Give him an ideal to aspire to, not a group to hate

I finished the book Toni at Random, the Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship by Dana A. Williams. Even with the subject’s distinctive face on the cover a person saw the title and essentially said, “Huh?” So I’ll expand it a bit to Toni Morrison at Random House Publishing. Yes, Morrison was a book editor, 1965-1980, before and while her writing career took off. She saw her job there as getting black authors published while also creating books to serve as resources for the growing Black Studies programs at universities. Those programs needed such things as anthologies of African (not just African American) writers to help dispel the idea that African culture was inferior to European culture. They also needed books of stories and essays where black people talked to black people while not actually explaining themselves to white people or dealing with racism as an underlying issue in everything. For some of these books Morrison conceived of the need for a particular book and went looking for people, frequently academics, who could create it under her guidance. Other times an author’s work would come to her attention and she saw the basic beauty of the writing and helped shape the work into a coherent book. We also learn how the editor guides the book through the publishing process: Convince management the book is worth the effort. Keep track of the contract and propose the size of advance. Work with the sales team to figure out what kind of sales the book might get and from that to determine how many pages the sales could support. Work with the art department for the cover and interior layout. Send out review copies and incorporate good quotes into the book’s advertising. Help schedule author appearances. Deal with agents and writers who fall behind schedule, then adjust the schedule as needed. There is much more. Some of the books discussed are a biography of boxer Muhammad Ali and an autobiography of Angela Davis. It is an enjoyable and informative book. But there were times I thought I really don’t need this much detail. One of those times was when she suggested to an author to get an agent and they chose one that became highly uncooperative. During that battle I skipped a few pages. My Sunday movie was Cactus Pears. The story takes place in India. Anand is 30 and unmarried, living in Mumbai where he has a pretty good corporate job. His father dies and he and his mother take the body back to their village to complete the ten-day mourning ritual. So a good part of the story is about rural Indian life. There is talk that since Anand is unmarried maybe he isn’t the right one to do all the rituals. His mother insists he is. During those ten days Anand renews his friendship with Balya, a childhood friend and now a local farmer and goat herder, struggling to earn enough. Also during that time there are a lot of offers to connect Anand and Balya with this girl or that. Both resist. As the mourning time ends the two men must decide whether Balya goes with Anand back to Mumbai. The title comes from Balya giving Anand a cactus pear fruit to show there is interest in deepening the relationship. I enjoyed the story, though I thought the pacing rather slow. In my election stories I briefly mentioned Haley Stevens. I said I would discuss the incident in more detail, then didn’t get to it. Back on November 1 Kos of Daily Kos reported, based in a CNN story:

Michigan Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens has stunned the political world by endorsing Republican Mike Rogers in the Senate race. Stevens narrowly lost the Democratic Senate primary to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in August, after a bitter campaign that featured more than $30 million in spending by groups affiliated with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC supporting Stevens. ... Things escalated Wednesday when Stevens’ fiancé, Jason Turkish, told The Detroit News that he would vote for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, citing concerns about El-Sayed’s positions on Israel.

Stevens’ staff quickly resigned. In the opinion of Kos she effectively ended her career as a Democrat without making any difference in the outcome of the race. In the opinion of the nasty guy she went from “Radical Left Socialist” to “Highly Respected.” I included the little bit about her fiancé because many are suggesting he had a great deal of influence over this announcement. The next day Walter Einenkel of Kos discussed Stevens’ appearance on CNN with Anderson Cooper to defend her decision. It did not go well. Here’s Einenkel’s summary:

Cooper continued trying to get Stevens to explain how she could justify endorsing a man who has conducted one of the most bigoted campaigns in modern history while suggesting that her own party’s nominee is somehow more racist.

I heard Democrats in Congress quickly isolated her, essentially booting her from the party. She leaves at the end of the year anyway because she ran for the Senate rather than to keep her House seat. I saw a meme about Stevens in the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos for October 31, but don’t see them now. There are a lot of comments condemning her. Madisonian of the Kos community wrote that the House held a vote on the first step to impeaching Pete Hegseth. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie filed the articles of impeachment on his way to retiring from the House. This should have been an easy win for Democrats, but it lost by 7 votes. The articles of impeachment were referred to committee where nothing will be done until at least January. Why did it fail? Wrote Madisonian:

11 Democrats decided not to show up and do their job. They decided that Pete Hegseth’s war crimes and repeated violations of Constitutional law, that his blundering and bluster, were fine by them. Here’s the Democrats who thought that they had better things to do that to hold the worst SecDef in American history accountable for his many, many crimes.

Madisonian pulls in the larger view and says those 11 weren’t there because Hakeem Jeffries, the current minority leader and the guy most likely to be the next Speaker, didn’t do his job. And that is a very disturbing indication that he’s not the right guy to lead the caucus in confronting the nasty guy. Madisonian gives several reasons why this is a bad sign for Jeffries’ leadership. I won’t go into details. I will mention the excuse he gave:

I haven’t had a conversation with anyone on the floor team about what may or may not have happened in terms of the Hegseth resolution, but this is not the end of it. It’s just the beginning.

That prompted Madisonian to reply:

Are you kidding me? This is a disaster for party morale, a giant middle finger to a huge number of people who turned out last week to vote. How dare you not have your ducks in a row on this? Either he’s incompetent, or he’s trying to keep Hegseth in power and the Iran War running. ... This fecklessness in service to never-ending wars in Iran, in service to the kind of horrors that Hegseth has committed in our name, this complete inability to read the temperature of the country and keep his caucus in line, should disqualify Hakeem Jeffries from the Speaker’s gavel. You cannot look at an impeachment vote for a monster like Hegseth and let your party off the hook. There has never been a clearer election in my entire voting lifetime, and Jeffries just proved that he’s not the man to carry forward what the people demanded.

In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had several interesting quotes. Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark about talking to committed Republican voters after the election.

In my conversation with these voters, one thing became abundantly clear in their cacophony of cope: They were not blaming Trump. Instead, they were blaming the GOP candidates on the ticket for being terrible. They were blaming social media for pushing Trump Derangement Syndrome. And they were blaming their fellow Americans, who they insisted were just too brainwashed and emotional to just hold their noses and vote for the terrible candidates that Republicans offered them. ... More often than not, these voters were appalled that their fellow voters could back Democrats—and suspected they simply weren’t educated in all the ways those Democrats were evil.

Michael McFaul tweeted a chart showing the ways voters in 2024 voted in 2026. A large chunk of Harris voters voted for Democrats, a small number voted for Republicans, and a few didn’t vote. A majority who voted for the nasty guy voted for Republicans, a small chunk voted for Democrats and a few didn’t vote at all. Of those who didn’t vote in 2024 roughly two-thirds voted for Democrats. This seems to have made the biggest difference. Matt McDermott tweeted a chart of which party won the various statewide races – governor, AG, Secretary of State, treasurer, school superintendent, head of Agriculture, etc. in Georgia, Texas, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Ohio. Not all offices are voted on in each state. 9 of these offices were Democrat holds, 1 was a Republican hold, and 25 were Democrat pickups. Here is the key sentence in what Grace Panetta wrote for 19th News discussing election results: “But the results also show that voters were fed up with misbehaving men of both parties.” David French of the New York Times:

Since I became a journalist, I’ve been writing about the challenges facing young men. One of the first columns I wrote at The Times was about that very topic — that men were falling behind women in school and that they were dying deaths of despair. The antidote wasn’t for young men to demand respect or assert their power but for them to find a purpose, a virtuous purpose in loving and serving others, that would provide deep meaning to their lives. And no, I don’t think that the left has always approached young men with an open heart and an open mind. I appreciate what my friend Richard Reeves wrote in his invaluable book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.” Phrases like toxic masculinity wrongly taught young men that there was “something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcised.” As the MAGA right knows, it’s possible to motivate young men through rage and fear. In fact, it’s possible to motivate anyone through rage and fear, at least for a while. But if you really want to reach a young man’s heart, you need to inspire him, not enrage him. Give him an ideal to aspire to, not a person or group to hate.

A tweet by Neil Shenvi:

Bo French getting Community Noted for being racist while also getting dunked on by Groypers for not being racist enough is peak 2026.

Tweets by Chaz Nuttycombe:

Democrats have around a 500-seat net gain currently in state legislatures nationwide. 229 seats remain to be called, but the final tally will likely be a ~575-seat net gain for Democrats in the 2026 state legislative elections. In 1974, they gained 628. 2026 is not only the largest Democratic wave in state legislatures since the 1974 Watergate Wave. 2026 is probably the 7th-largest Democratic net gain in state legislatures over the last 100 years. It's likely going to beat Landslide Lyndon's 1964 win.

In the comments is a meme posted by exlrrp. It shows the nasty guy and a turkey with the caption:

We’re hearing Donald Trump may not pardon the Thanksgiving Turkey at the White House this year because the turkey is having trouble raising the two million dollars pardons cost.