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.

A number of you have asked me to share my perspective on one of the Israeli opposition leaders (one of, not the official one) Benny Gantz leaving the Netanyahu coalition. So here goes. My overall impression, sadly, is perhaps best captured by not posting on it until now, though I was kind of letting it marinate while I thought of what to say. Basically, I think it matters very little. But it’s helpful to walk through the different dimensions of non-mattering.

In the most basic sense it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t endanger the governing coalition’s majority. That majority had 64 seats on October 7th, which means a majority and three seats to spare. They were added and now taken away, a wash. In the short term it only makes Netanyahu more reliant on the ultra-rightist parties in the coalition — something Gantz’s party’s entry was in some ways meant to limit.

I think a lot about resilience. It’s actually an underlying concern that forms a lot of my political opinions. Not about policy, though perhaps that too in some way, but politics in the sense of elections and how coalitions and individuals operate politically, how they sustain themselves. I thought about this when I heard these new recordings of Sam Alito, telling us in his own words what we’ve been learning in recent years from his actions. It was interesting to contrast Alito’s remarks with those from the parallel recordings of John Roberts. Roberts at least said the right things when pushed on these questions about polarization and the role of justices and the Court. I doubt the difference in the two responses is just about Roberts being more circumspect. While being part of the same corruption as Alito, he is at least concerned with public perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy and the historical reputation of the Court under his chief justiceship. He is concerned with the constraint of legitimacy, which is defined by public perceptions of the Court. It’s a low bar, but still a quite significant one.

The thing with Sam Alito is that he doesn’t give a fuck. He is a seventy-something Fox News watcher and religious fundamentalist who happens to find himself in a position of immense and almost incomparable power over all of American society and he’s going to take that power to the limit to advance his own political preferences. He’s not even going to go through the motions of pretending that’s not the case. You don’t like it? Well, tough shit. You should have thought of that in 2006. And he’s not the only one in this mode. Thomas is right there with him. The remaining four are functionally in the same place. They’re just more attuned to appearances and willing to pass up at least a few goodies in the interest of maintaining some patina of legitimacy and thus entrenching and confirming their illegitimate power.

So, resilience.

You’ve likely seen the news of the new European Union elections in which the far-right — particularly in France and Germany — have made big gains. Those gains in turn spurred French President Macron to call snap elections for the national parliament, an extremely high stakes gamble. European politics are complicated and different from those of the U.S. in numerous ways. Each country, notwithstanding the centralizing force of europeanization, remains its own microcosm. But it’s worth taking a moment to focus on their essential similarity.

Take the example of France.

I wanted to share another thought on the Post’s travails. I’m chagrined that a friend had to make the point for me since it’s a point I should know as well as anyone. It’s not like there’s not a ton of money to be made on journalism in DC. The fact that it’s one of the few spaces in the U.S. that has spawned a series of successful media startups over the last fifteen years testifies to that — Politico, Axios, Punchbowl and more. Indeed, it was veterans of the Post who branched off and launched the first two and in many ways ate the Post’s launch before Bezos came into the picture.