Editors’ Blog
Dignity Wraiths, Resilience and Democratic Character 
I’ve been reading through your emails about your favorite Editors’ Blog posts, and among the maybe dozen that are most often mentioned, there are three themes I wanted to highlight, because they each relate to a central dimension of our politics today.
The first is the post on “bitch-slap politics” which I wrote in 2004; I later began referring to the concept I described in it as “dominance politics”.
The second is the post I wrote the day after the 2016 presidential election about optimism as an ethic, a posture toward life rather than a set of predictions about the future. It was actually a post with a series of bullet-pointed observations. But that one bullet point — about optimism — resonated with people. A lot of you wrote in about it. And in recent years it’s probably the thing I hear about from people most.
I’ll return to those two topics in a moment.
The third theme is not really any individual post but a stream of posts and tweets over several years about “dignity loss” and “dignity wraiths” and like things, a whole bespoke vocabulary or a running gag about this pattern we’re all aware of in which Trump demands of people an ever escalating series of humiliations, dignity losses and more. Trump requires it — that part alone isn’t hard to understand. It’s that people give it … lavishly and fulsomely. Soon you’ve got some guy you may not have agreed with but seemed like a reasonably self-possessed adult, and they’re saying “thank you, sir, may I have another” each time Trump comes up with a new insult name for them, praising his far-reaching intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of history, clapping obediently on his approach. Trump somehow casts a spell over these people and soon they’re like a desiccated dignity husk. It’s like he’s a dignity black hole that no one can re-emerge from.
Read MoreA quick update on our weekend site upgrade (see posts below). We’ve got the new system up and running. Thank you so much for your indulgence over the weekend. We really appreciate it. We’re still working to get the comments widget on the story pages back up and running. That should be up soon. Otherwise, on the reader end, everything should be back to the way it was and, under the hood, much better than it was.
Thanks again for your patience.
Just a reminder that we are currently doing a major site upgrade, specifically tied to our membership system, and no one can currently log in to the site. If you’re a member there’s an email about this in your inbox that you should have received yesterday. And you can see the post two posts down in the Editors’ Blog. This is a weekend long project. As noted below, we apologize for the inconvenience. But I assure you it’s both necessary and worthwhile. You don’t need to change your password. There’s no technical issue with the log in. It’s just not available through most of this weekend.
Joe Boosted By Roaring Biden Economy. No, Really.
In politics and in our personal lives we are often spinning ourselves in circles searching for explanations of the inexplicable when a bit of comparative analysis would do us wonders. For Democrats an abiding question of the Biden presidency, especially in 2024, is this: why hasn’t Joe Biden gotten more credit for the roaring 20s economy? Growth is steady, unemployment is at historic lows, inflation has fallen dramatically, wages are rising. Each rosy data point purports to have a context which shows it isn’t all its cracked up to be. And some of those contexts bear consideration. But the G-7 summit in Italy this last week is perhaps the most clarifying context.
Read MoreThis weekend we’re going to be doing some very important site maintenance to upgrade our membership system. The site will remain online and our staff will continue to publish, so if there’s any breaking news, you can still count on TPM. However, while this work is going on, you will be unable to log into your account, comment, or access The Hive. Archived member-only content will also be inaccessible.
The work will begin early Saturday morning and may extend into Sunday. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but this work is critical to the stability and security of the site. Suffice to say it’s extremely important and we thank you for your patience during this process.
Josh and Kate convene for an insta-pod on the Supreme Court’s major mifepristone decision.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
A slew of headlines greeted Donald Trump’s return to Capitol Hill yesterday. “Triumphant return” in the words of AP and others, Trump’s “flex” in the words of Axios. Others less generously, including TPM, heralded Trump’s “return to the scene of the crime.” And with Trump, characteristically, there are many crimes to choose from, not just January 6th, his greatest crime, but the fact that this was his first big get together since being convicted of 34 felonies and earning his new first name: “Convicted Felon.” What all seemed to agree on is that it was a “Unity Rally.” But I think there was both more and less to it than that.
First, it was some mix of surprisng and revealing how little of the first round of press coverage noted the very Pyongyang-on-Capitol Hill vibe of these events, right down to the set piece press opportunities with grown men and women from the Senate manically clapping like seals as Trump walks into the room, interviews where they express their hopes that Trump will come and lead them again. Our friend Aaron Rupar really seemed to have his eyes open for this, and he captured it in this video.
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Making Sense of a Big Stack of Editors’ Blog Posts
I want to thank all of you who wrote in in response to yesterday’s post asking for your favorite Editors’ Blog posts. Please keep them coming. At one level it’s just very gratifying and affirming to hear which ones you’ve especially enjoyed, which ones had some particular meaning for you. But this wasn’t just an ego trip. Or, it mostly wasn’t that. I’ve been considering putting together a collection of pieces from the last 24 years. I’m not sure whether that would include the “best” or most popular, or just ones that built up a series of themes or arguments over time. My thought was too pull them together, clean them up and assemble them into bundles focused on key themes and questions that have animated the Editors’ Blog over the years. And then on top of this, add a short essay for each trying to make sense of how the question or problem evolved over time, how the opinions stack up in retrospect, what we can say now about something that happened in … say 2010, the importance of which simply wasn’t clear at the time.
Again, this is a very general idea. But I just wanted to give you a sense of what spurred me to ask the question.
Read MoreA new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the chatty Alitos, an Ohio special election and a new election forecast.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
I wanted to ask you a question for a project I’m putting together: Do you have a favorite Editors’ Blog post? This isn’t one of those things where you have to choose a single one. There are going on 24 years of posts in the Editors’ Blog. So I’m curious to hear from readers if there are particular ones that stand out or that you found memorable or anything else like that over that period. One, none, five — any number is fine. If there are ones that come to mind, can you drop me a line at the regular TPM email address — talk (at) talkingpointsmemo dot com — and just put in the subject line “Editor’s Blog,” or something like that?
You don’t need to know the title. For the first eight or nine years they didn’t even have titles.