Democrats Have to Do Something. Anything. Even That.

Plus, Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time continues with NWA, Metallica, the Strokes and Portishead.

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

---

It’s not really a compliment to Trump to say he’s had one of the most amazing lives of this millennium. His journey from real estate mogul to reality star was already unlikely enough, but then he leveraged a knack for social media to become bar none the greatest political success story of the age (give or take Zelensky, maybe).

Since then, the man’s life has been charmed by a quantum megaton of good luck or, at least, stands as a testament to how well things can go when an entire political party marshals its vast resources both legitimate and otherwise towards your success. He is, as a matter of legal record, a rapist, a fraud, and a felon. He tried to storm the White House. He encouraged his followers to have his friend and former Vice President hung from makeshift gallows. These things all failed to stall his momentum, and several of them have greased it. You can chalk some of that up to the moral degradation of the Republicans and ineptitude of the Democrats (and vice versa.) But then a bullet misses the guy by the width of a Trump Buck and you start to wonder if all that stuff about him being divinely appointed is totally a crock. 

But, no. Trump’s reputation for wriggling out of each and every jam has less to do with divine providence and more to do with hustle. The man is a born doer. A bullet clips his ear, he falls to the podium, clocks that he’s still alive and then has the wherewithal to go “content time, baby” and pump a fist for the cameras? Trump is on that grindset! Under him, the GOP has been characterized by action. In 2016, he made a series of improbable campaign promises and while many of them fell by the wayside (Mexico did not pay for any border wall, for example), it wasn’t for lack of effort. A Mexico-subsidized border wall is chump change compared to issues Trump did deliver on: a bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court, a Roe V Wade reversal, and a host of corporate tax cuts that’ll keep Gen Z’s middle class impoverished until the last ice floe melts into the Pacific. Republicans are the party that does things. Bad things. But things, nonetheless!

It would not be fair to Biden to say his administration has been characterized by a total lack of action. The man quietly delivered the most progressive agenda of my lifetime, dealing winning blows for the environment, unions, and student debt relief. He got us out of Afghanistan, which was a political loser but a moral necessity. 

But compared to Trump and the GOP, Democrats in general and Biden specifically just is not about that “Get Things Done” way of life. We are told to take his word for it that he’s privately being very stern with Netanyahu about knocking all the war crimes malarkey off, which would be a stretch even if he wasn’t dropping billions (billions!) in weapons off on the IDF’s front doorstep. His administration has dragged their heels on every step of holding Trump accountable for January 6. In Biden’s interviews, Democratic leadership seems to count Biden staying awake as a big win, even if he fails to change the narrative, tempt swing voters or score a single rhetorical blow on the most defeatable opponent in American history. 

That’s why I do think Kamala Harris is worth running. To be clear, I mostly don't agree with or even particularly like Harris. I think she would probably lose. But since it looks like Biden will definitely lose, I’ll take a “probably.” Switching Biden out for Harris has real risks and could blow up in Democrats’ face, but at least it’s doing something. It’s telling voters “we hear you, we know you’re not happy with either of these two geriatric options, here’s someone younger, fresher, admittedly weirder, but is weird so bad compared to *waves hands wildly*?” The sheer excitement of watching Democrats actually go big might be enough to get those wine moms and concerned centrists off their asses and to the ballot box in November. The stakes of Project 2025 are simply too big not to try.  

But of course, all this would require Democrats to do things.

---

Applecore: Counting Down Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of Al Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight.

---

70: NWA — Straight Outta Compton

The story goes that in the fall of 1987, six young Black men were hanging outside a recording studio in Compton, minding their own business, when a couple police officers showed up and made them all get on their knees. No explanation was given. No crime was being committed. But the cops still made the men hand over their IDs. At the time, Daryl Gates was Chief of the LAPD, and he’d declared a “war on gangs.” This, of course, often meant war on anyone who looked like they might be in a gang, which frequently amounted to a war on young Black men.