Aged Well Podcast

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dennisonwrites.substack.comLove me some hospital drama.

Wait, we’re fighting about the 10 Commandments in public buildings again? Is it 1998? This feels like a time travel story. Except in this yarn, our futuristic weapons and sensibilities are counting against us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

Texas, Commandments, and ideological intrusion into schools. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dennisonwrites.substack.comA reminder on why…democracy.

Why are some things okay to show on television and some things aren't, and why does race have so much to do with that? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

We lean into to showing some people doing some crimes, and we lean far away from showing other people doing others. Why? How does this work? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dennisonwrites.substack.comEverything about who Senator Joe Biden was ran in conflict to who President Joe Biden became. This comes into even sharper focus when you limit the sample of accomplishments to unilateral actions.

Everyone has an opinion, even if they pretend otherwise. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

The pretense that liberals “just don’t care” about which racial groups hold majorities in western countries is annoying. It’s also a lie. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dennisonwrites.substack.comMedia double standards for race and crime are coming to a head. What comes next may not be pleasant.

Truth shouldn’t be partisan. Pursuing it should be bipartisan. We can’t keep doing this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

Truth shouldn't be partisan, and pursuit of it shouldn't be political. We can't keep doing this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

The Aged Well Podcast is returning! Come one, come all! There is also a discount! 40% off annual paid subscriptions if you sign up by Wednesday! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been in the news since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. When New York Times columnist Ezra Klein eulogized Kirk in the Times’ pages, honoring him for practicing politics “the right way,” Coates responded critically in the pages of Vanity Fair. The two, who are friends, sat down for a one-on-one meeting of the minds that has been praised, panned, and picked apart across both legacy and social media.It was an interesting discussion, if not a terribly productive one. Throughout it, Coates bears the hallmarks of somebody who has mostly failed to do his homework on Charlie Kirk, preferring instead to repeat what have become predictable bromides about how violence is bad, but…No, of course, he doesn’t think Charlie Kirk deserved to be shot. He just also thinks that Kirk was hateful and awful, and used his hatefulness and awfulness as ways to promote himself and his cause. Aged Well is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.But the bones of the Klein/Coates showdown have already been picked dry, and I’m not especially interested in giving them another going-over. Instead, I wish to remind readers that Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man whose worldview and, as we’ll see, daily habits have been shaped by dynamics of race and violence, has built his career by being as unhelpful a contributor as possible to keeping this discourse focused on peace or resolution.Coates is a great writer. He crafts strong, if sometimes purply sentences, and he makes his arguments clearly and forcefully. He takes his time with his words, obviously choosing them very carefully, and I’ve always found charges that he is a ‘hatemonger’ or a despiser of white people difficult to accept, especially when evaluated next to writers (of whom there are many) whose racial animus bubbles much closer to the surface. The essay that catapulted him to prominence, ‘The Case For Reparations,’ is compelling, evenly argued, and one that I suspect far more critics have responded to than have actually read with any care.Still, Coates’s impact on America’s efforts to heal racial divides and reduce violence leaves much to be desired. If he is a deep thinker, he is not a wide one. He has essentially one point to make, and that one point acts as the lens and the filter through which all other points are run.Coates believes that years of racial subjugation and prejudice created conditions that have conspired, and that still conspire, to limit black performance in American life. ‘The Case for Reparations’ walks readers from slavery, through Jim Crow, and forward to red-lining and systemic wealth depression targeted at black Americans, but from which white Americans were spared. He doesn’t spend much time disputing performance gaps between America’s racial communities, opting instead to explain them. He does this by crediting for them forces which are, if not insurmountable, at least very difficult and complicated to surmount. And certainly, not ones we should expect to be surmounted anytime soon.He’s hardly alone in this. What I just articulated is more or less the view of every left-leaning American, and quite a few right-leaning ones also. Coates is neither wrong to point this out, nor off-base in his assessment of the scale of historical injustice.Where he errs is in his rigidity. Coates isn’t just committed to his preferred narrative, he’s committed to it to the exclusion of all other narratives, or even suggested narratives. He is a hammer for which everything is a nail. And nowhere is this tendency of his on better display than during a conversation in which he participated at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, 2015.Coates sat for a moderated discussion with then New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, the subject of which was ‘Is Violence a Function of our Culture?’ I watched it at the time it was first broadcast and despite my having been a culturally very progressive person at the time, it rankled me. So much so that I remembered it often through the woke years and went to revisit it in the wake of Coates’s Ezra Klein sit-down.The whole thing is instructive, but if you’re short on time, just watch the last exchange, starting around the 54 minute mark. We’ll also be discussing it later.For context, Mitch Landrieu, a white Democrat, was a mostly successful post-Katrina mayor for New Orleans. He made a dent in crime, and built trust in the black community by cracking down on police corruption and removing confederate monuments. He was well into his mayoral tenure at the time he spoke with Coates, who was himself weeks away from publishing his best-selling memoir Between The World And Me.Landrieu wasn’t, and still isn’t, a major player in the Democratic Party. He served as Joe Biden’s “infrastructure czar,” wrote a book about confronting America’s racial history as a white southerner, spent some time as a CNN analyst, and advised on both the Biden reelection campaign and later the Kamala Harris campaign. He was a successful man at the time of his Aspen Ideas Festival appearance, but it was Coates’s star that was truly on the rise.Landrieu had a lot to gain from this appearance. He would serve another three years as NOLA mayor, and had he been able to enlist to his cause the man who was a few weeks off becoming America’s preeminent black public intellectual, he could have reasonably expected great things. This was a big opportunity for Landrieu, not just for his personal profile, but for his project. Coates had the ear of the nation, and Landrieu had a good story to tell. If they could find common ground, it wouldn’t have been hyperbolic to describe the discussion in which it was reached as a turning point. For the speakers, for New Orleans, and possibly for the nation.It didn’t quite go that way. Everything was perfectly amicable. No real sparks flew until the end, and at few points did Coates and Landrieu openly disagree. But despite careful, persistent attempts, Landrieu was never able to knock Coates off his narrative, or force him to step outside his ideology. He was never able to get Coates to accept the invitation he was extending to the world of a real mayor, overseeing a real police force, protecting real streets, plagued by real violence.Coates was in the clouds. Landrieu, stuck firmly on the ground, tried repeatedly to tug at Coates’s balloon string and pull the writer back to earth. The whole talk is a dance of Landrieu trying to yank Coates in a direction that might actually be actionable or productive, and Coates flitting out of his grasp again and again. Landrieu is having a conversation with Coates. Coates seems to be more in conversation with himself.Again you should watch the whole talk, as both men have interesting things to say. We’ll zero in on just a few segments.It begins with Landrieu making an impassioned case for the urgency of the problem. Almost every night in his city, young black men were killing one another. And no, it was not a case of, “well, isn’t everyone killing one another?” It wasn’t. Most violent crime in the Big Easy was confined to a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were overwhelmingly young, black males (95%), most of whom knew each other (88%). Landrieu called this a “culture of violence.”Coates responded with an extended anecdote about his childhood, in which he describes the choices he had to make daily in service of avoiding violence being done to his person. How he dressed, who we traveled with to school, what route they took, where he sat in the lunchroom - all of these choices reflected a need to simply stay intact. It’s a somewhat strange story, in that what Coates thinks Landrieu and the audience should take away from it, or how it represents any kind of rebuttal to what Landrieu just said, is somewhat mysterious. It might sound profound…to someone only just learning that violence, and the threat thereof, is a problem particularly in black communities. But since Landrieu had just finished making the very same point himself, it isn’t clear why he needed to be instructed on this.Still, Coates was impacted deeply by this part of his upbringing - an upbringing made all the more stark by the dichotomy between it and the images of peaceful, white families he saw broadcast on television shows like All In The Family and Leave It To Beaver:“And I was struck by the gulf between the world in which I live and the world that America projected out to the rest of the world. And so I knew, you know, as an African American, as a member of a minority population, that these sort of rituals that we went through, that I think the mayor could call a culture of violence, but I would call a culture of self preservation.”How is a culture of violence different from a culture of preservation [against, one presumes, violence]? Isn’t this a bit like complaining that a boxing ring doesn’t harbor a culture of punching, but rather one of trying not to be punched?The audience, it should be noted, is eating out of Coates’s hand as he tells this story.It’s quite a frustrating exchange, and one that mostly sets the tone for the rest of the event. Landrieu has just invited Coates to join him in building meaningful consensus. When Coates ignores the invite, Landrieu is undeterred. He doesn’t care what we call this - what words we use - he just cares what it is, and what can be done about it. Coates is unmoved.To Coates, hundreds of years of oppression isn’t something you can merely undo. He actually says this directly at one point, making clear that however long Landrieu has left on his term as mayor, it can’t be enough to move past the past. Black Americans already have done, and are doing, everything realistically within their power to stem the tide of violence plaguing their communities. What more could they do?This too is discouraging, and not just because of the defeatism on display. If really true that the black community is doing not only its best but the best, doesn’t somebody else need to pick up the slack? Couldn’t that somebody be, for instance, a white mayor of a 60% black city? A city with an ethnic makeup not dissimilar to Coates’s native Baltimore?Throughout their parley, Landrieu reminds me of an oncologist begging desperately for a consultation on a sick patient. Rather than agree to it, Coates would rather talk about the dangers of smoking. To Mitch Landrieu, crime and violence are acute ailments. Treatment is not only possible, it’s his job to offer it. To Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re chronic conditions. Dangerous and regrettable, yes, but a long time in the making, and not sicknesses for which a mayor or anyone else has the medicine.By the end, it’s clear that Landrieu is getting pretty frustrated. He’s been mayor of an unusually dangerous city for five years, he’s making progress but not enough, and he’s got the opportunity now to bend the ear of one of the most respected, celebrated, and listened-to writers in the business. And he can’t make headway. Every time they get close to a point of material agreement, Coates punts the conversation back to the philosophical. Any time Landrieu wants to explore a solution, Coates insists they revisit the cause.After an hour of this, violence is starting to feel less like a problem Coates doesn’t think Landrieu can solve, and more like one he won’t allow him to, at least not in this discussion. Perhaps all this “culture of violence” business was veering too close to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric (this despite Landrieu having emphatically rejected that framing). As exclusively as Landrieu is forward-focused, Coates looks to the past. Landrieu is waiting with a mop. Coates is saying “but look at all the mess.”In the final minutes, things get heated. Coates is on the heels of having actually espoused a clear, albeit controversial policy; letting lots of violent criminals out of prison. Landrieu responds.Landrieu: Criminal justice reform is really important, and we should do it. But this is how criminal justice reform works: you come forward with an idea, the folks on the other side say ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t,’ you go to the state legislature, you go to Congress, you talk about it for two or three years, and then eventually you either get it done or you don’t get it done, and then in the meantime, 40 people a day are killed on the streets of America. Here’s my problem: I don’t talk in platitudes, I don’t talk in philosophy, I don’t talk about the black community or the white community, I talk about Joe or Jamal that’s gonna get their head blown out tomorrow. My life is immediate. So I guess what I want to know it–Coates: My life is immediate though!*Crosstalk*Landrieu: …but as a mayor, as a mayor.Coates: But I’m an African-American male, living in an African American community with a 14 year old son. It’s as- it’s immediate for me too.And then:Landrieu: There is an immediate, catastrophic epidemic that needs to be erased…If the cavalry’s not coming to save us…what are we in the community gonna do tomorrow, tomorrow, as fathers, as sons, as coaches, to change the way that we reconcile the differences that we have. That is really about–Coates: But see, you’re not gonna do anything tomorrow to change that.Landrieu: Well that’s not true.Since we were at the advent of what we now call woke when this talk was staged, it seems reasonable to evaluate it through the woke lens. And I think this helps to explain our problem.Landrieu is a guy with his sleeves rolled up. His literal job is to solve the problem of endless violence on his streets. He has to be effective. Coates just has to be right. But not only does this distinction earn Landrieu no points, and no benefit of the doubt from the crowd, it’s Coates who is considered the obvious authority. Of course he is. All one need do is note the skin tone of each man and that’s just…kind of that.Coates knows of what he speaks. Coates is the expert. Coates has the real investment.Perhaps it requires actually being a writer, as I am, to understand how astonishingly arrogant and misguided this is. We sit behind keyboards. When we die, our lives are not measured in deaths prevented, or criminals locked away, or jobs attracted, or neighborhoods made safe. Our metrics are simply how many seals clapped for us, and how hard.But Coates being presumptuous on behalf of my profession is not what bothers me here. Coates doesn’t really bother me here. I just think he’s wrong - something I think of a lot of people. His clapping seals are the ones on my nerves. Here’s how they recorded their views prior to the talk:To say that the deck was stacked against Mitch Landrieu from the jump would be a comical understatement. Listeners had their minds made up, there’s no indication he was able to sway them, and now, 10 years after this exchange, we’re still fundamentally arguing about the same things, in the same ways.A writer being wrong is only a problem to the extent that they are persuasively wrong. And we all ultimately own our persuasions. The audience for this talk, and Coates’s audience more broadly, is a class of well-heeled NPR-listeners, who more than anything, just want to be told stories they find validating. Politics for them isn’t just about what politics can do, it’s about how it can make them look. When those things are in conflict, there’s a predictable way they lean. The people who buy Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books don’t just buy them to read them - though probably a lot of them do - they buy them to carry them, cover-side out, outside their backpacks or briefcases, always ensuring their arm isn’t obscuring the title. The psychologists out there may be detecting a note of guilt here, and as well they should. Didn’t I just get done saying that I first watched this talk, and was first bothered by it, more than 10 years ago? Where was my essay then? The answer, of course, is that I didn’t have the balls to write it then. Being a white person who criticized people who weren’t white, wasn’t the done thing. I was unwilling to pay the social cost for stepping out of that line. But it’s about the most patronizing, disrespectful thing a person could do to pull punches when a few deserve to be thrown. Feeling like I can’t criticize you is the surest sign I could give that I don’t really consider you my equal. I wasn’t honoring Coates then by keeping my thoughts about him to myself, I was patting him on his dear little head and saying, “nice job, sport” for handing me macaroni art. I don’t owe Coates any apology for writing this. I owe him one for having had these thoughts for 10 years without writing them.Doing that then would’ve sent me afoul, not of Coates, but of the army of head-nodders making sure they always had one of his hardcovers on hand, just so it could sit at the top of the pile on their coffee table. It was their approval, not Coates’s that I sought, and their judgement I feared. But as much as we own our persuasions, we own our cowardices too. Mine should never have been triggered by such morally vapid and intellectually sleepy people. And for that I’m sorry. Not to them - f**k them. F**k them, all the way to spring training. I’m sorry to Coates, who deserved better engagement for his efforts. Coates would go on to stardom, of course, becoming one of the best-selling black authors of the decade and a voice of his generation. And how has he used that voice? At nearly every turn, he has used it to distract from progress, pulling focus instead to cause (though I expect he views the former as unachievable without an understanding of the latter). Black victims of crime are not suffering from a curable disease, so much as they represent symptoms of an incurable one. Race relations aren’t fixable, they’re perennial. The damage isn’t a mess to be mopped up, just one to be observed, lamented, and occasionally blamed on the appropriate party.Even “The Case for Reparations,” which was mostly just a lengthy call for Congress to pass HR 40, which would have studied reparations, concludes with this passage:“John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”We must wrestle with these questions, not answer them. Ask what is owed, not decide. This has been Coates’s entire career. This is his one magic trick.A mayor tries to engage him on ending a cycle of pointless slaughter, and he balks; that’s the wrong focus. A liberal extends a hand of friendship across the aisle to honor a slain conservative, and up pops Coates to wag his finger.But what if America isn’t, as Coates thinks, “looking away?” What if it’s looking forward? Looking beyond? What if America has simply grown weary of trying to answer for a past it can’t change, and has decided instead that that most problematic of goals - a solution - is a more worthy pursuit than yet more recriminations?So long as Ta-Nehisi Coates, and those in his mold, remain uncontested in their issuing of these non-prescription prescriptions, we may never find out. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

Some thoughts on Trump's Nobel snub. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

Just some thoughts on the state of things. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

A long rundown of things Charlie Kirk did and didn't say. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

I’ll say up front, this is mostly a thought experiment. A musing. Do I really think this will happen? S**t, I don’t know. I hope not.But I think it would be better if Trump’s detractors began planning for it, rather than assume a level of stability that doesn’t really exist anymore in our government. If we’ve learned anything from recent history it’s that the American system depends on good faith participants acting in concert to uphold it.Does anyone really think we have that right now?I’m not an historian, a lawyer, a politician, or even all that smart. I’m just a snarky writer that a handful of readers think is funny. I’m a jumped up shitposter, basically.And I’m here to spoil your Monday. Or, if you like Donald Trump, maybe I’m here to make it.You can count me among the small cadre of commentators who think the Signal-gate thing was largely a distraction. For those just joining us, I’m discussing the recent scandal in which Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a chat thread in which some of our government’s most powerful military and intelligence personalities were discussing an imminent strike on Yemen.Yes, obviously, it’s funny that high level government functionaries included a journalist in their deliberations over war plans, even if I don’t think the war plans themselves were especially amusing. (In my view, if we’re going to be isolationists, let’s be isolationists. If we’re not going to let Ukraine drag us into a conflict, we shouldn’t be letting Israel do it either.)But they left me off the Signal chat, so I didn’t get to weigh in 🙁Dave's Dispatch is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I also thought the lack of marching orders was funny. And interesting. Trumpers seemed to fall into three camps, at a time when they all should have been bunkering down in one:1) Goldberg is a traitor who leaked classified intel!2) It’s no big deal because no classified intel was leaked!3) It was a psy-op; they included Goldberg intentionally, duh!Very, very quickly, I’ll run down why each of these is bull pucky, but then I want to move on, because Signal-gate isn’t really today’s focus. In reverse order:3) Sure, okay, I’ll buy the targeted leak angle. But if that’s what they were doing, they’d have done it such that they didn’t all come out of it looking like idiots. There’s really no percentage in looking like an idiot, especially when you’re trying to project enough strength and mettle to scare the Houthis into backing off Red Sea shipping lanes.2) Yes, it’s a big deal, and yes, the intel was classified, whatever b******t excuse they’re spinning now. Pete Hegseth made clear that they had a high-level target in sight, and this was before the strike was carried out. If you’re a high-level Houthi target, you probably know you are. So if Jeffrey Goldberg goes to print, and you see it, you might think, “now would be a good time to go hang out somewhere else for a few hours.” If something like this had happened under Obama or Biden, does anyone seriously think all these Republicans would be parsing the meaning of the word “classified?”1) This one…actually, maybe. As in, the administration could absolutely go after Goldberg for printing this. I think they probably will. Doesn’t make it fair or right, and doesn’t make their case any less bogus, but since “he’s a traitor!” is something they can manifest into accuracy, it would be foolish to dismiss this possibility.And this is a good segue into what I actually want us to be talking about right now. Because even Trump’s angriest critics still don’t understand the reality through which they’re living right now. If you haven’t spent significant time in an authoritarian state, you might be forgiven for looking at the American landscape right now and thinking, “Golly, we are getting dangerously close to losing our democracy…”Oh, my sweet, summer babies. Your democracy is already gone.Signal-gate is out of the headlines. At the time of this writing, neither the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, nor the Washington Post has a top story about it. Nobody cares anymore. Of course they don’t. It’s boring. Trump’s not interested, the guys who did it aren’t sorry, nobody’s going to resign or be punished over it, so what is there to report?This is how it works with dictators. When you assume full power, you assume full responsibility. When that becomes embarrassing, like when there’s been an obvious screw up, you can either make somebody fall on their sword, or you can just give everyone the finger and move on.Pete Hegseth was unlikely to be made to take one for the team. His appointment to SecDef was too controversial. Even though Trump has never been shy about firing those who displease him, for him to admit so soon that he made a mistake with Hegseth would weaken him. He doesn’t want to do that, he doesn’t have to do that, so he’s just…not going to do that.Power means never having to say you’re sorry.When Trump says he’s not joking about a third term, it’s because he’s not joking. He’s going to do it. He’ll serve for life. Democrats will be very angry about it. Some Republicans too, probably. They’ll yell and scream and pull their hair and they’ll make lots of threats. But they won’t stop him. They don’t have the determination. He does.He thinks, credibly, that if he ever leaves office, he’ll get thrown in jail. Those are the stakes for him. How about for you? Are you willing to spend your life in jail to get him out of power? I suspect you’re not really. And I suspect he’s counting on that.One of the reasons the 20th Century was such a shitshow of war and revolutionary activity is because, just objectively, life sucked quite a bit more back then.There was very little air conditioning, for one thing. It was technically invented in 1902, but didn’t become common until the mid-century. In Europe, a lot of people still don’t have it. So people were uncomfortable a lot of the time. Add to that the heavy, scratchy clothing everyone wore, no washing machines, and limited choice in detergents or fabric softeners and people would have been itchy and smelly to a much higher degree than is common today.There was no Netflix either. In fact, there was no color TV of any kind for most people until well into the 60s. You couldn’t order Thai food to your door. You probably couldn’t order Thai food at all unless you lived in Thailand. Social mores were much more rigid, so you probably weren’t out dating a lot or otherwise having much fun. You certainly wouldn’t have had apps to help you do it, which is another thing: no internet! Your world would have been comparatively quite small, especially if you didn’t live near a library.I am really not being facetious. We live in a time of plenty. Of impossible abundance and comfort. Relative to our ancestors, we have it uh-mazing, and we know it. We’re all basically Caesar now.So when you weigh the idea of forfeiting all that (by going to jail forever or dying) in service of trying (probably fruitlessly) to depose some a*****e grifter who has quite a bit more to lose than you, by virtue of his having quite a bit more to begin with, it’s hard for me to take seriously the idea that many will actually risk it all to stop this guy. Much more likely, he’ll f**k around, he won’t find out, and he’ll die of old age in a decade or two in the Lincoln Bedroom, at which point, Don Jr. or Eric will take over, or if we’re very, very lucky, Ivanka.But that’s it, guys. That’s the future. That’s how this plays out.If it sounds like I don’t care, that’s not quite true. I’ve just accepted it. It’s like snow. I’ve never understood why people complain about the snow. If you complain, you have exactly the same amount of snow, you’re just sore over it, when you could be out skiing or making snow angels.If you want to keep letting Donald Trump live rent-free in your head though, be my guest. I evicted the prick, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.Anyway, as promised, here’s how Trump will make it work. Here’s how he’ll stay when you want him to go.I should note again here that I am not a legal or constitutional scholar. If you are, and you think I’m full of it, please say so in the comments. I’d love to be proved wrong.But I don’t really think case law, precedent, or textual originalism matter here. This administration has already made clear that they don’t care what any court says anyway, which means that however legally wrong I am, or Trump is, we’re still right back where we started; he’s not leaving until he’s made to leave, and nobody’s really going to make him leave.Anyway the *two terms of four years each* standard comes from two, different places in the US Constitution.Article II, Section I says the following:“He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years…”And the 22nd Amendment says:“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…”Article II says more than that, of course. So does the 22nd Amendment. But none of what else is said in either passage is germane to the question of how much time an individual can spend as President of the United States.And that’s it. Those 25 fragile words are all we have to give us the idea that an individual (strictly speaking, a man; Article II either says “person,” or uses he/him pronouns) can only hang out in the Oval Office for 8 years.**Actually, that’s not quite right. A person could do just under 10 years and still be in compliance with 22. If they served less than two years of a term to which somebody else was elected, they’d still be eligible to run twice more.But do you really think a determined, audacious autocrat couldn’t fiddle with those 25 words to argue that they say something other than what we think they say? To buy him some more time?Circumventing 22 would be the easy part. It only says Trump can’t be *elected* more than twice. But he doesn’t need to get elected again if he never leaves office.And the four years thing from Article II? Psh.“I interpret this as meaning, ‘a Term of four years at least’ or ‘four years or more’ or ‘four years to start with.’”Either a friendly court says yes to that, or it says no and he ignores it. Whatever. It’s all she wrote. The 20th Amendment says the terms need to begin and end on January 20th, but it says nothing about their length.The courts move slowly. And they do not have the US military at their command to enforce their will. If the executive chooses not to act in good faith, there are serious limits to what can be done about it.The no election thing would definitely be a sticking point, but ultimately possible to overcome. Trump’s got the Republican party captured. Nobody in it is remotely strong enough to stand up to him. If he tells them they’re not holding a presidential primary, they’re not holding a presidential primary.The Democrats still will, of course. But with no opponent, and no buy-in from Republicans, they’ll look tough for a day, defiant for a week, and ridiculous for the rest of the season. At a certain point, the political and media class will accept that there isn’t really going to be a general election for president, and they’ll stop covering the Democrats’ nominating process with any seriousness.Trump will announce well in advance his intention to ignore any electoral college result, or he’ll f**k with the electors themselves, or he’ll coopt red state secretaries of state into refusing to certify. Maybe he’ll do all of the above, and maybe he’ll find some novel way to approach this that I haven’t thought of. Doesn’t much matter in the end because we arrive at the same place: he digs his heels in, we don’t stop him, and he gets to stay on as president.Oh, and don’t underestimate the Overton Window. Trump is already talking about this, and he’s only been back in office for two months. By the time it’s general election season again, this discourse will have been 100% “normalized” (to borrow the left’s favorite/most toothless word). We’ll see the train coming from a mile down the tracks and there won’t be one, damn thing we can do to stop the crash.Hey, maybe I’m wrong! It’s happened before, like in this post where I argued that DOGE would be nothing to write home about. That piece aged like discount bread, and maybe this one will too. I don’t have a crystal ball, I just read the tea leaves like the rest of you, and this is what I see in them.However... The left has been wrong about a great many things over the last 10 years, but Trump’s dictatorial tendencies has not been one of them. He is exactly who, and what, they think he is.I’ve been taking some flack lately from fellow lefties about how I’m always beating on them, and not spending enough time going after Trump. The reason for that is that with such a useless and loathsome opposition in the Democrats, Trump is going to be able to do most of what he wants without meaningful pushback. My bet (and his) is that folks will tolerate even the destruction of American democracy as long as they never have to listen to woke people again.What are a few thousand deported exchange students if it’s okay to say “that’s gay” and “r*tarded” again? Basically, either we get our house in order or we lose the keys to it altogether. I’m trying - I promise - to help us get it together.There is still time to prevent this outcome. That I don’t think it will be prevented, isn’t to say its prevention is beyond the realm of possibility. Trump could, a bit like last time, become very unpopular. That would change things. Another, more popular Republican - or even, if God wills it, a Democrat - could rise up in his place.But I think - and I’m kind of, maybe serious - that this is the road we’re on right now. And it leads to Trump 4 Life. Cry about it if you need to, but crying isn’t going to change anything. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

When Donald Trump got reelected, I made what amounted to a series of New Year’s Resolutions - call them New Term’s Resolutions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

You’re an American. You live hundreds of miles from Washington DC. You work for a company. You own a house. You’re married. You have kids. You have some money (but could always use more). You have car payments, medical bills, a fat grocery tab, and a boiler that keeps threatening to crap out.There are two dictators in your life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe

Audio available for those who may be reading on the way to or from the polls. Sorry the quality isn’t great. My recording studio didn’t survive our house recently flooding and has yet to be reconstituted. There’s a tendency in the aftermath of a big election to try to break down and parse what the outcome says about us as a country. What did it mean in ‘68 when we elected Richard Nixon? Were we pro-war? Anti-war? Anti-segregation? Just anti-Hubert Humphrey? What did it mean that humanitarian Jimmy Carter fell to Hollywood Ron Reagan? Did it make us more macho or just less kind? What did it mean that pro-war George W. Bush beat back war hero and (sort of) Iraq-skeptic John Kerry? What did it mean that Hillary Clinton, the first viable woman to get a major party nomination went down to Donald Trump, an accused sex predator with a history of making misogynistic comments on tape? What will it mean if we elect the first woman of color? What will it mean if we don’t, and we re-elect Donald Trump? And on and on. It’s all kind of a dubious exercise in my view. People who think enough about politics to spend time reading and writing about it are quite rare. Guys like me tend to carry around a laundry list of complaints about politicians we hate, and a hagiographic CV of accomplishments for politicians we like. But most people don’t do that. Your “normies,” your “low information voters,” your “swing voters,” the folks watching Sportscenter or SVU reruns instead of tuning into MSNBC or CNN or Fox; those people don’t take such a tribal approach to this. And it leads to a disconnect.When somebody like me sees a Trump voter, for instance, a series of assumptions are made. We conjure Trump’s entire record, from the last eight years and before. We assume the voter must also be doing this, and thus, that they must be looking upon that record favorably. When dyed-in-the-wool Trumpers see a Harris voter, they react similarly. They project approval on behalf of that voter for every awful thing they’ve ever heard or thought about Harris. They assume that everyone voting for Harris must also know about all of those terrible things and be totally okay with them. You end up with a thought pattern that goes something like this: “I know that [Trump/Harris] is Very Bad. Everyone else must know this too. So everyone supporting [Trump/Harris] must also be Very Bad by virtue of their willingness to excuse the Very Bad things that [Trump/Harris] has done and will do.”This, in most cases, is wrong. Certainly some candidates are good and some are bad. And sure, some politicians do good things and some do bad things. But mapping your own reasoning and priorities onto other voters is almost always a mistake. So, in the social media age, is assuming that another individual is even operating from the same set of facts. Back in my acting days, I had the privilege to star in a wonderful play called ‘Same Time Next Year’ (also a movie with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn). It’s about two people conducting an extramarital affair by meeting up only once per year, and it follows this couple from young adulthood through to advanced age. In the most emotionally impactful chapter of their story (*spoilers ahead*) Doris has gone full hippie while George has become a stick-up-the-ass Goldwater voter. They’re butting heads, having an impossible time coming to terms with each other’s new identity. As their fight reaches fever pitch, George reveals to a horrified Doris that his Goldwater vote was a vote to end the Vietnam War at all cost. Because his beloved son had just been killed by a sniper while serving in country as a medic. The moral is, never presume to know what motivates another person. Never make the mistake of thinking their journey began where yours did or that they arrived at their destination for the reasons you would’ve arrived there. And I’m talking as much to myself here as to anyone else. Because I’ve been guilty as sin in this.Dave's Dispatch is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What follows is not going to be a doom forecast, a late hit, an endorsement, or a plea to vote a certain way tomorrow (today, depending on when and where you read this). It’s going to be a mostly nihilistic rundown of each of the four top-ticket candidates and why, either way, their victories or losses will probably not say and mean what you think they’ll say and mean. Why, whatever happens tomorrow, your thoughts about your friends, your family, your neighbors, and your country should probably stay mostly intact. Finally, it’s going to be a suggestion to come up for air. To cool it on the armageddon rhetoric, and to see your fellow citizens as just that: fellow citizens. Not traitors, infiltrators, or parasites.  Longtime readers will be surprised at this. My usual pre-election fare is a klaxon blast, yelling at folks to vote, and vote the way I think they should vote. But in 10 years of writing about politics, I really have to accept that in all that time, I doubt I’ve changed a single ballot. I doubt a single Republican has rocked up to one of my screeds and gone, “Damn. Dave’s right. Go blue!” I assume people like my writing because it either reinforces their thinking, challenges them in an engaging way, or gives voice to ideas they’d already had, but that were more nebulous in their minds. I do not think they enjoy my writing because it’s giving them needed advice. To the extent that I’ve ever actually impacted election day behavior, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had only been to shore up support for the other guy. Not “Dave’s right,” but “Dave’s so damn annoying that I now feel motivated to annoy him.”So things will be a little different this time around. And off we go, one by one:Tim WalzWe’re going to start easy, because there’s nothing really scary here. I know Tim Walz. Not really - Walz and I have never met - but I knew a hundred guys like him when I worked in politics. Walz is your upstanding community member who happened to be charismatic enough, and in the right places often enough, to end up with an accidentally storied career in public service. You really only find these guys in politically homogeneous places (which is why all the ones I knew in Northern Michigan were Republicans). Being in a swing district or state makes your teeth too sharp. Guys like Walz are ambitious but not competitive. They want to win, not to watch the other guy lose. Walz might just have easily ended up head of the PTA, a church deacon, a local chamber of commerce exec, or yes, Vice President of the United States of America. It’s telling that the best the Republicans could do to smear him was to take a highly uncharitable view of some comments he made about his military service (implying that he lied about having been in combat, though it’s far from clear that that’s what he did), and accusing him of “putting tampons in the boys’ bathroom” which is just not what happened. For the record, here’s what actually happened there:When Walz was governor of Minnesota, he signed a law - a really damn good one, by the way - that tried to make feminine products available to students of all income backgrounds, free of charge. Some Republicans wanted the law to specify that tampons - which were to be provided in school bathrooms - could only be available in girls’ bathrooms. Walz declined. The result is that some schools have tampons in the boys’, and some don’t. The law is written such that no school is out of compliance, irrespective of the choice they made on boys bathroom tampons. But really, who gives a s**t? Boys don't have girlfriends? Their girlfriends don’t have periods? A recent survey of men (this was in the UK, to be fair) found that 52% had never purchased a tampon for their partner, and 42% considered doing so too embarrassing. That’s some weak-ass s**t, guys. If having a dispenser in the boys’ room helps demystify this (admittedly terrifying and intimidating) product, so much the better. That it all got folded into the trans debate doesn’t mean it needed to. And that’s Walz. He’s not really an ideologue or a policy wonk. Nor is he a political genius or a major asset to the Dem ticket. He’s a Democrat because he leans left, and he came up in a blue state. If you met him, you’d probably like him, and he’d probably like you. He’d seem familiar. He’s a regular guy, so he doesn’t need to pretend to be a regular guy. He’ll be a fine VP (the job famously doesn’t take much) and I’d be surprised if, win or lose, he ever runs for president. If he takes office, the future king will not have been crowned (unlike our next entry). The point is: Tim Walz is not one of the Four Horsemen. If he becomes VP, for better or worse, you will not notice. He will not bring out the long knives or become the administration’s attack dog. He will also not push the administration in an ideological direction suited to his own whims. His victory will imply nothing substantive about America or the people who voted for him beyond the fact that he seems pretty nice and they’re probably Democrats.J.D. VanceVance is interesting for a few reasons. He’s both the youngest of the big four in this election, and he’s also, quite plainly, the smartest. In that regard, I don’t even think it’s a close call. He may be wrong about a lot of things, but it’s not for lack of thinking them through. Like Walz, he served in the military, though not in combat. Vance wasn’t a legacy admit to Yale Law, he got there the hard way. While a student, he was encouraged to write his memoirs, which became a bestseller and a movie. His transition into politics - after a stint in venture capital - was about as smooth as it could’ve been, and now, he’s pegged to be one of the youngest Vice Presidents ever (though not the youngest - that was John C. Breckinridge, who started serving under James Buchanan at the age of 36). For those curious, Vance will be 40 on inauguration day, the same age as Nixon when he became Eisenhower’s VP. Bottom line, Vance is an impressive guy, with an impressive CV, and an impressive life story.His intelligence though is probably also his biggest liability. Vance isn’t a cookie-cutter conservative. He’s an intellectual (yes, a few of those are still conservatives). He’s a thinker. Before Trump fast-tracked him to political stardom, he was a very free thinker. He said, for example, some very unflattering things about…*checks notes*...Donald Trump! He also, as we now all know, has said some pretty out-there things about women. Or rather, he’s played on podcasts and social media with a lot of beliefs that are very common on the right but rarely given voice. We parsed “Tampon Tim” so let’s parse Vance’s greatest hit: “childless cat ladies.”In an appearance on Tucker Carlson, Vance said that the US was controlled by, among other unpleasant groups, "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." He was careful to include Kamala Harris in this framing, as well as other high-profile Dems like AOC and Pete Buttigieg (who, in fact, adopted children right around the time of this hullabaloo). A more disciplined political operator would have known that this isn’t the part you say out loud. Or that if you must, you say it much more carefully. According to Vance, he was trying to make a pretty banal point about the Democrats being anti-child and anti-family. But he phrased it such that it sounded like he was taking a dig at all women who don’t have kids. Not a great look, especially for a party that’s hysterically underperforming with women. The real lesson here is that when you give smart guys with active minds an opportunity to talk for long periods of time, they’re going to muse about some weird s**t. On paper, Vance is a pretty doctrinaire conservative. He’s anti-choice. He’s anti illegal immigration, pro law and order, and everything else you’d expect. And the substance of the “cat lady” thing really wasn’t out of normal bounds for conservative discourse. It was just stylistically jarring (he says he was joking, but he’d made enough other critical remarks about single ladies to leave the impression that they really do gross him out). But it’s not like “Democrats are anti-family” is some new sentiment on the right. Vance is no scarier or more threatening than any Republican on this issue, he just talks about it more colorfully.He also appears to be a sort-of isolationist. Bad news for the Ukraine, but maybe not such bad news overall. And honestly, when this chapter of the history books is written, Democrats allowing Republicans to run to their left on war is going to be seen as the most hilarious reversal and the biggest political blunder of the 21st Century. But that’s for the history books. For now, Vance is a guy whose views on foreign policy are a lot less frightening than the views of guys who came before him. If and when Trump finally leaves the stage, if the choice is between a guy like Vance and a warmonger like Tom Cotton (or, ahem, the Dems’ new favorite Republican: Liz Cheney) that should be a very easy choice. Put a pin in this idea of style vs. substance, because we’re going to return to it - bigly - with Trump.Kamala HarrisI could write a book about Harris’s candidacy and probably four about Trump’s. I want to keep this post from becoming novel-length though, so I’ll try to be as brief as I can be. If you’re a Republican, here’s why you shouldn’t be that scared of Kamala Harris: because Democrats shouldn’t be that excited about Kamala Harris.  Unlike J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris is a cookie-cutter partisan. Her position, issue to issue, is whatever she thinks will be the most popular. At times, and when it’s been helpful (like as a California senator) this has placed her to the left of her party. At other times, when it’s been helpful (like when she was California AG) it’s placed her to the right. There’s very little evidence that she’s a policy wonk, an ideologue, or that she’ll be some kind of activist president. Should she win, she’s much more likely to govern according to where she thinks the nation is, rather than according to where she thinks it should be. That should pacify her conservative opponents (but it won’t). She’s not dumb. This is a favorite talking point on the right; “dumb,” “low-IQ,” “unimpressive.” Nobody who’s actually worked with her appears to have come away with the impression that she’s unintelligent though, so why do so many think she is? The trope has a few likely causes:First, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton set the bar extremely high with regard to intellect. Think what you want about those two, but they both pretty obviously have bank-breaking IQs. Both were policy wonks, both were good on-script and off-the-cuff, and both did evidence a strong command of and interest in issue details. And it’s not just them. Bernie Sanders could talk policy all day, so could Elizabeth Warren. Al Gore’s whole campaign was centered around his not being an idiot like Bush (not that that turned out well) and John Kerry may have been an effete toff, but he was certainly a bright one. That Harris doesn’t quite measure up to this - and I’ll cede that she doesn’t appear to - isn’t an indication that she’s stupid. And since the people who most earnestly believe she is also believe that Donald Trump is some kind of giga-genius, I think we can safely discount most of the “low-IQ” talk as partisan hackery.Her race is part of this equation too, but not (just) for the reasons folks on the left think; “Republicans are just SO racist!” Joe Biden did Kamala Harris (and later, Ketanji Brown Jackson) absolutely no favors by announcing in advance of picking them that he would be using their identities as deciding factors in their selection. I get why he did it. It was 2020, it felt like identity politics would live forever, and he thought he was taking steps to pacify butthurt progressives who’d just been shunted aside for the second primary cycle in a row. It had some unfortunate downstream effects though. When “DEI” became an albatross for Democrats, Biden had already hung the mantle right around his VP’s neck. “I’ll pick a woman” was now understood to have meant, “I won’t be picking based on merit.” And when he tapped Ketanji Brown Jackson for SCOTUS, having upped the ante by pre-announcing he would be nominating a woman of color, it further solidified the idea that these women didn’t get where they got fairly, or by virtue of their talents.If you’re a Democrat, that really sucks. And you should be really pissed off at Joe Biden right now. Kamala Harris actually does have an impressive political CV (certainly more so than Donald Trump did the first time around). And…it doesn’t matter. She’s still the affirmative action pick. Because the idiot who picked her told everyone in advance that that’s what she was going to be!  But here’s the thing: even the most conservative conservative out there has little to fear from four years of Kamala Harris. Because even actual visionary presidents have a notoriously hard time using the office to effect real change. The American system just isn’t set up to allow for it. And the Democrats’ instinct has always been to preserve that system. You might not love her rhetoric. You might not love her legislative initiatives (most of which will likely fail, because that’s just how Washington works nowadays), and you may not like the people she nominates. But Kamala Harris is not going to be some kind of game changer. She doesn’t even appear to want to be. Even the supposedly existential threat of mass immigration shouldn’t be a big point of concern. When Democrats like Harris take the rudder, they don’t tack left, they tack center. Deportations skyrocketed under Obama. Harris will crack down too, even if she didn’t as VP (when she was in little danger of being stuck with the bill and also couldn’t). In any event, Democrats scare easily. So if she wins, and you find yourself a distraught conservative on November 6th, be assured that with very minimal political organizing, you’ll be able to have a big influence on her administration.Donald TrumpSaved the best for last. The one that will get me in the most trouble with my liberal friends and family.   Look, I think Donald Trump sucks. I won’t pretend otherwise or imply that I’m somehow *above the fray*. He sucks. I can’t stand the guy. But…I no longer really fear him. And if you’re a worried liberal, I don’t think you should either. He’s not worth the energy.To convince you of this, I’d like to run a quick thought experiment. I want you to imagine a parallel reality in which Donald Trump never entered politics. (Nice, right?) I want you to imagine who the Republican nominee for president might be in this reality. What positions would they hold? What priorities would they espouse? What would four years of them as president look like? What would happen?Now, I want you to snap back to our reality. I want you to compare the hypothetical Republican nominee you just imagined with the real Donald Trump. Look at them side by side. Probably, this means adding a whole bunch of ugly baggage to the Trump side. But the final thing I want you to do is, piece-by-piece, strip away any of that baggage that can be reasonably placed under one of the following umbrellas: temperament, rhetoric, style, or personal corruption. If you’ve done this, and if you’re honest, I think you’ll find that you’ve come full circle, and arrived right back at the hypothetical Republican nominee from the parallel, Trump-less universe. Or at least, something pretty close to it. Because when you do that - when you forget about the insults, the circus, the grift, the embarrassment of seeing your country represented by a maladapted sex pest with a poor command of policy, you really just have…a Republican. One not much better or worse than any Republican.Now I get that that’s a lot to excuse. Personal corruption, (constant!) off-color remarks, sexual misconduct - these are big f*****g deals. They are big f*****g deals that you are under no obligation whatsoever to overlook. But what they are not are things that will have a direct, material impact on the lives of most Americans. If the US were a kingdom, and Trump were its king, you wouldn’t even be aware of most of these things. They’re style, not substance. They’re character, not policy. The reason Trump so outrages Democrats is not that his governing was any worse than other recent Republicans, it’s that they couldn’t tolerate (understandably, to me) the manner in which he governed. He offended every one of their sensibilities. His very existence is a thorn between the ribs. And you’re not ever going to hear me argue that style, character, and conduct aren’t important. But… Let’s compare Trump to the Republican who preceded him: George W. Bush. Round up all of Trump’s biggest scandals; pussy-gate, the two impeachments, even January 6th. Even with his lesser scandals peppered in for flavor, and as bad as those things all were, they don’t add up to a fraction of the own-goal catastrophe that was the Iraq War. Sure, Trump’s Covid response was abysmal. It was his 9/11. But to claim that another president would have handled it better is to run an unfalsifiable counterfactual. The US had mask mandates. It had school closures, and vaccines, and curfews. And we still got nailed. Other than Trump sounding off unhelpfully throughout it (which, to be clear, was a real problem) Trump didn’t make many moves that you wouldn’t have expected from another president, maybe even a Democratic one. As to the belief that he’s going to usher in some new, fascist dawn if reelected, a question for believers: when have you ever seen Donald Trump take enough of an interest in something (other than himself) to pull that off? When has Trump indicated, ever, that he works hard enough to execute a full, authoritarian takeover of the world’s most powerful democracy? And if he really wants to, why didn’t he do it last time?January 6th did not “almost succeed.” It was horrible, and a huge scandal for which Trump was appropriately impeached. But even if the insurrectionists had taken hostages, even if they’d camped out in the Capitol for months, there was just no way this was ever going to result in Trump getting to stay president. One other question: if your concern is that Trump is uniquely dangerous because he’s a right winger with authoritarian tendencies…forgive me, but have you met the Republican party? Were you just not around in the 90s and 00s? The Republicans are not the Libertarians, and never have been. Right wing authoritarianism has been their thing for a really, really long time. Trump may talk about it differently, he may do a lot of saying the quiet part out loud, but his predecessors really just had better polish. Thicker veneer. Put Trump next to any 9 of the last 10 GOPers to seek the nomination, and the only real difference you’ll find is that Trump doesn’t gloss over what he thinks and wants.  The Calculus On A Woman’s Right To ChooseSince there’s such a stark gender divide in this election, we should touch on a woman’s right to choose - one of the most powerfully animating issues for Democrats in this season. Trump is very bad on this issue. But is he worse than any other Republican would be? The overturning of Roe was not the result of some genius feat of political engineering by Donald Trump. He just got lucky. Barack Obama, in bending over for Mitch McConnell without so much as saying “boo” shoulders more responsibility for this than Trump does. So, I am sorry to say, does Ruth Bader Ginsburg, may she rest in peace. Ginsburg died at the age of 87 after having been a cancer patient for 21 years. She’d had pancreatic cancer since 2009 - early in Obama’s first term - and was well into her 80s by the time Obama was leaving office. Gambling on a subsequent Clinton term, and not voluntarily retiring under a Democratic administration, was a legacy-destroying miscalculation for which Donald Trump bears zero blame and deserves zero credit from his party. Obama eating McConnel’s s**t gave the Republicans Neil Gorsuch. Ginsburg making a bad dice roll gave them Amy Coney Barrett. Hell, even Anthony Kennedy - a supposed moderate/independent - gave Trump and the GOP an unlikely gift by retiring and allowing Trump to install Brett Kavanaugh. Somebody, please, point out to me the part where Trump is some kind of political savant who orchestrated a SCOTUS takeover and the end of Roe. Explain to me how he’s some anti-choice Machiavelli and not just a lucky ducky who had this all dropped in his lap. Being concerned about reproductive freedom is entirely valid, and being more concerned about it in the post-Roe era makes perfect sense. What does not make sense is crediting Trump’s personal savvy with any of what’s happened over the last 8 years. And unfortunately, what also does not make sense is expecting the next Democratic president - even a staunchly pro-choice one - to be able to fix this. To get abortion access codified nationally would now take an act of Congress or an unrealistically large shift in the composition of SCOTUS. Kamala Harris has promised to support the right to choose. Great. But does she have a plan to get a bill to her desk? Did she try for one as VP? Is she going to push to end the filibuster? Pack the court? Because that’s what it’ll take. The hard truth here is that Kamala Harris, like most professional Democrats, does not care about this issue the way voters do. Abortion access is not an urgent problem for people with as much money as she (and virtually every member of Congress) has. She’ll say all the right things about it. Should she get as politically lucky as Trump did, she’ll reinstate access, for sure. But if the calculus for Democrats is that a Harris vote restores reproductive freedom and a Trump vote uniquely threatens it, I just don’t think either of those things is true. This doesn’t mean don’t vote, or don’t vote for Harris, or don’t vote for other candidates pushing for access and freedom. It means be realistic. And don’t mistake a rhetorically useful talking point: “Donald Trump is a singular threat to abortion access” for reality: Donald Trump is no better or worse on this issue than the rest of the GOP, and actually showed some restraint by nominating real jurists to the Supreme Court instead of Ted Nugent, Maria Bartiromo, and Kid Rock.  For my Dem friends, I’m not finger-wagging here, and I’m not trying to both-sides this. If you’re pro-choice, Trump is a terrible pick. But there has been material harm done by failing to understand how Roe was actually overturned, and by utterly failing to understand what it’s possible to do about it now. With Roe gone, abortion is a state issue for the foreseeable future. That’s bad for red states. But it also leaves Democrats a lot of room to work, even in the event of a second Trump term. Putting all the eggs - really, putting any eggs - in the Dem nominee’s basket is foolhardy. On this issue, the most realistic thing to expect from a Kamala Harris administration is that if another SCOTUS seat opens up, she’ll nominate a Democrat. That’s good. But how likely is it to change the court’s makeup? Clarence Thomas is the oldest serving justice, but he’s only 76, and could easily last another one or two presidential terms. Next is Samuel Alito, for whom the same is even more true. After that, and probably the unhealthiest justice (Type 1 diabetes) is Sonia Sotomayor, who is 70, and by remaining in office this long, has fairly well missed this chance to guarantee replacement by another Democrat. So however much you think that reproductive freedom is a game-changing issue (and as an ardent pro-choicer, I 100% agree that it is) there is just no reasonable construction, and no survey of the landscape that places it on the ballot in this election. That ship has sailed. If it hadn’t, Joe Biden would’ve solved this problem in the four years he’s been president. With the exception of SCOTUS seats, most of the useful action that will be possible under President Harris will be possible under President Trump, and - crucially - is possible now.      Final ThoughtsI hope my overall point is clear here, despite this post including at least 18 things guaranteed to piss off every conceivable reader. We’ve all fallen into a terrible habit of regarding every election cycle as Maybe The Last One Ever. SNL just brilliantly skewered this sentiment in an uncommonly funny sketch. Elon Musk just repeated the same thing to a credulous Joe Rogan. All three major cable news channels have been screeching it at each other for two years, alternative media is also neck deep, and this zombie meme has turned our entire body politic into a deranged Rapture cult that keeps seeing the world fail to end, but keeps predicting its end anyway, with greater confidence each time.   Nostalgia for an imagined past plays a huge role in most of our lives. Our politics too. Conservatives tend to want a return to Camelot. To restore a golden age of men in hats and collared shirts, women in day dresses and aprons, of carefully mowed lawns, respectable television programming, and church every Sunday. Liberals want to time travel too, but not quite so far back. Mostly, they want to go back to a time when Republicans scared them less - usually, just to the last guy. In Trump’s shadow, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush don’t seem so bad. Relative to Bush Junior, Daddy was a cakewalk. Reagan may have been a bit dim, but he wasn’t intolerable, and at least he was going to protect everyone from the commies. Ford was actually sane, and Nixon, if you can get past Vietnam and his (considerable) personal baggage governed domestically as what we’d call a progressive now. And before that…all good. The fear is the same on both sides though: entropy. A sense that things are falling apart. That the country is being lost. And when I say “the same” here, I mean it. The same. Not similar, not roughly equivalent. Identical. The hardest core supporters of Kamala Harris think that Trump, if he wins, will destroy America as they know it. The MAGA set thinks that if Harris wins, she will…*checks notes again*...destroy America as they know it. In a slightly saner world, this shared fear would bring people together. “Hey, if you don’t want to destroy America and I don’t want to destroy America, maybe we should hold hands and…not destroy America!” But returning to the beginning of this piece, that’s not how it works. Because Trump isn’t just Trump. He’s a slate - a preset menu - of terrible things. He’s authoritarianism, police brutality, the end to a woman’s right to choose. He’s mass deportation, he’s tax relief for billionaires, he’s personal grift and corruption. He’s vulgar, humiliating comments, day out and day in until you want to puke and cry and tear your hair out. And you better believe, for MAGAs, Harris sits on the same throne of evil. She’ll jack up your taxes, bankrupt your small business with regulation, flood your neighborhood with violent immigrants and fentanyl zombies. She’ll trans your kids, kill your pet squirrel, and DEI white people into oblivion. What a choice, man. You can have soft on crime or soft on dictators. You can have a fascist or a commie. Hitler or Stalin. Whichever side you’re on, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed. The best lack all conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity. What ever to do?Not to be *that guy* but my prescription: mirror the world. The adage “be the change you want to see in the world,” which all will have heard, is often misunderstood, and often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. But that’s not what Gandhi actually said. What he said was much clearer, and much more sensible. Here’s the real quote: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”See how that’s different? “Be the change…” sounds like, “go out and effect change.” It sounds like “picket,” “protest,” “disrupt.” It sounds like “go fix the world,” which, while not the worst impulse, is a mostly impossible task for an individual. It’s an undertaking that leads to a sense of failure, of foreboding, of despondency, and of hopelessness. But changing oneself is possible. It’s also very useful. If we recognize that both left and right fear the same thing: destruction of their way of life, we might also take note that both sides harken for the same thing. Political nostalgia is really about a desire to resurrect a time when life was less bitter. When you didn’t have to hate your next door neighbor because of a yard sign he put up. When he didn’t hate you for your bumper sticker. When you could sit next to him at church, take him to a ballgame, chat with him at a barbecue, wave to him at the grocery store, and none of it felt like Consorting With The Enemy. And that’s something we can do. We can bring that back. I can do it, you can do it, and, as per Gandhi, it’s not a thing that requires waiting for somebody else to act first. You want a kinder world? Be kinder. You want a safer world? Be safer. You want a just world? Be just. You may not get it overnight. You may not get it at all. But you’ll have lived well, lived better, and you’ll have modeled decency and dignity for anyone in your orbit who might be paying attention. And that…ain’t nothing.You’ll hear a lot of people admonishing you to make a plan for election day. A plan to vote, to volunteer, to phonebank, to knock on doors. And by all means, do those things if you have the will and conviction. I’m going to make a different admonishment though: make a plan for the day after election day. Make a plan that includes doing something you enjoy and being grateful for it. Make a plan that includes being kind to someone without wondering who they voted for. Make a plan that allows you to be generous. To be decent. To be dignified. Make a plan to worry without letting the worry consume you. Make a plan to grieve without letting the grief consume you. Make a plan to celebrate without gloating, to walk tall without strutting, and to cheer without sneering. Because the cool thing is, if you do that, you will have made it matter a lot less who won the election. You will have helped cast a shade of unimportance over a process that should be vastly less important than we consider it to be. And hey, if, like me, you’re in too deep to simply shut off all concern, or to change the channel away from cable news, think of it this way: by taking a little breather, you’ll be keeping some in the tank for when you really need it. The outrage roller coaster will still be running on Thursday. The bottom isn’t going to fall out if you take a day off to make things around you a little nicer. You never know. It could end up being the most consequential piece of activism you ever undertake. You could, if only in your little corner of it, get your country back.         This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dennisonwrites.substack.com/subscribe