ironically prove the point that we should not nationalize elections. He apparently wants to target the administration at blue states, doing who-knows-what to make it harder for people to vote for Democrats. He desperately fears a Congress controlled by Democrats that could check his and his administration’s power. As he did in 2020, when he unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the results of the fair presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden, Trump hangs it all on voter fraud. His comments to [Dan] Bongino about noncitizens voting, just like his comments about mail-in balloting, show Trump as either a liar or delusional. The amount of election fraud of this type is extremely rare. We know it because states, including red ones like Georgia—where Trump’s administration recently raided election offices in a serious threat to the 2026 vote—have gone hunting for fraud and found very little.

(snip)

We should now look to states to step up the competence, integrity, and accessibility of their election systems. They serve as the front line against election subversion. Diffusion of power in the states makes it much harder for Trump to mess with the midterm elections. Whether or not the Framers intended it, our messy, decentralized, partly partisan, uneven system of administering elections turns out to be the best bulwark against would-be authoritarian presidents.

This is another example of an overworked Trump trick: telling lies to “create” a problem where none exists (massive election fraud) so he can suggest a “solution” (nationalizing elections) that would allow him to benefit…himself, in this case, to take official, legal control of elections so he can dictate the results.  If it works in the 2026 midterms – helping Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate – what might happen in the 2028 general election?

He’s daring us to stop him.

The real RINOs

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Today’s Republican Party claims to be the only truly patriotic, fully America-loving and God-fearing political party in the country, the one that will protect regular America-loving and God-fearing citizens from the perfidies of big gummint and make the country, well, you-know-what again.  So, how are they doing with that today?

Well, as I write this we are just hours away from the gummint shutting down much of its operations because Congress cannot pass the legislation needed to pay the bills.  But not because the Congress and the president haven’t been able to come to a compromise: this past May President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy did agree on total spending levels through 2024.  It’s that some Republicans in the House refuse to accept the deal.  If there is no agreement by the deadline we can all look forward to enjoying life with only “essential services” from Washington.  If you are a government worker (as I was) who is deemed essential (as I was not), you get to keep working but not be paid for it; non-essential workers just get furloughed.

So much for Republicans looking out for the average, America-loving, God-fearing citizen.

What Republicans are doing instead of keeping the government running smoothly is kicking off an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.  Against whom they have no evidence – zero – of his commission of an impeachable offense.  Who brought witnesses who say they don’t see it, either:  Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor, said “In fact, I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment.”  The same Republicans who screeched that Democrats were weaponizing impeachment against the former guy (who was as innocent as the day is long during his presidency, they insisted, and who is just being victimized by 91 criminal and civil indictments (so far) in his post-presidency) are only doing the Lord’s work in rooting out corruption in government.

The weird thing is, the same Republicans who are trying to use the mechanisms of government to impeach a president of the other party (albeit one who faces no substantiated allegations of any wrongdoing) are the same ones who by obstinately refusing to compromise on a spending plan will force much of that same government to close up shop for an indefinite period.  (Although, not Congress or their investigation.)  This is not, historically, what the Republican Party has been about.

The Grand Old Party was organized in the early 1850s as a coalition opposed to the expansion of slavery into new states and territories, and after the Civil War its majority in Congress –- the Radical Republicans -– passed laws to, among other things, protect the rights of freed slaves.  While Democrats in the South worked to chip away at the Reconstruction reforms, Republicans became more and more associated with the interests of business; some also supported (gasp!) progressive efforts for social reforms.

The growth of the federal government through the New Deal period and World War II encouraged more and more Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights for blacks (and other non-whites) and most expanded government programs to move to the Republican Party, where they joined up with conservative Christians stirred to action by opposition to “culture issues” that they were persuaded were threatening the “Christian nation” that God had intended America to be.  These elements came to control the party…or at least they did until they handed over the keys to a circus clown from New York.

Today those Republicans who are part of “MAGA nation” – polls say they are less than 25% of the nation as a whole — seem ever so pleased with themselves any time they get the opportunity to act-out as childish name-callers; one of their favorites is to brand a fellow Republican with whom they have some disagreement on a point of policy, no matter how trivial, as being a Republican In Name Only.  (How clever.)  But they are the real RINOs, who have succeeded in taking control of a once-respected political organization and philosophy and turned it into a vehicle (a clown car?) for instituting their warped social views into law.  It’d be a lot funnier if they weren’t so successful.

Court rejects race-based solution for race-based unfairness…hopes for the best

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It’s no easy trick to find a way for a society to accept responsibility for the wrongs of the past that will satisfy everyone as being fair and effective.  In today’s America, we can’t even agree that “we” have such a responsibility, much less concur on how we can make a good faith effort to address the injustices suffered by the generations of Black Americans since the early 17th century.

Three generations ago America made an effort when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.  But many felt more was needed, and as Jerome Karabel explains in today’s New York Times, “In a historic commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson laid out the intellectual and moral basis for affirmative action.”

Speaking less than a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and two months before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he invoked a metaphor that remains resonant 50 years later: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Affirmative action – race-based preferences in education, hiring and more – have been an attempt to correct historic race-based mistreatment.  Karabel says “After a brief honeymoon of public support, affirmative action was met with a powerful backlash, and the policy has been under attack ever since. Decades of lawsuits and legislation have chipped away at the use of racial preferences. And now, in a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court has consigned them to the grave.”

From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday held that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that relied in part on racial considerations violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

The votes split along ideological grounds, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the conservative members in the majority, and the liberals dissenting. While the ruling involved race-conscious programs at Harvard and UNC, it will affect virtually every college and university in the United States.

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Roberts said the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

But he added that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

(snip)

In a lengthy dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s lone Latina justice, wrote that it is “a disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required” to reverse precedent [of previous court rulings supporting affirmative action].

Sotomayor, who has said her own life is an example of how affirmative action programs can work, spoke at length from the bench on Thursday, a tactic justices use to mark their profound disagreement with a decision.

“Equal educational opportunity is a prerequisite to achieving racial equality in our Nation,” she wrote, joined by [Justice Ketanji Brown] Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan.

“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits,” Sotomayor’s dissent said. “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

As Jackson put it, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.  But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

If it can find that race can’t be a factor in college admissions, it should only a matter of time before the court expands that reasoning to include private business, and to say that considerations of race – in the form of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives – are also unconstitutional.

More from Karabel:

While race-conscious affirmative action is no longer permissible, it is worth noting that the Supreme Court ruling leaves intact many other forms of affirmative action — preferences for the children of alumni, preferences for the children of donors and preferences for student athletes, including for such boutique sports as sailing, fencing and squash. The consequences of this change are not entirely predictable, but based on what happened at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, after they were barred from pursuing race-conscious admission policies, a sharp decline in Black and perhaps Hispanic enrollments at highly selective colleges and professional schools seems almost certain. To offset the loss, many colleges are likely to switch to a policy of affirmative action based on economic class. Such a policy would attenuate, although by no means eliminate, the racial impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Affirmative action based on economic class is likely to enjoy broader public support than race-conscious affirmative action; according to a recent Washington Post poll, 62 percent of Americans believe that students from low-income families have an unfair disadvantage in getting into a good college. [David Brooks discusses this idea in the New York Times today.]  But affirmative action on its own, whether based on race or economic class, is far too limited a tool to realize the dream of the great civil rights movement of the 1960s for full racial equality. As we confront a world without race-conscious affirmative action, we would do well to remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that to produce real equality, “the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.”

I think most Americans agree that race should not matter, in college admissions or anything else.  (Not all agree, I’m afraid…and you know who you are.)  We wish it were true.  But as we all learned in our youth, wishing a thing doesn’t make it so.  Honest people will acknowledge that while we as a society have made great progress, race does still matter today.  Rulings such as this one seem aimed at making sure that some white Americans are shielded from any responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past.  Or of even acknowledging that there were past wrongs that need addressing.  That’s not a viable strategy for righting the wrongs.

(Jelani Cobb on “The End of Affirmative Action” in The New Yorker: “…almost from the outset, critics of the policy could be seen impatiently tapping their watches, questioning how long (white) society was meant to endure the patent unfairness of these racial considerations.”)

Self-inflicted wounds from the culture wars

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

There is little that Texas state legislators like doing more than passing a bill to help people who own and run businesses in Texas.  They will pass such laws even if the result hurts Texas citizens, as it publicly reinforces the perception that Texas leaders are “reactionaries uncomfortable with delivering an equitable society.”  Case in point, as elaborated by Chris Tomlinson in today’s Houston Chronicle: the current effort to outlaw diversity, equity and inclusion programs which Republican leaders claim discriminate against white people, even though those leaders are likely to “drive away private investments in higher education and disqualify the state for federal programs worth billions” if they succeed.  (Not online yet, will post the link when available)

Last week the GOP majority of the Texas Senate approved a bill to prohibit all Texas public colleges and universities from even having DEI programs or staff.  (Democrats were unanimous in opposition, for what that’s worth here in Texas).  The bill must still pass the State House before it could be signed by the governor, but the governor is already on board.

[Governor Greg] Abbott has argued DEI programs sound good on the surface but that they have been manipulated to pass on potential job applicants because of their race. He sent warnings to colleges and universities in February, which was followed by schools like the University of Texas, Texas A&M University and the University of Houston all announcing that they would step back from DEI programs or review how their programs work.

Despite that response by the big state schools, State Senator Brandon Creighton and his Senate colleagues have taken action.  Why?  Well, Creighton has said “while he is all for diversity, DEI programs have gone too farratio3x2_1200, and are actually excluding some job candidates and ultimately not succeeding in increasing the diversity of college faculty.”  So, his plan for achieving more diversity is to kill the programs that are designed to achieve more diversity.  Not to improve the programs so that they work better and achieve the result he claims he wants, but to drive a stake through their hearts so they can never rise from the grave.  Cue the law of unintended consequences.

When it comes to correcting generations of discrimination, inequity and exclusion, though, Texas Republicans think historical injustices will fix themselves.  Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are pushing Senate Bill 17 and other bills to make programs intended to correct past wrongs illegal.

They don’t care that a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI, will drive away private investments in higher education and disqualify the state for federal programs worth billions.

When companies pay the fee to join the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, DEI programs for students and faculty are among their top concerns, institute director Brian Korgel told me.  Federal and private grant applications always have DEI sections.

“Companies expect us as universities to play a role in terms of fostering the diversity of the student body, both in admissions and in terms of graduation and retention,” he said.  “For a single investigator applying for a science grant from the National Science Foundation, you really need to address diversity in some way in your proposal; otherwise, it becomes a real challenge to get the work funded.”

The Energy Institute has joined the Center for Houston’s Future, Exxon, Sempra and other companies to apply for a Department of Energy grant to build a hydrogen hub along the Gulf Coast.  But the application asks about DEI efforts.  The Legislature’s anti-DEI laws imperil that application.

In tandem with their valiant fight against DEI programs, Republicans in Austin have opened a second front against those who would defend DEI: academics, like Jeremi Suri of The University of Texas, who Tomlinson quotes arguing the similarities between the political leaders of today and those of post-Civil War America who fought to protect white privilege.

But Suri can reach such conclusions without fear of retribution thanks to the principle of academic freedom and tenure.

Abbott, Patrick, Creighton and their GOP allies intend to end those, too.

Professors who violate SB 17 can be placed on unpaid leave and fired, while universities will lose state funding and face $1 million fines.  Creighton’s Senate Bill 18 would end tenure, and Senate Bill 16 would make it illegal for Suri to teach the ideas in his book.

University deans already complain that the Legislature’s anti-intellectualism makes recruiting the world’s top minds to Texas difficult.  But ending tenure and fining professors for breaking with white supremacist orthodoxy will make it nearly impossible.

The best minds want to work at the best universities.  The best companies want to recruit from the best universities.  If the best professors take their research and go, corporations will follow them.

Culture wars may make good politics for the right, but they will also have consequences for the state’s economy.

So: you can’t have programs designed to try to overcome white privilege and promote greater diversity, can’t even teach about it, but you can be fired in contravention of the principles of academic freedom and tenure if you do.  Give Texas Republican leaders credit: they can be thorough when it comes to attacking the outward manifestations of their own inner demons.

Storm warning

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

First, point out to anyone who complains when all of the ballots in Tuesday’s elections have not been counted by their bedtime Tuesday night and says that is evidence of widespread voter fraud that that is pure bull.  All the votes have probably never been counted just a few hours after the polls are closed, certainly not in an era when we encourage everyone to vote and accommodate their exercise of their rights with early voting and voting by mail and voting from overseas and such modern developments.  And second, don’t listen to anyone who argues on election night that there is evidence of widespread voter fraud – especially if they do so on the Fox “News.”  First, it would take a thorough investigation to prove that accusation.  Second, no such investigation has ever proven that fraud pervasive enough to change the results of elections has ever happened.  (OK, retiring the italics now.)

I don’t know what the results of Tuesday’s elections will be, but I feel confident we won’t find that the poisonous political divide across our country has miraculously healed.  The fight for democracy, as some have cast it, won’t be over whenever this week’s votes are finally tallied, because the fight never ends.  “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” said…someone, I guess, but apparently not Mr. Jefferson despite many citations, but it’s a great thought to keep in mind: any system designed to guarantee freedom will face threats from those who find your freedom and mine an impediment to their own power.  (You know who I mean.) So how do we keep our spirits up in the face of that on-going threat?  Dahlia Lithwick has a great prescription in Slate.

It is easy to feel despair. The folks who keep disparaging those who worry about the future of democracy seem uninterested in the fact that one party refuses to accept election results, inflames election violence, admits the entire plan is one-party rule, and brushes off and even jokes about vigilante violence. Those same people have been adept at pushing us into semantic arguments about whether we’re using the right words to describe what we see happening right before our eyes. The problem with wasting our time fighting about whether the best word to use in this particular situation is “authoritarianism,” or “fascism,” or “vigilantism,” or “lawlessness,” is that such things can often only ever be empirically established in retrospect. We can hold the I Told You So Olympics in 10 years. Let’s get that on the books.

Call it whatever you like, but this speedy descent into a world in which people who are fundamentally unethical and unserious hold too many levers of power is not normal and it’s not funny. Even for the people striving to find meaning and purpose in the ugliness, the temptation to cede ground, give up, and go small is alluring. That they want you to cede ground, give up, and go small is in fact the problem we can name right now.

My rabbi recently reminded me of a useful way to think through the fog. Citing another spiritual hero last weekend, Aurora Levins Morales, she reminded me that there is always a difference between the weather and the stars. Morales, teaching in 2017, warned that it is too easy to be buffeted by the changeable weather, and in so doing, to lose sight of the immutable stars. The stars, in this telling, are a “constant to steer by, sometimes hidden by storm clouds, but high above them, untouched by wind or rain.”

The weather is different. Weather, Morales conceded, can be “violent, drenching, harsh.” But it isn’t constant. If we do nothing but chase and feel the weather, she wrote, “we could spin forever from emergency to emergency, shouting no to each new crime—but that would be steering by chasing clouds.”

The weather, and the stars: I think that’s a great way to think about it.  There’s the weather, that which we see every day and which changes day to day and in some cases hour to hour—it seems big and important, but it’s transient within the span of our own observation.  The stars, although not permanent in that firmament, can give each of us something long-lasting to steer by.  Lithwick again:

I spent the week before midterm elections that could help determine the fate of democracy in the United States trying to pick my own way through a careening mess of the world into those buckets: Weather versus star. Elon Musk is weather; so is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tucker Carlson is weather. Even losing tens and thousands of followers on Twitter is, respectfully, just weather. It all matters, sure, and it’s all painful. But it’s a series of transient states to distract you from what is real.

Stars are the things that don’t ebb and flow with the showy Twitter feuds, or the mutable hourly outrages, or public performances of ghastly daily mediocrity. For some of us, the stars are the upcoming elections and the extraordinary acts of voter registration, postcarding, election protection, and democratic engagement. For some of us the stars are the law, the rule of law, and the efforts to bring accountability for lawbreaking. For some of us the stars are efforts to build a tolerant, pluralist world in the face of rising racial and religious intolerance and xenophobia.

(snip)

As we move through the frightening and destabilizing days to come, the weather will attempt to consume more and more of your time and attention and energy. Fascists will tweet more fascism to try to distract you from the impacts of their fascism. My entirely inadequate advice will remain unchanged: Sit in the foulness of the roiling storm and do your work, whatever that may be, and triangulate by the light of whatever star feels eternal to you. Take care of your family; they need you, and take care of your health. Take care of your community; it needs you, and take care of someone in your community who doesn’t know Twitter is even a thing. Vote. Help others vote. Register voters. Staff voter protection hotlines. Place your own body between someone unkind and someone vulnerable. Read a book. Help a kid. Give someone food and love and respect. Donate something you don’t use. Ask for help. Don’t give your time or attention to anything small enough to diminish you along with it.

We’re in the weather, and the temptation to do nothing but talk about the weather is fierce. But above and beyond there are still fixed and immutable values and principles and we must try as best we can to steer by those things instead.

(snip)

You won’t always be able to see them, but the stars are still there. And we will get through the storms ahead, even if we don’t yet believe it, because the storms are not the story. We are the story. Keep looking up.