TLP Weekend Edition (April 19-20, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📖 “Progress Depends on Reversing the Left's Working-Class Woes: There’s no forging a durable progressive coalition without winning back blue-collar workers,” by Jared Abbott. Our friends at the Center for Working-Class Politics put out a banger of a post a few weeks ago. Abbott tackles an increasingly common argument in left circles that is, to be kind, highly dubious:
The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging support among the working-class voters who once formed the bedrock of its electoral support. Some analysts argue that parties of the Left and center left should embrace this shift and focus instead on the rising class of progressive professionals. But turning away from the traditional working class risks conceding vast swaths of the electorate to the far right and relegating progressives to the status of semi-permanent opposition. Working-class dealignment—turning away from the Democratic Party, in the United States—is real, and a really big problem.
Yes, it is! Bone up on why this is true.
📰 "Do Trump Voters Like His Tariffs? We Went to Michigan to Find Out," by Astead Herndon. This past week, The New York Times' podcast, The Daily, went to Michigan to interview auto workers who voted for Trump and see how they felt about his tariffs and general approach to the economy. The reactions were mixed, but many are still in wait-and-see mode. Times reporter Astead Herndon also commented on the Democrats' own mixed response to the tariffs—and how the Republicans' political fortunes not just in next year's midterms but in 2028, too, may well hinge on whether Trump's policies pan out...or lead to calamity.
🎧 Hang on St. Christopher, written by Adrian McKinty and narrated by Gerard Doyle. McKinty’s eighth book in the fantastic Sean Duffy detective series based in Northern Ireland during the Troubles is another crackerjack read—and listen. Duffy’s sly humor and wit come through perfectly in Doyle’s voice as a now semi-retired Catholic detective in the predominantly Protestant police force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC):
Rain slicked streets, riots, murder, chaos. It's July 1992 and the Troubles in Northern Ireland are still grinding on after twenty-five apocalyptic years. Detective Inspector Sean Duffy got his family safely over the water to Scotland, to "Shortbread Land." Duffy's a part-timer now, only returning to Belfast six days a month to get his pension. It's an easy gig, if he can keep his head down.
But then a murder case falls into his lap while his protege is on holiday in Spain. A carjacking gone wrong and the death of a solitary, middle-aged painter. But something's not right, and as Duffy probes he discovers the painter was an IRA assassin. So, the question becomes: Who hit the hitman and why?
This is Duffy's most violent and dangerous case yet and the whole future of the burgeoning "peace process" may depend upon it. Based on true events, Duffy must unentangle parallel operations by the CIA, MI5, and Special Branch. Duffy attempts to bring a killer to justice while trying to keep himself and his team alive as everything unravels around them. They might not all make it out of this one.
When you finish this one, go back and give a listen to Patrick Radden Keefe’s, Say Nothing, an amazing investigative book about the disappearance and murder of Jean McConville in Belfast in the 1970s. Brilliantly narrated by Matthew Blaney, the book is a gripping tale of historical memory and the dark secrets of the IRA, loyalist paramilitaries, and the British government.
🕵 “The Eastern Gate,” on Max. Foreign spy stories and global intrigue always make for a nice break from the nuttiness of real American politics. This six-episode series on Max follows a young Polish spy named Ewa as she and her colleagues try to figure out who is selling them out to the Russians. As The New York Times review described:
“Don’t trust anyone,” the characters constantly warn one another. And, well—don’t.
Ewa (Lena Góra) is a Polish spy, and at the outset she is undercover at a glamorous party. Only she isn’t there to hobnob with her boyfriend’s icy mom, she is there to gather information about said mom’s involvement in nuclear bomb making.
A lot of shows begin with scenes of shocking violence, but few stick with it the way “Gate” does. Outside of “Cobra Kai,” I’m not sure there’s a show with more kicking. Oh, there’s punching, eyeball-squishing, wrist-wrenching and plenty of shooting, too, but all the ways people can kick or be kicked are on vicious display here. It’s not morbid or gratuitous, though: It’s part of the show’s percussive insistence, heard also in its hostile knock-knock-knocks on car windows or in the startling clack of a bolt in lock.
The initial mission does not go exactly to plan, and in the fallout Ewa gets sent to Minsk, Belarus, where her bosses suspect a leak within their own intelligence program. How do you look over your shoulder and listen to the voice in your earpiece all at once? The show is set in 2021, and Ewa et al.’s espionage work focuses on the relationships between Poland, Belarus, and Russia, and on managing Russian influence as crises deepen and the body count grows.
The plot is intricate with excellent acting and realistic geopolitical scenarios.
🎻 Silentium, by Arvo Pärt. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s “holy minimalism” is a perfect listening companion for Easter Sunday reflection. This record includes new renditions of some of his best works including a 21-minute, half-speed version of the second movement of his famous concerto, Tabula Rasa, performed by the Boston-based chamber orchestra, A Far Cry.
A glorious piece of music!
Many opinion pieces describing the working class read like an anthropological dissertation on a recently discovered group of humans. They are measured and prodded, categorized by sociological attributes, and dissected according to attitudes and educational attainment. Mix it up with graphs and meta-analysis and here you have a definitive picture of the working class. Note that it is a picture but there is no understanding of what membership in the working class feels like nor how they have been betrayed and denigrated by the party who once supported them. They're not a market demographic that can be sold a product simply by a change of messaging. As to whether Democrats should abandon the working class in favor of progressive professionals, that ship has already sailed.
Defining the populist movement as "far right " is going to lose the war. The actual far right, whatever that is, has nothing to offer the working class and is not really a player. The use of the term is a tic signifying allegiance to faculty lounge policies that you otherwise decry. Consider Mr. Progressive, William Jennings Bryan. He had some positions that would no doubt horrify you, yet was the face of Progressivism for two generations. My favorite was him being anti-war.