I'm not an American citizen and I'm not employed by a socialist magazine, so I didn't have to watch

the Democratic National Convention this week. But you did anyway, right?

Because what gets me about the atmosphere right now is, you know, it's not enough for people to believe that supporting

the Democratic ticket is, you know, a necessary, strategic thing to do right now. They have to

pretend like this is all really good and exciting. And so the just breathless tone of some of the

punditry around the DNC, the fact that so much of it basically

just sounds like sports commentary. The whole thing is evaluated as kind of a performance.

The criterion that's being used is, was this a good performance? New York Magazine had an

article called Joe Biden and the Democrats found their voice this week.

And it's articles like that, headlines like that that make me feel like I'm going insane, literally.

Like, what's it to me if the Democrats have settled on a marketing strategy?

Right, right.

You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. Oh my God, what have we done?

The dramatic stakes in it, and I'd completely forgotten about this, the dramatic stakes in it

depends so heavily on you being invested in the mythos of John McCain. There's something

very tunnel visioned about this movie. It's conceiving of

politics as you have the political operators and you have the media. And these are the two sides of

the equation. And then you have, then you have a braying mob. Yeah, yeah. You have a braying mob on the

Republican side and then, you know, among liberals, you just have people who are in the thrall of a celebrity,

which, I mean, was accurate for 2008, to be fair. And seeing it now in a moment when, you know,

the United States' political institutions seem so hopelessly ossified and when so much of

actual political activity and so much actual political vitality is coming from the braying mob.

...