“The day after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released a video that encapsulated the left electoral movement he helped bring to life. Set to David Bowie’s iconic song ’Starman’, the video shows Sanders clasping hands with many of the candidates he endorsed this cycle. Not only did Sens.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI), James Talarico (D-TX), Troy Jackson (D-ME) and Peggy Flanagan (D-MN) (along with more than 50 U.S. House and down-ballot victors backed by Sanders) win their races, they were instrumental in delivering Democrats’ sweeping tidal wave in this year’s midterms. Far more than just a flex, the video served as a reminder of how deeply Sanders — the iconoclast democratic socialist leader — has transformed U.S. politics over the past decade.” (11/06/26)
“The weapons a country fights with, the software that aims them, and the officers who command them were for a century things a state owned and could not put up for sale. That arrangement is coming apart. One by one these assets are being bought by private companies, financed through public stock markets, and traded like any other holding, and the firm that has carried the process furthest spent most of its life making radios for freight trains.” (11/06/26)
“Two tribes, one reflex. When we are frightened, the person who chooses differently stops being a neighbor and becomes the threat. Every uniparty election campaign in America is built to harvest it. Politics learned the curfew lesson long ago. Fear travels faster than facts, and every cycle brings a new creature under the bed with a party beside it holding a flashlight and a donation link.” (11/05/26)
“The ultimate testament to [Patrick] Stewart’s acting skill is that he made it hard not to suspend disbelief, one hour at a time, in what [Ryan] Zickgraf calls ‘authority with authoritarianism apparently filtered out.’ In the real world, we have what we need to exclude authoritarians from getting in the way of getting things done.” (11/05/26)
“Rules of law can never always produce justice. That’s because life really is complicated. The facts that pertain to doing true justice are unpredictable. Inevitably, even the best-designed rules of law will sometimes get it wrong, with unjust results. When that happens, the law will be an ass. So in a perfectly just world we need sometimes to ignore rules of law. We need a government, or at least agents of government (in other words, judges) who will take into account all of the truly pertinent facts, not just the facts that rules of law say are pertinent. We need a government, in other words, that is not bound by the law, to really deliver justice in a way that the law cannot. Now medieval intellectuals had a term for a ruler unbound by law: a tyrant.” (11/05/26)
“With ever more Americans bizarrely rating ‘socialism’ favorably today, we should remember the high price paid by Hungarians to escape real socialism. Hungary’s tortured history reminds us of the fragility of liberty. Tragically, the Hungarian people lost their battle for freedom 70 years ago. However, their loss planted seeds for the ultimate destruction of Moscow’s satellite system and Europe’s liberation from communism.” (11/05/26)
“In a recent op-ed, President Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin, startled me with bizarre twist on potential electoral manipulation. Like others before him, Rubin boldly suggests that President Trump and his allies could also exploit ‘a procedural loophole involving the Clerk of the House that could enable them to refuse to seat duly elected Democratic members when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.’ … In the 19th century, the office of clerk was highly partisan, and there were several instances in which clerks simply refused to call the names of certain members thereby blocking their being sworn and seated.” (11/05/26)
“Contrary to what we seem to think, Americans are not intrinsically or constitutionally superior to other human beings who have walked on this planet. Our country had the extremely good fortune of being founded by brilliant men who tried to establish principles that would guide the nation into freedom, virtue, and prosperity. But Americans, suffering from the same faults and foibles all humans suffer from, have rejected those principles. … Eventually, all nations, peoples, and tribes weaken or disintegrate entirely. How many Babylonians do you work with? Any Assyrians living close by? Who was the last Girgashite you met? It happens. It appears to be inevitable. Someday, the question will be, ‘How many Americans do you know?’ Nations, if they don’t disappear, always morph into something else.” (11/05/26)
