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Looking back, I've sent your attention, through these weekly links lists, to far too many political stories that were of the moment. There was some decent writing in them: nothing motivates a journalist so much as thinking they can move the political needle. But you don't really remember the stories, aside from those that, entertaining as they were, were infamously wrong. Even the best political writers tend to keep their aperture too narrow to write anything that lasts. (This is probably because they're on a recurring deadline.) And, if you wait a few months, most of those of-the-moment pieces turn out to be, if not wrong, woefully incomplete. What kinds of stories last? The aperture needs to be a little wider than what's happening write now. The stories that matter are stories that unfold over years, not days or weeks. I find those stories are best best articulated in the telling of individual political lives. What it takes to make a longterm political career is of course the upward climb through various offices, elected and appointed, but also a slight shifting: you need to please different types of voters and meet different sorts of moments. Take Doug Burgum as an example. If you want to understand the political trend, what it means for "MAGA" to take over the GOP, then you could sadly look at opinion polls or pundit podcasts, or you could consider this former governor who first ran against Trump and then spent an early Summer attempting to kiss the ring. The shift in Burgum illustrates the shift in the GOP; as a bonus, it makes you wonder how you'd fare any differently were you in that arena. There are some other trends that I've been thinking will potentially matter even more than the GOP's MAGA-fication. Will the Democratic party turn into a party purely of the wealthy? Jared Golden, up in northern Maine, along with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Oregon are two of the very few Democrats representing blue collar people. The latter's story, told in the first link below, illustrates the challenge. While national Dems want to ban natural gas stoves and require table saws to be equipped with expensive safety equipment, she's attempting to make them understand how rural folks will suffer: if we make table saws prohibitively expensive, shop floors will have more of the far more dangerous circular saws. It remains to be seen whether either the party as a whole or her constituents appreciate her work enough to re-elect her. Another trend worth considering: do members of the ruling Democratic party have what it takes to face the spate of foreign hot and cold wars? John Fetterman makes a nice case in the affirmative. Much as he was a concerning figure, incapacitated enough to make his ability to serve in the Senate questionable, he's notably and somewhat fearlessly joined to the side of the civilized world in the latest Middle East wars. This runs so against the grain of his party that some of his staff contradict the boss and then quit during the reporter's profile-writing. It's also interesting to see the more hawkish people in the center and on the right make positive statements about a guy they campaigned bitterly against just a few years ago. Lastly, we have an Atlantic piece on JD Vance. He's just about as interesting as they come, at least in terms of story arcs: he's lived at almost every strata of society and held just about every center-right political opinion. He's also, perhaps most interestingly, become Catholic in the most avant-garde yet traditional sense of the word: there's a growing sense among his coreligionists that things were better when their church and various states commingled power. Some of the ideas seem absurdly silly, like wishing to live as a peasants of the 16th century or viewing every advance for humanity since the enlightenment as suspect. Others of the ideas are more winsome. Either way, the people holding these sorts views are very influential. The way the politically adroit Vance has joined their ranks suggests these people, and their ideas, are worth watching. I've been sitting on the profiles below since the Summer. And I think they hold up. If you waste as much time reading online as I do, you probably saw them already. These sorts of stories, considered a bit after publication, are a better way to understand what matters and what may end up happening than even the best political analysis, as much as I love reading Molly Ball & co. And so for this week, I give you these three interesting profiles of, er, courage? recalcitrance? Enjoy the reading. Reading
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The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party's Other Big Problem
John Fetterman's War