News

Democrats Must Discover Their Unique Selling Proposition
They’re the party of government. They should start acting like it.
Sam Kahn

One of the big questions raised by the recent transformation of American politics, and the breaking up of an older economic consensus, is what a coherent economic vision for the next decades might look like. Addressing himself primarily to the debate within the Democratic Party, Sam Kahn makes a case for a populist economist rooted in the burgeoning antitrust movement. Over the coming weeks and months, we will also feature many other voices, including ones that argue for an abundance agenda or address how the Republican Party can genuinely transform into party of the multiracial working-class. I hope you join us for these important debates.

Entering Our Crank Era
The Trump administration will be defined by people who refuse to trust empirical reality. RFK Jr. will be its avatar.
William Kristol and Andrew Egger, the Bulwark

In my lifetime, I got to watch the elimination of polio, a disease that caused 20 to 30,000 children to become paralyzed and 1,500 to die every year. In my medical lifetime I’ve gotten to watch the virtual elimination of a bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae B, which accounted for 20 to 25,000 cases of meningitis and bloodstream infections every year in this country. It dominated my pediatric residency in the late ‘70s—I mean, we’d see a kid come in, a child come in every week with severe meningitis caused by that bacteria. Gone! Most pediatricians in our hospital don’t see that. Have never seen it. Rotavirus—I mean, that was our vaccine, I’m co-inventor of that vaccine—that caused 75,000 hospitalizations a year. I don’t think pediatric residents have ever seen a case, currently in our hospital, of rotavirus-induced severe disease, the dehydration.

So, you know, vaccines work. When we make recommendations to give them, we lessen or in some cases eliminate diseases. So what is the problem we’re trying to fix?

The Morning: The BIG question I think about.  Is the Trump coalition durable?
Chris Cillizza

But I do think we have one interesting data point from the 2024 election: In 4 states where Trump won — Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan — the Democratic Senate candidate also won.

That consistent underperformance of Trump by GOP Senate candisates in swing states leads me to believe that it might just be a Trump coalition rather than a broader Republican coalition.

Joe and Mika Gave Us the Middle Finger…It Backfired
Ben Meiselas and MeidasTouch Network

I guess there is a silver lining to all of this.

The MeidasTouch Network is experiencing meteoric growth as viewers of Morning Joe and other corporate media shut off the “sane-washing” and Trump propaganda and turn to Meidas. So I make you this pledge: I will never “pull a Joe and Mika.” We will never be scared to report the truth about Trump and MAGA. We have built an infrastructure made for this moment, thanks to the support of paid Substack members. We are ready to meet the moment.

Repetition, Repetition… It’s How We Win
Ben Meiselas

The most important thing Democrats need to repeat is that they actually care about the people they fight for—unlike Republicans. Democrats often assume that because their policies—whether related to infrastructure, health care, unions, education, etc.—help people, those people will automatically feel that Democrats are on their side. That’s not how it works. We saw that in this election.

So, the most obvious thing Democrats need to do—and repeat, repeat, repeat—is tell people: “We care about you. We hear your concerns. We feel your pain. We are fighting for you.” Look people in the eye and say it. Over and over. Let them know you care.

The surprising idea from two conservative Democrats that could fix the House
Expanding the size of the House would make Congress more responsive to voters.
Ryan Teague Beckwith, MSNBC

Imagine you live in a city with 35,000 people. There’s a pothole in the street in front of your house and you can’t get anyone to come fix it, so you decide to call the mayor.

How easy do you think it would be to get a response?

There are now 200 million more Americans, but still the same number of representatives, which means each member of the House represents more and more people. In 1793, the average House member represented 37,000 people, or basically the number of people in a small city. Today, they represent 768,000 — roughly as many people as live in Seattle.

 Trump loves tariffs. Will the rest of America?
Haleema Shah and Noel King, Vox

Trump’s trade strategy is one that Greg Ip, chief economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal, says is a major departure from almost 80 years of US policy. In a conversation with Noel King, co-host of theToday, Explained podcast, Ip described how it might play out and have massive implications for the global economy. In today’s newsletter, we’ve got an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Traffic on Bluesky, an X competitor, is up 500% since the election. How will it handle the surge?
Bobby Allyn

“We’ve been growing by about a million users a day for several days,” said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an interview with NPR on Monday. “It’s proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they’ll have a better time.”

Rather than having one “master algorithm,” Bluesky allows for a more personalized experience. By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts you follow, another shows what your friends follow and a “discover” feed surfaces posts linked to your interests.

Bluesky Appeals to All Worldwide
Bluesky is NOT libs vs maga. Bluesky appeals to everyone who doesn’t want Elon Muskovic tweaking the alogrithm and skewing the data for his own interests. The Bluesky community consists of liberals and conservative, democrats and republicans, left and right from all continents of the world. Pro-Ukrainians and dictators-detesters; believers in justice, the rule of law, world order and unfettered freedom of expression. Greetings & welcome to all of moral dignity and courage to defend these basic values.

Trump’s messy coalition
Mike Allen, Axios

President-elect Trump’s Cabinet increasingly resembles a European-style coalition government, staffed with a dizzying array of ideological rivals united — for now — by a grand MAGA vision.

• The incoming administration has a little something for everyone: isolationists and hawks, populists and bankers — even a couple of lifelong Democrats who ran for president against Trump, Axios’ Zachary Basu writes.

The big picture: Trump’s picks suggest at least three factions in the new Republican coalition, with enough support to warrant representation in his administration.

OpenAI has some national policy ideas
Derek Robertson
OpenAI, at the white-hot center of the AI boom, is no exception. Chris Lehane, the political veteran and former Clinton White House lawyer who now leads OpenAI’s global policy, sees an expansive collaboration between industry and government in coming years as not just Washington, but state and local governments adapt to the dawn of powerful new AI tools.

The company is circulating an as-yet-unpublished “blueprint” for AI infrastructure, with proposals for special AI economic zones and cross-North American policy collaboration.

Donor-advised funds are drawing a lot of assets besides cash – taking a bigger bite out of tax revenue than other kinds of charitable giving
Brian Mittendorf, Nov. 18

Donor-advised funds, or DAFs, are financial accounts funded by donors to support future charitable work. This kind of giving differs greatly from charitable giving as a whole because it’s much more likely to involve donations of assets like stock, real estate or cryptocurrencies that have gained in value.

These noncash gifts were primarily investment assets like stocks, bonds and real estate. We find that while the average conventional charity gets around 33% of its noncash contributions as investments, the average DAF sponsor gets more than 90% of its noncash donations that way.

Young families are leaving many large US cities − here’s why that matters

Biswa Das, Iowa State University
Although many US cities have recovered from economic downturns during the COVID-19 pandemic, they still are losing young families in large numbers. Here’s how that trend degrades urban life.

Cryptocurrencies are making investors very rich – and making it harder to stop financial scammers
Samuel A. Beatson, University of Nottingham

Improving financial literacy among the population could make a big dent in scammers’ profits.

Robo price-fixing: Why the Justice Department is suing a software company to stop landlords colluding on rents
Alison Carrol, Brunel University of London

The company’s future will largely hinge on the UK’s relationship with its European neighbours.

Trump announced the DOGE in a statement on Tuesday, describing it as an effort to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Donald Trump is vowing to reduce wasteful federal spending by tapping two billionaires — Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — to spearhead the initiative, which the president-elect is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category that the executive order created.

The administration claimed the authority to create Schedule F based on statutory language that exempted certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees.

Trump has announced his intention to reissue Schedule F “on day one” of his next administration. During his first term, government employees were frequent targets of public insults, threats, and retaliation. Echoing Trump, other elected officials have advocated “fir[ing] every single mid-level bureaucrat” and made campaign promises to begin “slitting [bureaucrats’] throats on day one.”

Federal employee unions sought to balance reassuring members that they will fight the return of measures undermining feds’ civil service protections with asserting their commitment to nonpartisan service.

Labor groups expressing a willingness to work with an incoming president’s administration is nothing new—officials typically want to try to develop a relationship before becoming adversarial toward management. But after Trump’s first term was marked by numerous efforts to reduce labor power at federal agencies, leaders of employee groups acknowledge that the chances of a cooperative relationship are slim.

“Despite President-elect Trump’s track record with federal employees and unions, the National Treasury Employees Union will make every effort to work in good faith with his upcoming administration,” said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald. “However, we are fully prepared to work with our allies in Congress and use all the tools we have to fight any and all actions taken by his administration that would harm frontline federal workers, our ability to represent them or their ability to serve the American people.”