What You Missed: August 31-September 4
This week: Kennedy-bashing, Trump-bashing, fascist-bashing (wait, that's the same thing), and more!
Happy Friday! It’s time for our regular look at this week’s subscriber-only content.
First, a big welcome to any of you who signed up to Discourse Blog for the first time this week. We are so, so grateful to you for hopping into our deranged little boat.
Hopefully, we can convince some of you to take that extra step and subscribe, so you can get all of our content and help support our work. It’s just $8 a month, or $85 a year (or $42.50 a year if you’re a student—see details here). We have so many big things we want to do, but we can only do them with your help.
OK, sales pitch over! Here’s a taste of what our subscribers were able to read exclusively this week.
In “They Really Think We’re All Idiots,” Katherine Krueger confronted the liberals who are using Joe Kennedy’s Senate primary loss to Ed Markey as an excuse to—you guessed it—bash the left:
As ever, it’s easier to blame the left than to look inward. Liberals hate when the left won’t make the same deals with the devil that they will—something they reframe as the left simply not “getting” how politics works—but even more so, they hate that the left still has enthusiasm and that it was a deciding factor in this race. I’ve thought about this a lot since Bernie dropped out: Biden supporters are still trying to spike the football on Bernie people—to no avail—because, even though most Bernie people will still vote Biden come Election Day, we refuse to fully submit by admitting that we were stupid to believe in demanding more from our politicians. Liberals are also clearly flummoxed by the notion that, although Sanders has now endorsed Biden, the Bernie Bros’ enthusiasm couldn’t immediately be assimilated and weaponized by the Biden campaign.
Paul Blest also took aim at the Kennedy vs. Markey fight in the delightfully titled “Joe Kennedy Lost in Eastham, and Walpole, and Newton, and Boston, and Littleton, and”:
Markey’s win marks an important milestone, aside from finally handing a Kennedy kid his ass in Massachusetts: it’s the first big Senate primary win for the left during its resurgence over the past five years. Markey’s an incumbent, sure, but the Senate has always been a giant obstacle to progressive change and so the gravity of having even a few allies there can’t be overstated—especially because in two weeks, there’s a chance to add another one.
In our weekly subscriber-only Office Hours chat, we talked about that cheerful subject, fascism:
At what point do we call it fascism? Not “proto-fascism,” not “aspiring fascism”, or “nascent authoritarianism,” or whatever other qualified terminology might provide slightly more comfort than the invocation of naked fascism. I ask you, dear readers: What’s your personal fascism rubicon, after which you feel comfortable using the F word without equivocation or qualifications? Have we already crossed it? Are we being alarmist and overly sensitive?
And in his weekly “Man, What the Hell?” newsletter, Rafi Schwartz invents a new state of “Trumpian being”:
Let’s call it “Crusty.”
Crusty Trump is the one we almost never see. We mostly only ever hear about him after he does something particularly obnoxious from behind closed doors, away from the TV cameras and cheering crowds and teleprompters; He’s the one who says things like “shithole countries” and “grab ‘em by the pussy” and, according to The Atlantic this week, calls dead soldiers “suckers.” Crusty Trump has Wet Trump’s chaotic hubris without the performative glee. He has Dry Trump’s transparent inability to be interested in anything other than himself, but is still awake enough to be a total dick about it. Crusty Trump is, above all else, an asshole. Not because he thinks it’ll rile up his base, or because he’s bored with reading prepared remarks, but because that’s just who he is: a venomous cretin whose closest approximation of joy is making other people almost as miserable as himself.
If you liked any of what you just read, please consider subscribing. Here’s the button again:
And don’t forget to check out the free Discourse Blog content you may have missed this week, including:
—Jack Crosbie telling Andrew Sullivan to Please, Fuck Off
—Samantha Grasso sharing her love of cross stitch (and some awe-inspiring creations of hers)
—Caitlin Schneider writing about how the Trump presidency radicalized her
Thanks for tuning in, and have a wonderful long weekend!