TLP Weekend Edition (October 19-20, 2024)
What we're reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.
📖 “The Long Dealingment,” by Geoff Shullenberger. In Compact, Geoff Shullenberger examines the Democrats’ long-standing shift from a blue-collar base to a college-educated one through the lens of Timothy Shenk’s excellent new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics. Shenk’s book examines the standoff between party strategists Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen during the Clinton years:
By most accounts, the Democratic Party’s turn to more business-friendly economics under the sway of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council went hand-in-hand with its shift to a more upscale voting base. But the Democrats’ weakening hold on the working class had been a long time coming, and Clinton’s success resulted from a partial and temporary reversal of the trend. As young men, both Greenberg and Schoen supported Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 primary bid because they saw in it “a throwback to the New Deal, a multiracial coalition that ran strongest with the poor and working class.” Although they converged on supporting RFK, as they later would on Clinton, Greenberg was, in Schenk’s telling, more of a true believer in the animating values of progressive politics and in the project of rebuilding the broadest possible coalition, while Schoen was more of a pragmatist who cared most about doing what was necessary to prevail in a given cycle.
The famous Democratic consultants later converged in their evaluations of the party after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss:
“Democratic leaders, said Greenberg, had “stopped seeing the working class.” Or as Schoen put it: “You can’t run a party based on New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, with a little Silicon Valley thrown in.”
📰 “The Crude System of Coded Messages Keeping Hamas’s Leader Alive,” by Summer Said and Rory Jones. In the aftermath of the IDF’s relatively straightforward battlefield killing of Hamas mastermind and all-around scumbag Yahya Sinwar, it’s interesting to look back at this great WSJ reporting from September on how he managed to evade Israeli intelligence and military operations for over a year using no-tech methods:
Sinwar’s rudimentary approach to communications harks back to a system that Hamas used in its early years and that the Hamas leader took up when he was detained in 1988 and later imprisoned in an Israeli jail, according to experts on the group.
Before being incarcerated, Sinwar founded Hamas’s internal security police, called Majd, which hunted down suspected collaborators and was active in Israeli prisons. Majd recruited agents inside prison called “sawa’ed” who distributed encoded messages from one section to another, according to the book Son of Hamas by a former Hamas operative-turned-Israeli spy.
The sawa’ed, a nickname derived from the Arabic word for forearms, would wrap handwritten letters in white bread, roll them into balls, then let them dry and harden, according to the book. Like baseball players, the agents pitched the balls from one section of the prison to the next, shouting “mail from the freedom fighters!”
In the end, his system did him no good and an Israeli brushback pitch nailed him straight in the head. Justice served.
📊 "The God Gap in American Politics," by Ryan Burge. Burge, a professor at Eastern Illinois University who writes the excellent Substack, Graphs About Religion, took a detailed look at how the role of religion and religious beliefs have changed in the two parties' coalitions over the past several decades. He finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Democrats have become a much more secular party, though the majority of their voters still retain some level of religiosity. But maybe less expected is that the share of Republicans who identify less with a particular religious tradition has also grown, especially over this past decade. Burge's piece helpfully illustrates how all these shifts have taken place.
⚾️ ALCS Game 5 and NLCS Game 6, on TBS and FSI. The AL and NL pennant races head towards conclusion this weekend with Cleveland in desperate need of a ‘W’ and the Mets hoping for another post-season rally to force a Game 7. Join all of us non-Yankee AL East fans in wishing the Guardians the best of luck.
🎸 Sanctuary Songs: Live in Omaha, NE, December 1, 2023, by Hiss Golden Messenger. This sterling live show is good on the ears and good for charity. The crack HGM outfit led by M.C. Taylor along with Chris Boerner, Alex Bingham, Sam Fribush, and Nick Falk clearly enjoyed themselves one Friday evening in Nebraska last year. Classics like “I’ve Got a Name for the Newborn Child” and newer songs like “Feeling Eternal” take on a new life out on the road.
Purchase a digital copy of the show and all proceeds go to Hurricane Helene relief efforts in North Carolina.
I'm glad I got to read the book review, I'll ask my library to purchase a copy, they've always honored my requests in the past.
The review was a good read in itself as a tiny condensed essence of the book, and the subject matter, the confluence of populism, the working class, and politics, one I am fascinated by. I'm an old rust belt refugee myself and I vividly remember many of the periods covered. I remember going through the same sorts of loyalty to my original party with it's remnants of the New Deal and social programs. Later I too had a difficult time when my party abandoned protectionism for consumerism, and more recently open borders.
I only voted once in all those years of bumping around from the gulf to the arctic and anywhere in between where holes were punched in the ground to extract energy. The one time was for a populist in a primary, a guy named Jesse Jackson who I'd listened to on a radio interview. Jackson explained how he specifically wanted my vote and he asked for people like me to vote for him. So I did.
My next vote was for Gore and we know how that went. I've voted every time since, sometimes enthusiastically, other times less so. I've even split tickets much more often. I'm still waiting to see if we will ever elect someone who will do good for the working class.
That article in Compact Magazine was a good read until I hit the paywall. I'm one of those working class voters Shullenberger talks about but I can afford very few subscriptions while doing my part to support a house and a couple of kids. I already pay for the Liberal Patriot and the Free Press.
I wish there were a way the working class could afford to read about itself.