Editors’ Blog
Thank You For Everything, Folks 
Since this will be the final Backchannel of 2023, I want to devote it to a note of thanks as we go into the new year. 2023 was the first full year of The Backchannel. We launched it at the end of 2022, and it is a members-only newsletter. So I’m writing to you as the members who make TPM not only possible but vital: Thank you.
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I give you my favorite editorial fail of the final week of 2023, from the Times write-up of the Maine disqualification …
Do We Long for the Old School Terrible?
I noted on Tuesday that, for whatever reason, I’m feeling a relative optimism about the 2024 election. That leads me to speculate: what happens after Trump? I don’t think I’m getting ahead of myself. The question is important and illuminating even if Trump isn’t done with us. Because it goes to the heart of what exactly the Republican Party is today.
It is a commonplace and an accurate one to say that the Republican Party is Donald Trump. When we referenced this yesterday while recording our podcast, Kate Riga reminded us of the party’s 2020 decision to scrap its entire party platform and replace it with, simply, whatever Donald Trump wants. It made sense: the party is Donald Trump. The rest is just fine print, which Trump can make up or change whenever he wants.
Read MoreA new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss presidential immunity, the major Wisconsin maps ruling, and feelings of hope heading into 2024.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Boebert Hoping for Soft Landing in Nextdoor District!
I love this story. Lauren Boebert has apparently seen the writing on the wall and now realizes she can’t be elected in her congressional district, Colorado’s 3rd. Too much interrupting Joe Biden’s State of the Unions, too many Beetlejuice handies, too many bonkers TV appearances. So she’s decided to run not in her own district but in the neighboring 4th district, which unlike the 3rd is solidly Republican. That district is available because incumbent Ken Buck is retiring.
She just announced the move in a Facebook video post this evening.
Read MoreResponding to yesterday’s Backchannel …
Read MoreI read your post and have to say, I share some of your optimism. Not because things are good or getting better—they’re not!—but because for the first time in what feels like forever, I see potential for the coming year to bring some extremely dark chapters in world history to a close.
First, the Trump-Biden rematch. Like you, I’m not discounting the possibility that Trump wins. But if he doesn’t, that’s the end of him as an active political figure. He’s too old to run again, too criminally liable, too spent. He’ll have a second political life after he dies, I’m sure, like Ronald Reagan had until Trump displaced him with a new cult of personality, but the man himself will be really and truly gone from our politics. Phew!
Responding to yesterday’s Backchannel …
Read MoreYou asked for our thoughts RE: Can Any Centers Hold?
Like you, I seem to have had a revelation (somewhere around 2022 but continuing this year) that the good people of America will be fighting Trumpist authoritarianism for decades to come. It’s become the new American sin – not the original sin, but the adopted sin. A sin that was completely avoidable yet irresistible to the power-hungry and to the ignorant. One thing that makes it so dispiriting is that broad swaths of the American public either don’t take it seriously, or they actively (think they) desire it. Life since 2016 has resembled a horror movie where people become zombies not because they are bitten, but because they go down the wrong internet rabbit holes. The mainstream press isn’t immune, either, having developed an insatiable thirst for “Forgotten Man” blood long ago.
The first of several responses from TPM Readers to yesterday’s Backchannel …
Read MoreFWIW – I keep finding myself wondering whether, in terms of American politics, we are experiencing something of a rerun of Reagan’s reelection. The current situation, of course, differs in all kinds of ways from the situation around New Years, 1984. The geopolitical realities are very, very different. American society has become much more polarized since then, and much more unequal. Climate change did not loom in anything like the same way. Gerrymandering had not become an art form, and neither major political party included millions of people who had explicitly soured on democracy and lived within an epistemic bubble.
Can Any Centers Hold?
I’ve reading up on those end-of-the-year “what the year meant” columns. 2023 was the year of this; 2023 was the year when that happened. You know the genre. It’s a silly exercise since years aren’t about anything. Or to the extent they are it’s all but impossible for those of us living through them to make any sense of what it might be. But it’s still an interesting canvas onto which people paint an experienced moment. To me it was the year when people seemed to settle into, get comfy with the idea that our present is one of never-ending terribles. Put differently, it was the year that many of you decided that the annus horribilis of 2016 was not a comically bad demolition derby of years or a bad year with several relatedly bad years following it but simply the arrival of a new normal.
(Don’t worry. This post gets better! Follow me after the jump.)
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