Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Tack to the Center---Bleh

The Democratic Party is not run by progressives, and it never has been. But one wouldn't know that from most of the political reporting, and that's not just true of today. It's always been that way. The party likes having them around because (1) they are reliable votes and (2) they have someone to blame when things go bad. "Tacking to the center" has never worked but it is usually the strategy of the party.

In the Obama administration, the "moderates" (aka, the corporate Dems), convinced him to tack to the center on both immigration and Obamacare, saying they had tough reelections. Well, he did as they asked. What did we get? Sub-optimal policy, and they all lost anyway.

In the past few days, we've gotten another round of "what should Biden do to save his presidency" from a bunch of centrists. What's their prognosis? To do what Biden's pretty much already doing!

The party is run by corporate interest and K Street. Kyrsten Sinema is a K Street candidate, picked by them and Chuck Schumer. So are most of the rest of the Senate. The question someone asked on Twitter the other day was whether we think the future of the party should be centered around K Street or working people. So far the party has chosen the former and then blamed the latter when they lose elections.



Sunday, January 2, 2022

2021 Reading List

Books I read in 2021:


Alice McDermott, Someone

Porochista Khakpour, Brown Album

Chana Porter, The Seep

Nelson DeMille, The Cuban Affair

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

Tim Finch, Peace Talks

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening

Lara Vapnyar, Divide Me by Zero

E. J. Koh, The Magical Language of Others

Ellen Cooney, One Night Two Souls Went Walking

Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

Da Chen, Colors of the Mountain

Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft)

Andrew Krivak, The Bear

Charles Johnson, Middle Passage

Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (trans. Megan McDowell)

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel

Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station (trans. Morgan Giles)

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations

Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

Andrew Sean Greer, Less

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule

Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

Ali Smith, Autumn

Ali Smith, Winter