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In my talk I offered some thoughts on things we need to do together in the coming years (all still very much an early sketch of what comes next). Some highlights:

• Finding More Voters, Forging A New Majority – The dramatic gains Trump made with Hispanics and young people (particularly young men) unraveled the coalition that had gotten us 51% of the vote on average over the last four Presidential elections. We will need to imagine and build a new majority coalition now and need a concerted party wide effort to make gains with voters of all kinds – working class, rural, Hispanic, young men, etc.
• Getting On The Right Side Of Opportunity/Winning The Big Economic Argument – As I wrote the other day, we need a deep and long conversation about how we can win the big economic argument with MAGA in the coming years.. 3 consecutive Dem Presidents have left the country far better than we found it. 3 consecutive GOP Presidents have been economic and societal wrecking balls. We should not be losing the economic argument to these guys, or losing ground with working class voters given our economic track record. There needs to be urgency about finding a better path here, and it is very possible that Trump’s dangerous economic plans – tariffs, mass deportation, huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans, spending cuts for everyone else – will give us a big opportunity to make our case very soon.
• Getting Louder/Building A 24/7/365 Politics – This is a familiar topic for Hopium readers, but there is real urgency here too. For background see my post-election posts on the need for us to get louder here, here, here and most recently this one on how we need to get far smarter in how we strategically contest the right’s information superiority in our campaigns themselves. I am going to be talking a lot about the need to see the millions of people supporting our campaigns as “partners in the fight, not donors to the cause” and help unlock not just the financial or volunteer potential of our family but also its capacity to become information warriors and amplify.
• Advancing A New Reform and Renewal Agenda – In a recent post I discussed the need for Democrats to develop a broad agenda for renewal and reform, a topic we’ve been discussing here for many months and one central to my February New Republic essay, Biden Must Reinvent What A Presidential Campaign Is. In this period of opposition we must not only oppose, but must also propose.
• While Focusing On Kitchen Table Issues, We Cannot Leave Behind The Harris-Walz Campaign’s Powerful Embrace of Freedom and Patriotism – We can both be focused on improving the lives of everyday Americans and lean hard into the powerful love of country themes the Vice President advanced during her campaign. This is particularly true in the fights for our personal freedoms and rights of all kinds including reproductive freedom.

What is a self-coup? South Korea president’s attempt ended in failure − a notable exception in a growing global trend

John Joseph Chin, Carnegie Mellon University; Joe Wright, Penn State

There have been 46 attempted self-coups since the end of World War II – 80% have succeeded. So what went wrong for South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol?

White and Black activists worked strategically in parallel in Detroit 50 years ago, fighting for civil rights

Say Burgin, Dickinson College

As Detroit civil rights leaders in the 1960s deliberated how to harness white support for the movement, they struck upon an innovation that would strengthen the fight for civil rights across the US.

Long-standing American principle of birthright citizenship under attack from Trump allies

Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College; Julie Novkov, University at Albany, State University of New York

Since the earliest days of the nation, any person born on US soil is a US citizen.

Trump and Musk pick their man at NASA
Derek Robertson, Politico
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of billionaire space enthusiast Jared Isaacman to lead NASA earned immediate congratulations from Elon Musk and an explosion of enthusiasm from the stargazing corners of the right.

1 big thing: Biden’s haunting twin sins
Mike Allen, Axios AM

President Biden’s post-presidency now looks as bleak as his brutal final months, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column.

• Some top Democrats tell us they’re so furious about Biden’s abrupt, clumsy pardon of his son Hunter that they’re threatening to withhold donations from his future presidential library.
• “If they had their sh*t together, they would have been doing the work on this over the summer — right after he announced he was stepping aside,” one well-wired Democrat told us. “Now, it’s just too late. Hopefully they are rightsizing their expectations and budget!”

The horrifying implications of this week’s transgender rights argument in the Supreme Court
Ian Millhiser, Vox
It’s hard to divorce this case from its political context. During his recent victorious presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump went all in on anti-trans rhetoric — spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars on ads that, in the Washington Post’s words, “paint trans people as a menace to society.” Republicans control six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court, so it’s not surprising that a majority of the Republican justices seemed to align with their party’s position on trans rights (the Court’s three Democrats, for that matter, also appear aligned with their own party).

SCOTUS hears case on treatments for trans minors
Isaac Saul, Tangle

During oral arguments, the court’s three liberal justices — Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — seemed receptive to the challengers’ argument. “The evidence is very clear that there are some children who actually need this treatment,” Sotomayor said.

Conversely, five of the court’s conservative justices — Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts — all signaled skepticism with the challenge. Roberts and Kavanaugh focused on not wanting the courts to settle medical issues, while Alito added that he was concerned that siding with the plaintiffs would invite “endless litigation.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in Bostock, was silent throughout oral arguments.

AM Headlines

Axios AM   Smerconish  The Hill Morning Report   CNN Breaking News

PM Headlines

Axios PM    Politico Nightly

Associated Press   Digital Future Daily (Politico).   NPR Politics

There Is No Surplus Elite in America
Peter Turchin’s thesis that “elite overproduction” explains America’s instability is conceptually confused and empirically false.
Yascha Mounk

Over the course of the last decade, a seductive idea has conquered the discourse: the notion that the sudden surge in political instability in democracies like the United States has been due to “elite overproduction” and the subsequent formation of a “surplus elite.”

It in many ways remains puzzling why America, and many other Western countries, are going through a period of acute political instability at a time of relative affluence and prosperity. This makes it tempting to give credence to sweeping pseudo-scientific theories like the one on which Turchin has built his renown. But sadly, his arguments don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. For a real explanation, we’ll have to look elsewhere.

Democrats Will Keep Losing Until They Cut Ties With Billionaires and Corporations
Progressive movement leader Alexandra Rojas writes for Zeteo that those in charge of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign should have been fired a long time ago.
Alexandra Rojas, Zeteo

The truth is, the party willfully ignored the left and progressives. It willfully deprioritized the economic populism that unites people across race, gender, class, and zip codes. Instead of leading a campaign against billionaires who make millions in profits while everyday people struggle, Democrats employed billionaires like Mark Cuban as a surrogate to satisfy Wall Street and Big Tech donors. Instead of demanding an end to the US funding of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and investing that money in working-class jobs, housing, and healthcare, Democrats promised to be the party of forever wars abroad while employing a family of war criminals as campaign messengers.

Biden’s visit, the first to Angola by a U.S. president, is meant to promote billions of dollars of commitments to the sub-Saharan African nation for what he called the largest-ever U.S. rail investment overseas.

The corridor across southern Africa is meant to make it easier to ship raw materials for export and advance the U.S. presence in a region rich in critical minerals used in batteries for electric vehicles, electronic devices and clean energy technologies.

China already has heavy investments in mining and processing African minerals, and on Tuesday it announced it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other high-tech materials. It came a day after the U.S. expanded its list of Chinese technology companies subject to controls.

Africa is the continent of the future. Yet Europe and the United States are not paying enough attention to its 1.4 billion people. They are losing influence to China and Russia.

Secretary Blinken stressed that Washington will “not dictate” which choices Africa should make and “neither should anyone else.” The U.S. will launch a “Global Fragility Act” of $200 million each year for the next 10 years. This program “will make a decade-long investment in promoting more peaceful, more inclusive, more resilient societies in places where conditions are ripe for conflict.” The U.S. commitment is no match for Chinese investment. Ms. Pandor derided partners “in Europe and elsewhere” for their patronizing and bullying attitudes. The “elsewhere” might have been a diplomatic way to include the U.S. and the “Global Fragility Act.”

African countries need understanding, equal treatment and respect – which they receive from their non-Western partners.

Specifically, the West can help by giving easier access to its markets for African products. To encourage Western businesses to operate on the continent, their investments need to be legally protected. Protectionism, red tape and regulatory barriers are a big problem, both in Africa and the West.