Is Anybody There? The Systematic Dismantling of the Midterms

 

 

The New York Times recently published several unsettling reports concerning the upcoming Midterms, including "Republican Cash Edge Threatens to Swamp Democrats" and "House Passes Strict Voter ID Bill."   

 

Relying on the Midterms as the last bastion against autocracy may be chimerical, given what this administration is doing on its way to destroying our institutions, culture, and global agreements. The third article in the NYT yesterday underscores just how hopeless it might be to rely on those elections to bring us back from total oblivion: "Trump’s Director of Election Security Is an Election Denier; Even in a government full of conspiracists, Kurt Olsen stands out."

 

Appointing Kurt Olsen as the Director of Election Security and Integrity is the ultimate "fox in the henhouse" scenario. The administration hasn’t just invited the fox inside to guard the coop; they’ve given him a badge, a flashlight, and the authority to decide which hens are "legally" allowed to lay eggs. Putting a man sanctioned for spreading election falsehoods in charge of "integrity" feels like a satirical plot point a novelist would reject as too preposterous.

 

According to the New York Times, here are the major points of the investigation into Olsen's new role:

     He now has the authority to refer criminal investigations to the federal government—a power he has already used to catalyze a recent FBI probe into the 2020 election results in Fulton County, Georgia.

 

    Following the 2020 election, Olsen worked "round the clock" on a Supreme Court case seeking to reverse Trump’s defeat and pressured the Justice Department to take up similar suits.

 

    He has a long history of collaborating with conspiracy theorists such as Mike Lindell of PillowGuy fame and representing figures like Kari Lake in unsuccessful legal challenges.

 

    He was previously sanctioned in federal court for making "false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions" during election litigation in Arizona.

 

    His appointment is part of an apparent "multipronged approach" to challenge state power over elections as the administration begins to cast doubt on the upcoming Midterms.

 

This is all happening before our eyes, just as the January 6th insurrection did. The records from the House Select Committee explicitly link Olsen to the strategies surrounding that day; while he was a private attorney then, his actions were deeply integrated with the White House’s response to the certification process.

 

This administration has long defended its most outrageous actions by laughably citing "transparency" as "proof" of validity. So, there it is—the fox in the henhouse. Thankfully, the "Fourth Estate" still has a pulse after the diminishment of the Washington Post to point this out.

 

"Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?"

Five Years After the Day That Changed Everything

 

 

Out of necessity—primarily my own mental health—I just can’t write much more about that day that will live in infamy: five years ago, Jan. 6.

 

We all saw it with our own eyes, and no matter how it is spun by the nihilism of the right, it was not only an impeachable offense but the beginning of a lawlessness in this country that now, on a daily basis, reaches new lows—while trampling international law as well.

 

Mike Luckovich, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you for an explanation of what, exactly, is going on.

 

In the wake of Jan. 6, I wrote this entry, but Heather Cox Richardson today provides a thorough explanation with five years of hindsight and her command of history. 

There was once a time I would be writing our representatives. But Congress, as well as SCOTUS, has made it pretty clear that we are on our own. That leaves the midterm elections this year as our only hope. And that assumes the very kind of election interference Trump et al. have gaslighted accusations about is not turned on by them in this crucial election.

 

Between gerrymandering and Republican control of both the narrative and the election rules themselves, we should be concerned. And will the Democrats have the good sense to run moderate candidates—ones Republicans fed up with Trump can at least hold their noses and come out to vote for?

 

I can go on. To what end?

 

Totally changing the subject, as I need to turn to something hopeful: our community has a local art show, and I entered two photographic pieces. Here is the proud “artist” with his contributions.

 

The top photograph was taken at the J.P. Morgan Library’s Jane Austen exhibit this past summer. I titled the photograph “Deliberations.” It captures a museumgoer admiring Amy Sherald’s oil painting, A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune (2019). The title, of course, comes from Pride and Prejudice. Sherald composes striking, dignified portraits of people of color.

 

The second photograph I titled “Waiting in Casablanca,” taken quietly with a telephoto lens so as not to disturb the subject, who sat alone in his chair for some time.  

 

To me, candid portraits and composition are what make photographs interesting and potential works of art.

 

 

How Calm Becomes a Political Act

 

I’ve written a lot about politics in this space — usually zoomed in close, responding to the outrage du jour rather than stepping back for the big picture. I’ve long argued that political cartoonists have a rare gift for distilling truth into a single, clarifying image, such as this one by Barry Blitt of The New Yorker that captures the feeling of Thanksgiving this year. It’s ironic, then, that the most incisive political analysis I’ve come across recently comes from a former cartoonist turned writer: Tim Kreider’s new Substack essay, Sang Froid: The Case for Keeping One's Cool.

What sets it apart is not simply the macro-argument, what Trumpism is—how we’ve arrived here, and how democracies slide into authoritarianism—but its structure. Kreider frames the entire piece around a real event from his girlfriend’s youth: a terrifying encounter with a man she later in life recognized as the serial killer Israel Keyes. At seventeen, alone on a mountain trail, she survived by doing the counterintuitive thing: she stayed calm, engaged him directly, made eye contact, and refused to accept the victim role he was trying to impose. Her composure didn’t guarantee her safety, but it allowed her to navigate a situation in which panic would likely have been fatal.

 

That story becomes Kreider’s central analogy for our lethal national moment — when the danger is obvious to anyone who isn’t in denial, yet the rituals of normalcy compel us to behave as if things are merely “unprecedented” or “norm-breaking” rather than openly authoritarian.

 

This, I think, is the problem with the newly conciliatory Bill Maher, who now preaches a sort of kumbaya politics that feels more like a policy for “getting along” than one of resistance. For me, January 6 and everything that followed makes that approach unworkable.

Kreider would likely argue that this is also the problem with much of the traditional media: the persistent fantasy that “the system will hold” if only both sides show enough respect and tolerance. Where Kreider and Maher might actually agree is in their fear that the moment we drop the pretense of dialogue altogether, things could tip from a cold civil conflict into a hot one.

 

With that in mind, Kreider urges a different kind of resistance: to continue exhausting every legal and democratic tool available — courts, protests, boycotts, the defense of immigrants, insistence on due process, and protection of fair elections. The goal is not moral purity but tactical advantage: foul the authoritarian machinery from within the confines of legitimacy, buying time until circumstances shift. And when they do, the very Republicans who have bent the knee to Trump may ultimately turn on him the instant he becomes a liability.

 

In the end, what Kreider offers is a reminder that composure is a strategy that neither underestimates the danger nor romanticizes resistance. We only have to keep the machinery of democracy running long enough for the forces opposing it to exhaust themselves or turn on one another. And as his girlfriend’s story makes clear, survival sometimes depends less on bold, dramatic gestures than on the simple refusal to play the role the aggressor has written for you.

 

Full circle now, with Thanksgiving in mind. Fifteen years ago I marked the holiday with a photograph of my younger family and a warning about “increased polarization in this country.” That was during the Tea Party’s rise — a tremor we now recognize as the prelude to all that followed. So I’ll end as I did then, with something simple and still true:

 

To friends and family, near and far, Happy Thanksgiving — my favorite holiday, and a uniquely American one.

The Glide Path of Inequality

 

It was fifteen years ago that I wrote one of my first pieces on economic inequality in this country, and since then that inequality has soared on an exponential basis.

 

It is no longer the millionaire next door; it’s the billionaire—and now, with Elon Musk’s potential pay package, the trillionaire next door. That’s larger than most countries’ gross national product. That earlier piece was about a book I published years ago, Herbert Inhaber’s and Sidney Carroll’s How Rich Is Too Rich, and although its focus was on the inheritance tax (or lack of it), its ingenious first chapter vividly depicts the parabolic rise of wealth in our population in the form of a parade—each marcher’s size proportional to their income. Imagine what that parade would look like today.

 

Back then I pointed to the policies of the Tea Party. How quaint that Party now seems next to the present Republican Party of plutocrats, whose leader even held an extravagant Halloween Great Gatsby celebration at Moolah-Lago—as millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. It’s hard to accept that as “coincidence.” It is abject cruelty. Meanwhile, ICE roams the nation, snatching people of color it thinks may be illegal immigrants—under the guise that all such people are violent criminals, their families be damned. This is heartbreakingly captured by Mike Luckovich in a recent political cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution.

 

This especially hit home last Thursday. I was playing tennis, still recovering from my injury, and as I looked up to serve, I stopped: overhead was a low-flying C-17 Globemaster, a hulking military transport. Were we being invaded? Well, yes—in a sense. The tennis courts happen to sit on that particular plane’s low glide path into Palm Beach International Airport. And since it was Thursday morning, I knew what it meant: another weekend visit by our President, come to play golf and consort with the rich and famous and—with his steady stream of pardons for those who helped make J6 a reality or enriched themselves with crypto duplicity—the infamous as well. That transport carries “the Beast”—his armored car—as well as other security vehicles, devices, and, who knows, his favorite golf clubs.

 

We were once a country of compassion. Our tax laws have always been open to debate, but never before have they been so one-sided—or the government run so shamelessly as a personal plaything. It makes you wonder who will prevail at Sotheby’s impending auction of “America” AKA the Golden Toilet Bowl (Maurizio Cattelan, “America” --ca. 2016) reportedly being sold by billionaire Steve Cohen (also NY Mets owner). Perhaps it will be won by an absentee bid, destined for the Classified Documents bathroom.