Hand Over the Cash
By 
We all love Farley and how nice he is. But he’s a terrible fundraiser. That’s because he seeks to appeal to the best of you. That’s a mistake. I’m here to cajole you into giving us money. The reasons are clear–Farley laid them out already. This blog really is a ton of work. It’s true that we are Old Blogosphere. We ain’t going Substack. We ain’t going paywall either. Talking Points Memo finally went totally behind the paywall a few weeks ago. I found this amusing for one reason: Lawyers Guns and Money is a far better website than TPM. Sure, Marshall does a pretty good job providing a slightly different spin on basic DC news. But it’s still standard Beltway reporting. Compare that to us. I’m perfectly aware that my presence here is rather polarizing. However, I’m not boring! I alone provide the two long-running historical series on the internet with This Day in Labor History and Erik Visits an American Grave. And then there’s the music posts, the Film Club, the deep dives into labor issues that is nearly unknown elsewhere on what’s left in the blogosphere and on most political sites (and where there is labor coverage, it’s almost always hopelessly romanticized), my coverage of Native issues which really is nowhere else on major political sites, etc. And then let’s not sleep on the Obituary series, which has only been published a few times to remember such figures as John McCain and Rush Limbaugh, but which I have done work on that might not pay off for years or even a decade, with dozens of obits ready to run at the appropriate time.
Then add in Scott and Paul’s deep discussion of the contemporary issues of the day. Scott’s NFL open threads. The podcast that many of us are contributing to now. Farley’s national security discussions. Elizabeth’s music posts. The great if less frequent contributions from our other writers–from Melissa’s occasional posts on France and Islam to Simon’s personal and furious condemnation of police violence to Abigail’s pop culture and Israel posts–all add to the real diversity of subject matter this site covers.
Take this and add the hell that was 2020 to it. We got through the Trump years together. We haven’t always agreed on the details of the pandemic response and when and how to reopen, but that’s been a huge part of the coverage here. This blog if nothing else is an archive of the decline of American democracy and the liberal response to it with many thousands of posts over the last 17 years.
I could go on.
The point is that this is a lot of work for free. My grave post that is going up tomorrow morning took me 2 full hours yesterday to write. It’s true that no one is making any of us do this. But the compulsion inside all of us to share our expertise with you is something that is evidently appealing to thousands of people–mostly Americans, but with not insignificant readership in Canada, Australia, and a few other nations.
So we are here for once a year request that you fork over a bit of your excess cash to make this worthwhile. We have real expenses and they don’t get cheaper. Moreover, we believe that labor should be compensated. From the time I started posting here 10 years ago (anniversary is tomorrow!), I suggested that we pay our occasional guest posters cash for their work and everyone agreed to do that. We don’t really have guest posts anymore much, but this came out of Huffington Post stealing the labor of its writers and we decided we didn’t want to do that.
And we labor a lot for you. This is real work. It’s time we could all be spending on academic writing that might be better for our academic careers that no one would read. And lest you think this doesn’t matter, I’ve taken my writing here and spun two books out of it, including A History of America in Ten Strikes, which has had some staying power three years after publication and which of course was adapted from the labor history series.
So here’s what you need to do: become a Patreon subscriber. This is what can make our work actually pay something like what we put into it. If you haven’t done this before, even $10 a month makes a big difference when a lot of people do it. And if you now pay $20, could you raise that to $25 or $30? If you pay $100, could you raise that to $125? If it won’t really make much difference in your life, it will make a difference in ours. Obviously, if you are not in a situation where you can do this, that’s OK! Keep reading for free. Again, we aren’t going to put this behind a paywall. We want you to read. But if you can help make this a going concern, we sure would appreciate it.
At the very least, can’t you give us some of the tuition money you were going to spend on little Maddie and Connor and send them to public school instead?