Saturday, January 03, 2026

Democracy the Myth That Survived

Coming up on the anniversary of the January 6th riot, we may wish to believe that the U.S. is still the place we thought it was, and that the riot was a mere aberration. But I fear it’s time to face the fact that America has changed for the worse in fundamental ways we haven’t yet fully grasped.

Democracy is a myth, albeit one of the most useful myths humans have ever constructed, and I for one believe in it wholeheartedly. But it doesn’t exist independently apart from our shared imaginations. It doesn’t exist in nature — there is no democracy in the web of life. Therefore, for it to work, the great majority of people who live within the myth need to want it to work.

The truth is it has been a very good myth for most of us. It is flawed, deeply flawed, but not as flawed as every other human social order — autocracy for example. And democracy won’t survive if millions of our fellow citizens don’t believe our elections are fair and are willing to instead to try to install someone else by force.

Unfortunately, this week there will be some who celebrate Jan. 6, 2021 as a positive memory and perhaps a few who will even try to replicate some form of the attack on democracy again. Congress continues its exhaustive probe of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the evidence is horrifying but it will take a great writer to compile a report anyone will read, let alone believe.

And I’m not sure Congress contains any great writers.

What is the story? That the world’s strongest democracy came close to collapse? Even after a year of considering what happened, those words sound unreal, nightmarish. Yet hordes of our fellow citizens, some armed, all angry, rushed the Capitol seeking to disrupt the Electoral College from certifying the election of President Joe Biden.

The man who lost the election, Donald Trump, sat in the White House watching events unfold on TV after inciting the crowd to do exactly what they did. Remember how they chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and “Kill Nancy Pelosi” — were those empty threats?

I don’t think so.

From the Congressional investigation, we know Trump and his co-conspirators were plotting various options to keep him in power and subvert the vote of the people. That they were too ignorant and naive about the electoral process and how to successfully subvert it is what small, small comfort we have now.

Yes, we escaped disaster, barely, but Trump and his ilk know more about how the system works now, and some of the checks and balances that saved our system of government are more vulnerable now than they were a year ago.

Many of the county officials in swing states who refused to falsify returns under the pressure generated by Trump supporters have resigned or have been removed from office. The same with some of the Electors. Those replacing them may not act as ethically or as honestly should another closely contested election come down to the type of contested late counts as it did in 2020.

And given how deeply divided the country appears to be, it’s likely that the 2024 Presidential election will be very close again, even though we don’t yet even know who the candidates will be.

None of this is comforting. All those of us who care about such things can do for now is to remain vigilant and speak out whenever we can, which is what I’m doing today.

Of course, remaining silent is an option. It’s another way of saying you don’t think your opinion matters. Which is equivalent to thinking your vote doesn’t matter.

Which is one step away from ensuring that democracy will die.

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Friday, January 02, 2026

Dawn

Six years ago, as the year 2020 got underway, I wrote a very short entry to my personal blog called “What is January 1st Good For?” 

Here it is:

“I should have guessed this, but the first day of the year is a very good day to work on your memoir. I woke early and almost immediately began writing. It makes sense. You can feel the transition of the years almost physically. That is a good context for this kind of work.”

At the time, I was in a hospital, recovering from a series of maladies. I had as yet no inkling of just how momentous a year 2020 was to be.

First there was Covid-19, the pandemic that virtually shut our world down, setting off a wave of repercussions we are still dealing with today.

Then came the George Floyd killing by Minneapolis police and an unprecedented outpouring of anger on our streets.

Public opinion over both Covid and the nascent Black Lives Matter movement was deeply split — and the significance of that division was magnified because it was an election year.

The incumbent president, Trump, chose to fan the flames of division in his quest for re-election. His opponent, Biden, talked of unity in an almost nostalgic way. Unity seemed as distant a dream in the USA in 2020 as it does today.

After a nasty campaign, Biden won by 7 million popular votes and by an Electoral College total of 306-232. It wasn’t really very close. The better guy won, fair and square.

But we all remember what happened next — the Jan. 6th riot early in 2021 and Trump’s effort to disrupt the official certification of the electoral result.

So once again, I asked myself yesterday, what is January 1st good for? Memoir-writing? Yes, perhaps.

But it’s also a time to recount this painful recent history and to steel ourselves for another rough mid-year election battle this time around. May our better angels once again prevail.

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Thursday, January 01, 2026

And So It Begins

As 2025 slipped away and 2026 came into view, I was surrounded by perhaps 50 revelers counting down the last few seconds of the old and cheering the arrival of the new.

Everyone raised their glass to toast one another as fireworks lit up the sky to our west. The explosions reflected the wet vegetation around our neighborhood, as New Year’s Eve was a rainy affair here in Northern California.

Today is rainy as well.

The first thing I want to say in 2026 is thank you to everyone who subscribes to my newsletter. I’ve been doing this for the past six years since I retired from a 54-year career in journalism. A few days from now will mark the 60th anniversary of my first published story, which was in the Michigan Daily.

I remember going to a newsstand on campus that wintry day and seeing people pick up the paper and thinking, “I wonder what they would do if they knew I was the author of one of the stories they’re reading.”

On the other hand, it was unlikely that very many would even notice my story, which was a short item about the wrestling team buried near the back of the sports page. Yes, it was a modest beginning, but also a useful lesson in arrogance and modesty.

Most of the time, readers neither notice nor care who the author is — what they care about is the story. What this newsletter has always been about is the story of the times we are living through together, informed by the stories from the past half-century that provide the context for today’s headlines.

And speaking of headlines, there is one news item that bridged the news cycles overnight on this New Year’s that brought a ray of hope onto the bleak political landscape confronting us.

Quoting the New York Times, “President Trump said Wednesday that he would abandon for now his efforts to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. The president made his announcement shortly before a federal appellate court ruled that the Trump administration had to return hundreds of California National Guard troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s control.”

In the battle to preserve our democracy, chalk one up for the “No Kings” movement. And BTW, my newsletter has its own New Year’s Resolution for 2026: 

No Kings!


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Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Rosemary, Mint & Year's End

(This is from New Year’s Eve 2012, thirteen years ago. Oddly, it begins by referencing a New Year’s Eve thirteen years earlier than that one. To me, it’s a reminder that somehow it always seems to be the worst of times, but there’s always a new day tomorrow, and in all of these cases, a New Year.)

As we prepare for a likely fall over the fiscal cliff, the doomsday warnings remind me of December 31, 1999 and the y2k theory. I remember filling our car up with gas in Maryland, where we lived at the time, before traveling around the Beltway to wait out the impending crisis at my sister’s house in Virginia that New Year’s Eve.

The predicted disaster did not come to pass that time around, and maybe we’ll get lucky again.

This time it is not a technology issue but a political one. Competing theories of government’s role in a capitalist economy have come forehead to forehead, with neither side inclined to blink. Watching CNN tonight, I can see that the rhetoric chosen by Democrats and Republicans is still aimed at nothing more than public relations, as whatever backroom deal they may be negotiating succeeds or fails to pass the House, in the only vote that matters.

The Senate has had the votes to pass a reasonable compromise all along. Inside the Beltway, it is known as the house of Congress where the “adults” work, as opposed to the other chamber.

Be that as it may, the House is theoretically more representative of the nation, since every state, large or small, has two Senators, regardless of population. The House, by contrast, has 435 members allocated by the population distribution -- thus California has the largest delegation in that chamber, followed by other populous states.

From my time in Washington, covering the political system up close, what I remember most vividly is how much all the politicians I met there were image-oriented. There was the occasional policy wonk, who cared more about what would actually change things for the better, but most seemed far more concerned about looking good, raising money for their next election cycle, and cutting down their opposition.

In a similar vein, during the brief time my roommate in Mill Valley was a U.S. Senator, I learned just how much of his time had to be devoted to raising money and/or talking to donors. Basically, it was every available hour outside of meetings with his colleagues in the Senate.

Nothing I saw in either case increased my confidence in our federal government. And don’t even get me started about our state government in Sacramento, which I’ve also witnessed up close.

I actually have more faith in local government, which despite many problems, remains more closely in touch with citizens and their concerns — and therefore more accountable.

Not that our city and county officials do a good job of addressing those concerns much of the time. But we have a fairly responsive government here in the city of San Francisco. Come to think of it, I must find someone at City Hall to discuss the mess transit officials has made along my route from here in the Mission to Bernal.

They’ve screwed up the intersection of Bryant and 24th, and as I drive this route a thousand times every year, it really matters to me. More than the fiscal cliff, if you want to know the truth.

I don’t earn enough money to owe anything in taxes at the moment and I don’t rely on any publicly funded services, other than Medicare, so if they go over the cliff, I doubt it will matter much to me personally. On the other hand, I’m thinking of my country as a whole, and wondering whether it really can be a world leader much longer with such a dysfunctional political standoff, led not by leaders but elected officials refusing to lead.

So with all of that said, Happy New Year?

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Tuesday, December 30, 2025

The Bottom Line

As the year winds down, I’ve been thinking about money.

At present, there are about 3,000 billionaires in the world, 900 of them in the U.S. Each of them have more money, at least on paper, than they could ever actually spend, no matter how long they lived nor how many things they purchased.

By contrast, most people spend our adult lives working for wages and worrying about how we are going to pay our bills. For today’s college students, it will be all too easy to acquire a mountain of debt that may take most of their lifetimes to pay off. 

Wealth disparity is getting worse and it represents the single greatest threat to the future of democracy. Billionaires want to be free to acquire an obscene amount of wealth, but they don’t want the rest of us to be free to redistribute a tiny fraction of that wealth through taxes and social welfare programs to achieve a more equitable set of outcomes.

There’s a name for this — class warfare.

So Marx was right. (Sigh) 

But since the vast majority of us will never be in favor of violent political change, we are stuck with the messy work of elections and political parties and leaders we don’t like or trust.

Politically speaking, 2025 was a disaster, but 2026 is a new year, and therefore our next best chance to wage peaceful class warfare, even if nobody wants to call it that. 

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Monday, December 29, 2025

Monday Mix

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Sunday, December 28, 2025

Before the Song

Sometimes in journalism you get the chance to make a difference in one person’s life.

Back in the 1990s, I was in my office at Mother Jones one morning when the front desk buzzed me to say there was someone who would like to talk to an editor. It was the week following the Rodney King beating by police in L.A. and there had been destructive riots with looting in downtown San Francisco.

My visitor was a soft-spoken young man carrying a large package. He asked me if we could speak privately.

Back in my office, he explained the purpose of his visit. He’d been caught up in the anger of the moment, he said, and had been angry and frustrated by yet another act of police violence against his community — he’d grown up in South Central L.A. -- when he had joined the rioters and broken into a Radio Shack and stolen a computer monitor.

“I knew it was wrong almost the minute I did it, and now I feel bad,” he told me. “I’d like to ask if you’d return it.”

I looked closely at my young visitor. He was perhaps 21 years old with an honest face and a sincere manner.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I will return it for you if you’ll tell me why you stole it in the first place and what you wanted it for.”

He agreed and I assured him that we would protect his identity in any article that I might publish based on our conversation. 

So we started talking. He described growing up in poverty, surrounded by violence and family tragedy (he’d lost a brother in a random shooting) but told me how he had avoided getting into the worst things himself, largely due to his passion for music. His hope was to learn how to make music of his own and he had grabbed the monitor in the mistaken belief it could help him with synthesizing.

A few days later I arranged for the monitor to be returned to Radio Shack, which eventually led to a call from the D.A.’s office asking me to identify my informant so he could be charged for a crime.

I flatly refused and asked, “How many of the hundreds of rioters that looted have even offered so much as to turn the stuff they stole back in?”

“He’s the only one.”

That was the last I heard from the D.A., who couldn’t make a case without my testimony, but an editor over at the San Francisco Examiner read our piece in Mother Jones and asked to reprint it.

That set off a completely unanticipated seres of events, including a flood of donations from the public to help the young man buy a real computer, which in turn could help him pursue his musical dreams.

I made sure he got the money and that’s where this story ends, as far as my involvement is concerned. But often when one story ends, another begins.

And in this case, the young man sent me word a few years later that he was performing in local bars in a hip-hop band under a pseudonym.

But that's his story to tell.

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