If you listen to many prominent leaders of the Republican Party, it is easy to think that Timothy McVeigh inhabits their mind and rhetoric. In a recent interview, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassly said,

“Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s (sic) already loaded ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa with these? Because I think they are going after middle class and small business people because basically they think anyone that has pass-through income is a crook and they aren’t paying their fair share and we’re going to go after them.”

If this comment were an outlier it would be one thing, but it isn’t. It’s the mainstream message of the Republican Party. What to do? Challenge this fascist rhetoric in the public square and, above all, vote and organize others to vote this fall.

A week or two ago, I finished reading Heather McGee’s “The Sum of Us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together.” I came away from the reading the book quite impressed. In my view, her analysis deepens our view of the dialectic of racism. In doing so she makes a crucial correction in our understanding of racism and how to successfully fight it. Much like any book, there are things to quarrel over, but not enough to take away from the book’s carefully argued main thrust and thesis. It deserves a wide distribution.

A few months ago, I hoped that the Republicans would overreach as well as enter the fall months internally divided and with a less than optimal field of candidates. Well that has happened and much more, thereby transforming the November elections into a race that is too close to call. Recent polling bears this out.

What should illuminate political practice – strategy, tactics, demands, and actions – is, first of all, life itself. And yet, in the minds of more than a few political practioners on the left, political practice springs, not from the dynamics, novelty, and new challenges that life inevitably presents, but from political texts that were never designed to capture the full complexity and dialectics of political life.

This is a problem. But not everyone sees it that way. As a result, we see the phenomenon of some people on the left scrambling around and performing tortuous textual somersaults to legitimize their practice in a moment that insists on broadly constructed strategic concepts and flexible tactical rules. Is it really necessary? Sometimes, a little common sense and political knowhow will get us to where we want to go.

Listening to the Band, while unpacking in our new/old coop apartment in the Bronx. Thinking how much I would have loved to see them live. Great musicians, three lead singers, and one great song writer. I saw Levon in his later musical iteration at his barn in Woodstock – The Midnight Ramble – and what a treat that was.