Weekend Reading

Our guest this week was the truly great columnist Perry Bacon of The New Republic (and formerly of the Washington Post, until truly great columns stopped being part of Jeff Bezos’s business model). As a native and resident of Louisville, Kentucky, Perry has a sharp perspective on how geography shapes, and distorts, our media and political landscape.

This week I sat down with G. Elliott Morris — who ran FiveThirtyEight before ABC shut it down, and who’s built something better with Strength in Numbers and FiftyPlusOne — to get his read on where the midterms stand and what mainstream polling is missing. The upshot on the midterms right now, according to Elliott, is that “the cake is pretty much baked” on Republicans losing control of the House, while Republicans only have even odds or worse of keeping the Senate.

I sat down with my friend and former AFL-CIO colleague Damon Silvers to talk about how power actually moves through the economy. Damon walked through why the ecnomic crash hasn't come yet, why the AI boom is doing double duty as GDP prop and job-market panic machine, and why the real story isn't the quarterly numbers but the wage-productivity gap most people have never heard of.

History isn’t an endlessly repeating loop, Naomi Klein explained in our conversation this week — it’s more like a spiral, a drill bit that goes deeper and gets more dangerous with every rotation. The work we all have in front of us is how to get out of the hole and build something new. Anat and I are both longtime fans of Naomi’s work, which includes groundbreaking books like The Shock Doctrine and No Logo.

I sat down this past week with Carlos Odio, co-founder of Equis Research, who since we met back in 2017 has been the most insightful and honest analyst of the Latino vote I know. It’s well-known that Trump’s apparent gains with Latinos in 2024 evaporated after he started terrorizing immigrants and wrecking the economy.

After a brief discussion of Tuesday’s results in Michigan, Anat and I spent the bulk of this week’s Substack Live with Sarah Mehta, the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Policy and Government Affairs for Immigration, on an urgent story that has flown horrifically under the radar for a year and a half: the systematic dismantling of every legal protection this country has for unaccompanied immigrant children.

I’ve often said that the Constitution was designed to prevent America from realizing its founding ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But that’s an incomplete story, as made clear in University of Pennsylvania constitutional law professor Kermit Roosevelt’s underappreciated book, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story.

Anat opened this week’s show with a recap of her essential new piece, “Don’t Make the Argument.” (Big thanks to Anat for stepping in solo when I had to arrive late, and for navigating technical issues with the chat with her usual grace and good humor.) Her piece argues that every time Democrats have been advised to go quiet on something, it has backfired — and that only saying the thing, out loud, over years, can actually move the ground towards the change we need.

This week’s “Meeting the Moment” featured our dear friend and former Research Collaborative colleague, Jiggy Geronimo, whose work on narrative strategy and the surveillance state is as amazing as her name. We discussed her important new piece on Substack about how to get our comms to break through in the modern information environment — which pro-democracy progressives spend a lot more time talking about than actually doing.

Anat calls Doran Schrantz — the longtime former leader of ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, and the current founder and project director of the Organizing Lab — “your favorite organizer’s favorite organizer.” Our conversation with her on this week’s “Meeting the Moment” reveals why.