The Fortnightly Rant

Eighteen days to go: a fortnight plus four, making this our penultimate paper before we all plunge into the unknown. This brief interval of relative calm may give us our last chance for the foreseeable future to attain anything like coherence. So let’s step back from this endless succession of crazy trees and try to perceive the forest. We’ll begin by looking at the arc of the life of the writer Kevin Phillips. In his late 20’s, Phillips devised the Southern Strategy used by Richard Nixon to win the presidency in 1968: abandon moderate Republicans in the northeast, and court racist southerners. Watergate, and what …

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When, in the course of human events, it becomes possible for voters to place in high office a convicted criminal exhibiting florid symptoms of dementia, it behooves those who labor—and occasionally frolic—under the protections of the First Amendment, to scrutinize the person who will assume the office, should the principal become so incapacitated that even CNN and the New York Times no longer ignore his gibbering incoherence. As one might expect, given the person atop the ticket, by offering up Ohio’s junior Senator, Republicans are not sending their best. Their best have already self-deported. In fact, the previous occupant of the position to which JD …

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Anna Kilgore, of Springfield, Ohio, called the cops. She couldn’t find her cat, Miss Sassy. Anna suspected that her neighbors, who are Haitian, had eaten the cat. Ohio Senator and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance sprang into action. On September 9th, he tweeted: “Months ago I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” The next day, during the presidential debate, Republican nominee Donald Trump treated the alleged canis- …

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If this election campaign were an episode of “Star Trek”—we should be so lucky—we’d be hearing from Scotty pretty soon: “I dannea if she can take any more, Captain!” Eleven days ago one of the candidates released a campaign photo of himself doing something that no normal, sane person would ever do. If some normal sane person were somehow tricked into pulling this stunt—standing among the graves at Arlington National Cemetery, grinning like an ape, with his diminutive thumb raised—and was photographed in the act, they’d probably assume it was for blackmail purposes, and hire a gumshoe to deep-six the evidence. We are talking, however, …

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We can’t speak for our two dozen predecessors, but since assuming the throne—editors traditionally use the royal “we,” why shouldn’t regal nomenclature extend to office furniture?—our natural condition has been existential dread. That yawning abyss which strikes terror in most hearts, is like an Olympic pool to Katie Ledecky. Existential dread is our natural habitat. Perhaps it comes from having survived 267 years—so far!—despite revolution, civil war, and capitalism. Expecting the worst, we’re surprised and amused on those occasions when it does not arrive. We bring this up because we fear we may now have to prepare for something for which we know we’re not …

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What a difference a fortnight and a half can make. The past three weeks have raised the possibility that we, the people, may not, in fact, be strapped into cheap seats at the glacier races. To the contrary, we now have evidence that if certain people in strategic positions do the right thing, conditions may change. What’s more, these changes—at least so it appears at the moment, let’s not get ahead of ourselves—might move the nation away from, rather than toward, utter catastrophe. Obviously, any such bold pronouncement demands extraordinary evidence. Here ’tis: On the one hand exuberant Democrats, their internecine animosities forgotten in the …

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