My subscription of newspapers (the New York Times and the Washington Post) and newsletters (from writers using the Substack, WordPress, and Medium platforms) totals twenty-five. The written word is my main source of news and information.

Out of these various sources, there’s only one I read every day on the day it arrives: historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. Each day, usually six days a week, Richardson looks at the day’s news — often focusing on something outside the topic du jour of the popular press — and takes a deeper dive in a way that serves as “an antidote to toxic news feeds.” In both her daily newsletter and her most recent book, Democracy Awakening, Richardson has a talent to “wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feeds into a coherent story.” In easy-to-follow prose, she suggests what is important and helps prioritize our focus.

Letters from an American for January 31, 2024, is so important for all to read because it is so clear. After setting the stage on the Republican party’s playing games with our border to appease a criminal con man (my characterization, not hers), Richardson turns to what’s at stake in not funding Ukraine’s resistance to Russia and the murderous dictator Vladimir Putin. And she does it by extensively quoting a speech made on the Senate floor that evening by Senator Angus King (I-ME). King’s speech is clear and comprehensive, drawing on the lessons of history. It is also sobering to think about how we got to this point in time.

King harked back to the failure of European allies to stop Hitler when it would have been relatively easy. “Whenever people write to my office” asking why we are supporting Ukraine, he said, “I answer, Google Sudetenland, 1938.” “We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.”

The upcoming vote on whether to support “the people of Ukraine as they fight for our values,” King said, “will echo throughout the history of this country and the history of the world for generations…. If we back away, walk away, pull out and leave the Ukrainians without the resources to defend themselves, it will compromise the interests of this country for 50 years. It will be viewed as one of the greatest geopolitical mistakes of the 21st century.”

Putin clearly has more than just Ukraine in mind with his invasion.

“Maya Angelou once said if someone tells you who they are, you should believe them,” King said. “Putin has told us who he is. He’s an autocrat. He’s an authoritarian. And he wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. And I believe he wouldn’t stop there….  We have to take him at his word…. He despises the west. He thinks NATO is an aggressive alliance, somehow designed to invade or otherwise threaten Russia. NATO doesn’t want to invade Russia. NATO wants to keep the lines where they are.” King noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the first crossing of a border of this nature since World War II.”

The ending is a sober reminder of what’s at stake.

“[D]emocracy matters,” King said. “Values matter. Freedom of expression, the rule of law matter, and that’s what’s at stake…. This is a historic struggle between authoritarianism, arbitrariness, surveillance, and the radical idea that people can govern themselves. That’s what this is all about. This is a battle for the soul of our democracy in the world…. It’s worth fighting for. And in this case we don’t even have to do the fighting. We just have to supply the arms and ammunition.”

Please read the entire newsletter and, if you have the time, listen to Senator King’s speech. It is a warning about where Donald Trump and today’s radical Republican party are leading us, and it is not to a good place.

---

There are two other newsletters that I turn to soon after they arrive in my inbox. Former United States Attorney, law school professor, and chicken farmer from Birmingham Joyce Vance wrote yesterday in Civil Discourse about how Texas is ignoring the Constitution to score political points. And she started with this take on how “MAGA ‘patriots’ want to have their cake and eat it, too, when it comes to the involvement of the federal government in their lives.”

She doesn’t say so, but Republican-led states generally take in more dollars from the federal government than they send to the government through taxes. What she does say in this important piece on the legal implications of this manufactured border crisis is that Governor Abbott of Texas is playing dangerous politics with people’s lives at stake.

Lest you think Governor Abbott is just inexperienced in the subtle nuances of the law, this is from his official bio, “Before being elected Governor, he was the 50th and longest-serving Attorney General in Texas History. He also served as a Justice on the Supreme Court of Texas and as a State District Judge in Harris County.” So, a prosecutor and judge, both in trial court and appellate court. He graduated from Vanderbilt Law School. While I find it difficult to dislike a man with three Golden Retrievers named Peaches, Pancake, and Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit, you can’t avoid the conclusion that Abbott knows better and is disregarding clear law to score political points.

The other newsletter I generally read on the day it is published is Lucid from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Providing “big-picture thinking about threats to democracy around the world,” the January 31st post on Denial, Detachment, and the Desire for Normality is another must-read.

“Tyranny ‘advances with the pace of a tightening screw rather than with the dash of the executioner’s blade,’ wrote the Italian anti-fascist exile G.A. Borgese in 1937.”

Tyranny may advance bit by bit, but so does democracy protection. Each success brings more confidence that our actions matter, creating a groundswell of commitment and optimism. That’s how pro-democracy movements develop and how they bring in the detached and the disillusioned, giving politics new meaning and new life.

Three excellent pieces to better understand the world around us.

More to come . . .

DJB

Picture of sunflowers by Claire Holsey Brown