It is natural to think about what happened in America over the past year in terms of the rise of Trumpism. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the real political story of 2024 is the utter emptiness of the Democratic Party. It was the year when the party’s total lack of moral grounding let it shrivel up and blow away.

The death of the Democratic Party’s claim to respectability looks like a dead child in Gaza, killed by a bomb supplied by our government. It looks like five more dead journalists in Gaza, assassinated by our ally with our blessing. It looks like one more bombed hospital in Gaza, the endpoint of the road away from humanity and towards barbarity. It looks like our government burying official warnings of a famine in Gaza, because it doesn’t suit our political purposes. All of these things were done by the Biden administration. All of these things were done by the Democrats. When Joe Biden thinks back on his time as president, he should see nothing but an image of a mother crying over a dead child with its limbs blown off by an American bomb. That is the most morally significant thing that Joe Biden accomplished in the White House. No bit of positive domestic policy or sense of personal empathy is more important than the reasoned decision to supply the tools used to conduct tens of thousands of murders. That is what Joe Biden’s half century political career adds up to. When murderers die, their crimes are the first paragraphs of their obituaries. There is no reason to treat Joe Biden differently than that. Like other criminals, he was a complex man who did many things and had many redeeming qualities, in addition to being a mass murderer.

Of course, Joe Biden did not kill thousands of children in Gaza all by himself. He had a political party helping him. He had advisers. He had cabinet secretaries. He had the State Department. He had ambassadors. He had an entire Democratic Party superstructure of strategists and donors and lobbyists and state party chairmen, who put him in the position to kill thousands of children, and ensured that nothing would stand in the way of his determination to enable the killings of thousands of children. The Democrats wholly and completely own every child amputee, every dead baby, every shattered civilian body, every destroyed family home, every death by starvation and disease, every life ruined by Israel’s inhuman bombardment of Gaza, which would not and could not have happened without the blessing of the Biden White House. If you have children, or a home, or loved ones, you need only ask yourself: How would I feel, if that was me? That feeling—that rage, that revulsion, that despair—is, properly, how you should feel about Joe Biden’s legacy.

If I shot your child in the head, would you forgive me because I had good green energy policy? If I blew up your entire family as they slept, would you write it off because I was pro-union? If I assassinated your brother with a missile because he was a journalist, would you feel that was okay, as long as I supported slightly higher marginal tax rates than my political opponents? We all know the answers to these things. These things are simple to understand. These things are basic. No statement about the other party, no hypothetical about what the other guy would have done, can erase what the Democrats did, themselves. If you murder someone and then tell the judge, “I know another person who would have done this murder even worse,” the judge will not let you go. If you believe that the people who supplied the means and the funding for the 9/11 hijackers to fly those planes into the World Trade Center are culpable for the deaths that occurred, there is no reason to feel any differently about the Biden administration, for what it has done to the people of Gaza. Except that the Biden administration has helped to kill many more people than Osama Bin Laden ever did.

The Democrats facilitated an awful ongoing slaughter of human beings because they found it politically convenient to do so. Whatever qualms they may have had about it, the bulk of the party—with notable and heroic exceptions—concluded that the price of not killing thousands of children was, for them personally, higher than the cost of killing thousands of children. And so they went ahead and helped to kill thousands of children. That is what happened. I am sure that the members of Congress and the foreign policy advisers and Joe Biden himself all justify what they did, when they look in the mirror, in very creative ways. But thousands of dead children speak for themselves. They amount to evidence that is irrefutable. They are blown apart. We could have prevented it, but we didn’t. Instead, we helped it happen.

The Democrats have a problem: They countenanced and even perpetrated atrocities for their own personal gain. But that is what they accuse the other party of doing. The Democrats, in the broadest sense, in the world of branding where political parties forge their reputations in the public mind, are supposed to be the humane party. “Callously doing bad things for selfish reasons”—why, that is what rich people do, who don’t pay their fair share. That is what runaway corporations do. That is what fossil fuel companies do. That is what all of the malignant forces that the Democratic Party brands itself as opposed to do. That is their thing! That is all of it! All of the behavior that progressives stand against is reducible to that. We, the liberals, the progressives, the leftmost half of the voting population that clusters in the Democratic Party base, are, in theory, members of the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party because we think it is bad when powerful people and institutions callously do bad things for selfish reasons. We do not support that. We dislike it when rich people do bad things for selfish reasons, when corporations do bad things for selfish reasons, when unscrupulous politicians do bad things for selfish reasons. We believe in universal love and peace and human rights and we think that, even though it’s hard, we should all pull in the direction of helping out the most vulnerable people in society. We do not believe in the unrestrained exercise of power for self-serving ends. We do not believe that the powerful should be allowed to oppress the weak. This basic belief can manifest itself in many different ways, on many different policy issues. But it is, in most cases, central to why people choose to be Democrats rather than Republicans.

So when the Democrats supply an endless stream of weapons to an aggressive ally so that that ally can oppress a weaker population and kill thousands of children, well, the Democrats have forsaken their reason to exist. What use is this party? If I were for oppression, and violence, and the granting of carte blanche to stronger groups to use force to obliterate weaker groups, I would be a Republican. They have traditionally supported those things in a more straightforward way. The Biden administration’s decision to support those things as well does not mean that I will become a Republican. It does, however, mean that I and millions of people like me have been effectively robbed of a political home. Even more so than before. If the Republicans stand for fascism and the Democrats stand for nothing, the Republicans are going to win. And, indeed, they did.

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Some people will wave their hands and say “the parties are both corrupt” and act as if this was all expected and therefore should not arouse any great sense of outrage in us. Though there is a certain amount of analytical truth in this world-weary pose, it also amounts to a formula for nihilism, an implicit statement that if something is not surprising then it is not worth talking about. Few things in politics are truly surprising. People have been corrupt and malevolent and violent and self-serving for thousands of years. Our collective determination to improve on humanity’s failures of the past is what makes politics worthwhile. It is important to be outraged about the Democratic Party’s vacuousness for both moral and practical reasons. Morally, if our nation is going to cling to a two-party system that forces most citizens to pick one side or the other, we all have the right to insist that the side we pick not act in abominable ways. And practically, as I have written before, the Democratic Party are the cowards who can be pushed towards righteousness through political force, rather than the enemies who cannot be moved at all.

Gaza is not the only manifestation of the Democratic Party’s emptiness. It is just the clearest one. Dead children have a way of clarifying things. You could make a list of the party’s failures to uphold its stated purpose—cultivating billionaires, failing to fight for universal health care, and on and on. Yet Gaza will suffice to make the point. When you eagerly feed the machinery of death that kills thousands of poor people, and then use your diplomatic might to block the world’s attempts to halt the slaughter, you have exhibited a total lack of the moral scruples that are supposed to make you an appealing political choice, as compared to the other party. Apart from questions of what voters thought and what issues drove the electoral outcome sits the cold fact of mass murder. Joe Biden did not lose the election because of Gaza, but he did lose his soul.

The first and most basic step forward for the Democratic Party is to stand for something. Before the internal debate on the party’s values must come the decision to have values. Today, the party can claim nothing. No ethics, no moral red lines, no ability to assert its superiority to the poisonous (but transparent) fascism on the other side. It lost all of that as the children of Gaza lost their limbs and their lives. The party that says it will protect the downtrodden cannot murder the other downtrodden. It doesn’t work. It’s not convincing. Besides going to hell, Biden’s advisors have left the Democrats with no plausible identity.

The Democratic Party is a vessel. Right now, it is an empty one. It has to be filled up with meaning that is real. It has to stand for something. The people who got it to this point should—though they won’t—cast themselves out of politics forever. The people who have genuine moral concerns about the state of the world are the only ones capable of rebuilding the party, and they will have a lot of work, given where things are today. I don’t need to be reminded that this is a lofty ideal, but it is the truth. The Democrats have tried being spectacular hypocrites who perpetrated a great atrocity. They didn’t win. Time to try the alternative.

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• Related reading: It Would Be a Shame If You Sacrificed All This Good Domestic Policy In Order to Kill a Bunch of Kids; Don’t Make Your Voters Step Over Dead Bodies; The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is.

• Are you disgusted by the Democratic Party’s failures and seeking a new base from which to rebuild American politics? Join the labor movement. I wrote a book about it. My last book event of the year is tonight: Saturday, December 28, at 6 pm at The Lynx Books in Gainesville, FL. If you’re in the area, join us.

• This will probably be my last post of 2024. How Things Work will return in 2025. Thank you all, sincerely, for the support you have given me over the past year, that has allowed this publication to survive and thrive. Good things can happen in independent media, even during bad times. How Things Work is 100% supported by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. If you like this site and would like to help it continue to exist, become a paid subscriber today, for a modest price. I’ll see you all in the new year, my friends.

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Apple needs you to buy the new iPhone even though the old models still work just fine. Enter Apple Intelligence, Apple’s wrapper around ChatGPT, to abbreviate your messages for you!

As an LLM, Apple Intelligence also mangles them — because LLMs don’t summarize text, they just shorten it. In one instance, a message chain starting with “That hike almost killed me!” became “Attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palm Springs.” [Twitter, archive; Verge]

Apple Intelligence saw a BBC headline about alleged CEO murderer Luigi Mangione being arrested. Apple Intelligence shortened the story to “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” The BBC complained to Apple, in a bizarre story where BBC News reports on itself complaining about being misrepresented. [BBC]

These types of errors happen even after including prompts like “Do not hallucinate.” [Ars Technica]

Apple is floundering to promote Apple Intelligence as useful. One ad features a man writing a message to his boss with AI on his new iPhone when his computer is right there in front of him. [YouTube]

Ed Zitron is not a fan. “The product is wonky, ugly, feels constantly out of place, gets in the way of you trying to use your phone.” [Bluesky]

But Apple Intelligence has its good points. “I find the best thing about Apple intelligence is that since I haven’t enabled it, my phone optimized for onboard AI has incredible battery life,” responded another Bluesky user. [Bluesky]

by Jeremy Kohler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

One month after Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state are already working to overturn it — or at least undermine it.

One measure would ask voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception, declaring that embryos are people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The result would be to classify abortion as an unlawful killing.

Another proposal, aimed at repealing the abortion rights amendment, would ask voters to ban gender transition procedures for minors, tying the two issues together, despite the fact that the amendment did not address gender surgery and gender-affirming care for transgender children is already illegal in Missouri.

Other proposed amendments include stricter abortion limits, such as restricting access to cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies. These measures would impose additional requirements, such as mandating that rape survivors file police reports to obtain an abortion.

GOP lawmakers have also introduced a measure to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution through voter initiatives, which could make it harder to pass similar measures in the future.

The legislative moves follow the Nov. 5 election, in which the amendment to put abortion rights in the state constitution won by a 51.6%-48.4% margin. Starting Thursday, the right to abortion will be constitutionally guaranteed up to the point of fetal viability, while restrictions on post-viability abortions will remain in place.

In other states where voters approved abortion rights measures last month, there were no signs yet that lawmakers would also try to counter those measures.

Even before votes in Missouri had been counted, proponents of Amendment 3, as the measure was called, had anticipated that a victory would be met with efforts to somehow undercut abortion rights.

“These people will continue to rail against abortion,” said state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Democrat from the St. Louis suburbs.

Although Missouri already has a law recognizing life as beginning at conception, stating that unborn children have “protectable interests in life, health, and well-being,” the proposed constitutional amendment would go further. It would effectively elevate this principle to the state constitution and potentially complicate not only abortion rights but the legality of in vitro fertilization and the handling of embryos.

Several states have laws recognizing fetal personhood, but Missouri would be the second — after Alabama — to enshrine it in its constitution. That could create legal and ideological confusion or even conflicts, experts say.

“You could see voters saying, ‘I support a right to abortion,’ but also saying, ‘Life begins at conception,’ without understanding that you can’t have both of those things at the same time,” said Jamille Fields Allsbrook, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law and a former policy analyst for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The author of one of the personhood measures, Rep. Justin Sparks, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs, said he was emboldened by the narrow margin of the abortion rights vote.

“A clear mandate has not been achieved,” he said. While the amendment had strong support in metro St. Louis and Kansas City and in the county that’s home to the University of Missouri, “the vast majority of the rest of the state voted in a different direction,” he added. “So I think it’s fair to again bring the question up.”

But state Sen. Tracy McCreery, a Democrat also from the St. Louis suburbs, noted that Sparks was going against the will of voters in the St. Louis area. “I find that even more disrespectful of the voters,” she said. “It wasn’t just voters that tend to vote Democratic that voted yes on Amendment 3. It was also Republican voters and independent voters, and I think that’s getting lost in this discussion.”

The measure to link abortion and transgender rights reflects the campaign before the election, when abortion opponents conflated these topics. Critics said this strategy seeks to distract from abortion rights, which had strong voter support, by capitalizing on voter discomfort with transgender issues.

While GOP lawmakers push these measures, the legal landscape around abortion in Missouri is already shifting. On Wednesday, a Jackson County Circuit Court heard arguments in a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri that seeks to strike down Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and other laws that regulate abortion. The lawsuit followed the passage of Amendment 3. Planned Parenthood said if it wins in court it plans to resume abortion services in St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia on Friday.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has acknowledged that the amendment will legalize most abortions when it goes into effect, but he has said he intends to enforce remaining restrictions, such as a ban on abortions after fetal viability, a 72-hour waiting period and parental consent for minors.

Lawmakers are also pushing to raise the bar for passing constitutional amendments. Now, a simple majority is enough; that has allowed Missouri voters to bypass the legislature and pass progressive amendments that lawmakers oppose. A new bill would ask voters to pass a constitutional amendment requiring not just a statewide majority but also a majority of voters in five of the state’s eight congressional districts — a change critics argued would give disproportionate power to rural areas over urban voters. It would then be harder for voters to approve measures that don’t align with the priorities of the conservative politicians they tend to elect.

Earlier this year, a similar effort to make it harder to amend the constitution failed after Democrats in the Senate filibustered it.

Sparks criticized the Republican leadership in the General Assembly for allowing the failure, pointing to a Republican supermajority in both houses that could have passed the measure.

“We hold all the power,” Sparks said. “We hold all the procedural levers of power, and we can shut down debate in both houses any time, any day, for any bill we choose to.”

Florida shows how a higher threshold for voter initiatives might play out. In 2006, the state raised the bar for constitutional amendments to 60%. This year, a majority of voters — 57% — supported an abortion rights amendment, an even bigger margin than in Missouri, but not sufficient in Florida.

It’s not clear yet, though, whether any of the measures have enough support in Missouri’s General Assembly.

Lavender said that the campaign supporting abortion rights significantly outraised its opposition during the election. “It’s going to be difficult to overturn,” she said. “You’ll have the same money that supported it now going up against you.”

And the challenges of an AI world where everyone is above average

I’ve been an Apple fanboy since the early 1980s. I owned one Windoze computer years ago that was mostly for games my kid wanted to play. Otherwise, I’ve been all Apple for around 40 years. But what the heck is the deal with these ads for Apple Intelligence?

In this ad (the most annoying of the group, IMO), we see a schlub of a guy, Warren, emailing his boss in idiotic/bro-based prose. He pushes the Apple Intelligence feature and boom, his email is transformed into appropriate office prose. The boss reads the prose, is obviously impressed, and the tagline at the end is “write smarter.” Ugh.

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