I wanted to share a few thoughts on Tuesday’s primary in New York’s 16th congressional district, which pits Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) against Westchester County Executive George Latimer. It is apparently going to be the most expensive congressional primary ever. The headlines are that AIPAC itself, and a number of AIPAC adjacent pro-Israel groups, are pouring money into the race and Bowman is being wildly outspent. And that’s true. Limited polling suggests Latimer is a strong favorite. But this headline version misses a lot of the story. Or, more specifically, it mistakes cause and effect.

There’s a wrongheaded tendency to think the Court isn’t quite as bad or corrupt when it hands down one of these “good” decisions as it did today in the domestic abusers gun case. Resist the urge. One of the many things I’ve learned from my podcast colleague Kate Riga in our many podcast discussions is that we get a lot of these cases lately because, in addition to taking many fewer cases in general, the Court is now basically open season for culture-war cases. Even in relative terms there are many fewer of the cases that are on some obscure dimension of the tax code or other important-but-to-most-people-obscure questions that don’t obviously line up with hot-button political issues.

This case was one of those cases on a few different levels. The fact that the plaintiff succeeded at the circuit court level is astonishing and scandalous in itself. But let’s start with some basics. The landmark Heller decision in 2008 did not uphold the kind of absolute 2nd Amendment “gun rights” advocates have long claimed. It was terrible, but it didn’t do that. What it did was for the first time find an individual right to own and possess firearms. Like all rights, any regulation of that must be justified by and balanced against some legitimate public interest or need.

Yesterday I opened my inbox to an Axios email with the subject line: “Dems Fear Biden Loss.” Needless to say, versions of this story have become almost a stock piece of the 2024 campaign. And, look, I fear a Biden loss as well. He could totally lose and that would be really, really bad. But I got the sense that the import of this item was a bit more totalizing than that. And well … I was right. The item presents a picture of a campaign cocooned from outside input, intolerant of dissenters who aren’t confident of a win and largely the work of Biden and top advisor Mike Donilon, who is portrayed as having a strategy that is little more than a preciously naive hope that in the end voters will “do the right thing.”

But the heart of the piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.”

“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary.”

As you know, there are primary elections in a few states tonight. Virginia is one of them. And there’s one race I wanted to highlight because it’s a sign of the times, of the Trump era. Bob Good is currently the chair of the Freedom Caucus. If you’re assuming that because he’s in the Freedom Caucus he’s awful, well … good call. Because he’s completely awful. It also looks like his political career is going to end tonight. And couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Because Bob Good is awful. The reason his career is coming to an end, though, goes back to his very bad decision to endorse Ron DeSantis. In other words, he crossed Trump, although in a pretty meager way. Once Trump was back in the driver’s seat he made very clear that while he was supporting DeSantis he’d obediently return to the Trump Train as soon as DeSantis officially bowed out.

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.