The Backchannel

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.

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.

We’ve now got the brass’s take on the shake-up at The Washington Post via Dylan Byers at Puck. I subscribe to Puck, and some of the people there are extremely good. Others I read because I want to know what *those* people are thinking. Dylan Byers is in that category for me. He covers media but in a very corporate, rah-rah, mergery, no-actual-interest-in-journalism kind of way. William Cohan covers the titans for Puck too. But I always learn a lot from his reports. Byers is out now with his report on what happened. In his version of events, Buzbee, the departed executive editor, was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, the kind of serious and well-meaning editor you’d expect at the head of a dying institution. Indeed, she was so not a player that, in his account, she participated in the planning for the Post’s new direction, creating a “third newsroom” and such, without realizing until the last minute that it was in part an effort to ease her out. So not a player.

If you’re a subscriber, read his account and if you’re not I think you can read the article by, like, giving them your email. The are two points which suffuse his account and which he in various places states explicitly. The first is that the British newspaper execs have “swagger” and the current Post lacks “swagger” and needs it desperately. Buzbee is a fine editor but lacks “swagger.” She came from the AP, as he notes. How can you have less “swagger”? The second is that the Biden era is boring — “somnolent,” as he puts it — and lacks the “go-go” excitement of the Trump era.

A number of you have asked me to share my thoughts on abrupt shake-up at The Washington Post in which Executive Editor Sally Buzbee was abruptly forced out by turnaround CEO Will Lewis. I don’t know enough about the situation at the Post to add more than you’re hearing from other commentary. There are a lot of things that look bad and I’m fairly confident they are bad. But I don’t know the backstory or details well enough to do more than repeat widely shared impressions. But I have a few ancillary observations.

The first is a simple pattern, not terribly surprising, but still worth absorbing. We’ve seen a series of billionaires get into the news business by purchasing for-profit news entities with what seems like the implicit promise that their vast resources will allow them to focus on journalistic excellence even if that means running losses which the new owner can cover without much difficulty. This seemed like the Bezos concept. He bought the Post when it was seriously on the ropes and when its longtime family owners (the Graham family) simply didn’t have the resources to get the paper back to profitability or to secure its place as one of the 3-to-4 national U.S. newspapers.

Trump supporters are trotting out any number of responses to Trump’s string of felony convictions last week. One of the most perverse and malign is the demand or “request” for jurors to come forward and explain their reasoning. Part of the idea is to suggest that the logic of the verdict is obscure or hard to justify and thus requires explanation. “Can you explain how you came to this very hard to understand verdict?” Neither is the case. The logic of the verdict is very straightforward. There may be some room for debate about how the judge interpreted the relevant law. But within those interpretations the jury verdict is elementary. The other part is to suggest something odd or suspicious in the fact that none of the jurors have yet gone public in the press.

The Donald Trump we saw yesterday after his 34 felony convictions was angry, defiant but also visibly shaken, unsteady. His face and his hair and his comportment had that look I remember from childhood when I or other schoolboys would have the wind knocked out of them on the soccer field. We’ll see another version of him this morning in a press conference where he will no doubt expand his protestation of innocence and demand for vengeance. The spectacle is a reminder of and object lesson in what Donald Trump demands of his supporters and the country generally.