Superlative Tabs

There's a category on this blog called Too Many Tabs, which I haven't used in a while. It doesn't mean I don't have a lot of tabs sitting open: I do. Many, many tabs. I just don't have time to do a post to write them up.

I have a new bad habit, on top of my bad tab habit: opening new windows in my phone's browser, because I want to write a post about them. These are also essentially tabs. So instead of waiting for the never-never day when I write those articles, I'm going to do a Too Many Tabs post about that handful of recent windows.

These are [insert your favorite superlative] articles, which is why I wanted to write an individual post about each one of them, but time is going by and I'm afraid I will forget about them. So here goes.

Darrell Owens, How Urban Renewal Ruined Everything. I'll be thinking about this for a long time. Racist urban renewal devastated our cities — we all know that. But what is unacknowledged is that we have to get past that to loosen the process of building things in this country. Keeping with the status quo inherently promotes climate change and green house gas use. That has to change. 

Peter L. Laurence, Jane Jacobs, Cyclist. Just a wonderful article about Jane Jacobs and the role the bike played in her life and the life of her family, as well as her thoughts from her work on bikes. I had no idea she biked for much of her transportation. The article includes multiple photos of her biking, while wearing a dress, without a helmet or anything associated with "cycling." Here's one quote from her near the end: "a city good for cycling is also a city good for walking, strolling, running, playing, window-shopping, and listening for bullfrogs if listening for bullfrogs is your thing."

Hamilton Nolan, Everyone into the Grinder: It is good to require powerful people to participate in public systems and not buy their way out everything. Nolan expresses the radical notion that rich people should not have more choices than everyone else (in schools, health care, what have you): that if rich people have to face the same systems as everyone else, we all would benefit together.  (I thought I had posted at some point about the Finnish school system, which doesn't allow private and religious schools, but I can't find such a post.) We have become a nation of line-cutters, based on the idea of wealth makes right. It does not. "Choice" in this case is a false god.

Bill Pruitt, The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice. Do you remember hearing there was tape in a vault at NBC showing that Trump used the N-word during The Apprentice? Well, this article gives the context of when he said it. It's written by one of the show's producers, who was under a 20-year nondisclosure agreement, which just ended. Not only did Trump say the word, he said it while ruling that Season 1's Black finalist would not be allowed to win (even though everyone else in the room thought he deserved to win) because "would America buy a ** winning?" Which to me is worse than his use of the word itself. On top of that, the article documents multiple instances of Trump sexually harassing women, as well as his mental incapacity to do the job, which is covered up by the show's producers — the same way news producers to this day cover up his incoherencies each time he does an interview or has a rally. Read the whole thing, and tell me: Did you hear about the existence of this story anywhere? This should have been major news, but it was not. 

Rick Perlstein, My Political Depression Problem — and Ours. I am less interested in Perlstein's reason for writing the article (about his political depression with the Left) than I am in the first third of the article, which contains his crystalline analysis of the Right and conservatives. He describes the "authoritarian ratchet," which is based on promising the impossible return to a prelapsarian state (one that never existed), but which is imperative because without the return, civilization itself will collapse. He gives examples of various imperatives conservatives have demanded over the past 150 years (against women voting, against Social Security, against Medicare, and now against "open borders"). Once society continues to exist despite the Right's failure to deliver, they move on to the next dire threat (bathrooms! gas stoves! lab-grown meat!). And even when they win (as with abortion), it's no better — they devolve further. They require, he says, "even more radical panaceas." 

Anger at the designated Others who must have made it happen—for conservatism itself can never be the problem. Conservatism, as I once wrote, never fails. It is only failed.

This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.

Which leads us to Trump's talks of retribution and his Project 2025. In addition to the multi-millions of people they plan to round up and deport (and who knows what "rules" they will use for that), I'm honestly afraid for my own liberty if he is reelected, and I definitely fear for immediate family members. 

I was not afraid before. I had solidarity for many other people in 2016 and I felt some personal fear depending on the outcome in 2020, but now I can visualize them rounding up people who oppose them, including me. 

I don't want to be a person who shuts up to remain safe. I don't want to live in a country where that's something you have to do to stay out of prison. 

This is what we have come to because of the authoritarian ratchet Perlstein describes, and the Republican Party's failure to stop it.