Daily Bafflements

• Mike Pence plans to cast a tie-breaking vote to aid the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary. As Jennifer Berkshire wrote after her journey to the heart of DeVos-land, the “DeVosian vision of school reform is the anti–New Deal offensive launched by the free-market reactionaries of the American Liberty League, retooled for schools and delivered with evangelical zeal.”

• Calls for a general strike have been many; would one be possible yet? “Even moderately effective general strikes don’t emerge, willy-nilly, like miraculous interventions into national life,” writes Alex Gourevich. “They are intensifications and radicalizations of already existing patterns of resistance by the working class.”

• Baffler founding editor Thomas Frank was on the radio, talking about Steve Bannon’s knack for organizing discontent by adopting leftist language: “He sounds like me!”