Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneuver them and win.”

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.  But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people.

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life.

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures.

The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests

The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.

“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.

Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).

There is the "just asking questions" rhetorical trick, where someone asks something that sounds a lot like an outlandish assertion, and then defends themselves by suggesting they don't actually believe this thing — they're just asking if maybe it's worth considering.

There is also the “firehose” trick, which essentially amounts to saying so many untrue things in such a short period of time that refuting them all is nearly impossible.

Much more difficult, for all of us, is to engage the best ideas you disagree with, think about them honestly, and explain clearly why you don't agree. And even more difficult is to debate honestly, discover that the other person has made stronger arguments, adapt your position and grow.

Omitting key information in arguments, or omitting counter-evidence to central claims, is just one bad argument style that is common in politics.

The curse of whataboutism is that we can often do it forever. If you want to talk about White House nepotism, it'd take weeks (or years) to properly adjudicate all the instances in American history, and it would get us nowhere but to excuse the behavior of our own team. That is, of course, typically how this tactic is employed.

Bothsidesism: Naturally, this is what I get accused of the most. I'd describe bothsidesism as a cousin of whataboutism. Wikipedia defines it as "a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports." An example might be presenting a debate about human-caused climate change and giving equal air time to two sides: Humans are causing climate change vs. humans aren't causing climate change.Given that the scientific consensus on climate change is robust, arranging an argument this way would lend credence to the idea that scientists (or people in general) are evenly divided on the issue, even though they aren't.

A straw man argument is when you build an argument that looks like, but is different than, the one the other person is making — like a straw man of their argument. You then easily defeat that argument, because it’s a weaker version of the actual argument.For instance, in a debate on immigration, I recently made the argument that we should pair more agents at the border with more legal opportunities to immigrate here, a pretty standard moderate position on immigration. I was arguing with someone who was on the very left side of the immigration debate, and they responded by saying something along the lines of, "The last thing we need is more border agents shooting migrants on the border."Of course, my argument isn't for border agents to shoot migrants trying to cross into the U.S., which is a reprehensible idea that I abhor. This is a straw man argument: Distorting an opposing argument to make it weaker and thus easier to defeat.

"The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat."

This is classic moving of the goalposts. We went from “there weren't classified documents” to “they were classified but not that serious” to “they may have been classified but the raid was unjust unless there were nuclear secrets” to "okay, but he wasn’t selling the nuclear secrets to Russia."

The "prove a negative" argument is when someone insists that you prove to them something didn't happen or isn't true, which implies that they have evidence something did happen or is true — but they don’t actually present that evidence.For instance, if I asked you to prove that aliens don't exist, you might have a hard time doing it. Sure, you could argue that we don't have an alien body locked up in some government facility (or do we?), but you’d have a hard time listing the contents of every government facility. And if you could somehow do that, you haven’t proved that aliens don't exist at all, or even that they've never been to Earth. But the burden of proof isn't on you to show me that aliens don't exist, it's for me to show you evidence that they do.This was, in my experience, one of the most frustrating things about some of the early claims that the 2020 election was stolen. A lot of people were alleging that Dominion Voting Systems was flipping votes from Trump to Biden, and then insisting that someone must prove this didn't happen. But the burden of proof was not to show that it didn't happen (proving a negative), it was to show that it did happen. Which nobody ever did.

"The United States has prosecuted dozens of former governors, cabinet members and lawmakers. These prosecutions are essential in reaffirming the principle that no one — and especially no political leader — is above the law."

"This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come," the board said. It is "striking" and "legally notable" that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which "allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office... The indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents," the board said, which doesn't fit the spirit or letter of the PRA. "If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense."

In particular, Special Counsel Jack Smith hits a few key points: "First, that Trump handled the classified material exceptionally sloppily and haphazardly, including stashing documents in a shower, a bedroom, and—as depicted in a striking photo—onstage in a ballroom that frequently held events,” Graham said. "Second, that Trump was personally involved in discussions about the documents, and in directing their repeated relocation. Third, that Trump was well aware of both the laws around classified documents and the fact that these particular documents were not declassified. Fourth, that Trump was personally involved in schemes to hide the documents not only from the federal government but even from his own attorneys. The indictment carefully lays out its case with pictures, texts, and surveillance footage."

Nuclear and military secrets among the documents? Check. Knew the documents were classified, and confessed he hadn't declassified them? Check. Instructed lawyers to lie and conceal the documents' existence? Check. Showed off classified information to people without clearance? Check. Kept them in insecure locations? Check.

"However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia," the board said. Is that the standard? That a president can only be charged if he's found selling state secrets to Russia post-presidency? No thank you. Not in a country where people spend years and years in prison for markedly less than what Trump did.

As lawyer and conservative columnist David French noted (under "What the right is saying"), this is the "Comey test." This was the standard he set. Based on the indictment, the allegations against Trump very obviously meet that standard. The Justice Department is alleging his conduct was willful and that he obstructed justice.This was also the standard Trump himself set. Nobody is really talking about this for some reason, but please remember that Trump spent his entire 2016 campaign demanding Clinton go to jail for her email server. "Lock her up" became a rallying cry at his campaign rallies, and some of Trump's own quotes about the need to protect classified information were helpfully collected in the indictment (again, this was a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign)

Many Trump allies say that prosecuting Trump will make us a "banana republic." But the rest of the democratic world is actually much better at holding its leaders accountable than we are. If anything, there is a better argument that both Clinton and Trump should have been prosecuted than that Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because Clinton wasn’t.

France, South Korea, Israel, and Italy have all prosecuted former leaders for alleged crimes. Just this weekend, Scotland arrested its former leader Nicola Sturgeon for financial crimes. Why shouldn't we hold our leaders accountable?

As Barr noted, the documents’ degree of sensitivity was shocking, and Trump could have avoided all of this by simply returning them. Instead, he appears to have obstructed, lied to, and misled investigators over and over. Yes, we have to wait to see what the defense says, but as Barr also said: "If even half of it is true, then he's toast."

it is totally reasonable to prosecute him for what appears to be egregious and unbelievably negligent behavior. Trump has nobody to blame for his actions and decisions here but himself, and we should set the standard, for our future leaders, that this conduct is unacceptable.