Looking back at my writing in 2024, I clearly spent a lot of the year contextualizing—historically, economically, and sociopsychologically—the disaster of the election, even though most of those articles preceded the election. A nation of immigrants, it stands to reason, sometimes becomes a nation prey to xenophobia, and I found ample parallels to our current wave in our checkered past. (In one piece, I excavated one such long-past American wave whose ripple effect all but created the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
A lot of what we saw this year was a consistent pattern of urban-rural cleavages, which have defined us at least since the 18th century, and which have grown way more intense as economic inequality—between city and country, between the working/middle classes and the upper-middle and upper classes—intensified. I wrote a lot about the diminishing rewards for blue-collar work and the diminished opportunities for blue-collar men. I nudged the Democrats (Kamala Harris in particular) to address those issues more directly, and filtered my take on the election partly through that lens. On several occasions, the precedents I discussed happened exactly 100 years ago, in 1924.
“The Left Behind”
Here’s a scene-setter for the economic abandonment of rural America and much of the working class.
“100 Years Ago Today: Savage Nativism. And ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’”
Here’s a take on how the distinct voices and politics of rural and urban America grew more distant and opposed 100 years ago.
“While Campaigning for Catholic Votes, Trump Echoes the Klan”
This piece contrasts Harris’s and Trump’s approaches to immigrants in historical context, and as a bonus has a link to a recording of the now almost vanished classic white working-class New York accent.
“Pre-Preemption”
This piece, which ran in one of our print issues, looks at the sharpest clashes between city and country today: the moves by red states to negate the policies of their blue cities.
“The Limits of Harris’s Family Policy”
This one looks at the Harris campaign’s efforts to address the rightward movement of working-class men in particular.
“How the Republicans Became the Party of Precarious Manhood”
While this piece endeavors to explain that movement both economically and sociopsychologically.
“Couch Carries California”
One of my election postmortems looks at some of the most surprising election results through the above prisms and assesses the role played by the more general revulsion at urban disorder in America’s most liberal cities.
“Who Created the Israel-Palestine Conflict?”
Here’s the piece on the otherwise unnoticed 100th anniversary of our immigrant exclusion act, and how it decisively and numerically contributed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Bombed Back Into the Stone Age”
And here’s my take on the current (well, from last January) iteration of that conflict.
“Stop Equating Trump With Hitler! This Week, He’s More Like Stalin.”
I haven’t neglected the coming Trump presidency, for which I also have found some instructive precedents.
“On the Origins of Arizona’s New Old Abortion Ban”
My historical sleuth proclivities led me to document the circumstances under which Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban was passed—a ban that Republicans sought to enforce this past year until public pressure compelled them to relent.
“To His Coy Fellow Democrats”
And finally, during the period immediately following Biden’s disastrous debate performance, I penned a poem urging Democrats to pol up (as in man up) and compel him to end his candidacy.
