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On Popularism

The political strategy characterized by advising politicians, particularly Democrats, to prioritize policies with majority support supported by Wall Street while avoiding divisive, ideologically extreme, or unpopular issues, popularism consists of poll-driven, focused-grouped balderdash designed to resonate with existing public sentiment. While following polls is a bad approach, lefty or progressive stances that poll strongly are often not considered at all. Popularism is pseudo-analysis that elides clear public support for things like funding childcare and protecting immigrant communities, aka communities.
What are some leading issues? Are they popular? It’s an election year – let’s advise our candidates.
Over the past year, the White House has courted tech billionaires and gone out of its way to protect the AI industry’s agenda, fast-tracking permits for data centre construction and approving the sales of advanced chips to China while cracking down on states’ attempts to regulate chatbots … But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology.
Conclusion: not popular

And it was all too easy to be pessimistic about the prospects both for cooperation and for persuading voters to accept even modest future-oriented sacrifices.

Then came the renewable energy revolution. Solar and wind power have become cost-competitive with fossil fuels — they are, in particular, clearly cheaper than coal. Huge progress in batteries has rapidly reduced the problem of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.) There’s now a clear path for a transition to an “electrotech” economy in which renewable-generated electricity heats our homes, powers our cars, and much more.

Conclusion: very pop– wait. It seems that the Trump administration has decided to block/rollback this transition that would benefit the planet, ensuring that the US will be left behind in global competition. Oh well.

ICE detention centers:

Communities across the country have been shocked to learn that DHS wants to use warehouses in their towns for detention space amid the ongoing immigration crackdown.

Conclusion: as popular as the plague. And speaking of…

The bipartisan American investment, which the Trump administration led, was absolutely key to containing a horrific global pandemic which could have been exponentially worse without the stunning accelerated development of mRNA vaccines — one of the great public health triumphs in modern history. But this miracle cure was only the beginning. The massive investment in mRNA opened doors to numerous other medical advances…

These mRNA advances would obviously benefit people in the United States, who would be much less likely to die of cancer, flu, pandemics, and a range of other illnesses.

Conclusion: popular, live-saving, beneficial across borders and populations. Unfortunately, also vulnerable to disinformation by cranks and malefactors willing to lie to enrich themselves and endanger others.

So even among this small variety of issues, clear policy preferences can be sorted. Public opinion has a role to play, and it’s especially important in the face of corporate media with thumbs on the scale, keeping unpopular issues and policies in a kind of eternal toggle state where the jury is still out. These should not be avoided. Look for candidates who run toward your preferences. Some might even already be there.

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Kicking over the tipping point

Dignity, restraint and action in a time of constitutional crisis. It’s amazing but, like the Steven Wright  joke where he realizes someone has been following him from in front, the Republican Party is re-enforcing community by galvanizing communities against it. And that for which it stands:

Within hours of taking office on Jan. 17, Spanberger signed an executive order that rescinded Youngkin’s order mandating that state agencies contract with ICE, but that alone left the agreements intact. She went a step further this week by actually pulling the plug and ordering four state agencies, including the state police and the Department of Corrections, to end their 287(g) agreements, terminating their role as force multipliers for federal immigration authorities.

“Virginians deserve to have their state and local law enforcement resources devoted to the safety and security of their communities, not federal civil immigration enforcement,” the governor said in her order. These agreements “improperly cede accountability and discretion over Virginia law enforcement to the federal government.”

That’s the result of people pressure. Forces of civil democracy aka you, me, and all of us. One neat trick to turn many disinterested and distracted people into pissed off voters. I have always detested irony but I’m willing to let this one slip.

Governors and lieutenants, secretaries of state, state attorneys general have always been important statewide races. Now they are critical. Let’s elect good ones. Find one, be one.

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Of fulcrums and chasms

Given the very sleepy lead into 2025, despite the alarms blaring full bore, headwinds for clean energy seem to have roared to the forefront this year.

Tax credits expiring. Wind projects shelved or cancelled, often for extraordinarily petty reasons certainly consistent with the personality of leadership. Domestic US EV sales dipping.

Despite the pettiness and short-sighted backwards-facing outlook, a cultural shift has been been leveraged into place. The ancient kind of leverage – with a rock and an iron bar:

“…as of the last three or four years, we finally have a tool, not at this point to stop global warming — it’s too late for that — but perhaps to at least shave some tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets. And that tool is cheap energy from the sun and the wind and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. Alternative energy is the commonsense, obvious, straightforward way to make power on this planet, which is why 95 percent of new generating capacity around planet Earth last year came from these clean sources.

The authoritarian mindset –  which eschews progress on meaningful rights and resources for all in exchange for illusory safety from outside foes and forces – has always protected fossil fuel production by forgiving its destructive effects on people and planet in return for cheap energy. Another instant where the meaning of words carelessly cast aside returns for payment, with interest.

And now, that mindset is suspended over a chasm: destructive effects of global warming, coupled with cheap, clean energy increasingly available everywhere. Incompetent/compromised [let’s be honest] government is a distinct disadvantage. Can capitalism be saved?

Be neither depressed nor overly sanguine, as these were never the options. Instead, mock the laggards incessantly, especially your own. If you don’t know or feel unsure, find out. Use everything you have, make things. Row into the currents. Turn the beat around.

Image via

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Look away, part II

Part one, here. Unrelated but really, is anything?

The ‘world’ souring on climate politics (choose your word to emphasize) has a true and correct ‘as if’ quality about it. As we find more ways to do more, we also (reminder: there is no they) find more ways to do less, pollute more, question everything, bury it in euphemism, and not recall what the worlds mean and then discover new ways to say this is Just. Too. Hard.

The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so. In many places — like in South America and in Europe — existing laws have already been weakened or are under pressure from shifting political coalitions now pushing to undermine them.
To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney — whose 2015 warnings about the financial risks from climate change helped set the stage for Paris by alarming the world’s banking elite — became prime minister of Canada in March and as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election. To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world. Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed Paris has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference. “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day,” says Jason Bordoff, a former Obama energy adviser who now runs Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard.”
The world hasn’t actually abandoned green energy, with global renewable rollout still accelerating and investment doubling over the last five years. But climate politics is in undeniable withdrawal, and far from ushering in a new era of cooperative global solidarity, Paris has given way to something much more old-fashioned: an atavistic age of competition, renewed rivalry and the increasingly naked logic of national self-interest, on energy and warming as with everything else. In the wake of America’s presidential election, Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute declared that “the era of the climate hawk is over.” Perhaps, at least for now, the age of climate statesmen, too.
Lengthy quote because it’s pay-walled, but worth it if you can.
There is a great [human] tendency (unheard-of among rabbits and swordfish, one assumes) to struggles as one-off battles that are won or lost – rather than ongoing existential struggles for survival better-known among mammals and oceanic fish. Global warming is not a set-piece battle, though it has many sets and pieces. It’s successes need to built upon, it’s failures learned from. The article is also correct in that our language about it has stagnated, dominated as it is by capital interests. The role of the once ne plus ultra United States being self-negated has also proven to be of immense value to the rest of the world.
We yet need to face down the bullies – that is and always has been our existential struggle, presenting every single moment we’ve ever had to shine.
Coates is excellent on an adjacent, rhyming point.
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Answer the door

What are we trying to pretty up, by maintaining fictions that the current state of affairs is somehow normal, that it cannot be as grossly psychopathic for no benefit as it seems? And more importantly, why?

We’ve never had to make the case that maintaining a healthy ecosystem is good. The opposite case seemed self-refuting, until it making it became a badge of honor for disingenuous fraudsters to scare fraidsters, of whom we have plenty plenty and now more than is manageable because the original case that didn’t have to be made at all now seems questionable. Circular is the logic. Refuse to accept it but decline not to acknowledge its presence and malevolence.

Reason has been caught flat-footed in the face of the transparent willingness to lie and scare. Some call it boldness and question whether norms and even constitutional principles can hold. These are quaint notions, a reliance upon and retreat into status that were never anything more than rationalizations for themselves. And as long as they lasted, they bred contempt for any questioning of the status quo. The skullduggery has always been present but for decades channeled mostly yet viciously from pulpits and through direct mail campaigns, seldom wielded openly as the weapons they have become. Those who were getting fleeced should know better, so there was no need to defend them or point out the obvious problems with the arrangement. Or listen to the warnings of those tried.

Reason has not been ready to defend itself. Never felt the need.

Now the need is pounding at the door, and we are trying to act as though we do not hear, might not be home. Maybe the knocking will go away on its own. Consult any car repair manual for a detailed explanation regarding this strategy.

And along with the formerly self-evident case for a healthy ecosystem, add that for democracy, scientific research and discovery, postal delivery, voting rights, civil rights, marriage equality, human rights. Whatever the shape of the latest outrage or their accumulation, it is a symbol of an axiom long considered safe now under assault from all sides, with stunned onlookers staggering backward, wondering WTF and waiting for someone to do something.

And understand these strategies for exactly what they are – efforts to destroy the system.

Knock, knock.

Image: Author photo, Lefkes.

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Exceptionalism

With the AI on the fritz again, dear leader’s tenuous grip on a very limited supply of marbles, and the corporate media unable unwilling to call any of this what it is, the importance of checking the scores is our go-to.

Not those scores.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let’s start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said “We’ve hired him” in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen’s allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could “control” or “moderate” Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Italy was even dumber, if that’s possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he’s marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here’s the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said “not our problem.” Britain said “both sides are bad.” America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They’re still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he’d rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he’d gutted the judiciary. It’s 2025 and he’s still in power. The EU has been “very concerned” for fourteen fucking years. They’ve written strongly worded letters. They’ve held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just… accepts it.

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

The dreaded ‘someone.’ Not be outdone by Herr von Hindenburg

Want to know how many times people successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero.

Are we feeling special?

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Seeing it as it happens

Figure out what you think, first. Where you stand, what you can support. Yes, you may be challenged in an argument (or be the challenger) so this includes being able to defend what you think. If you can be convinced to change or alter what you think by a superior moral rationale or appeal to reason, this is the path to knowing. Pardon the prologue.

The tendency not to see, much less believe, what is happening in the US at any particularly moment but especially this one is itself more widespread than many want to admit.

Climate change, née global warming, offers some analogue. The shift in the name presents a clue, that the reality had to be softened, broadened, recast in a more natural-seeming context to gather more support or even acknowledgement. This was and is childish. The ‘skeptics’ who tentatively step on board thought-temple and nod will only demand more incontrovertible evidence later, when the latter has piled up beyond any denial. And that’s assuming they were acting in good faith in the first place. My desire for more ice cream before I cleaned my room was genuine. When I was six. Sometimes. Depending on how many times my parents and I worked out these deals.

The point beyond any denial above is critical,  because that is when the negotiations begin. With individuals, with themselves. We don’t want to entertain the possibility that some things are happening, that we have some responsibility for their happening, that they are the results of our actions, actions that have benefitted us greatly, that question the wisdom and grace of those actions and perhaps even their divine sanction. No, it can’t be that. Must be treachery of any other sort. Certainly not ours.

So, there’s a great deal of possible agency, and it can be winsome temptation.

The successful contortions that have both pushed climate solutions so near the point of no return AND super-charged the development of the same solutions – wind and solar power displacing fossil fuels – have been the result of enormous time lags that allowed technology to catch up as well as the proliferation of lies and frauds on an industrial scale. Decades. We had at least a very solid handle on global warming in 1988.

Alas, the analogue has it limits. The transition to fascist authoritarianism offers no such kind of lazy time frame. You can argue, but you need to. It is in motion, speeding up as the summer burns out. And no, simply getting depressed about it is not one of your options. Just clean your fcking room.

 

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You knewESCO

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations with the aim of promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.

A sort of civilization interlocutor,  UNESCO helps set global norms and standards, develop tools for international cooperation, generate knowledge for public policies and build global networks of sites and institutions that reflect the world’s cultural and natural diversity of ‘outstanding universal value.’

So, for obvious reasons, the US is of course now withdrawing from UNESCO:

“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” says Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, in the statement. Bruce asserts that UNESCO’s vote to admit Palestine as a full member in 2011 was “highly problematic” and “contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.”

Audrey Azoulay, director general of UNESCO, denied the anti-Israel claims, arguing in a statement that they “contradict the reality of UNESCO’s efforts, particularly in the field of Holocaust education and the fight against antisemitism.”

“UNESCO has supported 85 countries in implementing tools and training teachers to educate students about the Holocaust and genocides, and to combat Holocaust denial and hate speech,” writes Azoulay, adding that the agency’s work has been “unanimously acclaimed” by leading Jewish organizations.

That’s according to the notoriously hot-headed Smithsonian Magazine.

Yes, all is political, everything. Must learn how to politics.

Instead, we choose to deal with highly complex political, scientific and cultural questions by magically making them simple and easy.  If only there was an international organization designed to serve as arbiter on such matters, rather than re-drawing them as cartoons stick figures.

Image: Credentials from my documentary film project a few years ago.

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Don’t Look Away, Dixieland

Stone Mountain is a geological wonder that carries a social significance as profound as its granite heart.

Untold numbers of American soldiers have trained at bases named for treasonous leaders. A legion of Nathan Bedford Forrests gaze across the South from squares, courthouses and public parks, perhaps puzzled by the recent stirrings and troubled by the rumble of heavy machinery. Discussions on re-naming buildings and removing commemorative statues that celebrate heroes of the Confederacy achieved new momentum as America re-inspected its past in light of its present, for a moment at least. The stirrings introduced great unease in many citizens, whatever their physical distance to the South. Still, a logical elegance about re-evaluating our symbols, their connection to identity, and the poison they present to our democracy should be able to guide us toward better role models and more equitable public allegory.

But the options for what to do about the massive carving into the eastern face of Stone Mountain celebrating that past sparks a different kind of negotiation. The question elicits a category error, a kind of nostalgia for a monument that would better serve us as the marker for a tomb, the final resting place for a reign of terror.

The vast crimes we perpetrated on our own people still loom large today – unequal schools, segregated neighborhoods, glass ceilings as far as the eye can see. While calls for diversity harkened the great benefits of inclusion, the remnants of Jim Crow and abandoned commitments to Reconstruction still haunt our communities. The many millions living under the duress of poverty somehow continue to threaten those struggling within their well-tended fear of others. We cling to prejudices – and violence – and succeed in continuing to avoid reckoning with the facts. Violence privileges as much as it destroys.

Impossible to relocate to a museum with other relics, we could blast Lee, Jackson, Davis and their mounts off their perch, replacing them with and/or even adding more worthy images to the composition. But we should not – and hardly only because of the anachronism it would create by adding a kitsch element to what has such a serious and devastating effects we also misunderstand.

The carving at Stone Mountain should remain permanently ensconced as exactly what it is: a dark guarantee of second-class citizenship for the vast majority of the descendants of Black slaves, 12 generations at Emancipation. That it could succeed only in anchoring the entire country to the fulfillment of false prophets from time immemorial is its own testament.

Irreverence might call this an opportunity, one instance where we might not politely look away, as the tune went, from who we are and how we arrived here. The monument represents a fraught reality in a difficult time that stretches across an open wound. A monument to a defiantly un-Reconstructed South, the three horsemen have ridden roughshod into our moment as a deliberate expression of what brought us exactly to here: a genteel façade that required decades of brutal viciousness to maintain. Overwhelming wealth mixed ever so precisely with extraordinary poverty presents as just one result of a systematic effort to elevate some and exclude others. But the power of the “Lost Cause” mythology that clouded the real outcome of the peace has kept the American Civil War alive in the imaginations of too many. Manifested through police violence, white supremacist ideology does a lot more than echo today.

When plans were initially finalized for a commemorative sculpture at Stone Mountain, there was no coincidence about the timing. In 1915, the KKK announced its modern rebirth by burning a cross on the mountaintop. Admittedly, it was not even an original gesture but one borrowed from the film, “Birth of a Nation.” Myth melting into reality was and remains one of the constant themes of celebrating the “Lost Cause.” And yet the implications of these social expressions remain as tangible as Stone Mountain itself.

After financial problems caused stops and starts on a Stone Mountain monument, an unfinished version sat untouched until the 1960’s. The project was reprised under state sanction when segregationist governor Marvin Griffin had Georgia purchase the mountain and fundraising began in earnest.

Why complete the monument then? Was the state government trying to make something clear? Is it possible to attend a laser light show at Stone Mountain Park and understand what it was? Deliberate and extensive efforts backed by unmistakable intentions on the part of the state and local governments sought to maintain segregation despite Supreme Court decisions about schools, despite federal laws and programs. It is folly to try and think of any other reason why the monument was completed then or why it should be destroyed now. The white majority decided and made itself clear with a statement visible for miles and in fact years, writ across inadequate housing projects and failing schools from the coast across the Piedmont.

White segregationists used the mountain to signal that they would turn the terror of white supremacist violence into a kitchen sink of socially acceptable but no less violent restrictions, from real estate redlining to voting barriers to gerrymandered districts, to assure the continued dominance of the white supremacist state.

The gargantuan efforts required to skirt the spirit of new laws, to soften your language but not your heart, merited a gargantuan symbol. And we can see the symbol and fruits of those efforts through today, from every vantage point. People mired in poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth; Georgia itself with the highest rates of felony convictions in the nation; voters still responding to dog whistles and scare tactics that hurt people, devastating families and local economies, attacking the very notion of a national commonwealth.

Let the carving stay and let it remind us that we still have work to do, that there will always be work to do while we have to convince ourselves that there is no they.

Stone Mountain should remain a permanent marker to who we are, to the deliberate cruelty and injustice that has so marred our society until the descendants of white supremacists rise up and plead for its removal. And then we should still say no. We need something to remind us: never again.

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Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes