Announcements
Back to podcasting, and now available on Substack!
Expect biweekly podcasts dropping from September to December.
Plan is to release podcasts to premium subscribers first, then publish to free subscribers a couple days later.
Format will be changing as well as I’ll be moving more to conversations and interviews.
All TTP content now on Substack.
I’m a contributing editor at Providence Magazine!
Also, now on ‘X’
Overview
In this episode, I do a quick review of domestic politics in the Summer of 2024 and look ahead to what’s in store for this publication in the coming months.
The Summer of 2024
The Summer of 2024 will go down in American history as one of the most exciting, if not consequential, summers in modern history. The way I’ve been putting it to people is that it’s like we’ve taken the political violence, economic turmoil, and geopolitical tensions of the 1960s, that whole decade, and just squeezed it into one summer. That’s intense.
The presidential debate between President Biden and former President Trump on June 27 kicked off an intense six weeks that had parallels to memorable moments in the 1960s.
You’ve got the first televised presidential debate in 1960 that demonstrated the power of television moments to shift an election, and that’s more or less what happened on June 27 of this year.
You had political assassinations aplenty in the 1960s and an attempted one this summer when a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump in Pennsylvania.
Next, unable to recover from the political damage done by the ill-advised debate and a party increasingly clamoring for his head, President Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race a la Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968.
What we’ve yet to see in this rhyming summer of ‘24 is if the Democratic National Convention will be as tempestuous as the 1968 Democratic Convention… held in Chicago.
Economically, the decade of the 1960s was one of expansion and growth… until the late 1960s, when growing inflation and unemployment coupled with an oil supply crunch due to wars in the Middle East served to stagnate the American economy, sending it into a decade of decline. We’re not entirely there yet, but we certainly have seen sticky inflation and rising unemployment rates AND the threat of broader war in the Middle East sending markets downward just this week (August 5).
Geopolitically, the current conflicts and flashpoints around the world, while not directly paralleling the 1960s, certainly have echoes: A militant Russia threatening Europe, war in Israel, heck even Cuba’s back in the game.
I take the time to rehearse this to reiterate something that I say in my newsletter at the close of every year: Steady eyes and level heads, friends.
In some ways, we’ve been here before, this is not wholly new ground, though there are new players and new ‘x’ factors (AI, anyone?).
But my entreaty of “steady eyes and level heads” begs a question: How do we develop and/or maintain those kinds of eyes and heads?
Stay grounded in reality.
Exercise your commonsense.
Stay focused on living life well.
Practice contextual awareness.
Here’s how I plan to help you do that:
My newsletter, the Weekly Brief is designed specifically to keep you grounded in reality and to encourage the exercise of commonsense. That’s why I put left and right leaning publications in conversation with each other, that’s why I shy away from predictions and try to focus on probabilities, and that’s why I work to keep an even handed tone.
Additionally, you can anticipate a more regular podcast in the latter part of this year that will be a mix of conversations with some amazing and talented people that will be aimed at addressing those other two points: living life well (pursuing happiness, to use Jefferson’s phrase) in the midst of upheaval and developing contextual awareness in terms of history and ideas that shape our lives.
In a way, Tim Talks Politics has always been about more than news commentary or political analysis. It’s been about that bigger question of how one lives life well when the tides of history rip and swirl. It’s an old question that every generation has had to contemplate and answer. So, now I’m taking my turn and would love to have you join me and my friends in that conversation.
Conversation starters
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