Winners & Losers for May 12
A new pope & an old dope.
The world is collapsing under the weight of catastrophic ideas. In some cases, the bad ideas aren’t really ideas at all, they’re just things President Trump mutters incoherently that people decide to take seriously. Does he actually want to open Alcatraz?
Who cares? It’s a bad/non-idea that only matters when someone decides it’s actionable.
But the enormous complexity of the catastrophic interweb of non-ideas creates a problem: Which ones are we meant to pay attention to?
Sometimes you need someone to call winners and losers. That’s just what I’m going to do. Each week, I will hand-select a winner who has done something that should inspire you to keep up the fight, and a loser … who’s a loser.
It’s not as easy as you might think. The world is crawling with losers. So many to choose from! And here’s the rub: There are two kinds of winners and two kinds of losers.
For example: Trump is the president. He’s literally a winner. He won. And for that reason, the rest of us have lost so much. We are, literally, the losers.
Trump is the winner, but he’s a loser.
There are winners who are losers, and losers who are winners, and losers who are losers, and so on. And sometimes that changes!
In fact, all of us at Lincoln Square — you, too — are engaged in the work of taking the loser authoritarians who have won office (losers who won), and putting them squarely in the losers column by defeating them next time (losers who lose).
And that’s why this is necessary. We’re keeping track. Parsing. Each week, you’ll get a name and a little batch of receipts. Together, we’ll start unwinding the tangle of absurdity to get shining clarity on who’s doing what and why — and why it matters.