Attention to the Unseen

Thomas Wright writes: In Biden’s view, the United States and other democracies are in a competition with China and other autocracies. This is being exacerbated by a period of rapid technological change that could give China an opportunity to leapfrog the United States in certain areas. Biden regularly invokes his many conversations with Xi Jinping to observe that the Chinese leader is deeply ideological in his personal commitment to authoritarianism. Biden’s top Asia adviser, Kurt M. Campbell, has echoed that…

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Politico reports: When President George W. Bush first met Vladimir Putin, he seemed smitten, describing the still-new Russian leader as “very straightforward and trustworthy,” even claiming he got “a sense of his soul.” A certain Democratic senator from Delaware had a very different reaction. “I don’t trust Putin,” Joe Biden said in the days after the June 2001 Bush-Putin summit in Slovenia. “Hopefully, the president was being stylistic rather than substantive.” Twenty years later, Washington has come around firmly to…

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ProPublica reports: In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. ProPublica has…

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Alex Pareene writes: The average consumer of political news can be forgiven for not being entirely sure how much to panic about the state of our democracy. On the one hand, one can read in the mainstream press that “more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement” warning that “the future of our democracy itself” is in jeopardy. The president, a kindly old moderate who touted his ability to work across the aisle, even echoed this…

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CNBC reports: The political advocacy group backed by billionaire Charles Koch has been pressuring Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to oppose key parts of the Democratic agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation. That lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act, which, advocates say, would limit the influence of big donors on elections. President Joe Biden…

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Politico reports: Two weeks before the GOP had its first chance to pick up a seat in Congress since Joe Biden became president, the Republican Party of New Mexico hosted a three-day event dubbed “Operation Freedom.” State Sen. Mark Moores, who was running for the open seat, addressed a crowd of a few hundred party leaders, activists and donors in a hotel conference center. Afterwards, he left the hotel and drove nearly 300 miles back to Albuquerque, where he was…

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The New York Times reports: For QAnon it is “The Storm,” when mass violence will topple the elite cabal of pedophiles who they imagine to be running the government. White-power groups in the United States have long promised a catastrophic race war. And in Germany and Austria, neo-Nazis herald an imagined putsch on “Day X” — when the democratic order collapses and they take over. All are examples of “accelerationist” ideologies, which promise a moment when the institutions of government,…

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Jonathan Chait writes: What does Joe Manchin want? The inscrutable whims of the West Virginia senator and 50th Senate vote have always controlled the future of the Biden administration’s domestic agenda. As such, Manchin’s desires are the subject of daily speculation and the vessel into which his party has projected a mix of hope and rage. It would be a relief of sorts if Manchin would simply tell us what he wants. The problem is that his statements frequently conflict…

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The New York Times reports: Rob Goins is 57, a former Marine and a lifelong Republican in a right-leaning jigsaw of golf courses, strip malls and gated retirement communities pieced together in the Arizona desert. But ask about the Republican-backed review of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 election victory here in Maricopa County, and Mr. Goins rejects the party line. “There’s a lot of folks out there trying to make something out of nothing,” he said recently as he loaded…

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Timothy Snyder writes: I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections. The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win…

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Sue Halpern writes: A few hours after Michael Flynn, the retired three-star general and former national-security adviser and convicted felon, told a group of QAnon conspiracists who met in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend that the Biden Administration should be overthrown by force, Democratic legislators in the Texas statehouse, two hundred miles away in Austin, did something remarkable: they stopped their Republican colleagues from passing one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country. Flynn’s pronouncement and the Republicans’…

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Daniella Peled writes: It would be encouraging to think that the massive upheaval afoot in Israeli politics with the unseating of Benjamin Netanyahu also signals a seismic shift in political culture. Perhaps a turning point in its democratic decline, even a move towards ending its rule over millions of Palestinians. Unfortunately, it signals none of these things. The burning desire to depose Israel’s longest serving leader is certainly the driving force behind the disparate eight-party coalition that hopes to replace…

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