Real wisdom is unconventional. For almost three years on Patreon and dating back to 2016 as a blogsite, I have published Wolves and Sheep as an alternative to the political analysis of Washington insiders. I have nothing against the perspective of smart Beltway professionals, but they lose me whenever they succumb to the groupthink that passes as conventional wisdom. In an unsettled time like ours, conventional wisdom is often wrong because it relies too much on faulty assumptions about stability and consistency. Sometimes you can see things more clearly when you’re not on top of them, or when you’re trained to see events as elements of patterns. Because my perspective is academic rather than journalistic and with the advantage of being 120 miles from DC, I can take a less conventional approach to our politics than what you’ll find on most pundit sites. You can read more about what I mean by unconventional wisdom here.
Historic generational realignment is driving our deep divisions. Much of what I write here starts with the assumption that we are living through a jarring but slow-rolling generational revolution that’s elevating Millennials and Gen Z, whose values and political preferences threaten long-established arrangements about power and privilege. But their emergence is being aggressively blocked by portions of the twilight electorate who cling to power at all costs, even if it means sacrificing democracy. The outcome of this conflict will depend on whether the emerging electorate arrives fast enough to prevent the reaction against it from taking root. By the way, we are hardly the first generation to live through a political realignment. They’ve happened fairly regularly throughout our history—usually every 40 years or so—and some have been pretty rocky. Arguably the worst was the transition between the Jacksonian Democrats and Lincoln Republicans. That required a Civil War to straighten out. Our era is a pretty close second.
Democracy is worth saving. I don’t regard defending democracy as a partisan matter, but the democracy/autocracy fault lines we’re experiencing track with the blue/red divide. By elevating Donald Trump and MAGA politics, Republicans are embracing autocratic means like suppressing the vote and blocking the legal transfer of power, and autocratic ends like vesting unchecked power in a strongman leader and threatening to use the state to attack political opponents. This leaves electing Democrats up and down the ballot as the surest way to protect “small-d” democracy. To advance this objective, I partnered in 2024 with Chris Bowers, the longtime Executive Campaign Director at Daily Kos. Chris brings his activism skills to Wolves and Sheep, adding important new opportunities for political engagement. While we support “big-D” Democrats, we welcome everyone invested in working toward a healthy democracy.
Trumpism is a play in three acts. I like using the structure of a trilogy to provide context for understanding seemingly unrelated events. In my first few years writing Wolves and Sheep, I used the framework of the Trump administration as a three-act play to prepare my readers for the culminating act where Trump was going to have to be extracted from office, which came to fruition in the events surrounding January 6. I saw the Trump post-presidency as a play in three acts as well, in which the quickest route to reestablishing democratic norms and procedures was for Democrats to win the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections. Well, there was twist ending to Act III. Now we find ourselves in the middle of a different trilogy, one that I had fervently hoped to avoid, where Joe Biden is an interregnum between two Trump administrations rather than a bridge carrying us safely over the roiled waters of generational change. The outcome of this three-act play is uncertain, and while that is a scary prospect we can also view it as an opportunity now that the denouement is upon us. This would not be the first dark moment that leads to a democratic rebirth.
Democracy requires accountability. When we look back at the period between the two Trump administrations, we are likely to see the inability and unwillingness to disqualify Donald Trump and his enablers from returning to power as the touchstone failure of our time. Democracy demanded legal accountability for anyone involved in planning and facilitating the failed coup, with indictments, jury trials, verdicts, and prison sentences following convictions. We will never know if successful prosecutions would have increased the electoral salience of Trump’s crimes and led to a backlash at the polls the way voters punished Republicans after Watergate. What we do know is that the coup plotters have been invited to return through the front door, reducing the near term prospects for accountability to zero. So we have to look to the long term. Coupling accountability at the ballot box with accountability in the jury box is ultimately how democracy will reassert itself.
Hard Reality confronts Fake Reality. This one keeps me up at night. I have no answer for how we’re supposed to function as a democracy when we are invested in different factual understandings of the world. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts.” Or maybe it was James Schlesinger. In any event, we live in a time when people feel entitled to their own facts to the point where two competing and mutually exclusive realities live side by side. Just take the simple proposition that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. There is abundant evidence that he did and literally no evidence that he didn’t. Yet to many of our neighbors, this last sentence is factually inaccurate. I can find plenty of verifiable “hard reality” evidence to justify my claim about Biden’s legitimacy, but my facts will be rejected as false by those who live in the unverifiable “fake reality” where the 2020 election was stolen. The problem, of course, is “fake reality” feels like “hard reality” to those who believe it, making it impossible for us to speak to each other across the divide. And if we don’t agree on the facts, there can be no common ground for discussion and therefore no way to understand each other. I can’t solve this problem, but I can establish ground rules for conversations here. The pro-democracy community lives in “hard reality” and so does this site. The claims Chris and I make will be verifiable by sources traditionally deemed reliable, and your claims should be, too.
We need compassion. I don’t look kindly on Democrats when they call Republicans stupid or crazy (calling behavior stupid or crazy, or denouncing Donald Trump’s actions is another matter). And I don’t look kindly on Republicans when they goad and troll progressives. Yes, there is a whole lot of crazy in our politics right now, but it only dehumanizes people when we see them that way. I may find things said and done by some Trump supporters to be wrongheaded, insane, or even threatening, but I also think it is possible to see it as coming from a place of fear. I think you can dislike someone’s values and reject their objectives and still try to understand where they’re coming from. Accordingly, I have no patience for name calling and trolling from any direction. I know it’s retro, but I’m more interested in generating light than heat.
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