What Now?

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What the hell happened in politics this week? Esquire's legendary blogger Charlie P. Pierce has answers

I'm Absolutely Sure America Is About to Get Exactly What It Wants

There will be no asterisk this time around. Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States. The asterisk came at the suggestion of my wife. In 2016, I was struggling with a way to describe a president whose ascent came via what I believed to be dubious means. Four years of typing some elaborate and derisive descriptive seemed like a dreadful prospect. So when my wife suggested the asterisk, it seemed so brilliant in its simplicity, and so popular once it appeared, that it was clear that it had been a magnificent choice. Not this time. The asterisk is not coming back.

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The Never Trumpers Are the Most Useless People in America

I am deliberately staying away from the instant autopsies of What Went Wrong?—and from the now-doomed and futile exercise in What Could They Possibly Be Thinking? It will take a couple days before I feel up to engaging in that stuff. But here is one conclusion that heavy chains cannot drag out of me. It is the same conclusion I drew in 2016, and in 2020, and that was definitively validated on Tuesday. Despite their ludicrously outsized presence on cable news, particularly on "liberal" MSNBC, in terms of moving votes and affecting election results, our Never Trump allies have been as useless as a butter knife against a freight train.

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How We Built This American Corporate Oligarchy—and How We Can Free Ourselves from It

The project to replace the American republic with a corporate oligarchy has been up and running for a long time. Thom Hartmann argues, and I agree, that it began in 1971 when Lewis Powell, then a wealthy tobacco lawyer who saw his primary client's industry suddenly found guilty of millions of negligent homicides and on the verge of destruction, and Powell vowed that these interlopers with their pesky citizen lawsuits and their pesky public-interest lawyers would not "victimize" his friends in the executive suites without a fight. So he wrote a memo laying out the case for an American oligarchy and the best strategy for achieving it. President Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and the game was on.

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The Louisiana Legislature Is Holding a Special Session??? To Consider Corporate Tax Cuts??? In This Economy???

F*ckery never sleeps out in the country, not even when the country in general hangs up its autographed portrait of Jack Kevorkian again. We begin in Louisiana, which is holding a special session of the legislature to consider "improvements" to the state's tax code and, this being Louisiana, you can imagine how this is going.

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A 109-Year-Old Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre Just Cast Her Ballot. It's My Favorite Story of the Year.

A 109-year-old survivor of a horrendous racial pogrom that this society can barely bother itself to atone for puts her name to a statement that sums up the stakes of this election better than one from a herd of highly paid pundits, then she bestirs her 109-year-old self to vote anyway.

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