| October 30, 2024, Mother Jones Daily |
| I’m back from a quick, child-free vacation with the closest of friends, the kind of hang that leaves your soul nourished. But after spending the morning catching up on the news—which is to say, the racist vitriol, threats of election violence, and cowardice of billionaires—I’m now feeling catastrophically nervous. What is the world going to look like this time next week? Will we finally close the door on this horrific chapter? Will democracy survive another Trump win? These questions are at the center of my colleague Pema Levy’s latest piece in which she talks to Steve Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die with co-author Daniel Ziblatt, about the bolder, far more authoritarian agenda that could unfold with another Trump presidency. Their conversation happened to dovetail with a New York Times op-ed by Levitsky and Ziblatt that excoriated America’s business and religious elites for sitting on the sidelines of the election. While Pema’s piece didn’t exactly help cure my anxieties, it did once again press the urgency of this moment while the other side of my brain frantically researches properties abroad. Anyway, if you have any other suggestions to ease my mind or simply want to chime in with how you’re feeling about everything six days out from the election, please let me know. —Inae Oh |
CVD 